Dave Rubin and Gad Saad dissect the assault on free speech, citing incidents at Missouri, Yale, and Rutgers where leftist forces stifled dissent. Saad, an evolutionary psychologist who fled Lebanon as a Jewish child, critiques political correctness as a form of Munchausen syndrome where individuals feign victimhood. He defends tenure for protecting dangerous ideas, quantifies hate in religious texts using content analysis, and argues that atheism offers a "Carpe Diem" transcendence without requiring religion. Ultimately, the discussion frames campus culture wars as a crisis of intellectual freedom driven by oppressive social justice movements. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, let's talk about college and education this week.
Perhaps the best way to dive into this discussion is to first tell you guys a bit about my own personal experience.
I went to public school in Long Island from kindergarten through high school and then on to Binghamton University.
New York actually has a pretty great college system for decades, and since I was a resident, tuition was discounted to just a fraction of what most colleges cost now.
I got a solid education at an affordable public school and have used my degree in political science to do exactly what you all tune in It was my education that led me to guiding conversations about important topics with interesting people.
I also spent a lot of time in college smoking pot and listening to Phish, but that's another story for another time.
This show has been devoted to discussing ideas.
That very concept is rooted in a good education in which you can question what you believe.
This is the number one reason to go to college, to learn how to think critically.
When we talk about a battle of ideas, you can only have that battle when people know what their ideas are actually based on.
When we talk about free speech, you can only really talk about knowing why free speech is important and what happens to societies that don't have it.
When we talk about the dysfunction of our political process, you can really only understand it if you know the basic tenets of how it was designed to work in the first place.
And when we talk about the complex issues facing the Middle East, you can really only understand them if you know the history of the countries and the people living there.
I didn't learn all of these things in college, but the foundation of having my ideas challenged and learning new things absolutely was built there.
Learning is something I try to do on this show each week, and it's why I have no problem telling you guys I don't know everything and I don't have all the answers.
At this very moment, the American education system, and our colleges in particular, are under total assault from the backwards forces on the left who don't want open discussion and would rather stifle ideas they don't like, such as critiquing a certain religion or questioning the motives of the social justice movement.
Because of the authoritarian crusade to shelter young people from ideas that might challenge them, we've created safe spaces where we once had rigorous debate.
We now issue trigger warnings where we once were brave enough to hear ideas that would make us uncomfortable.
The attack on the honest debate has gotten so bad, it is now hard to tell if this intellectual affliction is coming from the students or from the faculty.
Between the professor calling for muscle to remove press from a demonstration at the University of Missouri, to students demanding the dean be fired at Yale for defending the freedom of expression, to my former guest Milo Yiannopoulos being shouted down while talking about free speech at Rutgers just two weeks ago, the tentacles of intolerance are taking root at colleges all across America.
And it's the ideas which take root today that will be the ideas that lead us into the future.
That's the real risk here.
We must be willing to exercise our free speech more thoughtfully than to only use it to prevent other people from exercising theirs.
We have a right to free speech in this country, not a right to not be offended.
My guest just last week, Ben Shapiro, just had a speech about conservatism at Cal State University cancelled after leftist activists protested his presence on campus.
The school president said that Ben would be invited back, but as part of a panel when more diverse views could be heard.
While that concept doesn't sound terrible in and of itself, let's really understand what happened here.
When the authoritarians, be they on the left or on the right, when they like your views, you can speak freely and there's no need for counter voices.
When they don't like your views, well, you will be screamed at or outright cancelled.
This is dangerous and it's happening more and more every day.
I sat here for over an hour with Ben, and although I didn't agree with him on an array of topics, I listened and I learned.
From the response we got on the episode, so did many of you, even if all you learned was that you completely disagree with him.
That's what conversation's all about, and it's that precious space where you learn to think on your own, which is exactly what the point of higher education is supposed to be.
College is the single most important place where ideas must be challenged.
