Aug. 19, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:15:00
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[MUSIC PLAYING] | |
| Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. | ||
| Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Hillary Trump and Donald Clinton. | ||
| 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? | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| 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 | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me back. | ||
| It is four times. | ||
| It is four times, technically, because you were also on a panel once. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me again and congratulations on going independent. | ||
| Best of luck. | ||
| I'm sure it will be a huge success. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I am indeed. | ||
| So your glow, you always have that glow. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I grew up there. | ||
| Arabic is my mother tongue. | ||
| We're Lebanese Jews. | ||
| And in 1975, the Civil War broke out, which was a profoundly barbaric civil war. | ||
| And the Jews—the Jews that remained in Lebanon were really caught in a very, very delicate position, where we really needed to leave. | ||
| And so, we were there for the first year of the civil war, and then left Lebanon under imminent threat of execution. | ||
| Subsequently, when we emigrated to Montreal, My parents kept going back to Lebanon, back and forth. | ||
| And on one of their trips back to Lebanon in 1980, they were kidnapped by Fatah. | ||
| So not only did we experience the horrors of the civil war, subsequently, after being | ||
| safe in Canada, my parents were—you know, faced new trials and tribulations on a return | ||
| trip. | ||
| Luckily, we were able to—I say "we." | ||
| I was actually not involved. | ||
| I was 15 years old. | ||
| But my family and their connections were involved in rescuing them. | ||
| I think they spent eight days in captivity. | ||
| Some real bad stuff happened to them. | ||
| But luckily we got them out. | ||
| And since 1980, no one's been back to Lebanon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 didn't want to obviously retire. | ||
| He saw that he could no longer stay in Lebanon. | ||
| This is before the civil war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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
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You could probably check it on Google or, you know, do a search. | |
| But that shows you sort of the hypocrisy of the Middle East. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Then the Israeli judo player—what is it? | ||
| Player? | ||
| Did they say player? | ||
| Judoka. | ||
| Judoka, yeah. | ||
| He beat an Egyptian. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The evil juice. | ||
| The evil juice, the Jews. | ||
| Now you're an atheist. | ||
| 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 | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| So what happened here? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it's not Israel. | ||
| It's Jews. | ||
| Let's not make a mistake. | ||
| It's Jews. | ||
| So how do you make that distinction? | ||
| 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. | ||
| The creation of Israel was a godsend—forgive the term—to all the Jews. | ||
| Only an atheist Jew could say that, right? | ||
| There you go. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| By the way, Jerry Seinfeld, who at least one of his parents was Syrian or is Syrian, not | ||
| going too well for the probably one remaining Jew in Syria. | ||
| There's probably one or there's 10 left in Egypt or in any of those places. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It might have been a valid one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No country is above criticism. | ||
| I say that all the time. | ||
| And no people are. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So it's not, because people write me and say, so are you saying that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But the question is, you know, you could be 20 pounds overweight or 200 pounds overweight. | ||
| Both people are called overweight. | ||
| Right. | ||
| One is 10 times more overweight than the other. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Does this sort of show you the general absurdity of religion in a weird way? | ||
| Because to me, it seems like the idea of the chosen people... I could see... First off, I never liked that phrase. | ||
| Growing up, I never liked that phrase because I thought, chosen for what? | ||
| I'm no better than anyone. | ||
| I never felt that in any way that that was a good thing being thrust upon anyone. | ||
| I never liked that phrase at all. | ||
| But if you were an outsider, and you go, and let's say you were a believer, right, | ||
| and you're an outsider, you go, "They're the chosen people," | ||
| well then, putting yourselves above them on the oppression Olympics makes sense, | ||
| 'cause ah, see, they did something, and they're chosen. | ||
| So it really just becomes this, like, self-fulfilling prophecy, sort of. | ||
