Sept. 19, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
47:49
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Dave here, and this is Rubin Report. | ||
| I've been really inspired by the reaction to the interview with Sam. | ||
| I knew that I felt really passionately about the issues we talked about and needed to address the campaign to discredit him, and I knew a lot of other people felt the same way, but I think I actually underestimated just how badly people wanted this conversation to happen. | ||
| From YouTube comments, to the tweets, to people who wrote me literally pages of thoughts on Facebook and email, there was a real sense that it was cathartic for people who were feeling the same thing I was. | ||
| That's exactly what I want this show to be, so I'm really proud that we got off to the right start. | ||
| If we're going to build some kind of community here based on the principles that I laid out last week and put in action in the interview with Sam, I think I have to ask something of you now. | ||
| Many of you were giving me kudos for having an honest dialogue, but if we really want to change things, it's going to have to be way bigger than just me. | ||
| I'm sure some of you know that I'm gay. | ||
| Actually, I got gay married two weeks ago, which is pretty gay. | ||
| It's pretty much the gayest thing you can do. | ||
| I don't really bring it up anymore unless it's related to something in the news and I don't want any extra credit for it or anything like that. | ||
| We got equality, there's still work to do, but we've done great things that are moving forward. | ||
| That's how progress is supposed to work. | ||
| A couple years ago I hosted a podcast in a SiriusXM show called The Six Pack. | ||
| It was a pop culture and news show with celebrity guests aimed at the LGBT community. | ||
| The show was really different than most gay culture out there in that it was hosted by two guys who just happened to be gay, but we didn't make everything about being gay. | ||
| I mention this because we used to get a ton of email from people saying how much we were helping them come to terms with themselves, come out of the closet, talk to friends and family and all that stuff. | ||
| Even more than that though, we got a ton of email from people saying they were still closeted and our show was their only gay outlet. | ||
| One day this strange paradox hit me. | ||
| The people that we were helping the most by doing the show, the people who were closeted and had no other outlet, were the same people who helped us as a show the least in that they couldn't tweet about us or share posts about us on Facebook or even tell their friends about us. | ||
| I really struggled with this in my relationship to the audience because I knew that closeted life all too well and I know that if the situation had been reversed I would have been one of those people. | ||
| Like I said before, I think we're onto something really special here. | ||
| We're going to be part of something that takes back liberalism for true liberals. | ||
| But to do that, we have to be louder. | ||
| We have to be braver and bolder to say what we think and share it with the people we know. | ||
| I noticed a lot of the people with the word atheism in their usernames have anonymous profiles on Twitter and some even on Facebook. | ||
| We all have our reasons, and I'm not passing judgment on anyone here. | ||
| But think about that for a moment. | ||
| In 2015, atheists are one of the last groups of people that feel like they have to be anonymous when they say what they really feel. | ||
| Again, this isn't everybody or even the majority, but it seems to be a bigger portion than it should be. | ||
| And believe me, I get it. | ||
| I was closeted for a long time. | ||
| You might have family that won't accept you as an atheist, or maybe your community won't, or maybe you aren't fully sure what you are. | ||
| I don't want to make this just about atheists though. | ||
| I think all of us secular people have to be seen and heard more. | ||
| Let's not just talk about it with each other. | ||
| Let's get other people in on the conversation too. | ||
| We don't need to go out and find converts. | ||
| They'll find us because that's what humanism and secularism does by default. | ||
| We just have to be louder. | ||
| It's not going to be easy. | ||
| All three of the people who Sam and I talked about who continuously misrepresent him have done so again publicly since our interview. | ||
| Feel free to check out my Twitter feed to see the latest nonsense. | ||
| These people are simply not going to stop. | ||
| If we want to be heard, we have to clearly fight back with logic on our side. | ||
| So if you hear me, if you dig what we've started here and you want it to get bigger and better, then like, share, comment, post, and do whatever the hell else there is. | ||
| The forces of anti-intellectualism and radicalism are always on the march. | ||
| Let's get our voices heard so that we can win, not by violence, but by ideas. | ||
| Remember, as Obi-Wan said to Luke, the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. | ||
| It's an energy field created by all living things. | ||
| It surrounds us and penetrates us. | ||
| It binds the galaxy together. | ||
| But if you don't post about it on Facebook, nobody will know. | ||
| Cara Santa Maria is the host and producer of the Talk Nerdy podcast, co-host of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, LA area Emmy Award winning reporter for SoCal Connected on KCET, and science correspondent for TechNow on Al Jazeera America, but most importantly, she's my friend, Cara. | ||
| Welcome to the show. | ||
| Hey! | ||
| Man, your resume is blowing up, huh? | ||
| It's getting kind of crazy. | ||
| You got a lot of stuff going on. | ||
| All science-y stuff, and you are my science-y Girl. | ||
| I'm the go-to. | ||
| Yeah, you are my go-to. | ||
| So I thought you'd be a perfect second guest to have on the show, because you know we had Sam Harris on last week. | ||
| Also a scientist. | ||
| Also a scientist. | ||
| Actually, like, really a scientist. | ||
| I'm not really a scientist like Sam is. | ||
| Is he more of a scientist? | ||
| Well, Sam has a PhD. | ||
|
unidentified
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He's a neuroscientist. | |
| Yeah, Sam actually finished the PhD. | ||
| He took time off to write his first book, but then he actually went back and finished. | ||
| I took time off and just kept taking time off. | ||
| So, I got the master's. | ||
| Yeah, but you're my science girl. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I'm a science communicator. | ||
| Alright, you are a science communicator, so that's where I wanted to start actually. | ||
| Because right under your name, right now, it says science communicator. | ||
| So what is a science communicator? | ||
| You know, I think, more than anything, it's just a catch-all term that a lot of people in my profession use. | ||
| So it could mean that you communicate science as an author, maybe you're a blogger, maybe you give talks, maybe you do what I do, which is more in front of the camera work, or even some production work behind it. | ||
| So sometimes it takes a more journalistic flair, sometimes it takes more of an entertainment flair, and those are two very different camps, but it all falls within that science communication umbrella. | ||
