Feb. 26, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
58:30
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| 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. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me again. | ||
| So I'm very excited to talk to you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| This sort of, what do we want to call ourselves now? | ||
| What space are we in? | ||
| Fighters of good ideas. | ||
| I like that, fighters of good ideas. | ||
| All right, so I wanna get into the work that you do. | ||
| I wanna talk about your books, I wanna talk about your tweets, and I wanna talk about your YouTube channel. | ||
| But I saw you do an interview with Asrin Omani, which was really, really fascinating. | ||
| Talk about your history. | ||
| So you were born in Lebanon, and I'm gonna let you take it away from there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Okay, so let's back up before we get to your escape, because before your escape, there was some pretty amazing stuff that happened. | ||
| So your parents were kidnapped by PLO terrorists? | ||
| Later, later. | ||
| So we emigrated to Canada in late 75. | ||
| Then for the next four years, my parents kept going back and forth from Montreal to Lebanon. | ||
| They really couldn't extricate themselves fully from their previous life in Lebanon. | ||
| And on one of those trips in 1980, They were kidnapped by Fatah. | ||
| You had a guest, Tariq Fatah, but of no relation. | ||
| No relation, no relation. | ||
| But Fatah is sort of, now it's considered the moderate version, the moderate to Hamas. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Was he the president of Lebanon at the time? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, he was the president of Syria. | |
| 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, so I don't know that you can know the answer to this, but what were they trying to get out of your parents? | ||
| What was the advantage of taking expats that were now Canadians and kidnapping them? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow, that's really incredible. | ||
| So now I know why I jumped ahead with the story about your parents, because what happened to you getting out of Lebanon I thought was fascinating. | ||
| So you were talking about going through the checkpoints and being in a car. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And you have a very foggy memory of exactly what happened. | ||
| So I remember very, very well. | ||
| Actually, we had hired PLO militia. | ||
| I mean, you think about the guys that you see today, the ISIS guys, how they look. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's what I grew up with. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All of that, I have zero recollection of that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Oh, so you don't believe in all Muslims are bad. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How do you feel about Lebanon now? | ||
| I do so much. | ||
| You know, I have two children. | ||
| So between my wife and I, we speak five languages. | ||
| So I speak French, English, Arabic, and Hebrew. | ||
| She speaks English, French, and Armenian. | ||
| And yet our children only speak French and English because by virtue of living in Montreal. | ||
| And I really regret the fact that we don't have the opportunity to take our children back to Lebanon. | ||
| For example, one year visiting professorship at American University of Beirut, you know, dump them in that context. | ||
| They could come back fluent Arabic speaker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Could you do it though? | ||
| Is there, because of the political situation? | ||
| You know, in Beirut, if you make a left turn here, then there's an ISIS recruitment center perhaps. | ||
| I mean, you don't know who's the nice guy, who's the bad guy, right? | ||
| It won't take much for people to find out. | ||
| Number one, that I'm Jewish. | ||
| Number two, that I've written quite forcefully about some of these issues. | ||
| It's very easy for you to disappear in the trunk of a car, right? | ||
| So, I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable, given the current situation, to take a risk. | ||
| Now, I've been told, I have a lot of friends that have said, look, we can guarantee your security, come back, and so on. | ||
| Can you really? | ||
| So, I'd rather not, and certainly not when I have young children. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So before the Civil War, and I know you were 12 when it happened, so you were pretty young. | ||
| 11. | ||
| 11. | ||
| What was it like to be Jewish there? | ||
| It was actually okay? | ||
| So that's a very interesting issue because oftentimes people will say, oh, but Jews were treated very nicely. | ||
| I mean, yes, nicely in the sense that There aren't daily decapitations in the center square, right? | ||
| You could go about your business. | ||
| But everything is nice until the decapitations happen, right? | ||
| So, you were tolerated, right? | ||
| I mean, people knew you were Jewish. | ||
| They didn't necessarily bother you every day. | ||
| But anti-Semitism pervades, you know, the fabric of every possible element of society in those regions. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean that everybody's an anti-Semite. | ||
| But you know, just be quiet. | ||
| Don't signal your belongingness to this group. | ||
| Be understated. | ||
| Yeah, and then once the Civil War happened, sort of the rules were just changed, right? | ||
| Is that what it was? | ||
| Basically, you guys felt that whatever side wins this thing... We're finished. | ||