| Although, just to clarify, at least as I understand it, 'cause I once asked a rabbi | ||
| about the exact meaning of chosen people, it's not how people typically take it | ||
| to mean that you're superior or better. | ||
| It's actually chosen in the sense that God has chosen you. | ||
| To be pious to lead the way in your purity. So as sort of I'm not sure how well I'm doing that either | ||
| but as Supremacist baloney goes right. It's actually a rather tame | ||
| version of supremacy. There are other religions We won't say which ones they are that are supremacists, but | ||
| are not quite as tame in their supremacy. Yeah Okay, so let's shift a little bit. | ||
| And again, we're not going to spend the entire some-odd hour on all the religious stuff and Islam and all that. | ||
| I didn't say some. | ||
| I did not say Islam. | ||
| Where's your Aslan decoder? | ||
| Your Aslan Uyghur decoder? | ||
| Aslan Uyghur decoder 5000. | ||
| Yeah, where is that thing? | ||
| You don't bring it with you? | ||
| It's in my brain. | ||
| It's in your brain. | ||
| Okay, very good. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So I'll start with just the what I call cultural homophily. | ||
| So if you look at how people choose their mates, it turns out the birds of a feather flock together. | ||
| In other words, if you want a successful union with someone, it's not opposites attract. | ||
| All the research shows that somebody who shares your values, your beliefs, your interests, you're likely to have a better union. | ||
| We tend to choose dogs that look on average more like us. | ||
| So there are all sorts of ways by which this idea of homophily, being attracted to someone similar to you, manifests itself. | ||
| And so doesn't that somehow seem racist or narcissistic? | ||
| Or somehow you're othering or something? | ||
| Right. Well, maybe. | ||
| Maybe, but it's true is what you're saying. | ||
| It's life. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| 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, you better sell this. | ||
| You better sell this. | ||
| Where are you going with this one? | ||
| Because hopefully, if in the future I have the need for you to save me, you'll reciprocate. | ||
| It's a form of reciprocal grooming that we see in other primates, right? | ||
| Tit for tat, right? | ||
| So now take these two principles. | ||
| We tend to want to invest more in those that are genetically related to us, and we tend | ||
| to want to invest in those who are likely to reciprocate in the future. | ||
| Now, how does that fit with having Germans letting in 1.3 million people, who certainly | ||
| have no genetic — never mind no genetic affiliation, right? | ||
| They don't share any cultural overlap, right? | ||
| And these guys are not going to reciprocate. | ||
| It's not as though, in some future world, Syria will reciprocate the kindness. | ||
| So, it's a very parasitic relationship, right? | ||
| We're always expected to exhibit infinite altruism, but never is that reciprocated from the other camp. | ||
| So, that's actually really fascinating, on a couple levels. | ||
| So, on one hand, you could look at just the bordering Arab countries and the Gulf states that are absurdly wealthy, that have—what is it? | ||
| Doesn't Saudi Arabia have housing for something like... | ||
| For 3 million people, I think. | ||
| Yeah, for all these people that go to the Hajj every year. | ||
| These air-conditioned tents that sit empty probably 90% of the year, | ||
| and they're not letting anyone in. | ||
| So that's what you're talking about. The altruism really only works one way. | ||
| So is that a defect of the West? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is this a... you know, I keep saying the road to hell is paved with good intentions. | ||
| It's an old phrase, but it's become my new phrase, because I see it permeating almost everything right now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you make of the fake moralizing? | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's outrageous. | ||
| I did a satirical piece on one of my sad truth clips where I talked about we have to stop dark alley phobia. | ||
| Because if you look at the number of murders per year in Canada, it's astonishingly low. | ||
| Now if you look at the number of murders that are committed in dark alleys, it's almost as high as if a meteorite were to hit us. | ||
| Yet most people have the evolved response of not wishing to walk down a dark alley, | ||
| and that's very racist and gross and bigoted against dark alleys, right? | ||
| Our brains have evolved to calculate statistical regularities. | ||
| I know that when I walk down a dark alley, four young men are likely to be more dangerous | ||
| than four elderly women. | ||
| That's not because I'm ageist. | ||
| That's not because I'm sexist. | ||
| Because on average, young men are more dangerous than old ladies, even though most young men | ||
| are lovely. | ||
| So the fake moralizing actually makes you remove a piece of yourself that we've evolved to understand. | ||
| That's why I call these people, as you know, the Ostrich Brigade, the Castrati Brigade, and the naturally lobotomized. | ||