| I mean, the main goal is to help communicate scientific principles to the public, Right. | ||
| help improve science literacy, and do a little bit of translation, because sometimes scientists | ||
| aren't very good at liaising with the public. | ||
| Sometimes they're amazing, and I love that. | ||
| Sometimes they need a little bit of help, and so that's where people like I come in. | ||
| Right, and I think sometimes people on my side of it need help, and that's why I always | ||
| bring you on to clean up some of the scientific messes. | ||
| I'm better at social studies and English, but you help me clean up some of that stuff. | ||
| So obviously we have some of our old audience that's going to have heard some of what we're going to do here, but we have a whole bunch of new people that I think are going to really dig this. | ||
| So I want to get to the science stuff later, but I want to start with atheism. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Because you're also my main atheist. | ||
| You and Jacqueline Glenn are my two main atheists. | ||
| So first off, why don't we do some basic definitions here? | ||
| This might be tough. | ||
| Is this going to be tough? | ||
| I think you can handle it. | ||
| Atheism versus agnosticism. | ||
| Yeah, so, I mean, technically, agnosticism is, if you just break down the word, it's not knowing, right? | ||
| A lot of people self-identify as agnostics if they say, I'm not sure if there's a greater power, I'm not sure what happens after you die, and I don't want to hedge any bets. | ||
| Now, I personally think that the label agnostic is redundant, because, you know, whether you're atheistic or theistic, whether you're a believer or a non-believer, I said those backwards, Nobody knows. | ||
| If you claim to know, like, you're full of shit. | ||
| You don't know. | ||
| You don't know things I don't know. | ||
| You don't have powers I don't have. | ||
| And don't the people who scream about it the most, they usually seem to know the least? | ||
| Yeah, actually, there are some studies that confirm that. | ||
| So I think of myself as an... | ||
| agnostic, or I'm sorry, an atheistic agnostic, and some people are theistic agnostics, meaning that I | ||
| you know, don't factor God into my daily life. I simply do not believe that God exists. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't know. | ||
| How do you have morals if it's not coming from somebody up there? | ||
| Where do morals come from? | ||
| Yeah, well, how do you have morals? | ||
| I mean, morals come from... I know you to be a pretty moral person, right? | ||
| I am, I am. | ||
| A pretty honest person, a pretty forthright person. | ||
| That's very nice of you to say, actually. | ||
| Well, it's true, but how do you navigate the sort of moral divide if you're not getting it from some old book with some numbers? | ||
| Right, because I was raised Mormon, too. | ||
| Let's not forget that. | ||
| We're getting to that. | ||
| And then I left the church. | ||
| So not only... I'm like more of a heathen. | ||
| I'm kind of the worst criminal within the church's viewpoint because I actually accepted Jesus, was baptized, and then rejected it, which is way worse than never having it to begin with. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Where do I get morals? | ||
| I get morals from literature. | ||
| I get morals from ethics courses. | ||
| I get morals from, you know, empathy. | ||
| I get morals from interacting with people and looking at their struggles and trying to put myself in people's shoes and trying to understand the human experience. | ||
| I mean, we are innately Empathetic creatures. | ||
| We are innately moral creatures. | ||
| And the more that we can kind of embrace others, the more that we can try to, I think, remove the us-them paradigm, which is also very human, and it's also very difficult to push past. | ||
| But the more that we do that, I think the more that we can live these moral lives. | ||
| And a lot of people want to say that morality is sort of a... | ||
| An outcome of religion? | ||
| Perhaps religion is an outcome of morality. | ||
| Sure, there are correlations between the two, but as I often say when we talk about science, correlation does not imply causality. | ||
| There's no way to prove that without religion we wouldn't have a moral compass, and it's actually pretty philosophically ludicrous to think in those terms. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay, so you are from Texas. | ||
| As you just said, you grew up Mormon, so in the Mormon Church. | ||
| When did you come out as atheist? | ||
| Yeah, so if I'm remembering correctly, I came out when I was around 15 years old. | ||
| And it was... Did you consider it like coming out? | ||
| I mean, how did the... I did. | ||
| 15 year old Kara, how did she feel about like actually having to say this thing? | ||
| And that's the thing, I actually had to say it because I wasn't, I didn't grow up in kind of a sort of religious household. | ||
| I grew up in a very traditional Mormon household. | ||
| So I remember telling my father, I had been questioning for a while and he had been giving me kind of the pat responses of like, you know, pray about it and whatever, you'll figure it out on your own. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And when I would pray about it and nothing would happen and then I was like, what am I doing? | ||
| I finally remember telling my father, you know, I don't believe. | ||
| I don't believe and I feel like I'm lying myself going to church every Sunday, every Wednesday, every day before school, going to seminary. | ||
| It was a huge part of my life and it felt like a big ruse. | ||
| I think much like somebody who is in the closet and who is struggling trying to act straight or trying to be somebody that they're not. | ||
| And so I remember telling him and I remember these words. | ||
| As long as you live under my roof, I have a moral obligation to God to force you to go to church until you're 18 years old. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| So what do you do with that as a 15-year-old? | ||
| I didn't live under his roof anymore. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So it was a big choice. | ||
| You know, my parents had long been divorced, and at 15, I remember saying to him, You know, technically I think I'm of an age of consent where if we went to the courthouse and I pled my case that a judge would say she can stay with her mom full time. | ||
| It's her choice. | ||
| She's, you know, she's old enough to make these kinds of decisions. | ||
| And I was a pretty precocious kid. | ||
| I'm sure I could have convinced the judge that I had thought about this quite a bit, which I had. | ||
| And so my father said, okay, he let me make that choice. | ||
| It was a difficult bind to be in. | ||
| And I didn't talk to him for many years after that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Our relationship took a big hit and yeah, it took a long time for us to get back on good terms. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So there's two really different but interesting pieces to that because there's the choice that you made in your own life to say, this is who I am. | ||