| I mean, there were Jews that were killed, and it would have only been a matter of time where somebody would have found us and killed us. | ||
| So it really was under imminent threat of execution. | ||
| I mean, we either get out or die. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How do you reconcile that? | ||
| 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, | ||
|
unidentified
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right? | |
| And so in that sense, I'm very Jewish, but in the religious element, I'm not at all Jewish. | ||
| Yeah, do you think you don't get a certain cred of being from the Middle East because of that? | ||
| Because there's a sense, and we're going to sit down with Lalo Degasha a little bit later, | ||
| but, you know, I've known him online for over a year. | ||
| Because he said that he had Palestinian ancestry, I just assumed he was Muslim. | ||
| I didn't know until we met two weeks ago at dinner that his family actually was Christian. | ||
| That was just a silly and sloppy thinking on my part. | ||
| But do you feel that you sort of don't get some of the cred of being a real Middle Easterner? | ||
| I mean, it depends on who you're speaking to. | ||
| I guess from the people on the left that we spend so much time thinking about. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But you know, but you're not a Jew Jew. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I said, no, no, I'm a Jew Jew Jew Jew. | ||
| He goes, no, no, come on. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You're not a Jew. | ||
| So in that case, what he was saying is you're not really the archetype of what I imagine a Jew to be. | ||
| You're really Arabic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so it's the opposite of what you asked. | ||
| I think all of this is so fascinating. | ||
| 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'll bring it back. | ||
| And then the religion thing's up here, depending on what religion. | ||
| People should be walking around with cards, and you can just hand it to them and be like, well, here's my shit and my underprivileged. | ||
| I did a thing on BuzzFeed the other day about privilege. | ||
| Did you see this on BuzzFeed? | ||
| I didn't see it. | ||
| They did a How Privileged Are You, and I got a 42 out of 100. | ||
| It said I wasn't privileged at all. | ||
| That's pretty great. | ||
| I'm not privileged. | ||
| I thought, I'm gonna, I gotta tell people about this. | ||
| I'm off the charts on that one. | ||
| Yeah, you'd be, you'd get a negative six. | ||
| I'm fantastic, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so I wanted to get some of your history out of the way, but let's talk about what you're doing now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you are a professor. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you do research on your own and all that. | ||
| We've got your book, The Consuming Instinct. | ||
| A signed copy for you. | ||
| You signed it already? | ||
| Signed it, and if I see it on eBay as a means for you to try to fund your Malibu house, I'll be upset. | ||
| No, no, don't worry about the Malibu House. | ||
| I'm working on it in other ways. | ||
| So tell me a little bit about what brought you to the world of academics. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's silly. | ||
| Well, I mean, if you were just to look at people being gay, wouldn't that be an argument against that? | ||
| Because by that logic, they would say you could override it or something like that. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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? | ||
| So you might have seen, I recently delivered a lecture at the University of Ottawa on political correctness and the thought police. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, so when you say that to students, I'm going to guess that on an individual level, if you're sitting across from them, they probably do get that. | ||
| They probably do understand it. | ||
| But that when you get them in a group and the groupthink starts, that that's where it becomes dangerous. | ||
| So how do you combat that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And the reality is that it's not restricted to a few examples such as rape. | ||
| It becomes everything. | ||
| It's everything. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So how could that be then? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how it could be, and yet here we are. | ||
| Where do you think this started? | ||
| Because that's the part that I find really interesting, and I did discuss it a little bit with Tarek. | ||
| Where did this idea that you have to be protected come from, and how did it proliferate so quickly? | ||
| Well, I think it comes from different sources, but political correctness is really the impetus of all of these subsequent movements, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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That's it. | |
| Do it. | ||
| God, I mean, it's really nuts when you, especially when you lay out like a great metaphor like that. | ||
| It's like, this is, because we could all do this. | ||
| And that's why, what do they call it? | ||
| You know, it's just like the afflicted Olympics or the... The oppression Olympics. | ||
| The oppression Olympics. | ||
| It's like, it will never stop. | ||
| And I see this now as a disease that's running rampant. | ||
| And that's why I talk about it so much. | ||
| I can't imagine that this will continue. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I don't get it to my face, because I'm a formidable guy to go against. | ||
