Dave Rubin and Gad Saad dissect the 2016 election's failures, advocating for Gary Johnson to break the two-party stranglehold. They debate the "Oppression Olympics," contrasting criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, while Saad applies evolutionary kin selection to argue against mass immigration from culturally incompatible groups like Algerian refugees in Quebec. The discussion highlights corporate censorship via YouTube's algorithm targeting the word "Islam" and Quebec's Bill 52, which fines religious denigration regardless of truth. Ultimately, they address the dangers of bureaucratic speech control and the necessity of balancing professional obligations with personal well-being against the "giving tree" metaphor. [Automatically generated summary]
No matter how you rearrange their names, something is really, really wrong with our political system right now.
You know this to be true whether you're a political junkie or if you couldn't name the vice president if your life depended on it.
Our broken system churning out uninspiring candidates, coupled with our broken media that often just repeats campaign talking points, has given us two broken candidates from two broken parties
competing in a broken election for control of a nation going broke.
This isn't how it was supposed to be, nor is it how it has to be.
I don't particularly like Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Hillary has been involved in the political machine for the past 30 years
at various levels, from wife of a governor to first lady to senator to
secretary of state, and it's not really clear to me if her accomplishments outweigh
her poor decisions.
Nothing she says strikes me as real or honest, like how she's constantly rallying against Wall Street while at the same time taking at least $25 million from Wall Street this campaign cycle alone.
At a time when we're all frustrated by the system, she is the ultimate insider trying to maintain her grip on power.
Add her willful ineptitude at best, or gross negligence at worst with her emails, her questionable decisions in Iraq and Libya, and the Clinton Foundation's ties to various foreign governments, and there is a lot of questions about her campaign.
She also constantly plays into the Social Justice and Oppression Olympics, which judges us all as groups rather than individuals, and I'm pretty sure you guys know how I feel about that.
As for Trump, even after all these months of campaigning, I still have no real idea what he thinks about any issue.
He seems to have a staggeringly low amount of knowledge about basic policies or how the government is designed to work.
Do you really think he knows the different duties of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government?
The fact that I can't say so for sure that he does is extremely concerning, to say the least.
I also don't sense he has any sort of moral center other than what's good for him at the very moment.
He will say anything, quite literally anything, to stay in the news, and we simply have no
idea how he would govern.
His comments constantly toe the line between fact and fiction, and he seems deeply uninterested
in other opinions than his own.
While many think he'll shatter the monster of political correctness currently assaulting
us, it seems like a tall order for someone who threatens to ban news organizations and
sue reporters when they ask him hard questions or challenge his statements.
So how did we possibly get to a place where everyone I talk to is either begrudgingly
voting for one of these two people or just won't vote at all?
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How did we end up with two deeply unpopular, polarizing people who seemingly represent the worst of us as the only two legitimate candidates for the highest office in the land?
It's probably time we looked in the mirror and saw our own responsibility in this unfolding clown show.
The writing has been on the wall for years.
We watch garbage reality shows, some of them hosted by future presidential candidates.
We read biased listicles full of GIFs instead of actual news articles.
We say vicious things to people online that we would never say to their faces.
Our thoughts have been reduced to six-second videos, 140-character sentences, filtered images, and mindless snaps.
We reward the Kardashians with fame and fortune while we can't come up with the money to take care of our veterans.
We watch news channels that are nothing but mouthpieces for the political parties.
We shame and slander and deplatform people we disagree with.
We issue trigger warnings and safe spaces instead of promoting true education and open discussion.
We ask for better leaders, but then we don't vote on election day.
We complain, but we don't get involved.
When you step back and you think about all of this, it's pretty obvious why we got left with these two candidates.
Now, allow me to make the quick case of why you should vote for each one of these people, in case you didn't think I was gonna do that.
With Hillary, you know what you're gonna get.
Our system is messed up, but she's part of it, and she's damn well gonna make sure that the wheels don't come off during her watch.
She's a known quantity in that she cares about her legacy and she doesn't want to see the country crumble after spending her entire life trying to get to this very place.
In short, if you think things are going okay, it makes sense to vote for Hillary.
The case for Trump is totally the reverse.
He's an unknown quantity and the system hates him.
He's given a voice to middle America that is usually ignored or mocked by the elite.
He represents the greatest threat to this social justice fiasco infecting all levels of society.
He's used the political system and our pathetic media against itself.
In short, if you think that things are really messed up and we have to change it at any cost, then it absolutely makes sense to vote for Trump.
I for one, despite everything I've said here, think that the truth lies somewhere in between.
There is no question that our system is screwed up, but the truth is, it's still one of the best ones out there.
And despite our flaws, Americans have freedoms which make people all over the world envious.
People still look to America as a beacon of light in the world.
People still want to move here, and most of us don't want to move out.
We have an imperfect system, but a system that can and will survive these two imperfect candidates.
Some people are voting for Hillary because they think she's the last line of defense against Trump, who they liken to Hitler.
Some people are voting for Trump because they think he's the only way to stop Hillary, the Manchurian candidate.
What a sad and pathetic state we're in.
Hillary, a candidate saying she can fix everything that's wrong, even though it's her team who's been in power for the past eight years.
And Trump, a man whose staggering lack of worldly knowledge, outside of his own tiny bubble, is somehow considered an asset by his supporters.