| But then there's this other piece of, it's not easy for a 40 year old to say to their parent, I don't believe in what you believe, much less a 15-year-old. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Maybe it's even easier for a 15-year-old because you're, like, rebellious at that point anyway. | ||
| I mean, I'm not sure. | ||
| But definitely, I look back at the gravity of that decision and I think, like, whoa, that was pretty bold of me. | ||
| I'm not sure if I felt that way at the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of the things we talked with Sam about a lot was separating the doctrine of something from the people that follow it. | ||
| So in the case with Sam, it was mostly about the doctrine of Islam versus Muslim people. | ||
| So how do you now, after the experience that you had with your father, Believe in what you believe. | ||
| Your whole career really is very much based in this. | ||
| How do you separate the doctrine of Mormonism? | ||
| I'm sure you have many other family members that you love that are great people and all that. | ||
| How do you separate that from the piece of you that says, I just don't believe in any of this? | ||
| Yeah, you know, I think it's—for me, it's easy to separate for my own life, right? | ||
| Like, I can look at Mormonism and I can look at my beliefs and I can say, that's bullshit and I don't believe in it. | ||
| But of course, there are people that I love who are like hook, line, and sinker. | ||
| They buy into it. | ||
| And it's one thing to step back and say, you know, they bought into bullshit. | ||
| But it's another thing to actually say, I still respect these people and they're well-educated. | ||
| You know, I don't come—yes, I come from Texas. | ||
| I don't come from, like, rednecks. | ||
| You know, my mother, who's no longer Mormon, is an educator. | ||
| She's a schoolteacher, recently retired. | ||
| My father, who still is very much Mormon, is an engineer. | ||
| And his wife, who is also very much Mormon, is a science teacher. | ||
| A very good science teacher. | ||
| And so these are educated people who promote education and who are very good parents, adopted, you know, adult -- | ||
| not adult, but teenage children after we had moved out of the house. | ||
| Like, incredible people. | ||
| And I love them dearly. | ||
| But we have a big disconnect when it comes to belief. | ||
| Now, I don't think they need to believe what I believe for us to get along and vice versa. | ||
| It's one thing when you're in a parental child situation. | ||
| The rules are a bit different. | ||
| But it is still tough because I think one of the things that you take with you, no matter how long after the reconciliation happens, Is a bit of pity? | ||
| A bit of, like... I know in my heart of hearts that I kind of feel sorry that they live this lifestyle. | ||
| I feel sorry for them that they're sort of enslaved to these religious rules. | ||
| I feel sorry for them that they have to struggle with big issues like accepting homosexuality in the family, for example. | ||
| And their church teaches them that this is an abomination and it's so ingrained in them. | ||
| But I know they must struggle feeling like, But I love this person. | ||
| How could that person be an abomination? | ||
| I feel sorry for the completely religiously inundated that they have to do that. | ||
| Do you think they would feel that pity for you, too? | ||
| Like, they would look at you and go, well, she doesn't have these incredibly powerful beliefs. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| My dad thinks I'm not going to heaven. | ||
|
unidentified
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Like, can you imagine? | |
| Well, you're not because it doesn't exist. | ||
| Well, yeah, exactly. | ||
| And especially not the celestial and the terrestrial. | ||
| Heaven gets super complicated in the Mormon faith. | ||
| But yeah, of course he feels sorry for me. | ||
| He thinks I'm not going to bathe in God's glory for all of eternity. | ||
| That's like a pretty big deal to somebody who actually believes that exists. | ||
| And you're not doing it just as a private person. | ||
| You're doing it very publicly. | ||
| Oh, very publicly. | ||
| And interacting with a lot of people and potentially influencing people. | ||
| I'm a heretic. | ||
| And that's probably not something he's very proud of. | ||
| Why do you think atheists are so hated? | ||
| I've seen poll after poll, and we've talked about them in some other shows, that atheists are the most distrusted group in America. | ||
| People would never vote for an atheist to be president. | ||
| You know, Barney Frank, who was a congressman from Massachusetts, a pretty liberal place, came out as gay in something like 1983, didn't come out as an atheist until he was on Real Time with Bill Maher, After he had retired, and since then has even backtracked a little bit on saying that he was an atheist. | ||
| What is it about atheists? | ||
| Because the atheists that I know are pretty much, by and large, the most decent, sort of humanistic, open people that I know, and yet there's this portrayal of them that's completely the reverse. | ||
| I don't think it's that people think that atheists have, like, horns or anything, you know? | ||
| I think there's racism and there's xenophobia and there's hate and there's fear and there's all of the different things that feed into why people don't trust or don't like what they don't understand. | ||
| I think specifically, though, with atheists, you have to put yourself in the shoes of the religious to understand where this hatred comes from because, of course, Non-religious people don't have any problem with religious people running for office. | ||
| It's religious people. | ||
| I'm sorry, non-religious people don't have any problem with atheists running for office. | ||
| It's religious people that have a problem with that. | ||
| And think about, okay, so for example. | ||
| You are an upstanding gay man. | ||
| You know, I have my moments. | ||
| You have your moments. | ||
| And there are some religious people who think that you are just yuck, right? | ||
| Who think that being gay is disgusting, like Edward Falzon's book, because that's what the Bible teaches. | ||
| And so they have these ideas in their head that your lifestyle is an abomination and blah, blah, blah, and it is a choice and you could have chosen to live another way, but you're still A person, and you're a flawed person, and you've made a difficult choice, and maybe you can come back around. | ||
| I think that there's something that really speaks to the core of the structure of belief, that an atheist is somebody who actively rejects the foundation of what matters to these people, and that act is so closely tied to what they think of as the devil, what they think of as evil, what they think of as, you know, heresy, All of these pure, just irrationally fearful states. | ||
| It's apostasy. | ||
| It's what fuels ISIS, right? | ||
| It's worse than being an Islamic apostate. | ||
| It's worse than being a Christian apostate. | ||
| It's being an atheist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's the ultimate one. | ||
| It's the ultimate apostasy. | ||
| And I think that that's really where it comes from. | ||