As I say all the time, let the battle of ideas happen, and the good ones will eventually win.
By slandering opponents, demanding professors be fired, and canceling speaking events, these college kids are unwittingly strengthening ideas that will one day silence them.
Eventually the day will come when they want to say something that's considered unpopular, and they will then be subjected to the same practices that they themselves are propagating right now.
The second they leave the safety of their college quad and are hit with the harsh reality of the real world, they'll be ill-prepared to deal with anyone who doesn't share their myopic view of how things should be.
To help me dissect this crisis, and that's exactly what it is, is Professor Gad Saad.
Gad is an author, professor, and evolutionary behavioral scientist at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
Gad is also a fearless defender of free speech and an outspoken advocate of free expression in an academic climate that doesn't look too kindly on these things these days.
We're going to dive deep into what has happened at college campuses all over the world and why free speech must be defended at all costs.
Once again, get in your safe space.
You've been trigger-warned.
Let's exercise some of that free speech while we still have it.
Gad Saad is a professor, author, YouTube creator, defender of free speech and secular ideas known as the Gadfather.
And he's spreading the sad truth.
I think you're gonna spread a little of it right here.
I say that to all my guests, because I'm always excited to talk to people, but I particularly mean it today because you joined me for the first test show all the way back in August.
People think that Sam Harris was the first guest, but technically, Gad Saad was the first.
And the first repeat guest.
So you were the first guest, you were the first repeat guest, and you're doing so much cool stuff in this space.
Right, so I was born in Lebanon, late 1964, so now everybody knows my age.
>>>MICHAEL STOLER: There you go.
>>>MARCUS MIRANDA: Lived there for eleven years, then the Civil War broke out in the mid 70's,
it became very very difficult to be Jewish in Lebanon and so we really had to leave under imminent
threat of execution. In Lebanon everybody carries an internal I.D. card, very much like a passport but
for the country itself and on that I.D. card is stated very clearly what your religion is and so if you
were stopped at particular roadblocks by militia who were not sympathetic to you being Jewish it wasn't
going to turn out well and as you might imagine most of the militia at that point.
You know, you wouldn't have cleared those roadblocks.
And so we really needed to leave.
And so we left Lebanon.
The day that we left Lebanon and we cleared the airspace of, well, Lebanon, as the captain had mentioned it, my mother takes out a Star of David, puts it around my neck and says, now you don't have to hide who you are.
Moderate in the Middle East is a very tentative term.
Sure.
And so they were kidnapped.
They disappeared for, I think it was eight days.
At the time that it was happening, when my siblings, who are much older than me, were trying to find a way to rescue them or even know if they're still alive, I had been lied to.
I was told that they had some financial problems.
That's why there was so much upheaval in the house.
So during those eight days when my parents had disappeared, I didn't know that they were potentially, you know, dead.
Yeah.
When they were finally rescued, they were rescued actually because my mother's best friend at the time, her name was Ehsan, was the personal dresser of Hafez al-Assad.
And so through those connections, we were able to pinpoint which militia group had them.
And then through him, I think, Yasser Arafat got involved and finally they found him.
They were with a group led by Abu Nidal.
I'm going on my memory here from when I was 15.
Yeah.
And then they were rescued.
And I think one of the things that you might remember from the story with my discussion with Astram, when my parents were eventually rescued, my father had a severe injury from having been beaten with a Kalashnikov, and he had a temporary stroke, a paralysis in his face, which eventually subsided.
And in my mother's case, I remember that one of the things that had really disturbed me as a 15-year-old young male was whether she had been raped.
And I remember that shortly after they were rescued and came back to Montreal, I asked her, the only time I've ever brought up this subject, and she said that while they repeatedly threatened her psychologically with rape, that they hadn't raped her.
And I don't know if that's true or not, we just sort of dropped the subject and never raised it again.
Yeah, great, actually it's one of the seven deadly sins of greed.