Now, before I tell you who I'm going to support and why, I want to say one more thing.
Whoever you choose in this election, I'm actually okay with it.
Probably the most important thing I've been fighting for with this show is the ability to agree to disagree.
To sit across from someone and hear their ideas and make your own judgment call.
I don't ask that you agree with my guests or even myself.
In this case, I don't ask that you support who I support, nor agree with my reasons for supporting them.
What I hope for, not ask for, is that all of us, whether you support Hillary or Trump, are able to sit across from people who support the other person.
That regardless of who someone votes for, we realize we have two candidates but one country.
And most importantly, that people are able to make different choices than you for different reasons, and that doesn't mean they're mean or evil, or even worse, gross and racist.
I spent a lot of time on the Rubin Report talking about the role of government.
It's something so important, yet in our public discourse we rarely talk about it, even as government gets bigger and bigger.
Both the Democrat and Republican conventions were perfect examples of this.
At the DNC, speaker after speaker talked about how Hillary could solve all of your problems.
I guess she's had all the answers this whole time, but just forgot to tell them to her old pal Barack.
Every speaker, including Hillary herself, said that she has the answers and that government, under her watch, can solve everything.
The RNC wasn't very different, though, for a series of other reasons.
Trump and his speakers talked about how corrupt the system is, but their answer was that Trump and Trump alone could fix it.
Immigration?
Well, only Trump has the answers.
The economy?
Only Trump can fix it.
Terrorism?
Only Trump can keep us safe.
In both cases, the answer to everything was bigger government.
Your decisions, be it economic or personal, should be given to you by the government.
This concept has been creeping on us for a long time, and now we have two candidates that think they are the only ones who know how to live your life even better than you do.
There is simply only one way out of this mess, and I don't think it involves propping up a broken system or burning it down altogether.
Every election we hear, this is the most important election in a generation, but you know what, this time it actually might be true.
Despite everything, we deserve better than this endless battle between Republicans and Democrats who are more concerned about their grip on power than they are addressing the needs of the people that they're supposed to serve.
There is only one way to take the power away from their monopoly over our lives.
We must, from this election forward, put both the Democrats and the Republicans on notice that they no longer have a stranglehold on the political process in America.
The only way we can do this is to starve them.
We must starve them of our attention, of our money, and our votes.
Their diet must begin right now.
For these reasons and some others, I'll be supporting Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson for President of the United States.
I don't think Gary is the perfect man, nor the perfect candidate, and I suspect that he doesn't think he is either, but he's sure better than these other two options.
As a libertarian, Gary doesn't want to tell you who you can marry and what you can smoke.
He wants lower taxes and to empower local, not federal government, which in my view is always a good thing.
He wants to hand the power back to the people to control their own lives.
He wants a fair resolution to our immigration problem, and he acknowledges that radical Islam, especially in the form of Sharia law, is a real threat.
He wants a strong military so that we won't have to use it, not so that we can go on military adventures and nation-build.
His blend of being fiscally conservative and socially liberal is really where I think most people are ideologically, but we just never get the chance to choose it.
I do have some differences with Gary, and the Libertarian Party in and of itself is a total mess, but I think he best represents the ideals I would want in a president.
Sometimes you have to stand on principle, even when you know the result will be a short-term loss.
Now before you guys tell me I'm throwing my vote away, let me lay out a plan here.
I think that if you've listened this far, you acknowledge that we do have a problem here.
Well, the only way we're ever going to solve this problem is by getting more voices heard, not less.
If Gary gets to 15% in an average of national polls, then they have to put him in the presidential debates.
Why not have at least one debate with another voice?
At the absolute bare minimum, we deserve to hear one different point of view now more than ever.
I don't need a president to be my savior, but maybe having an alternative to the two-party stranglehold on American politics is actually what can save us.
The polling may be antiquated and many only use landlines instead of cell phones, but I think if there was enough public support to get Gary to 15%, they would have to put him in.
I don't think Gary is even a particularly good debater, but how about once, just once, for the first time since Ross Perot in 1992, we get a third person on that debate stage.
From now until the debates, Gary Johnson has my support.
That he will not be president, nor do I agree with him on everything.
I think he best represents the ideals that I want to see from our government and our president.
If we're ever going to fix this broken mess, we must start now.
Let's show the Democrats and the Republicans that they don't own us, but they do owe us.
They owe us the chance to hear more voices, because they damn well haven't done a great job while they've been in charge.
If Gary doesn't hit the 15% threshold, or does one debate and then his support falters, I'll decide what to do at that time.
Regardless, I think that the classical liberal and libertarian ideals that Gary embodies more than either of the other two candidates can truly, and should truly, be the future of American politics.
We need a new generation of leaders who believe in these ideas to wake up right now, but it just isn't going to happen by itself.
So let's put the people in power on notice and let them know that we won't be sleeping until 2020.
Instead, we're going to make sure that they know with absolute certainty that this is their last free ride before the rest of us are heard.
All right, so there you go.
Simply by the math alone, I suspect that my choice will have more people angry at me than either of the other two choices could have.
But I hope that whether you agree with me or whether you disagree with me, that you'll respect the rationale and the logic that I've used to come to my decision.
At the end of the day, one of these people will be president, and we're still all gonna be here.
So let's try to be better than them before Canada builds a wall to keep us all out.