| And because of that, historically, generation after generation, I think we get a bad rap. | ||
| So you've got some people who are such deep believers that there's no way they're going to come around to it. | ||
| And then you've got other people who just equate the word atheism with like, I don't know, just like bad stuff. | ||
| Like they're criminals. | ||
| They're just like bad dudes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I want to get to new atheism. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But do you think the other piece of this is that, to me it seems like, because an atheist can come from any religious background, be any sex, be any sexuality, be any nationality, all those things, that in a weird way what they fear is that this group of people is coming together using sort of the best of all of us. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's sort of like for gay people. | ||
| There are gay people of every nationality and ethnicity and religion and all that. | ||
| And that's why there's so much richness, I think, in the gay community. | ||
| And I'm starting to think that that's what people fear about atheists, too. | ||
| Because there's black atheists, white atheists, gay atheists. | ||
| But see, this is something that, I think, intrinsic in what you just said, the gay community. | ||
| Like, the atheist community, it exists. | ||
| It exists, but not to the same extent. | ||
| Because I think there's something that's sort of fundamental to being an atheist that I think it makes some people reject trying to find community. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The whole point is that we're not a church. | ||
| The whole point is that we just don't believe. | ||
| It's not that we all believe the same thing. | ||
| It's that we have a lack of belief, and I think that by definition, that makes some people feel like we don't need to band together. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| There is no common thread here. | ||
| It's just the default state. | ||
| All right, so that's exactly where I wanted to go with this, because new atheists, that seems to be the new thing. | ||
| So do you have a definition for new atheists? | ||
| I can sort of tell you what I think, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I think that New Atheist is a term that's often used by non-New Atheists, so it's sort of a derogatory term. | ||
| So I'm not really sure how to define it because it seems like from the outside people apply that label. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Maybe I'm a New Atheist. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I do know that the term Firebrand Atheist is one that's actually kind of welcome within that community. | ||
| So David Silverman, who is the president of American Atheists, He has a new book coming out. | ||
| I actually wrote the foreword to his book, which is really funny because he's a hardcore Firebrand atheist, and I'm like, not at all! | ||
| But I like that he is one, because I think it takes all types. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So by Firebrand though, you mean like really outspoken? | ||
| Oh yeah, like he doesn't think you can be an atheist Jew. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like he thinks you need to drop the Jew side because how can you be both an atheist and | ||
| a Jew? | ||
| You have to, you know, hold on to your atheist values and you have to be very open about | ||
| it. | ||
| Like we talked about this at length on my podcast and I'm like, of course you can be | ||
| an atheist. | ||
| I mean Sam Harris last week, who's one of the biggest atheists I know, that barely makes | ||
| any sense, but... | ||
| He is so atheist. | ||
|
unidentified
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He so doesn't believe in God. | |
| But yeah, I mean, one of my best friends is an atheist Jew and I get it. | ||
| Like, and he's super Jewish and super atheist. | ||
| And so I'm not a firebrand atheist. | ||
| I am really kind of accepting of people's religious beliefs and I think that we need a spectrum of more secular values if we want to move the goalpost. | ||
| But I think it's important that there are firebrand atheists the same way that I think that it's important that when you look at feminism, That there are men who hold on to feminist ideals, that there are women who are out loud and proud and in front of the line talking about it, and then there are women who act in a feminist way, but who don't make it their mission to always, you know, be that feminist. | ||
| Same thing with Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Across the spectrum, you need the people that are out in front, that are being loud, that are making sure that people pay attention to this movement, but you also need the people who quietly live their lives that way every day. | ||
| It's almost like we should have a broad spectrum of people who believe in different things and can all still get along. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| And the truth is, if you have atheists of all these different flavors, then I think that you're going to see more people being affected, more people that are afraid to come out saying, That person is just like me, or I see myself in that person and I can look at them as a role model. | ||
| If we were all one flavor, we would turn off a huge section of the population. | ||
| Yeah, and I think, to sort of wrap this up, I think that's sort of the people that are, and unfortunately it happens to be a lot of people on the left that have been attacking new atheists, My friend Kyle Kalinske said that a new atheist to him is just an atheist that finally is saying I'm an atheist. | ||
| Because atheists used to have to just not say anything about it. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| And when I see these people on the left attacking new atheists as if new atheists have some set of beliefs. | ||
| All they have is this one thing in common, which is not belief. | ||
| Not a bigger set of beliefs. | ||
| And I, you know, I remember dating somebody previously who I think was a little confused about my atheism, but was probably agnostic himself. | ||
| And I remember him saying something about, like, I just don't understand why you have to be so public about it. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| It's a private matter. | ||
| Why are you always... And it's such a double standard. | ||
| He's like, Are you kidding me? | ||
| Religious people are like the most public people about their religion. | ||
| And the fact that I want to say vocally, I'm an atheist. | ||
| I don't believe in God. | ||
| I don't factor God into my decision-making. | ||
| I don't believe in any afterlife. | ||
| I don't believe in anything supernatural. | ||
| I'm a science-based, evidence-based thinker. | ||
| The reason I do that is because then if I continue to live my life the way that I hope I'm living it, in a moral way, in an upstanding way, then people can look and go, oh, that's what an atheist looks like? | ||
| Oh. | ||
| I've been really inspired the last couple weeks, and I've been noticing this over the course of probably about six months or so. | ||
| I sense a real awakening by secular people. | ||