One of the, the owner of a building where my father had a store in the lobby
was trying to lowball my father to sell the store and thinking that, of course, as Jews,
they were in a very precarious situation, he had hired these militia to try to extract from them
confession that they were Israeli spies.
And the only thing, and then if they would then execute them as Israeli spies, somehow magically he could get that sort.
Luckily for my parents, of course, they didn't confess to that because they're not Israeli spies, and that's what kept them alive for those eight days, because there was an ulterior motive to get them to sign those confessions.
Now, those guys were contracted to drive us to the airport, precisely because close to the Beirut International Airport, there were a lot of militia checkpoints of Palestinians, and there was no way you're going to get through that if they weren't sympathetic to you.
But of course, they could take you, and they could take you to a ditch and shoot you, so you don't really know what's going to happen.
So I remember being picked up by these guys.
I remember getting to the airport and then the story would end up on the plane.
But everything in between, I have zero recollection of that.
And I once asked my parents, you know, what happened?
And she said that as we were going through different neighborhoods that would have been hostile to Palestinian militia, for example, Christian groups, everybody was engaging one another, very much like a Rambo movie.
We were at the bottom of the floor of the car, sort of being hidden.
Yeah, it's so fascinating because it shows you how complex the entire situation with Lebanon and the Palestinians and the Israelis is because you had Palestinian militia people being paid off to help Jews escape Lebanon because of their civil war.
I mean, really, if you map this whole thing, people will go, this makes no sense.
Well, I've actually written about this that, you know, Muslims were trying to kill us and Muslims saved us, right, so you can't sort of I have a blanket statement, you know, all Muslims, right?
Okay, glad we got that out right at the beginning because we don't want you to be misquoted.
So you must feel sort of very strange when right now, you know, Hezbollah is sort of taking over Lebanon and they're fighting in Syria and that's your home country and it's teetering on democracy or its democracy, I should say, is teetering.
So I know that a certain amount of people will be watching this and will say, well, wait, I don't understand because Gad is an extremely outspoken atheist, but he's repeated several times that you're Jewish.
How do you reconcile that?
Because I've had a few people on, I've had Ali Rizvi, who's an atheist Muslim, and we talked about how he reconciles it.
And there's been a couple other people where we, the way I reconcile it for myself.
So the way I would answer that is that Judaism, or to be Jewish, is a multi-faceted identity.
There is a cultural element, there is a historical element, there is a shared, you know, context, shared history, shared lineage, one of which is adherence to a set of religious doctrines.
And so I could choose to ignore those doctrines and still say, I do belong to a group of people that can be traced back in this manner through genealogy,
You know, once I break down with the flawless Arabic, then those kinds of concerns go away, right?
Because it's quite impressive for somebody to accuse you of that.
I mean, everything about us is Arabic.
I mean, yes, we happen to be Jewish.
I mean, you know, culturally, we're Arabic, right?
We're Arab-Jews.
So, it's very difficult for people to levy that charge.
Although, I have an interesting personal anecdote.
When I was a graduate student, a doctoral student at Cornell, I became friends with a lot of Arabic students, as would typically happen, because I have more in common with them than I might have with the Jewish guy from Poland, right?
And so, at one point, one of these guys, we had gone for coffee, He said to me, uh, you know, I really, I really like you, Gant.
I said, well, why do you say that as though you're so surprised?
He says, well, you know, because, well, you know, because you're Jewish.
The reason I like talking about it, it's very similar to what I was discussing with Tariq Fatah a few days ago, that identity is so malleable, actually.
It's so not necessarily your religion or your history or even your ethnicity or where you were born or nationality, because it's all of those things.
And I guess that's why I hate identity politics so much, because I realize that most people are like you or like me.
Pick and choose what to believe in, and that secular values ultimately are the things that should move us forward as a society.