My guest this week is a professor of marketing, an evolutionary behavioral scientist, an author,
and now the first ever three-time, although he may think four-time, guest on The Rubin
But I was saying three because only when you're fully here and fully present and we can lock eyes like this for an hour and have that mind meld does it fully count.
So far so good, and I'm thrilled to have you back, because you know how much I enjoy talking to you, and there's just never an ending here, this conversation that we've been having for quite some time.
So, over the course of the next hour, I want to review some of the things we've discussed, because some of these trends keep bubbling up, and then I want to go into some new territory.
But I should start by saying that you're on vacation right now.
The glow is here in a natural state, because I'm in the sun, I'm from Lebanon, and it only becomes unnatural in the winter of Montreal when I turn green.
Yeah, so you live up in Canada, so you don't get the natural sunshine of SoCal, but I'm glad you brought up Lebanon, because that's where I want to start, because the Olympics are right now, and while you're on vacation, you've been pretty much taking a social media hiatus.
And I had tagged you in a tweet about a week ago where it was that the Lebanese team would not let the Israeli team on the bus the first night of the Olympics.
And I tagged you in that because you are Lebanese, and we've talked about this a little bit.
If we could just, for a couple minutes, just review your history growing up in Lebanon.
You went through some just absolutely horrific stuff, what you and your family have been through, and you are a refugee, and a brown person, and all that.
Now I've done a lot of talking, so just can you just catch us up on that for the people that haven't heard the story?
So, Fatah, for people that don't know, is basically—that's the political party of
the Palestinian Authority now.
Okay, so I wanted to just get that out there so people understand a little bit about your history, and then to link it to the Olympics, you told me privately a really fascinating story about your brother.
Yeah, so I have two brothers and a sister, all of whom are much older than me.
The next oldest older brother is 10 years older than me, who lives actually in Southern California.
He was a international level judo player.
He had been Lebanese champion three years in a row, if memory serves me right, and then he was approached by some thugs, and under the auspices also of supported by the Lebanese, I guess, Judo Federation, and told that he needed to retire from Judo because, you know, you can't have Jews, you know, winning these competitions.
And so, he left to France, to Paris, to pursue his studies and his judo career.
And so, he didn't really experience the Lebanese Civil War.
Then, when we emigrated to Montreal, in 1976, the Montreal Olympics were happening—well, the Olympics were happening in Montreal.
And so, then, the Lebanese Federation was willing to overlook, to forgive the fact that That he was a dirty Jew, because he was an international level, you know, Jew-lica.
And so he represented Lebanon in the 1976 Olympics.
So the guy who was kicked out of Lebanon because he's a Jew, then represents the flag of Lebanon.
Regrettably, I think he lost in the first round, I think to a Bulgarian.
unidentified
You could probably check it on Google or, you know, do a search.
So it's incredible hypocrisy, of course, and it really goes to show you, and everyone's screaming about this is about land, it's about land, it's about land, but you were Lebanese citizens.
You were an ethnic religious minority in Lebanon, but other than being Jewish, it had nothing
to do with land.
Zero.
It had literally nothing to do with land.
Zero.
And so those old hatreds.
And that's what I thought was so fascinating about what happened at the Olympics this week,
that basically is getting no coverage.
So the Lebanese wouldn't let the Israelis on the bus.
Often, the Arabs don't even compete when there's an Israeli involved.
He wouldn't bow to him.
He wouldn't shake his hand after the Israeli went on and won the bronze.
A Saudi Arabian suddenly claimed an injury out of nowhere to not face an Israeli.
These things happen in all these international tournaments all the time.
And I thought this really fits, not only does it fit your personal story, but it fits a lot of the things we're talking about all the time because you've sort of, you've been a big defender of what you call the juice.
So, we've discussed this before, and I've had a few guests on, who describe themselves as atheists, but they still either are connected somehow culturally to Judaism, or in the case of my friend Ali Rizvi, he just wrote a book, it's called The Atheist Muslim.
He's a non-believer, but believes that there's an ethnic attachment to being Muslim.
Can you describe how that sort of fits in your worldview?
So, if you take a car, a car is defined by many attributes.
It's a multi-attribute object.
It's defined by its gas efficiency and its safety record and its brand name, right?
So, there are multiple components that constitute a particular car.
Well, your Judaism is a multi-attribute object, right?
There is an element of religiosity, but even if I exclude that, if I say, look, I don't believe in the Bugha-Bugha stuff, there is a cultural element, there is a genetic element, a lineage, there is a shared history, there is Cuisine there so there are meant there's Jewish humor Jewish culture Jewish science So there are multiple ways by which I could identify with a group of people the way people can identify with their favorite soccer team Right and I can belong to that shared people without necessarily Believing in the religious narrative and so in that sense I'm an atheist Jew and if you look at throughout history most of the Prominent Jews that you could probably think of who are clearly defined as Jewish were either atheists or very strongly
I mean, Albert Einstein would probably be the greatest example of that.
So tying this back to everything that's going on with Israel, and as I said, you openly defend Jews, which is not thought of as cool, even though Jews are an absurdly tiny minority of 15 million people left, and have been Holocausted and pogrommed and everything else across the world.
What is going on here with this Oppression Olympics thing and everything that we constantly are fighting against with the left, where it's fairly obvious to me that Jews are being first thrown under the bus.
They're the first minority thrown under the bus.