| In other words, you better come with all your guns if you're going to do this stuff with me. | ||
| So usually it doesn't happen directly, but I will hear from sources that such and such person is upset that I'm taking these positions. | ||
| So I know that there are groups that are upset with me, but they don't necessarily come to my face and say it. | ||
| So this is a great argument for tenure, right? | ||
| I mean, you have tenure, right? | ||
| Oh yeah, since 1999. | ||
| Since 1999. | ||
| So when you got tenure, did that change? | ||
| At that moment, what did they do? | ||
| Did they hand you a paper? | ||
| How does it work? | ||
| Well, it's actually a committee. | ||
| It goes through several layers and finally you receive a letter saying that you've been granted tenure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The process of applying for it is you basically give your whole dossier to demonstrate that you're worthy of that honor. | ||
| What are the protections you actually get for tenure? | ||
| I mean, they just can't fire you just like that, but there must be some... What if they run out of money if the university closes? | ||
| Only if your department would have to be closed for financial reasons. | ||
| Then that would be ground for then closing the department. | ||
| The fact that you're tenured wouldn't protect you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's basically them saying that they're idiots. | ||
| It's them admitting they're not doing their job. | ||
| Tenure is there to make sure that you can pursue dangerous ideas. | ||
| Now, regarding my specific context, even when I didn't have tenure, I was outspoken. | ||
| Maybe not necessarily about trigger warnings, because there wasn't such a thing then. | ||
| But in other words, I never modulated my behavior, maybe to a fault. | ||
| Maybe I'm not enough of a careerist. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| The pursuit of truth for me is greater than any careerist considerations. | ||
| 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 do you think that's really the healthiest way to approach most of this stuff? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that becomes unassailable. | ||
| Well, so would the assailable part be, though, that what's in the book only matters depending on the amount of people that act on it, right? | ||
| True. | ||
| So that's not unassailable in its scientific method, but that's what the real issue is, right? | ||
| The real issue is not what's in all these books, as much as how many people are acting on it. | ||
| That sounded almost Reza Aslan-ish to me. | ||
| Did it? | ||
| Yeah, did it? | ||
| No, get me out of that then. | ||
| Because Reza Aslan... Because I fully, I mean, look, we know these books are all nuts, right? | ||
| They're all filled by, written by men thousands of years ago, but it's not really what's in them as much as how people act on them. | ||
| So Reza Aslan basically used the... That's the worst thing anyone's ever said to me. | ||
| My deep apologies. | ||
| Reza Aslan basically used the BS argument from postmodernism To say you put your meaning to it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, you know, who are we to judge whether kill, kill, kill means that? | ||
| Kill, kill, kill could mean a stroke with kindness and caress, right? | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| Language has accepted meaning and no amount of postmodern gymnastics is going to alter that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, one of the, for example, if in the Old Testament it says, Well, they don't exist anymore. | ||
| So even if I was desperate to act on that edict, I wouldn't be able to. | ||
| On the other hand, if another religious book has the following tenet, kill the non-believers wherever you find them, that is actionable today. | ||
| So, no, the argument that, well, it depends who acts on it, is not true. | ||
| Plus, we don't have many people today that act on Deuteronomy. | ||
| Right, well that was my point, that it depends on who's acting on it, but that doesn't change the specifics that are in the text. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Do you find that as an academic and as a social scientist and all that, that it's exhausting talking about religion because you don't believe in it? | ||
| So that, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like you're trying to add something rational. | ||
| This is what I feel. | ||
| I'm constantly trying to rationalize things that cannot be rationalized anymore. | ||
| And actually, also in your discussion with Bill Warner, he said one of the interesting things about the Qur'an is you can almost rationalize anything. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because you can say something's really great. | ||
| Dual logic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So can you explain dual logic a little bit? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| All right, so let's just talk about Reza for a minute, since you brought him up. | ||
| And he's become such a player in this space, and CNN's even giving him a show all about belief, which sounds just horrific to me. | ||
| When he plays those games, you know, right? | ||
| You know that He knows this, he knows about what you just described, and yet he's doing this. | ||
| So what do we do with these players? | ||
| You know, it's a great question because I don't know what his endgame is. | ||
| I mean, is it that he's engaging in self-deception, as we know humans are very adept at doing? | ||