Speaking of identity politics and privilege scores, I should mention that I've lost some points because my skin is a bit lighter than summer, but I've made sure to put on a bit of weight so that I could gain on the FATISM score.
So it's a homeostatic mechanism whereby I maintain my victimology score at a certain Right, but the fat thing is way lower on the list than the skin color thing, right?
So I've always known, I mean there were two things that I was really good at and interested in.
Soccer and studying books.
I was certainly going quite, my soccer career was going quite well, but then I had some serious injuries and other circumstances that didn't allow me to pursue that.
And so that accelerated my move to academia, and so I always knew.
I mean, I didn't even take any breaks between my degrees.
I just went straight through to my PhD, straight to a professorship, because I never imagined doing anything else.
In terms of the work that I do, if that's what we want to talk about, so what I do is I basically marry evolutionary psychology and biology to the study of consumer behavior.
So the idea being that what makes us consume the way that we are is ultimately rooted in some evolutionary mechanisms.
Why is it that men are the ones who are most likely to succumb to pornographic addiction?
How do women's hormones throughout their menstrual cycles affect their behaviors as consumers?
And so I look at these biological underpinnings specifically in the consumer setting.
So do you think that most behaviors, most human behaviors, are linked back to genetics more than anything else?
I know you've talked about this, and it's the nature versus nurture argument and things like that, but would you say that's really where the stuff were made of?
I mean, certainly there are the biological imperatives that are part of our shared human nature.
But there's always an interaction between our genes and our environment.
I always love to use the cake metaphor.
So if you take the ingredients in a cake, the baking soda, the flour, the sugar, the eggs, they're each separate ingredients.
Then you put them all together, you make a cake.
If I were to tell you now, point to the eggs or point to the sugar, You wouldn't be able to.
It's an inextricable mix.
And so much of who we are is an inextricable mix of our nature and nurture.
The problem with most social scientists has been, over the past hundred years, is that they have doggedly refused to accept that biology matters.
And so their position has always been, yeah yeah, evolutionary theory is relevant to explain the behavior of the dog and the mosquito and the zebra, But don't you dare apply it to human behavior.
We transcend our biology.
What makes us human is that we are cultural animals.
Of course, that's one example, but there's a zillion, right?
It behooves one to understand how serious academics could genuinely believe that biology doesn't carry much importance when it comes to understanding human affairs.
But it really originally started from a very good place.
A lot of miscreants used evolutionary theory for nefarious goals.
Hitler misused it.
Eugenicists misused it.
Social class elitists in Britain said, The upper classes are better than the lower classes.
Who cares if the lower classes die?
Hey, that's Darwinian.
Of course, it had nothing to do with Darwinian theory.
But because of all these, you know, cretins, misused evolutionary theory, social scientists said, OK, well, let's create a new understanding of human nature where biology is no longer relevant and hopefully there won't be these types of abuses.
But that's silly.
I mean, you have to root your science in logic and reason.
Yeah, so my whole direct message at the top of the show was talking about academia and sort of the ideas that are that are working in colleges and mostly that are not working and the free speech problems we're having.
Which we're having hugely here in America, but I know it's happening in Canada too, and it's happening all across Europe right now.
And you're right in the thick of that because you are outspoken.
I mean, that's why we connected in the first place.
I saw this guy on Twitter and I was like, wow, this guy gets it and he's not afraid to say it.
So what do you think the general atmosphere, or talk about for your experience, what's the general atmosphere?
And I gave many of these examples, which if they weren't true, you would think it's straight out of the onion.
I mean, it's really just impossible to imagine that the fulcrum has swung so much towards lunacy.
I think we have to fight it.
I mean, the reality is that most academics, I hate to keep repeating this point, but are afraid of their shadows, their careerists.
To the extent that the general environment is you have to cuddle the students, you have to infantilize them, don't you dare say something that might offend them, then they perpetuate the problem.
But if enough people stand up courageously and say, look, this is not right.