And we're seeing that other minorities now are being thrown under the bus in the course of the Oppression Olympics, because that's how it works.
You always have to throw somebody else to move yourself higher.
You know, it's amazing, because just in the years that I've been on social media, I've noticed the greater acceptance of exhibiting open Jew hatred.
I don't have any empirical data, so it's anecdotal, but if I look at the amount of Jew-related comments Not positive ones that I received five, six, seven years ago versus today.
There definitely seems to be a permissiveness that is now seeping its way into public discourse where it is okay again to criticize, to hate, to point the finger at Jews.
Because I know that people are going to say, you know, if you defend Israel or you say that something's actually anti-Semitic when you're attacking a group of people, it all gets conflated with what Israel is.
I posted a picture on Twitter the other day of this absurdly tiny piece of land that's
literally smaller than New Jersey, that if you remove the West Bank, at one point it's
something like six miles wide.
I mean, we're talking about nothing, that for many years had no natural resources.
Now they've got some gas or whatever.
But it's like this focus on this little place is just insane.
To all the Jew haters, because now they could openly be hateful towards the Jewish people, but always couch it under the sort of veneer of, no, no, no, it's Israel.
I love the Jews.
Jews are really cool, they're funny.
I love Jerry Seinfeld, that was my favorite show, but I just really hate the Nazi apartheid you know, state of Israel, which, by the way, we should
condemn them, because otherwise we're not fair and balanced.
So we both despise the evil Nazi, racist, apartheid state of Israel.
Actually, several of my grandparents are originally Syrian Jews.
Yeah.
So, but anyways, and so if you're an Iowa kid in your mother's basement and there is endless number of injustices and genocides happening around the world that are infinitely greater in how grave they are than whatever is happening in terms of the dynamic in Israel, but yet you choose to focus on On some violation.
So, therefore, when you forgive the 250,000, 300,000 people that have been just killed in the Syrian war, you know, who cares about that stuff?
But then you focus on some interaction that happened between an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian woman, and you're some kid who's not wearing pants in his parents' basement, then maybe you're anti-Semitic, because your focus should not necessarily be on that particular issue, if you care so much about universal justice.
Okay, so it seems to me that it's very obvious right now that, and you've been one of the people really calling this out, that there is a clash of cultures happening right now.
And we've seen what's happening with the immigration and the migrants in Europe.
And good people, good, decent people, not bigots, not xenophobes, not racists, are trying to get a hold of, if you see bombs going off, and you see stabbings, and shootings, and all of these things, how do we deal with this?
And whether it's purely about religion, or cultures, or all of this stuff, you've put yourself right in the middle of this conversation.
What do you think?
And you've seen the way Canada's changed, by the way, which is something I wanted to ask you about, about what's going on in Montreal.
Okay. People like to band with those who are similar to them.
Now, so then I take this principle and I apply it at the cultural level.
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If you are Sweden, you're likely to experience greater success assimilating people from Denmark—and it's a profoundly obvious and trivial statement to make—than people who are coming from Yemen.
not because Yemeni people are evil and diabolical.
It's because there is such a minimal overlap in their central, defining cultural values
that it becomes difficult for these two cultures to assimilate with one another, to get along
with one another, right?
If you have a messy person who lives with a very clean person, it's going to result
in problems, right?
And so, I argue, basically, that it doesn't really take a sophisticated intellectual to
realize that if you take endless millions of people that almost share none of the cultural
compass that define Western society, it doesn't take much to predict what's going to happen.
And it doesn't make you a racist or a bigot.
Look, the Dalai Lama came out publicly and said that, "Oh, you know, we can't allow Germany
to become an Arab country."
Now, how come they didn't go after him the way they go after Donald Trump?
He said basically the same thing.
I've had on my show a guy by the name of Professor Salim Mansour, who's a practicing Muslim,
who appeared in front of the Canadian parliament saying, "Stop Islamic immigration."
He's Muslim.
He's a practicing Muslim.
Why is he saying that?
Is he an Islamophobe?
He's a brown man.
He's an Indian man.
Well, because he realizes that the cultural values of the West, the cultural values of
the West, are not the same as the cultural values of the West.
values.
The cultural baggage that these guys are bringing are not consistent with ours.
Yeah, so how do you make the moral distinction there?
As someone that wants to do good, I'm a firm believer that most people want to do good if they can help other people they want to, and then also understand that there are actual cultural problems, and forgetting culture even.
There are economic reasons.
We know what's happening in Germany.
They brought in 1.3 million people.
Even if all of those people were the most wonderful, assimilated, spectacular scientists and free thinkers ever, the strain on the system in terms of health care.
I saw something like it was going to cost like a billion American dollars to just do dental work on these people, which they're going to get for free.
That then creates a hostility towards the immigrants.
So how do you—it's hard to sort of make that moral guide, right, or follow that path.
Right, so I would say, look, you leave a very few select numbers of entry numbers for people who are truly fleeing.
So if we're talking about the Middle East or Syria, there are people who are, you know, the Yazidi or the Iraq or Greek Orthodox or Catholics that should be at the front of the list because they're the first ones who are going to be beheaded, right?
So you leave a certain number of Yeah.
as we, when we escaped and came to Canada.
It's not as though I'm anti-immigration or anti-refugee or anti-altruism,
but it doesn't make sense to allow the types of numbers in, precisely for the reasons that you said.