| Alright, so one of the things that you've been talking about is that you've been seeing more hijabs in Canada in general. | ||
| I think you were talking about Montreal specifically, is that right? | ||
| Now, I see the way the hijab has been fetishized here in America. | ||
| For example, the fencer that just won, I think, was it bronze? | ||
| She should have been the flag bearer above a guy who holds the all-time record for most medals because she has made a sartorial decision. | ||
| Clearly it was Islamophobic not to make it. | ||
| So for the people who aren't quite following the sarcasm there, I think you're referring to the piece that was written on CNN, you saw that? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Saying that basically she should carry the flag at the ceremonies instead of Michael Phelps. | ||
| Despite his 21 gold medals and blah blah blah, she did win one thing, but it would be better for society if we showed her. | ||
| So they fetishized it. | ||
| I have no problem with her wearing it if it's her choice, of course. | ||
| I would be for anyone doing what they want with their body. | ||
| But I would always take the most successful athlete in an Olympic competition, call me crazy. | ||
| So what do you make of the situation in Montreal specifically? | ||
| Because I don't think you're against, you're not in and of itself against the hijab, 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That doesn't bode well in terms of secularism and liberalism and modernity. | ||
| Okay, so that's the part that I think is important here. | ||
| So you're not, in and of itself, you don't care that this woman is wearing this if she chose it. | ||
| And as you said, there isn't enough information, studies, to prove whether she was forced to or not, whatever. | ||
| But it's what it really says about society as a whole, right? | ||
| Because you can get a sense that People that wear religious garb probably are going to vote in certain ways that will be against secular values. | ||
| So that's why it's not racist or bigoted if you are just a free thinker to not want, and it's also always women. | ||
| Why is it always women? | ||
| Right. | ||
| How many men are walking around? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, let me add another point to make it personal. | ||
| So I'm Jewish, right? | ||
| If I see the Hasidic guy dressed in his garb, as a matter of fact, I do in the privacy of my car as I drive by with my wife say, look at these guys. | ||
| I'm not feeling happy about it. | ||
| So now you're an anti-Semite. | ||
| I hate Jews, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was because he's the Jew. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Look, I think maybe Sam Harris mentioned this tweet that I had sent out, I think, about my t-shirt test. | ||
| Oh, right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| So let me reiterate. | ||
| Please. | ||
| Right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Come back to us and let us know how it goes. | ||
| Yeah, probably not. | ||
| Well, you probably don't come back to us. | ||
| So it's a one-way ticket. | ||
| So, you know what? | ||
| I'll foot the bill. | ||
| Hey, I appreciate your altruism. | ||
| I'll foot the bill. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| So, as you said, I mean, people don't appreciate the number of messages that we receive and the hundreds and the thousands, right? | ||
| It's endless. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I receive them on my Gmail account, on my university address, on my private Facebook page, on my public Facebook page, on Twitter. | ||
| So, I am bombarded endlessly by all sorts of requests. | ||
| The reality is, being who I am, I'm astonishingly accessible. | ||
| Way more accessible. | ||
| Everybody's told me, please reduce your... you're going to burn yourself out. | ||
| So I come on vacation here and I take the position that I'm not going to, you know, | ||
| work, right? | ||
| Anything that I'm going to post is going to be related to my vacation. | ||
| Here I am surfing here, here I am, you know, whatever, right? | ||
| To prove this, you called me to tell me that you weren't going to respond to my tweet | ||
| that I sent about that. | ||
| Exactly, precisely because I was... | ||
| So you're not lying. | ||
| I know you're not lying. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So then this gentleman wrote, put some tweets out tagging me, several times, I think. | ||
| Then he posted on my public Facebook page, then sent me several private messages. | ||
| The smart thing for me would have been to just ignore, okay? | ||
| Because of my purity, sitting at the beach with my children playing around, I wrote back, | ||
| "Hey buddy, look, I'm on vacation, you know, lay off, right?" | ||
| I mean, I was a bit indignant. | ||
| He writes back, he's upset that, you know, I was rude. | ||
| And then I block and ban him. | ||
| So, then the e-mob is started. | ||
| First, they release our private exchange, which is... there's nothing to hide in that private exchange, but that's a huge social faux pas, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, already that. | ||
