Aug. 11, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:09:50
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(upbeat music) | |
| Joining me today is an author, a professor, an evolutionary behavioral scientist, | ||
| a man who wears a bow tie when speaking to the Canadian Parliament, | ||
| and a guy with an incredible tan, Gad Saad. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| So nice to be back. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| The tan. | ||
| I don't know that our cameras, I don't know that YouTube, through the wires and the tubes or whatever, gets it out to the people. | ||
| I don't know that it can take that level of tan. | ||
| Just you being next to me, you're going to get tan. | ||
| I hope so, because I've never felt whiter than I feel right now. | ||
| That is that good Lebanese skin that you have. | ||
| That is indeed. | ||
| Alright, so you've been on the show many times. | ||
| You were on the first test show of the Rubin Report. | ||
| You were on the first panel we ever did. | ||
| We've done one-on-ones a couple times. | ||
| From getting to know you, you have just been in sort of what I would call the fight that is happening now, the free speech fight, the fight for enlightenment values, for liberal values, this whole thing. | ||
| But I thought a nice way to start would be, you happen to be on vacation right now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You are in the midst of a five-week SoCal vacation, and how important Is that, when you are someone that puts yourself out there all the time, as I said, you just spoke to Canadian Parliament, you were at Google doing a talk, I mean, just as someone that's always out there. | ||
| The shutdown, how important? | ||
| Very important, although I've done a few shows while I'm here, so there is a bit of work interspersed within the vacation. | ||
| It's terribly important, not so much for going to the beach, but for disconnecting from being available to the public. | ||
| Now, I always promise my wife that I will absolutely not check a single thing on social media. | ||
| And then usually that lasts three, four, five days, and then I succumb to the temptation. | ||
| But that, I think, is fundamentally the most important part of my vacation, which is to not weigh in every hour on Twitter, to just disconnect. | ||
| Yeah, so profoundly important. | ||
| How do you balance between the academic things that you care about and all the stuff that we're going to talk about for the next hour or so, and just being human? | ||
| Because I feel like that's what people are having trouble dealing with, and I mean that from people that work blue-collar jobs to people that are doing high-level math stuff. | ||
| I feel like people are having trouble separating just all the noise from reality. | ||
| So, I basically have, professionally speaking, I have really two hats that I wear. | ||
| That of a professor, with all that that entails. | ||
| Which, if I only did that, it would keep me busy 18 hours a day. | ||
| And then there is my public intellectual hat that I wear. | ||
| Over the past few years, I feel that a large part of my time has been taken up by the latter. | ||
| And now I'm trying to kind of rein that in. | ||
| So to still remain a viable voice in the battle of public ideas, but I need to sort of go back to some of the fundamentals, the lab stuff. | ||
| Not that I've ever given it up, but it takes time, as you know, right, to build an audience, to get people excited about what you have to say. | ||
| It takes a lot of effort, and so I don't think I have the magical recipe yet, but I try to, every day, do a bit of both. | ||
| Yeah, when you made that shift, which probably was right around when I met you, met, whatever we did on Twitter, however you connect with someone on Twitter, whatever that is now, four years ago or so, when you made that sort of shift from academic to someone that was gonna speak their mind publicly and fight with people publicly and make videos and interviews and all that stuff, did you realize how much of a, not just a time suck, but an important piece of your life it was gonna become? | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| You know, I'm very much of a purist, so I'm just excited by things like a child, right? | ||
| So I discovered that there's this thing called social media that allows me to advertise my ideas with all sorts of people, meet people that I would otherwise never meet, like Dave Rubin and countless others, even random strangers that I get to meet who send me beautiful gifts and I get to know them well, who tell me stuff that's personal in their lives. | ||
| So I never thought that that would be possible, but I'm amazed at the power of the medium. | ||
| And I don't say this in an arrogant manner, just walking down the street, and probably you get this probably ten times more than I do, the number of people who recognize you, who come up to you, who say they love your work, who fall... You know, we could be on the beach and I'll be stopped. | ||