Forget about Islam, forget about the cultural thing.
Just pragmatically, how do you integrate so many people?
How do you integrate so many people?
So I use two principles from evolutionary theory when I talk about these points.
So I use two principles from evolutionary theory when I talk about these points.
So there's a principle called kin selection in evolutionary theory,
So there's a principle called kin selection in evolutionary theory, which basically refers
which basically refers to the idea that, why do I jump into the river to save my sons,
to the idea that, you know, why do I jump into a river to save my sons but not some
but not some random other kids?
random other kids?
Well, because my sons share, on average, half my genes.
And so if I save three of my children from an evolutionary calculus, it actually makes
sense if I sacrifice myself.
So hold that thought for a second.
There's another evolutionary principle called reciprocal altruism, which is, you know, why
would I jump and save Dave Rubin, who doesn't share my genes?
Well, because it's become a form of secular religion, right?
And the same way that religion parasitizes your brain so that you no longer have the capacity to reason properly, you could have other parasites, other parasitic, you know, ideas.
In this case, infinite altruism, right?
Praying at the altar of self-flagellation, as I call it, right?
The West is bad, self-flagellate, let in the guys who are going to behead us.
That makes us then we're somehow good.
So, look, I'll just give you a great example from Quebec, and maybe eventually we'll move to what's happening in Canada.
So, the Quebec government is profoundly concerned by losing its linguistic identity, right?
It is amongst a sea of evil English speakers, whether it be the rest of Canada or the United States, and it's desperate to maintain its linguistic integrity.
So, in their desperate desire to maintain French as a dominant, you know, reality, they let in endless folks from profoundly disturbing backgrounds.
For example, take the Algerians.
So, Algeria in 1997, had a war between some really hardcore Islamists and the
government.
They wanted to set up a, you know, theocratic state.
They lost.
The Islamists lost.
All those Islamists then turned to Quebec and said, "Oh, refugee, refugee, we're being
persecuted by the government."
They come to Quebec.
Well, guess what happens?
Quebec says, oh, you could say bonjour, comment ça va?
Okay, great.
You could behead me, but as long as before you behead me, you say salut and bonjour, then everything is good.
So, I mean, I'm being a bit facetious, but it really is that, right?
So it becomes this diabolical parasite that causes people to not be able to think clearly about trivially obvious realities.
Because that, to me, is what I see as the biggest problem, and you're calling it the self-isolation.
I mean, I was on a radio show with a guy who I've known for a long time, and he was asking me about the refugees, and I said, look, I'm for refugees, for immigration as a general rule.
All of us, unless our ancestors were brought here as slaves or we were Native Americans, we're all refugees or immigrants of some kind.
So I understand that.
But I kept saying, I just don't know that we have the systems in place and the checks in place and we have to figure some of that out.
I didn't think that was gross or racist or anything of that nature.
And he kept going on and on about how he would house them in his house and blah blah blah.
And I said, well, this was on air live, I said, well, you know, if you'd like to have them in your house, I'd be happy to do a little research for you and let you know.
And then suddenly he said, well, my wife, I don't know if my wife would let me know.
So it's like this fake moralizing to somehow make me feel bad like I was a bad guy just for having an honest conversation.
I wasn't saying stop the people.
I wasn't saying kick anybody out.
This fake moralizing and then you turn it on them and you watch their arguments usually crumble, right?
So people actually write and say, you know, are you just against people choosing what to wear?
I mean, it's astonishing that you could be so myopically stupid.
Yeah.
If I wear a shirt that says, I despise people with green eyes, right?
It's not just, there is a message to that t-shirt, right?
So, the hijab is also a political statement, right?
It is basically saying that there is increased Islamization that is conspicuously around us, right?
Now, individual woman might—it might certainly be the case that she chooses.
We don't have any empirical data that I'm aware of that tells us how many of these women are forced versus how many choose it freely, but we know through, again, history, that if you look at women in
Afghanistan in 1950, if you look at women in Iran in the 1960s and '70s, if you look at
women in Pakistan, if you look at women all over those regions, in Egypt, you know,
graduating class in Cairo University from 1970 to today, it seems quite astonishing that they've
all decided at the same time to freely don massive Islamic garb.
The more likely statistical, probabilistic argument is that there is now an environment that is forcing women to wear that, right?
So, there is a message to that garb, right?
And therefore, when I, you know, from 1975 to 2003, That's when we moved to Montreal in 1975.
I had seen a single woman in Islamic garb in my entire life in Montreal.
From 2003 till today, you can walk in areas of Montreal where 30, 40, 50% of the women are veiled.
Sometimes it's not just hijab, it's more, you know, Islamic garb.
I've done very little, as you said, social media, but in two instances, I've taken photos of fully veiled women on Southern California beaches.
The men that they're with are completely dressed, right?
Where are the feminists arguing about that, right?
So the guys are allowed to naturally experience the environment of the beach.
But the women have to be cloaked, an incredibly restrictive thing.
Doesn't that seem sexist?
Yeah.
But then I'll get attacked.
But so what if she wears a bag over her whole body and there are only slits that allow her to see the Laguna Beach?
Who are you?
What do you mean, who am I?
I mean, again, we have common sense, right?
I mean, do most women, if they've given a choice, would they prefer to be dressed in a bag over their head rather than wearing shorts and experiencing the beauty of the Pacific Ocean?