| Not just atheists. | ||
| I mean people that are secular in that they can have whatever belief that they want, but they want our public space, our politics, and our public life to have nothing to do with religion. | ||
| Do you sense this? | ||
| Please tell me yes, that there's been some kind of awakening. | ||
| So, like, constitutionalists. | ||
| So, like, people who are coming back around to 250 years ago. | ||
| Yes, no, I definitely think so. | ||
| I think that it does come from more people being willing to say that they're non-religious. | ||
| It's the largest growing minority in the country. | ||
| And so even though people who self-identify as atheists are still the most hated group, and trusted less than rapists, which is totally crazy, People who are not religious are growing in numbers, and I think they're growing in solidarity. | ||
| And even religious people who are sane are standing up for secular values and saying, we need to promote a separation of church and state. | ||
| And we need to move away from the Christian privilege that has, like, underlied our political structure for way too long now. | ||
| Does it always strike you as odd that it seems to me the religious right, on one hand, they always scream about separation of church and state, and then they're the same ones that are always pushing religion into the conversation. | ||
| Do they really scream about separation? | ||
| I guess they do. | ||
| I don't listen to them very much anymore. | ||
| Well, you know, you could something, you know, real quick, something like Kim Davis and Huckabee, where he was telling people that she shouldn't abide by a law that she doesn't believe in. | ||
| I guess that's combining church and state. | ||
| I was giving them a little more credit than they deserve. | ||
| And also, I feel like, just a quick aside with this whole Kim Davis thing, why do people care? | ||
| It's one woman. | ||
| This is like the plane crash over and over and over, right? | ||
| This has really no bearing on anything. | ||
| If anything, this one woman is emblematic of how much this movement is You know, the fact that there's only one person that they | ||
| can point to and that everybody's rallying around her and it's a joke. | ||
| It's become such an eye roll. | ||
| And to me it's actually a good thing because it's showing me that it's becoming more and more marginalized and we don't | ||
| have to take them seriously. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I completely agree. | ||
| I think I've sent two tweets on the whole Kim Davis thing, which normally it would be like one of my wheelhouse things. | ||
| But it seems to me it's like we've won this one. | ||
| We've won, right? | ||
| There's nothing that Mike Huckabee can do to reverse this. | ||
| No. | ||
| Even if, God forbid, he became president. | ||
| I say that with all due irony. | ||
| Yeah, he won't. | ||
| He's digging himself, like he's doubling down on a non-issue that's embarrassing that It's laughable. | ||
| And I think that the more that we put her in the spotlight, and the more that we do the wall-to-wall CNN coverage about her, the more it gives this false sense of legitimacy that just doesn't exist. | ||
| Right, it's like the media is blowing it up to be this thing where actually the average person is like, you know what, this is a dying dinosaur right here. | ||
| No, yeah, she's a monologue joke. | ||
| That's all she is, you know? | ||
| So, one more on this sort of broad topic. | ||
| So again, I had Sam on last week, and it's been really interesting for me to see what happens when someone with a background in science gets involved in politics. | ||
| And I almost think that if I have one critique of Sam, it would be that he's placed himself in this really precarious position out of his own bravery. | ||
| And as he said, it was at huge cost to him, probably personally and professionally, I would imagine. | ||
| Do you think it's hard for scientists or should people of a science background get involved in the political debate? | ||
| Because it seems he's too, in a lot of ways, he's too smart to be talking about the way we talk about politics because politics is so dumbed down, i.e. | ||
| Donald Trump is leading in the Republican polls. | ||
| And it's so binary, right? | ||
| There's no room for nuance in political debate, especially not in the eight-second soundbites that we've grown used to in political media. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm of two minds about this. | ||
| So I am a co-host on The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, which is a popular science podcast that really celebrates skepticism, evidence-based thinking, debunking medical quackery, and things like that. | ||
| And the host, Stephen Novella, is a renowned neuroscientist and a renowned skeptic. | ||
| And he has made an editorial decision on this show over the past 10 years, which I just joined like two months ago, that we don't discuss politics. | ||
| That that's not relevant to the scientific conversations. | ||
| Now on my podcast, I talk about politics all the time because I think that science is not just a topic that you study. | ||
| It's not just facts and figures in a textbook. | ||
| But it's a way of thinking, and it's a way of utilizing the principles of the scientific method and looking at evidence in order to make informed decisions. | ||
| And so for me, scientific thinking is the foundation of politics. | ||
| And if we could start moving into kind of a direction where this country is governed based on evidence and not based on, as Colbert calls it, | ||
| truthiness, which is so often what we do. | ||
| Legislation is passed because it gives you a gut check, right? | ||
| Or because there's pork or all those other reasons, financial incentives and things like | ||
| that. | ||
| But so often we make strong legislative decisions where there is evidence available to us and | ||
| we don't base it on the evidence. | ||
| And I think that if we started moving more in that direction, we'd have a much more functional government and definitely a more functional economy. | ||
| And so I would like to see more scientists moving into the political arena. | ||
| But I can see why it would be disconcerting if you are a functioning university scientist, because you also oftentimes receive federal money. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And so then things start to get a little bit confusing about where your allegiance lies. | ||
| Now, Sam is not a university scientist. | ||
| He was a trained academic, but it doesn't work as an academic. | ||
| He's an author. | ||
| He does political punditry now. | ||
| I mean, it's part of his job. | ||
| And I applaud him for that, even though he's on Hit List. | ||
| I'm sure he's on Hit List because of this. | ||
| You know, it's a choice that he made, and I think it's a really brave choice. | ||
| But yeah. | ||
| I have no doubt he's on hit list. | ||
| Yeah, his life is at risk. | ||
| Look at my Twitter feed from today. | ||
| It's completely out of control. | ||
| So GMOs. | ||
| We've talked about GMOs before. | ||
| Can you give me like a five-minute sort of GMO 101? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You just say GMO, people freak out. | ||
| They go Monsanto and everyone goes nuts. | ||