| I could be in a bathroom and someone will say, hey, Godfather. | ||
| And so that's... Nothing worse than that when you're peeing at somebody. | ||
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The guy next to you, it's like, come on. | |
| But that... | ||
| I look at that with a bit of humility in that it's incredible that we have these platforms, which five, 10 years ago, a guy like me in academia could have never hoped to have, and so it's been wonderful. | ||
| It's been a blessing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there a real silver lining to everything that's going on now, which is people feel like everyone's dumber and fighting all the time? | ||
| I'm a firm believer that most of us, 80% of us, want the same simple things and to live decent lives and have some food and have some money and be able to go on vacation and have some sex and just whatever. | ||
| Whatever those basics are. | ||
| But the silver lining, while it sounds so crazy, that obviously if people are recognizing you and rewarding you for the work you do, it shows that there's an intellectual thirst these days. | ||
| It's not being given to you by the mainstream media, but it shows that it's out there. | ||
| Absolutely, and I mean shows that are not mainstream, I think eventually this will be the mainstream. | ||
| It amazes me how the mainstream media has sort of doubled down to use a term that we might talk about later, | ||
| ostrich logic, put them in the sand and refuse to sort of recognize some of the dynamics. | ||
| Look, anything that promotes more discussion is great. | ||
| I only wish that people were sometimes a bit nicer. | ||
| But perhaps they haven't evolved to be nicer? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| That should be your next book. | ||
| Maybe that should be the next book. | ||
| The evolution of evil online. | ||
| I mean, I think we both most of the time do this, right? | ||
| We're able to brush it off, but it takes a toll, you know, reading about You're, in my case, my weight, my Judaism, my... I mean, it's just endless, you know, nasty things that are written about you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wish people would recognize that both of us, and many of us who play in this marketplace of idea, are really doing it with pure reasons, to contribute to a discussion. | ||
| And if people could learn to be a bit nicer, we would all be richer for it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I wish it, but I don't sense that coming down the pike. | ||
| All right, so we're gonna do a lot of stuff here, but I think just first, because it couches everything else, on the free speech front, you've become one of the few people that I know of, at least, on the public side in Canada that are really fighting the free speech battle. | ||
| Of course, the real high-profile guy also is Jordan Peterson, also at the academic level, of course. | ||
| What is happening in Canada right now? | ||
| I mean it seems pretty scary actually when you hear some of this stuff. | ||
| Canada I think is desperately trying to become the number one social justice warrior country in the world. | ||
| trying to catch up to Germany and Sweden, in part because we have a Prime Minister who | ||
| very much epitomizes those positions. | ||
| And so the endless tsunami of these types of positions are difficult to keep up with. | ||
| You mentioned earlier that I had appeared in front of the Canadian Senate to testify. | ||
| Maybe I could mention this very briefly. | ||
| So there's a bill... | ||
| Dad, you're here to tell me what you think. | ||
| You don't even have to ask me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Bill C-16 is a bill that has now since passed. | ||
| Both Jordan Peterson and I, in separate sessions, have been asked to appear to discuss some of our concerns with the bill. | ||
| The bill basically refers to incorporating gender identity and gender expression within hate crime laws. | ||
| That if you target someone based on their gender identity or gender expression, then it's hateful. | ||
| So then, you know, I guess the penalty would be ratcheted up. | ||
| And I appeared in front of the Canadian Senate to basically argue that the way that it was worded is so vague and potentially so dangerous that literally anything that I teach in my evolutionary psychology courses could be construed as, quote, transphobic systemic violence. | ||
| And the reason why I say quotes, because those are terms that a Harvard pamphlet, the LGBTQ office at Harvard, had put out a pamphlet where they argued that people who support, quote, fixed binaries and biological essentialism. | ||
| Fixed binaries is male-female. | ||