Right, so the critic will make it sound like you're focusing on that, but actually what you're doing is you're using the same principles across the board.
You're not focusing on that.
You're pointing something out because it's an aberration to the way the rest of the society behaves.
And by the way, to prove that we're not gross and racist, I mean, you know, look, I live here in California.
It's probably 95 degrees out right now.
There are going to be Orthodox Jewish men wearing big wool hats and crazy long jackets.
I think that's equally as bonkers.
They're not forcing other people to do it, which is a difference.
That Bill Warner made a point when you had him on your show, and I had him on and he brought that up, that there's a difference in the way the religions act.
So in that case, those Orthodox guys, as silly as that may be, they're not trying to spread that to non-believers.
But I know that this guy poses literally zero threat to me.
Now, there are endless studies that we have data looking at Jew hatred, not Israel hatred, Jew hatred stemming from
Islamic countries, 95%, 99%, 93%.
The numbers are not good.
So if I see somebody who is advertising their identity, and that identity has a probability
of 95 to 100% hating me.
Have I evolved the brain to be minimally concerned about having an increase of those people, just statistically speaking?
Notwithstanding that many women who wear the hijab, I could probably invite them over to my house for dinner and vice versa, and they could become my best friends.
Statistically, on average, in the same way that when I walk into the dark alley, I am more afraid of four young men than four elderly women, I'm more afraid of somebody who is exhibiting their fundamentalist religiosity if it's Islamic than if it's Jewish.
Yeah, and that's why I started this with the Olympic thing, because in the judo match, when the Israeli put his hand out and the Egyptian wouldn't shake his hand, first off, these countries have a peace agreement.
There has not been one Israeli killed by an Egyptian or an Egyptian killed by an Israeli since 1979, or probably before that, probably since the 1973 war or something.
And also, Egypt lets no aid into Gaza.
So Egypt, you could make a very strong case that Egypt, they've sealed off the border, they've destroyed all the tunnels, they shoot people that try to get out of Gaza, that they're much worse to the Gazans than Israel is, where all the aid comes through.
So it's a fake.
So the point is that— No Jews, no news.
Well, exactly.
There's not one Jew in Gaza.
But my point being that this person, we have two countries that are at peace.
He wouldn't shake this guy's hand, not because it's a cold peace.
To anybody who tries to argue about, no, but it's peaceful on their level, right?
Just, I will pay, right?
Or maybe because of all your massive Patreon donations.
I'll split it with you.
I will pay to the idiot who utters that stupidity.
A ticket to go to the place that I choose, but you have to tape it with a t-shirt that says, I'm a gay Jew, I love Judaism, and walk around in that neighborhood.
All right, so let's go a little more on this sort of moralizing stuff.
We have been emailing privately.
I'm going to expose a little bit of our private email from about a week ago.
You were telling me a bit about how you were sort of caught in an e-mob of sorts, that people ask you a lot of things. They ask for favors, they ask for retweets
on this or help this person or that person. I get a lot of it too. I do
things privately that I don't talk about. Sometimes there's legitimate security
reasons that I don't talk about it. Sometimes it's just I don't have to sit here
and pat myself on the back.
Whatever.
It's fine.
Even that sounded... I didn't even like the way that came out.
But basically, you were asked to sort of help somebody.
Well, I bring it up not so that you can prove what a good person you are, which I know is not what you're trying to do there, but to just show that there's a personal piece of this, that this online world that we've all been part of, and you have a channel on YouTube which I want to talk about in a second, I become Hitler.
putting stuff out there on Twitter and all this stuff, that it's connected us, and at
the same time it does rip us apart in a weird way.
So I suspect that the person that sent you this probably is a huge admirer of your work,
knows that you care about the same things that they care about, and yet because you
didn't behave in one instance how they want you to, now you're the enemy.
I'm Hitler.
Right, now you're Hitler.
But this is the danger of what's happening online, and I think we're starting to see it permeate into every part of society.
But in other words, it's just the unique combination of genes that make who Gazzan is means that these kinds of guys are not... I mean, I face threats from much bigger guys than an 18-year-old, you know, who's a castrato, who calls me bitch.
I face, in terms of the hierarchy of threats that I receive, he's not very threatening to me.
Yeah, I guess it's that we don't take a breath sometimes before we realize what we're doing.
You know, as you're saying that, I'm recalling during the last attack in Brussels, I saw just within—as it was unfolding, I mean, they didn't even know how many people were dead.
I saw someone that I didn't know—it was just a random person—tweet something about even worse than the dead is the amount of Islamophobia this is going to create.
And I retweeted and I said, "This is the very definition of regressive left."
That we're more concerned about an idea that may cause some ill will towards an idea,
right?
Now, I'm not talking about hurting people.
That we're more concerned about that than actual dead bodies that are still warm and
being counted.
And it happened to be a random person, and I got a couple thousand retweets.
And I actually felt bad after, because I felt that I had then unleashed, you know, the mob
on some random person.
So it works every which way.
And none of us are perfect, I think, is the point of this, that you try to do good, but
sometimes— And how about just being decent, right?
I mean, a lot of people, incidentally, out of the endless number of people who kind of weighed in on this, you know, 99% were like, hey, the guy is on a break with his family, pay off, you don't think he does enough?
But, you know, 1% of a very large number... Yeah.
It's still a big tsunami of hate.