As a matter of fact, I've had this discussion recently here with some college students, and I explained to them that it's not to your benefit There's a great article, I can't remember the name of the professor who wrote it, he basically said, my students terrify me.
That's not a good thing.
I mean, if you're a student, you don't want to hear that, right?
You want professors who challenge you, who get you to move from your positions.
If we are afraid to utter one syllable that might somehow necessitate you going into a safe space, it shatters the possibility for dialogue.
Patiently, by demonstrating through evidence that this is ultimately suboptimal and it will only hurt your growth, right?
I mean, people learn by engaging the diversity of ideas.
I mean, that's what learning is about.
And so, and I explained to them that I'm very open to somebody coming to see me and saying, look, I've experienced this and this trauma and therefore I need this particular I mean, I'm an empathetic person.
I'll take that into account.
But to have, for example, a trigger warning that is sufficiently vague that it covers every possible thing that might trigger somebody, that's not a good idea.
Right, so let's dig into the trigger warning thing a little bit.
So there would be trigger warnings, for example, if you were teaching a course and you were going to discuss rape.
A certain amount of people that like these ideas would want you to issue a trigger warning so that in case someone that was in the class had been raped, or their mother had been raped, or their sister had been raped, or whatever it is, They would receive notice before discussing it.
I know that doesn't sound terrible in and of itself, but it's the pervasiveness of it, right?
It's the way that it then sort of shelters you from really dealing with hard topics.
As a matter of fact, I I took it upon me to actually generate a list of topics that have been suggested as possible topics that would be worthy of a trigger warning.
And actually, I covered that in my lecture.
And basically, those topics that I generated would pretty much cover anything that anybody could ever talk about.
The idea that there are certain things that you should not say.
And then we take this idea and then we say, well, there are certain things that you shouldn't say because it makes people feel uncomfortable, or it hurts them, or it triggers a past trauma.
And so it becomes, the way that I've described it is, and it's a speculative hypothesis right now, but it's certainly worth testing.
There's a phenomenon known as Munchausen Syndrome, which basically says a woman, typically it's a woman who suffers from this disorder, will try to feign an illness to then garner sympathy.
Then there's Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, where you harm your child or your pet or your elderly parent Yeah.
to try to then garner sympathy.
Well I think this type of crying for safe space is sort of this grotesque, collective,
Munchhausen syndrome, right?
Where people get attention by constantly screaming victimhood.
And so it becomes a very alluring way to navigate through the world.
I always get attention by saying that I'm offended, I'm hurt.
Well, I escaped execution.
I could still watch a military movie, right?
I want from now on, whenever I walk around in any city, you shut down all movie theaters that have military because I was going to be executed in Lebanon.
I already see a lot of academics write to me privately, saying to me, they don't yet have the courage to come on board publicly, but they say, you know, thank you for speaking out, thank you for being a voice of reason, this has empowered me to try to be a bit more open.
And I think all it takes is for a flicker to start, and then eventually I think the tide will shift back.
Yeah, well that's nice to hear that they're privately doing that, but do you get pushback from professors that think, you know, Gad's pushing this too much?
But the purpose of tenure is really to make sure that, let's suppose I'm doing work on evolutionary psychology and the dean is a young earth creationist who thinks that evolution is a Zionist hoax.
Well, he or she can't come to me and say, hey, you better stop this evolution stuff because it offends me and it makes our university look bad and I'll fire you.
Right?
So tenure is a means by which you ensure that Good ideas are able to be pursued because oftentimes most of the important ideas are dangerous ideas.
They're ideas that go against the orthodoxy.
They're ideas that are considered heretical at the time, right?
Think of Galileo.
Think of Socrates, right?
And so the idea, oftentimes in political discourse, politicians will say, oh, we've got to get rid of tenure because all these fat professors sit around doing nothing.
Yeah, well, I love that, and I know that to be true from you, and that's why your channel
has been picking up steam, and why you're talking to so many great people.