| And then, they start with the e-mob. | ||
| You know, this guy is taking pictures of him at the beach, but he can't retweet something. | ||
| He doesn't... but they don't appreciate that I... if I did... first of all, I have to vet what that tweet is. | ||
| That means I'd have to take half an hour to an hour to know, who's this guy? | ||
| What's the thing that they're asking for, right? | ||
| What's the cause? | ||
| What's the cause? | ||
| Is it legitimate? | ||
| But I also have 300... | ||
| Other such requests, right? | ||
| Why yours? | ||
| I've received a request from people who've come on your show. | ||
| Famous people. | ||
| I wrote back to them, very much like I wrote to this kid, although less indignant because they weren't hounding me as much. | ||
| And I said, hey, sorry, X and Y, I'm on vacation. | ||
| What did they write back? | ||
| Because they're sane gentlemen. | ||
| Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know you were on vacation. | ||
| No worries, God. | ||
| This kid posts, you know, bitch this. | ||
| Forget about who would speak like that to somebody, right? | ||
| I'm old enough to be your dad, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, the reality is that there is an ugliness. | ||
| People don't appreciate what we do. | ||
| You know, 95%... I'm a professor who has a full-time job as a very serious academic. | ||
| I don't even need to be involved in this public debate. | ||
| I take great personal and professional risks to do what I do. | ||
| So now I want a couple of weeks where I'm not... | ||
| Bombarded by all this ugliness. | ||
| That ugliness exists whether I'm at the beach or not. | ||
| I just want to break from it for a week or two. | ||
| No, I'm a pig who doesn't appreciate the danger that this guy's going through. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And let's be very pragmatic. | ||
| Now, just because of my personality, when these guys come at me, you know, it's only going to embolden me more. | ||
| Because I am walking big testicles. | ||
| Our approach to this is very different. | ||
| You do the attack. | ||
| To me, it's like, goodbye. | ||
| No, but I'm always polite. | ||
| I never insult. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But let's suppose I decided, let's just play out an exercise. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I decided, you know what? | ||
| I hate receiving all this hate stuff. | ||
| Who wants to be, you know, when you're doing this for only pure, pure reasons, right? | ||
| I mean, you're doing this to introduce your small voice to the greater debate. | ||
| I decided, you know what guys, good night, I'm packing it in. | ||
| Would that be a good thing? | ||
| So if I decided that, if tomorrow you decided, you know what, I'm tired of the hate, right? | ||
| So these guys who are supposedly on our side, by acting in this brutal, barbaric, e-mob manner, it might not dissuade me, but it could! | ||
| But it could dissuade this person. | ||
| Now if we bring it to another context, what about the 12 year old girl? | ||
| Who is receptive to a similar e-mob. | ||
| Who doesn't have the structure of personhood that Gaa Saad has. | ||
| I could look at it. | ||
| It annoys me for an hour. | ||
| I'm upset. | ||
| But then I forget about it. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I move on. | ||
| But that 12-year-old doesn't have the same thing. | ||
| But it's the same phenomenon, right? | ||
| There's an anonymity here. | ||
| We e-mob and we trash. | ||
| And that's truly grotesque. | ||
| And I wish people would think about it before they do it. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| You're fully for short of direct violence. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Or they then say, oh, the guy speaks against safe space, but he wants a safe space. | ||
| Again, they completely misunderstand. | ||
| Safe space is a term that developed in the context of universities, where you're supposed to, by definition, be exposed to a multiplicity of ideas. | ||
| That's what education is. | ||
| And then a bunch of people are saying, no, but if you hold it— Idea that's different from mine that makes me feel unsafe | ||
| here. I'm saying look I'm tired of hearing you call me a fat and | ||
| Therefore I'd like to shut off your voice. That's not creating a safe space in the way that we criticize safe | ||
| space on universities So they're just so you know pathologically confused | ||
| 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. | ||
| And look at the interactions that we both have with our guests on our shows. | ||
| They're always respectful, they're always pleasant, people always want to come back on our shows and so on, precisely because we create it. | ||
| You can't have a conversation if you're calling the other person bitch and fat and gay. | ||
| That's not how reasonable, rational people engage in serious conversations. | ||
| You know how hard it is for me to sit here and not be using all those terms all the time? | ||
| The only term you're thinking of looking at me is sexy. | ||