And so again, stop and think before you do this.
Do you want the people that you supposedly admire, that you respect, to ultimately be driven out because of your hatred?
Or do you want to encourage us to continue?
You and I already receive tons of hate from really nefarious folks.
We don't need the additional hate from supposedly our friends.
Now, I suspect, despite the hate or the memes that people may send you—and, you know, I've mentioned this a few times before, but Ben Shapiro, who's an Orthodox Jew, where's the amicus?
So he's putting himself out there in a certain respect.
You know, I've seen the horrible memes that people show him in Auschwitz and in ovens and terrible stuff and all this stuff.
My policy on all this is I either—basically, I ignore it.
I don't engage with these people.
A crazy random person came up to me on the street that I didn't know and started screaming at me.
I would ignore them, so why would I not ignore the crazy online person?
So you're not for banning these people or any of that stuff, right?
Banning them from my page or banning them from speaking?
Well, I meant from speaking, but you're okay with... No, speak as much as you want.
Look, as I've always said, I support Holocaust deniers.
I mean, it's difficult to give an example of somebody who supports free speech more than a Jewish person saying that I support a guy who denies the reality that is about as clear a historical fact as the existence of gravity, right?
So I support the right of these people to be assholes.
Here's the difference, though.
I sometimes will ban and block people because they're just endlessly abusive, right?
Then they will find a way to start a narrative that, how could I be for free speech, right?
Because free speech is about allowing an intruder into your shower.
And when you go in, he starts saying, hey fat boy, take a shower, fat boy, fat boy.
And if I kick him out of my house, I am forbidding his free speech.
I mean, you must be so incorrect in your thinking about what free speech is to actually make that argument.
And hence, that's why you're naturally lobotomized.
To be absolutely clear, you're not against them exercising their free speech.
You just don't have to be the knowing recipient of it, nor give them a platform.
So, for example, on your Facebook page, if someone was slamming it all day and fighting with people and all that, you don't have to give them that spot to do it.
They can do it wherever they want.
But somehow, now, you're the enemy of free speech.
Yeah, it's funny, because on my own Facebook page, I think I've banned maybe three people, and I can't even swear that it's that many, but it was for just that.
If you were just in there to fight, I didn't care what you were saying about me, but if you're just in there to fight everybody else with just epitaphs and racial stuff and language, it's like, that's not the forum that I want to create in this world.
It's not what I do here physically with you right now, and it's not the forum that I want to create on the internet.
So what they usually do is they unmonetize the clip.
For whatever reason, I don't know why.
And then you could request a manual review, which I guess some actual human goes through, and they either then re-monetize it or they un-monetize it permanently.
And the reality is that there is a general theme to the clips.
Let's not say what it is.
There's usually a theme to what is being unmonetized.
So if we're going to be charitable, then I might say that it's maybe an algorithm that is being used.
It's not a human.
There's an algorithm.
If you ever see the word, and here I'll put in square brackets, redacted.
Then it will get unmonetized and it's some algorithm that needs to be fixed and updated.
If I'm going to be less charitable and kind of more conspiratorial, then there is literally some clear direction, directive, where people are being told, remove this type of stuff.
Yeah, you know, I don't know what the answer is, and I would welcome the CEO of Google or YouTube or any of these people to come on the show and talk to me about this.
And I've invited Mark Zuckerberg, and I've invited Jack from Twitter, and all these people.
But they keep this stuff kind of secret, and when I've talked to a couple insiders at a few of these companies, What they've told me is that it's not necessarily the
algorithm, but there is a mob of people that don't like you, for example, about what you're saying
about Islam.
So they automatically keep flagging your videos.
And they're all day long, and they're doing it from multiple accounts.
And eventually, that flagging then leads to either the algorithm kicking in or whatever
their then safety—you know, you've hit the threshold, and then they unmonetize it.
But that's just as dangerous.
Letting the inmates run the asylum is just as dangerous as letting the algorithm—a
And I should say, what I'm going to say next, this reality should not exist independently of what I'm going to say next, but if you typically look at the like to dislike ratio of all of these clips that they unmonetized, it's 700 likes, 4 dislikes.
So it's not as though, you know, people are collectively saying, this guy's putting out bad content.
Not that if I were putting out bad content, you should be censoring me.
But the reality is, there is nothing, as you said, that's objectionable in what I'm saying.
Yeah, so I bring this up not so that we can pontificate on our little YouTube worlds, although I do think that this little ecosystem... Mine is a lot more little than yours.
And mine's a lot more little than PewDiePie, so, you know, whatever.
But I don't bring it up so that we can just sort of do insider baseball on that, as much as it shows that there is something bigger happening here related to free speech.
So, you know, for example, with Milo being booted off Twitter, and just in the last couple weeks, Ali Rizvi, who I know you know, and Faisal, and Melissa Chen, all got banned temporarily from Facebook.
But nonetheless, it's a very, very dangerous thing because now you can have a bureaucrat I don't know all the details of the law, but if somebody complains about you having posted something on your Facebook page that is denigrating towards a particular religion, then you could be taken—now, they don't put you in jail, but they'll fine you, you know, $7,000, whatever it is.
Well, that's going to make me think twice before I press that—so, it's dangerous.
And you see it all over Europe, right?
I mean, Geert Wilders, for some of your guests who—some of your viewers who don't know who he is, he's a Dutch parliamentarian who could potentially be the next prime minister of the Netherlands.