| There's actually some very interesting evolutionary arguments for why people engage in self-deception. | ||
| You want me to take off? | ||
| Yeah, let's go there. | ||
| So the argument for the evolution of self-deception is that when you and I are chatting, We're engaging, if you like, in a Machiavellian battle. | ||
| I'd like to get you to do what I want, but I don't want you to know that I'm doing this, right? | ||
| So, when I'm lying to you, there are typically markers in me that you're trying to pick up to see if I'm being duplicitous or not. | ||
| The way that I shut off those markers is by first convincing myself that I'm not lying. | ||
| In other words, by engaging in self-deception, I shut off the mechanisms that you might otherwise read in me that I'm lying. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| But is that a fully conscious decision on the part of the person that's doing it? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| 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? | ||
| You just went out of your way to not say this guy is a duplicitous liar or whatever. | ||
| And you know, Sam Harris always says how intentions matter. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you're trying to say, well, maybe his intentions are good, so that would be a reason to You know, fiddle with some of this stuff. | ||
| I sense that all the people that we argue with all the time, they would not give us any of those passes. | ||
| And that, to me, shows you where this battle really is happening. | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's extraordinary, right? Because if you take a belief that someone holds | ||
| and you don't cloak it under the robe of religion, then this would be tantamount to the guy being schizophrenic | ||
| and let's commit him to a mental hospital, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Wait, can you give a good example of that? | ||
| Because I think that's a really great point. | ||
| Okay, so this prophet has gone on a winged horse somewhere, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If I say that, hey, you know, I believe that Dave Rubin, yesterday, I saw him on a winged horse going to heaven. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those are good mushrooms. | ||
| Then I would call my clinical psychologist or psychiatrist friends and say, hey, let's try to commit Dave Rubin to a psychiatric hospital. | ||
| On the other hand, if I say the exact same thing, but it is cloaked under a religious narrative, don't you dare criticize that narrative, right? | ||
| So the exact same statement is either a form of lunacy or perfectly acceptable religion, depending on whether it is protected by religion. | ||
| And that's grotesque, right? | ||
| I mean, why is your belief, in whatever narrative you choose to believe, somehow sacrosanct, and I can't touch it? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And the team that lost, but also prayed to the same God. | ||
| But somehow God really was for the Cardinals. | ||
|
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He hates the trailblazers or whatever. | |
| I'm mixing sports with that. | ||
| You make sport, really? | ||
| I really do know sports more than that but I'm trying to think on the fly. | ||
| But to me, what that shows is not a belief in God, per se, as much as it shows almost a narcissistic disorder. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, and by the way, we can also take examples. | ||
| It would be like, you know, if you jerked off or something and then felt guilty after because God was watching you. | ||
| It's like, he's watching you do that. | ||
| He's watching basketball. | ||
| He's everywhere. | ||
| Doesn't he have better things to do? | ||
| 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? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Really. | ||
| Otherwise, it seems so silly. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| He's quite pedantic. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I bet you didn't know that. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| 10,000. | ||
| Now, here what I mean is different denominations of Christianity would count as different religions, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So, there are 10,000 of them. | ||
| The only thing that they typically have in common is that each of them says that I'm the true religion, the other 9,999 are false. | ||
| That's incredible! | ||
| 999 are false. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| That sounds a bit fishy to me. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| 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? | ||
| I've actually used that same argument, but under the context of an academic setting. | ||
| So, there's a concept known as a meme. | ||
| Are you familiar with that? | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| So, this is from Richard Dawkins, right? | ||
| Well, Richard Dawkins argues that religion is a memeoplex. | ||
| It's a collection of memes. | ||
| And memes spread very much like how viruses spread or how genes propagate in populations. | ||
| Well... | ||
| Or how memes spread on Twitter, right? | ||
| Or how memes spread on Twitter. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| For a simple example. | ||
| So to go to your point about religions, some religions, the content of their memes are | ||
| inherently infectious. | ||
| In other words, the transmissibility of that religion is much greater. | ||
| So in Judaism, the fact that you don't proselytize is precisely the reason why there are 13, | ||
| 14, 15 million Jews, depending on how you count, right? | ||