| I see incredible tan. | ||
| That's what I see, just incredible tan. | ||
| So let's talk a little bit about your YouTube channel, because a couple of interesting things | ||
| have happened with that. | ||
| So you do a lot of direct-to-camera stuff where you explain a lot of evolutionary stuff, | ||
| I mean all the things that are in your expertise, and you talk about religion, and a lot of | ||
| great stuff that I love to share. | ||
| But you've screen-capped a couple times in the last few weeks that YouTube has unmonetized | ||
| some of your videos. | ||
| Now I love YouTube. | ||
| The reason that I'm doing this show independently is because I wanted to remain fully on YouTube. | ||
| We all know about the discovery on YouTube, this is where everyone finds us, etc. | ||
| etc. etc. But what do you make of what's happening? I mean, I've watched, I'm pretty sure I've | ||
| watched almost all your videos. I've never seen you say anything hateful or call for | ||
| violence or even marginalize a group in any of that stuff. | ||
| And YouTube has come after a couple of your videos lately. | ||
| Right, so there are two levels. | ||
| In some cases, they un-monetize a clip. | ||
| So for those people who don't know what that means, basically it removes the ability for the content provider to make money off that clip. | ||
| And the reality is, I make very, very, very little money on my YouTube clips because I'm not the gamer. | ||
| I don't remember his name. | ||
| Pee Weed? | ||
| PewDiePie? | ||
| You're not pulling in the PewDiePie? | ||
| I'm not putting this right. | ||
| Well, I think, you know, 44 million subscribers, 12 points, he's making 124 million, right? | ||
| I mean, I can't buy shoes with the amount of money that I'm making. | ||
| So, certainly, my indignation is not due to the fact that you're removing the rights of my, you know, being able to buy a house on Laguna Beach. | ||
| By the way, you didn't even monetize for at least two years. | ||
| It was about two months ago. | ||
| You emailed me and said, how do I even turn this off? | ||
| Even Patreon, I only started in the fall, right? | ||
| Precisely because it takes so much of my time. | ||
| I mean, this is your full-time job. | ||
| I'm doing this as extra. | ||
| This is after my 12-hour, up to 18-hour day, is when I do this stuff, okay? | ||
| So it only makes sense that hopefully you can be remunerated in some small amount. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Right? | ||
| You're saying Islam. | ||
| I just heard a few people that don't. | ||
| I am saying Islam. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So, in either cases, it's soul-crushing. | ||
| 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 | ||
| flawed algorithm—run the asylum. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, it might be objectionable, but it may not. | ||
| That's life. | ||
| But that's life. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Oh, what I meant to say is something that would truly, you know, I'm triggering violence against a group of people or hate speech. | ||
| I'm not doing any of this stuff. | ||
| And oftentimes it's just conversations with other academics or experts. | ||
| Oh, it has Islam in it? | ||
| Boom. | ||
| Unmonetized. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Ingrid Kalkwist, who was on my show, was banned. | ||
| I mean, I know tons of people who've been banned. | ||
| Right, so I've helped some of them get back on Facebook, because I have a decent connection to Facebook. | ||
| But how do you place that threat to free speech? | ||
| Because in America, we do have the First Amendment, and, you know, it's about the government coming for your free speech. | ||
| So this isn't government, regardless of whether it's an algorithm or just a kid clicking flag. | ||
| It's not the government. | ||
| But these companies—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube—are very in cahoots with the government. | ||
| We know that they meet with high-level officials all the time. | ||
| So how do we separate those two things? | ||
| How do we go about the discussion? | ||
| So legally, I'm unsure what would be the ways by which we can address it. | ||
| I'll leave that to the relevant experts, legal experts. | ||
| But in terms of the zeitgeist, it's dangerous, right? | ||
| I mean, the fact that you and I might even, before we send the post button or "Oh, is Facebook gonna ban me for this?" | ||
| The fact that I have that instinct, it has never stopped me from posting whatever I want. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Incidentally, I was at one point myself... | ||
| Let me mention this very quick story. | ||
| There was a woman, a Lebanese, I think Christian woman, who was sending me, you know, "But why don't you hate | ||
| Israel? | ||
| But you're not being fair. Why don't you hate Israel? | ||
| You have to hate Israel." And so on. | ||
| And she was... It was progressively getting more Jew hatred. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So at one point, I decided to just say who she was. | ||
| I mean, although she had posted stuff, so she was public. | ||