And I think part of it really is because of exactly what you wrote about in this book, that you're approaching the political topics that we're talking about and the religious topics from a scientific place.
I sense that that really is the bedrock of what you do, because as a scientist, that's what you're trying to quantify and qualify all of this stuff.
And I saw your interview with Bill Warner, who's also a scientist, and he studied all of the religions, right?
He said he studied with imams, he studied the Quran, and he studied with rabbis in Jerusalem, the Old Testament, all that.
And I thought he said something very similar, that he's looking at these things as a scientist, not as a sociologist.
Exactly, and actually that's one of the reasons why, I mean of course I receive negative comments from people and hate mail and so on, but given the types of positions I take, there are actually quite few of them, precisely because I approach it in the manner that I do, right?
So whenever I take a position, I make sure that it is documented as it would be if I were submitting a paper to a scientific journal, right?
My evidentiary threshold is set so high that it becomes difficult to break it down.
And therefore people can accuse me of hate speech and this and that because everything is backed up.
In the case of Bill Warner, for the viewers who may not know this, he basically applied the tools of content analysis.
To then quantify the amount of hate that is found in different religious texts.
So we don't have to have a vacuous discussion about whether Islam is peaceful or not, whether the Old Testament is peaceful or not.
I can actually use the tools of science, in this case called the content analysis, to quantify how much hate there is in this book.
Right, so I guess what I, I think what I was saying is that if you looked at the three books, and you, I think by most accounts that the Old Testament's probably the most violent of them, but no one is really acting on the violence of that.
So that doesn't discount that it says some horrible stuff, but if nobody's acting on it, then it's sort of irrelevant.
So I hope, I hope that's not the postmodern, because I know, I know that exact quote from him and it sounds like pure... Well, I mean, yeah, so we could get into the theological discussion.
So the idea is, so people don't know that the Qur'an has what's called abrogated verses.
God might have decided through the revelations to say, there's no compulsion in religion.
And then later God is allowed to change his mind and say, kill, you know, don't be so tolerant, right?
Right.
Well, how could it be that A and not A can coexist?
Well, through dual logic that can be allowed.
And the way you do that is through abrogation, which basically means that when you have two texts that contradict one another, The later text supersedes the previous one.
So when people typically quote the gentle passages from the Qur'an, that's the Meccan period, those passages have actually been abrogated.
They've been made null and void.
So now, in some cases, the people who quote those passages know this, and they are actually being duplicitous.
In other cases, they're unaware of this abrogation mechanism.
It's an evolutionary mechanism that's been built into us now.
So, you know, on Seinfeld there's a classic episode where George Casanza says to Jerry, I might get the quote wrong, remember Jerry, it's not a lie if you believe it.
I actually talked about this in one of my earlier books.
Well, that's the idea.
So, I don't know, in Reza's case, whether he truly believes just the endless tsunami of nonsense that he produces, or whether it's just a duplicitous attempt.
You know, this is the way by which I've become very famous.
This is the way by which I get a lot of attention, because I'm sort of the brown guy from Iran You know, it's so interesting because when I hear you say that, it clearly comes from a place where you're trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, right?
There's kind of an immediate reflex to label anybody who's in our space, you know, a Nazi and Hitler and Himmler, right?
That's what you're saying, right?
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, I've been fortunate, again, knock on wood, that I haven't had too much of this stuff, maybe because I am quite measured in how I speak, and maybe because I come from that background, it gives me a layer of protection which maybe Sam can't have.
I'm not exactly sure, but I've been fortunate in that sense.
Right, so to my question that started this whole thing, using scientific method to discuss texts, not this text, but religious texts that aren't necessarily based in rationality or in secular values, do you find it exhausting?
Right? Like, do you find yourself spending a lot of time deciphering things that we shouldn't be worried about
anymore?
We don't worry about what scientists thought 3,000 years ago,
so why are we worried about what religious people thought 3,000 years ago?