| And lately there's this added confusion because a scientist who I've interviewed many times across multiple platforms named Kevin Folta has been in the news a lot because of a FOIA request that revealed some things that people didn't want to see, mostly things that he never denied anyway. | ||
| And it wasn't a lot of money that he got and all that, but that's a whole other topic. | ||
| The ethics get complicated, but regardless of that, if we're going to talk about the core of GMOs, These other conversations really are irrelevant to this | ||
| core conversation. | ||
| So literally 101. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Like focus, if you don't know anything about... | ||
| Yeah, so what is a GMO? | ||
| Well, technically the word genetically modified organism could refer to anything, any organism, | ||
| anything that's alive in which the genes have been modified. | ||
| So basically breeding two plants together to try and get a desired trait is technically | ||
| Now that's not how we casually use the word anymore. | ||
| We usually use the term GMO to actually refer to transgenic organisms. | ||
| So these are organisms where they weren't selectively bred for particular traits, but there was actually a transgene that was inserted. | ||
| We've gone into the laboratory, we've tested, and we found these genetic markers, these areas where we can do something to the plant. | ||
| Generally we're talking about plants. | ||
| There are some animals that are up for FDA approval, like salmon. | ||
| But generally we're talking about plants. | ||
| And scientists will say, for example, this is a big one right now, citrus greening is wiping out oranges in Florida. | ||
| Wiping them out, they're all really sick, it's getting harder and harder to get fresh oranges. | ||
| And this is a problem that they don't see going away. | ||
| Can we make oranges that are resistant to this disease? | ||
| Because if we don't, we may not have oranges anymore. | ||
| So these scientists work very hard to go into the genome to try and understand all of these different genes within the plant and try and modify them in a certain way. | ||
| Sometimes it involves taking a gene from another plant and inserting it. | ||
| Sometimes it involves turning a gene on, silencing a gene, making a gene do something that maybe it wouldn't have done unless it was under pressure. | ||
| There's a lot of different ways that you can genetically modify a plant. | ||
| These are things we've done for a long time for all kinds of different plants. | ||
| Oh yeah, and there are literally thousands of research versions of GMOs, but there are very few GMOs that are on the market, and I think that's another big misconception. | ||
| You'll see labels on crazy stuff, like you'll see labels on potatoes that are like GMO-free, and it's like, well yeah, because there's no such thing as a GMO potato! | ||
| Because they're not modifying it to stop bugs from eating it. | ||
| I mean, they are in the lab, but you can't buy it yet. | ||
| So the thing is, the only crops that are available are mostly big ag crops. | ||
| So corn is genetically modified, probably most of the corn that you eat. | ||
| Soybeans, sugar beets, papaya is genetically modified. | ||
| A genetically modified apple just came on the market, or it's about to. | ||
| I think it's the Okinawa apple, and it doesn't brown. | ||
| You can take a bite out of it and sit it on the table and it doesn't brown. | ||
| It's pretty cool. | ||
| I tried it. | ||
| Did you try it? | ||
| It tastes like an apple. | ||
| And you didn't grow some weird... I did not. | ||
| You know, you've eaten a lot of GMOs in your day and I don't see any appendages that aren't supposed to be there. | ||
| Well, you can't see them. | ||
| Alright, so from that very sort of simplistic explanation of what GMOs are, why do so many people hate GMOs? | ||
| Because people are afraid of what they don't understand. | ||
| And there's a lot of misinformation out there. | ||
| And so there are some legitimate concerns when it comes to environmental consequences. | ||
| I think probably the most legitimate concern when it comes to GMOs is a normal outcome of evolution. | ||
| And I use the example of superbugs with antibiotics, because I think it's a good analogy. | ||
| So when we take antibiotics, we actually induce resistance in the bugs that can infect us, and now there are whole classes of bugs that are resistant to those antibiotics. | ||
| Just like in GMO plants, when you alter them to resist certain pests, or to resist, mostly with the pests, when you alter them to resist those pests, you may have new pests that evolve a resistance to that resistance. | ||
| You see it a little bit with weeds too, like the glyphosate argument, which is Roundup, people are really scared of Roundup. | ||
| BT is more the pest thing, and the glyphosate is more of the weed thing, and people sometimes mix those things up. | ||
| That's sort of where Monsanto gets involved, but we'll cover that another time. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| We're talking about the potential for super weeds to grow because these plants are helping them grow. | ||
| It's a natural process, and it doesn't just happen in GM. | ||
| It happens any time that you're doing large-scale agriculture. | ||
| And so I like to say to people, you know, would you want to take all the antibiotics off the market because they're making antibiotic resistant? | ||
| No, we need to be smarter about how we use them and we need to come up with new antibiotics. | ||
| And so what scientists are actually doing is they're trying to figure out new and better ways to improve resistance to these different bugs. | ||
| Let's say that there is a A pesticide inside of a plant and the bug develops resistance to that pesticide. | ||
| Well, if you actually alter that plant in two ways now, you have two lines of defense against this bug. | ||
| It's statistically very unlikely that you'll get a mutation in that bug against both of those lines of resistance. | ||
| So now you can have a resistant plant and you're less likely to see resistance occurring in the bug. | ||
| Scientists are always trying to keep one step ahead of nature and these are the biggest problems that we're seeing with genetic modification. | ||
| A lot of the problems that people think are happening with genetic modification, cancer, health problems, seeds blowing into another field and getting sued for it, suicides in India. | ||
| None of these are substantiated. | ||
| None of them. | ||
| The science shows time and time again that these are not real concerns, and if you actually do dig into the case law, and you actually do try and understand what has happened legally in these situations, most of those lawsuits with the big ag companies involve people storing seeds, which is technically against the law. | ||
| Now if you have a problem with, you know, patenting a seed, Again, it's sort of a whole other thing. | ||
| Or if you have a problem with large-scale agribusiness, and you have a problem with the way that we dry out the land by only farming a very particular crop, I get that. | ||
| But that has nothing to do with genetic modification, and I think we often conflate the issues. | ||
| The topic of abortion never seems to go away. | ||