He was taken in front of a court in— Because he said some things that were deemed hate speech.
And at that, he stood up in front of the magistrate and said, but do you contest the veracity of what I'm saying?
Not that, by the way, the veracity should matter whether you should say it or not.
So is the problem here that we've put religion in such a protected class that even when there's a political element to religion, and this again is what Bill Warner focuses on, and his site is called Political Islam, there is a political element to Islam that the other religions don't really have.
Not to say that Christianity hasn't had a strong influence on America, we know.
But the Christian right is crumbling.
We know that right now.
I mean, I went to the Reason Rally in D.C.
There were about five protesters, you know, and they were being laughed at the whole time.
The Christian right is having virtually no effect in the election this year.
The evangelicals, Trump went there, went to, remember, did you see that?
He went to Liberty College, babbled at them for a minute, screwed up some verses.
And it was like nobody, they've lost their influence.
They lost the gay marriage battle, etc., etc.
That with Islam, there is a political bent to it, and we can't seem to untie these two things, and that's the danger.
You're not attacking anyone for their faith, as long as it doesn't bother anybody else, but you're talking about the political element that could put women in beekeeper costumes, as Bill Maher says, and all this stuff, and that's the part we have to fight.
Alright, well I think, you know, we spend so much time and energy talking about that, but let's move a little bit to your academic stuff before we have to wrap up.
And you've peppered it in here, because it all fits within the construct of what you're talking about.
What do you do all day as a professor?
I think people wonder, as a professor, are you sitting in a smoking jacket, and I picture you, and there's a lot of books around you, and folders, and files, and you're in a chair, and you're befuddled, and kids are banging on the door.
Did I just make it up?
Or are you doing more of an Indiana Jones kind of thing?
So, a lot of people, let's say, who don't know what academics do, think that you're basically a high school teacher, except that the students are older.
Nothing could be further from the truth, right?
So, teaching is actually a small, very important, but a small part of your day.
So, I teach students, of course.
I apply for grants.
I serve on editorial boards of scientific journals.
Sometimes I'm an associate editor of a journal.
I supervise graduate students, but predominantly most of my day is spent thinking and writing, doing studies, writing up papers for scientific journals, writing books.
So, if you look at all of the things that I do in a typical day, a serious professor can work 12, 14
hour days doing much, much more than teaching.
So, one of the things that I, actually one of my colleagues said that that's the thing
that irks him most about being a professor is that when people tell him, "Oh, so you're
not teaching this semester, so you're off."
Because if you're not teaching that three hour class, the rest of the time we're all surfing.
Because you know, the books, they write themselves.
The scientific papers, they write themselves, right?
I mean, typically a paper, for you to write a paper, a scientific paper, you come up with the idea, then you decide how you're going to collect the data, you collect the data, you analyze the data, you write up the paper.
You send it to a journal, and then it goes through many rounds of peer review.
So the process of publishing a scientific paper could take two, three, four years.
And you're doing many of these projects, and supervising students, and writing grants, and writing books.
And so, whatever I do that you see as a public intellectual, outside my job as a professor, is an added on.
I already have a very stressed professional life.
And that's something that I take on simply because I think that my small voice can hopefully contribute to the big debate.
And so going back to our earlier argument, give a brother a break, right?
I mean, you know, we do a lot of stuff, and I'm not getting paid for this, and I'm not making a lot of... I'm doing this only from the purity of my heart to lend my small voice.
It's funny, every now and again, you know, one of the random haters will be screaming, Ruben's only talking about this stuff because he knows he's gonna make money off it.
Because I care about this, and I guess I'm okay at it, but you know, we'll see.
How, when you're doing all this stuff, so everything we've talked about, this is serious stuff, you're working hard as a professor, all this, how do you get some balance in your life amongst all that?
This is what I asked Sam, who's under, you know, such assault constantly from all these people, and wrote a book called Waking Up, Spirituality Without Religion.
Do you have any spiritual practices in your own life, or how do you get some sort of soul?
The closest that I would come to spirituality would be to sit on a beach in Southern California and experience the elements without having somebody sending me endless requests.
That would be the closest that I would come to a transcendental moment.
I mean, I exercise a lot, despite the fact that you probably don't believe it.
I mean, I love to be physically active.
I used to be a serious competitive athlete, so I haven't lost the desire to exercise.
So if I'm feeling very stressed, getting on the bike for an hour is the way by which I decompress.
But actually, I think that I haven't achieved the right balance.
I think that I'm way too accessible.
And again, it comes from a strand of purity that I have.
I feel as though I owe this person a response, right?
Somebody just wrote four paragraphs to me in email, and I could do the smart thing, which is ignore it, because I receive 400 of those emails a day, or I feel guilty.
Like, this guy just took 45 minutes to write me this thing, asking me about some personal thing.
Well, now I just lost 25 minutes because I'm going to write to him.
So, to be honest with you, I don't think I'm very good at achieving balance, and usually my The yearly pilgrimage to Southern California is where I try to recharge.
Well, just to add, I mean, and sometimes, because I'm giving so much to random strangers, then the ones that truly matter, which is someone called your wife or your children, Yeah, my wife will see me on the... I say, hey, can you put it down?
And so the reality is that we do have to step back and achieve that balance.
Because that random person, ultimately, you don't owe them anything.