| I said, "Here's the person who's the Jew hater." | ||
| She must have complained to Facebook and for one day they banned me or something. | ||
| I had to kind of log in or whatever. | ||
| Now, so you can post hatred towards me. | ||
| I say who you are. | ||
| I get banned. | ||
| So, it's dangerous. | ||
| There should be—unless you're posting something that says, go out and harm these people, incitement for violence, that's a no-no. | ||
| Otherwise, everything is a go. | ||
| How much is the free speech debate being had in Canada? | ||
| Because obviously, you guys don't have the Ten Commandments. | ||
| You don't have our Bill of Rights, but you have a healthy respect for free speech and a history of free speech, but it is a little different. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I mean, you have a strong additional layer of protection by having the First Amendment. | ||
| So, in Quebec right now, there is a bill that's being discussed, and I'm not sure where it is in the process, Bill 52, I can't remember the number. | ||
| It's a bill on hate speech, no denigration of religion and so on. | ||
| Of course, the driver behind that whole bill stems from not touching one particular religion. | ||
| I won't say it this time. | ||
| I think they got the point. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The judge answered, I mean, if you want to get goosebumps, this is going to get you goosebumps. | ||
| He said, it doesn't matter whether what you say is true or false. | ||
| Even if it's true, if it denigrates a people or a religion, then you're not allowed to say it. | ||
| So even saying something true Truthful becomes hate speech. | ||
| It's grotesque. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And again, to go back to my analogy of the person who's 20 pounds overweight and 200 pounds overweight, both are called overweight. | ||
| If we stop the descriptor there, then they're indistinguishable. | ||
| But if we say that how much overweight you are matters, then we recognize that the 20-pound overweight is not the same. | ||
| So, same thing for religion. | ||
| Or I think Sam Harris uses the example of sports analogies. | ||
| I don't know which sports he uses, right? | ||
| MMA fighting is a sport and badminton is a sport. | ||
| They're both called sports. | ||
| One is a lot more violent than the other, right? | ||
| It can be quite cruel. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So the reality is, there is a unique reality to political Islam that we need to confront. | ||
| And no, Mormons and Seventh-day Adventists are not indistinguishable from the nefarious aspects of political Islam. | ||
| And I mean, only a fool or somebody who is duplicitous is going to argue otherwise. | ||
| It's so clear. | ||
| Yeah, it is incredibly clear. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Are you out and doing adventures? | ||
| A bit of those and much more. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| There's no network that would put me on. | ||
| Like, is Fox going to put me on? | ||
| I'm too left. | ||
| Is MSNBC going to put me on? | ||
| I'm too right or center. | ||
| Is CNN? | ||
| No, because I have an opinion, so they're not going to. | ||
| So it's like, everyone just, they make up their little ideas about you. | ||
| You're doing this because of the strength of your convictions. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny. | ||
| I feel very much the same way. | ||
| It's like, I see what's going on in my inbox. | ||
| People writing these incredibly personal, nice notes to me, and I want, you know, I live this. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I'm living this in the most... Well, it's humbling. | ||
| It's humbling, but it's now. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, it all feels very now to me. | ||
| I'm doing something that's relevant now, and I'm doing it because I think it's the right thing to do. | ||
| But if I was to give much more, it's sort of like the giving tree. | ||
| I could give a certain amount more, and then eventually you just got a stump. | ||
| I forget how the giving tree ends, but I think it's not good for the tree, right? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| It doesn't end well for the tree. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The machines are going to take over, huh? | ||
| The machines are going to take over. | ||
| We're doomed. | ||
| We're doomed one way or another. | ||
| Listen, we could talk forever. | ||
| I mean, we really could just talk forever. | ||
| I'm going to ask you to stick around and do one little bonus thing that we're going to do for our patron people. | ||
| But it was a pleasure chatting with you as always. | ||
| And you've got to get down to SoCal more often. | ||
| All right, well, of course I want to thank my friend Gad Saad, and you can check him out on YouTube. | ||
| It's YouTube.com slash Gad Saad, and it's Patreon.com slash Gad Saad, I think. | ||
| Gad Saad, we think, but we'll at least put a link to it down below. | ||
| See, he does not care about money, people. | ||
| We just proved it right there. |
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