Yeah, so when it comes to religion, and obviously we've spent a lot of time talking about this, and I've had mostly people that are anti-religion, but just last week I had ultra-orthodox, or not ultra-orthodox, but orthodox Jew, Ben Shapiro.
Who I thought made some pretty cogent arguments separating religion from politics, even though I didn't agree with him on a lot of it.
But I thought he did an interesting, you know, he wasn't trying to govern, I sense, from a place of religion, which I could at least respect that.
But what do you make of the general feeling that, you know, you watch the Super Bowl, and the second the Super Bowl ends, they thank God.
These are people who spend their entire lives training to become machines of athleticism.
The Lord of the universe, and I mean, if only people would have a sense of the vastness of the universe, uniquely cares about a point guard who's about to make a three-point closing shot.
And if he makes it, oh Lord Jesus, thank you.
I mean, Jesus must really be invested in your career stats.
I mean, really, without even mocking, like, I know there's a certain mocking tone here, but without even mocking it, if you really believed in this, wouldn't you believe that God would be doing something else, creating another universe?
Actually, it's in this book where I played this following mental game.
Suppose you had a Martian who came to Earth and he's shopping for the one true religion.
And so he asks a bunch of questions.
Am I allowed to wear leather shoes?
Can I have a tattoo?
Am I allowed to have homosexual relations?
I mean, you think from the most mundane to the most metaphysical questions.
I demonstrated that for every possible question that you can generate, I can identify two religions that prescribe the exact opposite thing to that same question.
I mean, if that doesn't serve as a devastating blow to the whole scam of religion, nothing does, right?
Right.
Let's put it another way.
There are 10,000 documented religions in the world.
Right, and also that they're all designed differently.
I find that when we're debating a lot of this stuff, especially with, we've gone almost 40 minutes and haven't said regressive, so I'm finally gonna say the word regressives and regressive left, that they always want everything to be equally as bad, except some religions want people to convert into them, some don't.
That would show that, not that it's necessarily better, but it would show that certain people don't wanna spread their ideas as much as other people, but there is a need on the left to go, ah, everything's equally as bad.
And once you do that, you're actually saying nothing, right?
So, okay, we take all of this, we get it, you think that this mode of thinking is not great for the world and all of that, and you want to use things from a scientific place.
So when I had Peter Boghossian on, he wrote a book called A Manual for Creating Atheists.
And I read it, and I thought it was a really great book, and I've tried to use some of those practices when I've talked to people about this stuff.
And I asked him, what's the difference?
At the end of the day, if someone holds some of these beliefs, but isn't doing anything nefarious, and isn't pushing these ideas on anyone, do you still think it's bad?
And he basically said yes, because he said, I'm not quoting him exactly, but that you're diluting yourself and that's not really what the point of being human is.
If I were to be a purist, right, the pursuit of truth matters, then I would agree then with Peter that to believe in these types of fairy tales is actually injurious to the human spirit.
Right, so that in and of itself, even if it's not propagating violence or something on someone else, that it's against the sort of human nature or something like that.
And if anything, I mean, and many atheists have talked about this, There is a wonder that you can access without needing religion.
What religion does, in a sense, is it covers the capacity.
I mean, I can go and see a beautiful landscape and be transcended by the experience without needing booga-booga for me to actually experience that, right?
So it actually cheapens life to always have to contextualize it within the context of a big daddy in the sky.
Yeah, I think I've told this story on the show once before, but I once ate Pop Brownies, and I was going to see Air Force One with some friends, and it was sold out, so we went and saw Contact.
Jodie Foster, and it was written, it was Carl Sagan's only fiction book, and I didn't know what the movie was at all.
I had no idea what we were walking into, and I don't know if you remember, but the opening scene was this incredible panorama of the universe, and I ate these Pop Brownies.
I was basically like, Tripping out of my mind and the whole movie just blew my mind apart.