| And I want to talk to you as someone of science and as an atheist who obviously has no morals, how do you negotiate this? | ||
| Because it seems to me that people on the left, when they talk about abortion, they make it sound like everyone on the right hates women and that they want to control women. | ||
| And when people on the right talk about it, they make it sound like everyone on the left hates babies, and those are all babies, right? | ||
| And neither one of those things are true. | ||
| No. - That's very obvious. | ||
| So how do you, as someone that comes to conclusions based on science, how do you navigate the sort of ethical, | ||
| I assume you're pro-choice, but actually I'm just assuming that, but is that-- | ||
| No, of course I am. (laughs) | ||
| So how do you then, as someone that's pro-choice, believes in evidence, believes in science, how do you decide where, like, do you think that it should be a two-month cutoff for an abortion? | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| Where do you come up with that as someone that isn't coming from the religious angle, but is coming from the science-based angle? | ||
| I'd say abortion should be legal up until 12 years old. | ||
| I'm like, until the brain is fully—no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Actually, that'd be more like 25. | |
| You know, it's funny because I am an evidence-based thinker. | ||
| I try to be an evidence-based thinker and a skeptical thinker, and I try to listen to the science first and then make my political decisions based on that. | ||
| So I am liberal. | ||
| I am left wing. | ||
| I am progressive. | ||
| I think it's easy to paint me. | ||
| But I'm also super pro mandatory vaccinations. | ||
| I'm pro GMOs, which is usually a more conservative viewpoint. | ||
| So sometimes it's hard to put me in a box. | ||
| I'm not pro-life. | ||
| I am pro-life. | ||
| I hate that term. | ||
| It makes it sound like I'm not. | ||
| I am pro-choice. | ||
| It's partially because of the science, and it's partially because I'm not religious. | ||
| And I think that a lot of pro-life ideology comes purely from religion. | ||
| And once you take religion out of the equation, it becomes a much more nuanced and complicated topic. | ||
| I am pro-choice, meaning that I don't think that if a woman wants to have an abortion she shouldn't be able to and I | ||
| don't think that if a woman | ||
| wants to keep her baby she should be coerced to have an abortion. | ||
| I think that a woman should be able to make a decision based on her own body | ||
| and in my view, which may sound kind of extreme, until that baby is born | ||
| it's hers. | ||
| It's her body. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I agree with you, I guess, up until that point. | ||
| I'm absolutely pro-choice. | ||
| But a week before the birth? | ||
| I mean, where? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I think that's a strawman argument because it doesn't happen. | ||
| It's like the voter ID stuff, you know? | ||
| Like, oh, voter fraud. | ||
| We've got to be careful about that. | ||
| Women don't carry babies to a week to term and then go, I think I'm going to lose this baby. | ||
| But so at three months, when the baby now has features and, you know, all of these things, And I guess this is the slippery slope. | ||
| It's legal up to this point. | ||
| It's legal. | ||
| First and second trimester abortions are legal. | ||
| And I think that you have to look at all... This is the thing. | ||
| When you're writing laws, we have to think about not just the obvious cases, but the aberrant cases. | ||
| This is why writing legislation is actually a very, you know, it's a nuanced and artistic endeavor. | ||
| And especially then when you look at how you defend laws in the courts, right? | ||
| When you look at case law, it's complicated because we have to fully understand all of the times when the laws can be misused or misinterpreted. | ||
| And there are cases, for example, where a woman does not know that she is pregnant until well into her pregnancy. | ||
| And I think you do have to take that. | ||
| There are cases in which women are victims of coercion or abuse or sometimes it is more nuanced than that. | ||
| Maybe they feel pressure from their husband, their boyfriend or a member of society to have a baby and they don't realize until later that they do have these options. | ||
| Maybe they fall on financially difficult times. | ||
| Maybe they find out that there's, you know, some sort of genetic abnormality in the baby and that they don't have the means to raise that baby. | ||
| And I think that all of those really complicated, really emotional, personal questions have to be taken into account. | ||
| I don't want to say, and maybe it's easy for me to say because I don't have kids, but the woman is the vessel, and she is carrying this child, and until the child comes out of her, it is her body, it is her choice, and they are her rights. | ||
| And I do think that it's a complicated topic, and I think that that's why it's important that we do talk about it, and that more people are comfortable talking about it. | ||
| I agree with you, and I almost regret having said the part about the one week before birth, Because I know it is a straw man and it's not something that happens, but I think there's something interesting about the when is it really a feasible life thing. | ||
| And obviously we can't resolve that now. | ||
| And I think that we have to think about every possible option because even religious people, you'll find that whereas they would be appalled if they got knocked up and had an abortion, they might go get IVF, which some religions don't even allow that, but they might get IVF and of course they're going to do selective reduction during IVF. | ||
| Is that not abortion in their view? | ||
| I mean it's very complicated. | ||
| Because, you know, sometimes you do IVF and, like, five of them stick! | ||
| And then you turn into John and Kate plus eight! | ||
| So I guess the most extreme religious people, even in those cases, look at a baby as a blessing from God. | ||
| It's almost like people pick and choose when to believe in religion. | ||
| It's weird like that, yeah. | ||
| Alright, so one more for you. | ||
| What I want to do with all these interviews is sort of end on a very personal note. | ||
| And we actually started on a personal note because you talked about leaving the church and very personal things related to atheism. | ||
| Holdin' on. | ||
| So you have talked about your battle or struggle with depression. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| Pretty vocally. | ||
| But I know you pretty well over the last three years. | ||
| It's not something that we talk about a lot privately. | ||
| It's not just, hey, let's talk about my depression. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's not, actually. | ||
| It's not a cheery topic. | ||
| Well, in that way, I know you to be totally, like, happy and well-adjusted. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Most people who struggle with depression are really good actors. | ||
| They are, they are. | ||
| It's a coping mechanism that they develop. | ||
| And that's not to say that like every day of my life I'm pretending to be happy because I experience joy and I experience happiness on a regular basis. | ||