| Biological essentialism is arguing that there are, you know, biological realities, evolved realities, innate sex differences. | ||
| If you promulgate these types of position, you are actually engaging in, quote, transphobic systemic violence. | ||
| That's not allegorical. | ||
| It's not metaphorical. | ||
| You literally are being transphobically violent. | ||
| And so I argued that anything that I say in my course, when I walk into my course and introduce the concept of sexual selection and how sex-specific traits evolve, I only use words like male and female. | ||
| I don't refer to the non-binary and non-gender and so on. | ||
| So any person in the room could say, hey, in a 13-week course, you never once recognized my personhood. | ||
| You're engaging in transphobic systemic violence. | ||
| The answer to this very sober presentation that I gave was that one of the Canadian senators | ||
| accused me of being pro-genocide. | ||
| And where did that come from? | ||
| Because apparently the fact that I was not supporting the bill, somehow through a gargantuan | ||
| leap of logic, I wanted to feather and tar our transgender people. | ||
| And I specifically argued that all people deserve to be treated equally under the law, | ||
| we don't have to uniquely celebrate your personhood, right? | ||
| There's a distinction between treating you as an equal member of society and having to go an extra mile to uniquely celebrate your personhood. | ||
| I'll give you another example. | ||
| Canada wanted to now create a gender-neutral society. | ||
| So the idea being that the marker, male or female, say on official government documents should be removed because that small percentage, less than 1%, substantially less than 1%, who consider themselves non-gendered or non-binary are going to feel marginalized by having to write male or female. | ||
| So 99.9% of a population should lose an identifying marker that is part of their personhood. | ||
| I am a male. | ||
| I have a child that's male, I have a daughter that's female, I'm married to a woman that's female. | ||
| All of these things should be removed because someone might be marginalized by that biological reality. | ||
| It's insanity. | ||
| So for someone like you that deals in academia, but more importantly that deals in the realm of science, and you have to base things on fact, this is actually a direct assault on you in a certain way, right? | ||
| Like you're talking about something that's important societally, but really it's rational self-interest. | ||
| You want to be able to do your job that you have been trained to do at the highest level without having outside fears. | ||
| So when you finished up that talk over there, did you feel better or worse for the course of it? | ||
| I felt better in that at least my positions were on record. | ||
| I didn't have any sense that the bill would be defeated. | ||
| I felt very strongly that it would ultimately pass, just because of the reality of the dynamics of the political system there. | ||
| But at least I knew that Jordan had been heard, I had been heard, it's officially on record. | ||
| So in that sense, I had done my, quote, civic duty. | ||
| But I had no illusions that I would help sway the vote. | ||
| I knew that we would ultimately lose the battle. | ||
| So when people say, I'll see online sometimes, people say, oh you guys are overestimating when someone says racist or bigot or homophobe or islamophobe or any of this stuff. | ||
| This really goes to show why these are not, we're not just making up this fight. | ||
| This fight Forget what people are saying online. | ||
| This fight is now starting to codify things into law. | ||
| Absolutely, right? | ||
| I mean, but never mind law. | ||
| I mean, people say, well, you know, don't take these extreme examples. | ||
| Well, you had Brett Weinstein on the show. | ||
| I mean, is he not a real person who's experienced real death threats? | ||
| So, people always think that we're, in a sense, engaging in an exaggerated narrative by pointing to these extreme cases. | ||
| But what is extreme today, tomorrow becomes mundane. | ||
| And so, this is why Canaries in the coal mine stand up and sing and warn people but unfortunately Apparently people don't want to listen. | ||
| Do you ever think that it's kind of it's kind of sucky to Be someone that sees something a little bit early I think it's sometimes like it's great at a certain level, right? | ||
| Because that's what makes people care about what you're saying because they have a they have a twinge of oh that guy's on to something but like when I sat here with Brett and And he, at the time, I don't know what he identifies as now, but at the time he was saying I'm a, you know, he said a deeply, I think, deeply committed progressive. | ||
| I now know that he at least, I don't want to speak for him, but basically has said, you know, the progressive train has left him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or he grew up. | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| I don't know that he would say it so specifically, but I knew it. | ||