| In the whole entire world, there are 15 million Jews. | ||
| On the other hand, in a religion where you're allowed to proselytize, and there are other | ||
| things that you can do also. | ||
| For example, it takes very little to get into the religion in Islam, for example, right? | ||
| In Judaism, if you truly wish to convert according to the strict tenets, you can't just sort | ||
| of say one sentence and boom, welcome to the Jewish clan, right? | ||
| You actually have to go through a very costly process. | ||
| So there are all sorts of mechanisms that you could study in the context of a religion that demonstrate why one spreads and another one doesn't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And by the way, using the example that you just mentioned, it's also a lot to get out of Judaism. | ||
| You could say, I'm not a Jew anymore. | ||
| Nobody cares. | ||
| But if you were to get out of Islam, we know this with apostates all over the world, you might get killed. | ||
| Oh no, but to kill means to caress, so you just understand that properly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What would you say in that case? | ||
| If someone just picks some beliefs, it's nominal, nobody cares, you know, you're not oppressing someone or making women dress a certain way. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| So it depends if I want to be pragmatic or a purist. | ||
| If I want to be pragmatic, I say, you know, believe whatever you want as long as you don't impose your beliefs on third parties. | ||
| Then I don't care. | ||
| So that's the pragmatic part. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did you see Contact? | ||
| Yeah, this is with Jodie Foster? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Actually, that was one of the starting points that got me away from religion. | ||
| We were sitting at a synagogue. | ||
| Magen Abraham in Beirut, okay? | ||
| And I asked my father, you know, I'm confused, when do we stand up, when do we sit down? | ||
| And he's like, you know, shut up, just do it! | ||
| And the fact that he said that really upset me, because already, as I don't remember how old I was, maybe five, six, seven, that left a hole in me. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Why am I just standing up and sitting down? | ||
| Give me an explanation. | ||
| So the fact that there was sort of this dogmatism is probably the starting point of But let me stray from religion. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And who is the fourth? | ||
| I think there was a fourth in there. | ||
| Sam Harris. | ||
| Oh, Richard Dawkins, of course. | ||
| But the idea that these people, these new atheists, they're not just atheists who believe whatever the hell they want to believe. | ||
| They want to destroy religion. | ||
| And I think they've spread this meme. | ||
| As a way of silencing people who would critique them. | ||
| That, to me, is all they've done here. | ||
| Because I know many, many atheists. | ||
| I know no atheist that is trying to use violence or intimidation in any way to stop anyone from believing anything. | ||
| Sure, they may critique you. | ||
| They may ridicule you. | ||
| Why should they be quiet? | ||
| Why should they be quiet? | ||
| You shove your religion at me all day long. | ||
| I should be quiet in my non-belief? | ||
| Why? | ||
| I mean, I'm not suggesting that you should ever be impolite. | ||
| I mean, you could be nice and you could be polite about it. | ||
| But I have to be quiet? | ||
| I was all quiet when I was living as a Jew in Lebanon. | ||
| I don't want to be quiet anymore. | ||
| So that's really interesting. | ||
| So that all it is, when they say new atheist, all they mean really is an atheist who's speaking up. | ||
| And that's what they hate more than anything else. | ||
| Have you seen some of my satirical tweets about new atheism? | ||
| I'm sure I've seen. | ||
| So, I used to weigh 200 pounds, then I put on 10 pounds, I'm now a new atheist. | ||
| I used to have this skin tone, then I went on vacation, I became... New atheist is a term that's complete nonsense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How big does it feel to you? | ||
| Very big. | ||
| I would say that the last six months. | ||
| 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? | ||
| How do you feel? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| Truth is on our side. | ||
| We will win. | ||
| Yeah, so that's what enrages them more than anything else, to wrap this up. | ||
| That's what enrages them, is that they've been sort of unchecked this whole time, right? | ||
| Because the right, in a lot of respects, has gone off the deep end, so that there was no rational argument to be had. | ||
| Now, here come us, and it's like, oh, we're going to have some rational arguments. | ||
| But they've been doing the whole cries of racism. | ||
| They've had a monopoly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They've had a monopoly, and there's a new company that's offering another product. | ||
| They're not happy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we're going to beat him with better ideas. | ||
| What do you say? | ||
| We will. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Well, it was a pleasure talking to you, of course. | ||
| And for more of Gadsad, you can follow him on Twitter, at Gadsad. | ||
| His YouTube channel is in the description below. | ||
| And there is something big coming. | ||
| We're going to be working together pretty soon. | ||
| We're going to discuss that with Lalo. | ||
| Thanks for watching. |
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