I was like, this is amazing I ended up reading a whole bunch of Carl Sagan's books and all that and it sort of led me to a lot of the things that I think now but the movie ends she has this sort of Not that satisfying experience because she can't prove that what happened to her Actually happened and the movie ends with her just looking out on a sunset and that's exactly what you're saying that there are ways to I suppose feel connected and feel part of this thing that don't necessarily mean standing up and sitting a lot at a church.
But to come back to atheism, I've written an article on my Psychology Today blog where I talked about Carpe Diem, right?
Seizing the day.
And that atheism is really consistent with that ethos, right?
Of living in the moment, right?
There are no do-overs.
There is no eternal life.
It's now, right?
It's the relationship that I form now.
It's the knowledge that I help spread now.
It's the goodness that I can In part to the world and so that actually makes it a much more Wonderful experience to realize that you have a very short limited time now, of course, it's very scary, right?
I mean you and I want this party to go on forever.
Yeah, and that's why I think actually that religion will never cease to exist will never eradicate it because we will never resolve the problem of our existential angst and Right.
So when you say the word eradicate there, I know that the regressives who have launched this huge assault on new atheists, they sort of came up with this term new atheists.
And I guess originally it had to do with Hitchens and Sam and Daniel Dennett, I think.
All right, so we're going to do a little more of the regressive stuff when we sit down with Lalo in a little bit, but I'm just curious for you personally, as you've been part of this discussion.
And again, we just sat down for the first time in August, so we only met about eight months ago.
I probably only knew of you on Twitter for maybe three, four months before that.
As you've become part of this, I'm curious how much of it How much of it consumes you, actually?
Because I know how personal this is to me.
I know that I have trouble shutting it off sometimes at night, and I don't mean just my phone.
I mean just the thought process and feeling that there is something big going on here that we're part of.
I've spent maybe 50% of my time working on these types of issues as opposed to, say, my sort of classic scientific career.
Yeah.
Precisely because, if you like, I define my role.
More broadly than just as somebody who's a professor, right?
I mean, I can engage the public in the battle of ideas.
And frankly, I'm quite disappointed in many of my colleagues who don't think that way, right?
I mean, nobody is contesting the fact that it's really important to do your great basic science.
I mean, that's what you are, you're a professor, you're a scientist.
But if you've got the capacity to reason, then it is important for you to also participate in battles of ideas that are outside your very limited You know, lab studies, right?
And so, in that sense, I actually have been quite consumed by some of the issues.
Now, where I sometimes regret my participation is when I don't know when to stop engaging some ass who's constantly hounding me.
Now, in many cases, I'm able to disengage, but in a few times, they kind of, they trigger you in some way, and then you engage this person, you realize you just wasted an hour and a half speaking to somebody who's in his underwear in his mom's basement.
Yeah, all right, well I'm going to dive more into that with you and Lalo in a little bit.
All right, so look, we could talk forever, and this is my second interview in a row where I haven't even picked up my notes once, but because I started by talking about college and that's what you just brought this to, what's the hope?
Give me the hope point for some of this turning.
Now I get we can talk about this stuff, and we see it that there is this now movement growing of people that aren't afraid of speaking and all that stuff, but how do you as a professor feel that you can win this thing?
It's precisely in empowering every single individual to engage the debate, right?
I receive endless private messages from people whom I've never met, I'll never see again.
You know, just because I watch how you behave and how much you've got to lose professionally, and if not also personally, I mean in terms of threats and so on, this has gotten me the courage to speak out against some of my regressive friends on Facebook.
And I just spent three hours taking on these guys, and I wouldn't have done it had I not seen your courage.
So, basically, all you're trying to do is to empower people to feel as though they can make a difference.
And by having enough of them—because think about it, the regressive left is quite invested in this fight, right?
And all you need to do is stand up and offer a counterpoint and get enough people to do it.