| I'm also in treatment and I take medication every day and that has made a huge difference. | ||
| There have been periods of my life where if you had seen me, which I would not have allowed you to see me because I was very private, you know, again, we come up with our strategies and we come up with our coping mechanisms. | ||
| If we had been in a position where you had seen me at my lowest of lows, yeah, you wouldn't be saying the same thing. | ||
| And so I think that that's a common experience for people who struggle with depression. | ||
| There's a private side of your depression, and then there's a public face, if you're willing to have one, which not many people are, and I completely understand that. | ||
| I personally feel like I have a responsibility as somebody who has a bit of a, you know, people tweet me, people Facebook me, they, you know, some people know that I exist. | ||
| And I've noticed that when I do talk about this, the feedback that I get is really It just makes me feel good. | ||
| It makes me feel good to know how many people are out there who are struggling with this and don't see that a lot of people are talking about it publicly. | ||
| So because of that, I feel a real obligation to do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is it depressing? | ||
| I guess that's an odd choice. | ||
| Is depression depressing? | ||
| Is it depressing to you, or disconcerting, I suppose would be a better word, that we don't really have a mental health discussion in this country anymore? | ||
| I feel like maybe five years ago we actually did, a little bit. | ||
| People talked about it a little bit. | ||
| And now, and I think it was around when the shootings started really becoming... That's when we talk about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I don't think we do anymore with the shootings. | ||
| We're not. | ||
| I mean, we do for like a minute. | ||
| We immediately go into the gun thing, and that's obviously, we need to have that discussion. | ||
| But I worry that the mental health thing is like a scapegoat for the gun advocates. | ||
| So you have the gun nutter-butters who are like, but it's not because of guns, it's because he was mentally ill and he shouldn't have gotten... I'm not saying that that's not also a very important conversation to have, but just like we should be having conversations about gun control, When we're not in crisis. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know the same thing like when you're having like sexual problems at home. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Probably not a good idea to talk about them when you're both like naked and like ugh. | ||
| It's better to like wait until it's a more calm situation. | ||
| You say okay sorry I didn't wasn't really into it or I couldn't get it up or whatever is going on. | ||
| It's a safer time to talk about it. | ||
| I think it's the same thing when it comes to both gun control and mental health. | ||
| Like we should be talking about this in the light and in the dark because It's not really that helpful when we're doing it only in crisis. | ||
| And I think it also elevates and ignores the day-to-day struggles that people have. | ||
| You know, depression is a massive illness, and it's a biological illness, and it's an illness that destroys lives, and it is so treatable. | ||
| The problem is that, you know, in this country, especially I think with the older set, we are getting better, just like with coming out as atheists, we are getting better with the younger people erasing that stigma and being more comfortable talking about it. | ||
| The problem is we still treat psychiatric illnesses like disorders of will. | ||
| And that's a fundamental hurdle that we have to get past. | ||
| That somehow you can will yourself out of it. | ||
| That somehow you can change your patterns of thinking. | ||
| Just think more positively. | ||
| Just do that and you'll be well. | ||
| It's because people don't understand the biological basis of these issues. | ||
| And we've never treated depression, for example, the same way that we've treated diabetes. | ||
| You would never shame somebody into needing insulin. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But we do. | ||
| We shame people who take antidepressants. | ||
| We shame people who have to take psychiatric medication. | ||
| And that's just a huge bummer. | ||
| And I hate to see young kids either Being scared away for it or feeling like they're not allowed, or scared away from it, I'm sorry, or feeling like they're not allowed to be honest with themselves. | ||
| And older people, too. | ||
| My father. | ||
| My father went through a depressive episode. | ||
| And my father has struggled with some things. | ||
| And I remember when he finally told me, when I was struggling myself, it was so meaningful for me. | ||
| It helped me so much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| Oh! | ||
| So much is explained! | ||
| And then he became this confidant, and I could talk to him about it. | ||
| But I had no idea when he was going through it, because he lived as a generation. | ||
| It's sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy, almost. | ||
| The shame then just continues the cycle. | ||
| Meanwhile, you hear it from your father, and then it probably makes you feel better in who you are. | ||
| Well, and the thing, I mean, what you just said is so important. | ||
| There's this negative feedback. | ||
| When you're depressed, like actually physically experiencing a depressive episode, such a big portion of that is guilt and shame. | ||
| And to have an added layer of guilt and shame that comes from society not understanding your depression, and then having to carry the guilt of being depressed while you're depressed, It's insane. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| And so I think the more that we become open about it, and the more that we celebrate all of our differences and our quirks, and the more that we understand that going to therapy is like something that a lot more people should probably do, and being okay with that, and being okay with the fact that we all have our issues, you know what I mean? | ||
| And we all struggle, and I think it makes us richer, and it makes us more interesting, and it makes us more human. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's the world I want to live in. | ||
| Yeah, that's the world I want to live in. | ||
| I think we did a little talk therapy here, right? | ||
| How do you feel now? | ||
| It's definitely not the same. | ||
| Not the same? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| My shrink would probably not like to hear that this was a therapy session. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| Well, Cara, our time is up. | ||
| That's the worst part, I'll tell you what. | ||
| That was a hell of an outro. | ||
| All right, well, Cara, of course, is one of my favorite people. | ||
| You can follow her. | ||
| It's carasantamaria.com, at carasantamaria on Twitter. | ||
| Do you want to send them anywhere else? | ||
| That's good. | ||
| That's good? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alright. |
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