| As I was sitting here with him and he was saying how he was this deep progressive, I knew that it was just a matter of a month or two months or whatever before he'd see the thing that we've all been talking about for that long. | ||
| So there's like a joy and also like a depression in that, I think. | ||
| Well, my wife often tells me that I'm an avant-garde, both in my scientific career and in my public engagements. | ||
| I think it's in part because I do see these trends early, but also because I have the courage to speak about them. | ||
| You and I might both see them at the same time, but if I only have the courage to say it, then I appear as though I'm the avant-garde guy, whereas you saw the same pattern but were too afraid to say it. | ||
| And so, in a sense, it's a unique combination of both seeing these patterns early enough, but then having the courage to voice my opinion. | ||
| And of course, that ultimately in academia is not something, contrary to what you might think, is not something that's desired. | ||
| Herd mentality is really, as we say in French, de rigueur. | ||
| It's the official way to be. | ||
| Don't cause too much waves. | ||
| We don't want trouble here. | ||
| Right, which is so the reverse of what true pursuit of knowledge is. | ||
| So when people say that, I'll also hear that. | ||
| Well, you guys are overblowing what's happening on college campuses, or you're overblowing that there isn't enough diversity of thought there. | ||
| As someone that's on college campuses, as someone that has testified about what's happening there, and as someone that knows plenty of academics in Canada and the United States, are we overblowing this? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| I mean, when it comes to issues like political matters, how people make pronouncements about a given religion or not. | ||
| Everybody walks the exact same beat. | ||
| Again, I could just use, for example, anecdotal evidence or I could cite actual studies, but let's go with anecdotal evidence. | ||
| and I think I might have mentioned this before on the show, if you just go to my personal Facebook page, | ||
| you will never see anyone, and I've got hundreds of academic friends | ||
| on my personal Facebook page, not a single person has ever uttered a position | ||
| regarding, say, Trump, that I would construe as surprising. | ||
| Surprising in the sense that they might say something that is positive of him, or favorable, | ||
| or why someone might have voted for him. | ||
| Every single academic friend that I have apes the identical same position, | ||
| and that's simply not possible, right? | ||
| Within any group of people, you would expect some diversity of thinking, | ||
| while apparently there isn't. | ||
| All right, so let's talk about Trump a little bit. | ||
| Now, I wanna be clear. | ||
| It's clear that right now as we tape this, I'm about to go off the grid for a month. | ||
| So this is going up about 12 or 13 days after we're taping this. | ||
| So in the way that we live these days, Trump could have done anything by then. | ||
| The impeachment proceedings could have begun. | ||
| The monarchy could have started. | ||
| Who the hell knows what's gonna happen. | ||
| But as we tape this on, what's today, July 28th, Right. | ||
| 2017. | ||
| I think you've been basically pretty fair on Trump. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I don't sense that you love the guy. | ||
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No. | |
| But I don't sense that you have a deranged hatred of the guy. | ||
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Right. | |
| Is that a fair estimation again? | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| And usually when I've come out, quote, in support of Trump, that's not usually what I've done. | ||
| Instead, I have offered very reasonable psychological reasons why someone might vote for Trump. | ||
| And so you may remember this in one of my conversations, I think it was with Sam Harris, where I explained the actual decision rule that someone might use in arriving at a decision to vote for Trump. | ||
| And I'll just repeat it here. | ||
| So when you're choosing between two multi-attribute products, two cars, two people to hire, two mates to marry, they're each defined by many attributes. | ||
| So there are many decision rules that I could use in deciding whether to choose alternative A or alternative B. One of these decision rules is called the lexicographic rule, which basically says, take your most important attribute to you and choose the alternative that scores higher on that most important attribute. | ||
| That's the only thing you look at. | ||
| So in the case of applying that rule to Trump if let's say my most important attribute my lexicographic rule attribute is immigration and Rightly or wrongly I view that Trump scores better on immigration and if I use that rule I will choose Trump even though if I had looked at all of the attributes defining Trump and Clinton I might have ended up choosing Clinton So, as someone who studies psychology and decision-making, there were very, very clear cognitive processes that we could use to explain why a very reasonable person might end up choosing Trump. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean that I, as I jokingly say on Twitter, that I have posters of Trump in my bedroom. | ||
| It simply means that as someone who is this passionate, who's studying it from my Canadian context as a behavioral decision theorist, I could understand why people would vote for Trump. | ||
| Just uttering that, the amount of hate that you get and the amount of, you know, ostracizing that happens within academia because you dare say something that seems to support Trump, I mean, it's craziness. | ||
| How much of that do you think is sort of the elitism of academia? | ||
| In other words, you're saying something that you're using the discipline that you have to give this idea of why people may have voted for Trump. | ||
| So you're separating sort of the gad human part. | ||
| You're saying this is what I think is happening based on information that I have versus other academics that because they want to go to all the parties with the academics and all of that stuff that Trump is sort of the reverse academic. | ||
| So the idea that they could say anything nice about the person who's the reverse, who speaks in such ridiculous speech patterns and says so many over-the-top things and tweets like a madman, that somehow that would all be thrust upon them. | ||
| The way that I would frame exactly what you said is the elitist, the academics, the ivory tower folks, excuse me, they view Trump as A fatal attack on their sense of aesthetics. | ||
| He is an injury to their aesthetics, right? | ||
| The way he speaks, the way he enunciates, the way he shakes hands. | ||
| Everything about him is an affront to their haughtiness. | ||
| And therefore, there is this visceral hate of him at an aesthetic level. | ||
| He's grotesque. | ||
| He's an ogre. | ||
| He's a buffoon. | ||
| And I see this This position enunciated amongst some of our common friends, where I typically would consider those common friends to be very sophisticated, dispassionate thinkers, but they've succumbed to that trap, where they are simply unable to stomach the possibility that this person could be sitting in the highest office. | ||
| I think it really is that simple. | ||
| They despise his sense of aesthetics. | ||
| So I sense that your position on him is sort of where mine is in that forgetting what I think about him personally, and again I could say the phrase moral center every time I bring him up. | ||
| Again, don't know what his moral center is. | ||
| I'm still confused as whether he's waking up every day and making all the decisions as they come on the fly or if there's a grand plan here or any of that. | ||
| But the part that I like is the part that the media has taken it on the chin and basically been blown apart. | ||
| And that, I think, is what we needed in this country. | ||
| I sense you're kind of with me on that. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Look, to use a cliche that I don't particularly like from sort of the buzzwords of business, he is a disruptor, right? | ||
| To the extent that you wanted someone... It's funny because they they all love disruptors, but now they, but every now and again you're gonna get a Disruptor you don't like, right? | ||
| I mean, he's a disruptor in every possible way that you could conceive of that term, right? | ||
| He's from outside the political class. | ||
| He's never held political office. | ||
| He speaks differently from them. | ||
| He's a brawler. | ||
| He's a real estate guy. | ||
| His language pattern is that of a thug in great... | ||
| He is somewhat buffoonish. So in every possible way that we could think of what | ||
| they aspire to, you know, Barack Obama, he's the anti-Barack Obama. Barack Obama is | ||
| sophisticated, he's majestic, he's a great orator, right? | ||
| But again, those are superficial cues, right? | ||
| Typically, when we look at psychology of persuasion, we look at substantive cues or cosmetic cues, right? | ||
| How tall you are is something that people use when they judge your leadership qualities, but objectively, it shouldn't matter, right? | ||
| And so, in a similar manner, the fact that he might speak in a way that is clearly much more buffoonish than, say, Barack Obama, doesn't necessarily speak to whether you appreciate his policies or not. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the part that I think is interesting, because again, as I said, we're taping this about two weeks before it's going to air, so who the hell knows what's going to happen. | ||
| But even just in the last couple days, there was this thing with Scaramucci, and all the recording, and you know, Bannon wants to suck his own cock, and blah blah blah, all this stuff, and everyone's freaking out. | ||
| I'm looking at Twitter, and all the journalists, all the lefties, everyone's freaking out over the language, and how can they talk like this? | ||
| And all I was thinking was, yeah, I mean, I guess in some perfect world that we don't exist, I wish that government officials would be a little more professional, but the idea that Obama people and Bush before that and Clinton before that, and you can go back forever, literally go back to George Washington, the idea that they didn't speak With blue language and say nasty things about each other and all of that stuff and the infighting and backstabbing. | ||
| The idea that this has just appeared now is just... It's full outrage, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's just fake. | ||
| It's full outrage. | ||
| Again, it's trying to maintain the facade of the ivory tower, right? | ||
| This highfalutin way of And by the way, I wouldn't want them to be. | ||
| I want them to be human. | ||
| That's also the irony. | ||
| every second word is F this and F that. | ||
| Yeah, these guys are not Oxford professors of philosophy. | ||
| And by the way, I wouldn't want them to be. | ||
| I want them to be human. | ||
| That's also the irony. | ||
| It's like when Bill Clinton said, "I don't inhale," | ||
| it was like, you could admit you inhale. | ||
| Or when Barack Obama, I guess, did say he inhaled. | ||
| But it was like the idea that we have to feel guilty about all of these things. | ||
| Like, we're all humans. | ||
| We curse. | ||
| Some of us drink or smoke pot or do some other shit. | ||
| And just to mention a couple of other qualities that I think Trump does have. | ||
| You know, when you face a lot of conflicts, there's some research, I don't remember who it's by, I think it's made by Greg Murray at Texas Tech, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| He looked at what types of leaders do people wish to elect as a function of the environment? | ||
| Is there, for example, war or not? | ||
| And so our preference for a particular type of leadership style changes as a function of the environment, as you would expect. | ||
| Well, to the extent that we now face a lot of chaos with terrorism, with the immigration problems and so on, I would have predicted that someone like Trump, a guy who appears to be a bit reckless, who appears to be as though, am I going to press the red button? | ||
| Am I not going to press it? | ||
| Even though he's not going, but the fact that he exudes those types of signals, I think to a lot of people that is equality. | ||
| Because you have very dangerous guys in the neighborhood who might feel intimidated by someone who appears to be a risk taker, who appears to be a brawler. | ||
| And so in that sense, Here's another psychological reason why a lot of people might have latched onto him. | ||
| So it also goes to show why when Obama or Hillary wouldn't say radical Islam or terror or whatever phrase that you wanted to say, and Trump would just say anything, Trump was just giving them the red meat. | ||
| They were going, give me something. | ||
| Give me something that makes sense. | ||
| Then Trump says something that's probably over the top, but they're going, well, at least it's something. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| I should mention, I know that we both Tentatively agreed not to talk much about Islam before the show, but let me just mention one or two things. | ||
| I think it is a misnomer to constantly come up with qualifiers before the word Islam. | ||
| And let me explain why that is. | ||
| There is no Islam, there is no Islamism. | ||
| Islamism is part of Islam. | ||
| Islam is a set of codified ideas that has a spiritual element and it has a political element. | ||
| That political element is Islamism. | ||
| The manner in which now people are talking about Islamism is it's something that is outside of Islam. | ||
| And I understand the reason why people want to do this. | ||
| It's because they feel as though it's too gauche to frontally attack a religion. | ||
| So if you attack something that has magically ISM at the end of it, Islamism, that's okay. | ||
| If you attack Islam, that's not okay. | ||
| But the reality is, if we're truly going to have a serious and honest conversation about this topic, we have to recognize that it's not radical Islam, it's not Islamism, it's not militant violent extremism. | ||
| And every other permutation of a euphemism that you come up with, it's Islam. | ||
| Now most people choose to practice a cafeteria version of Islam. | ||
| They pick the parts that they like and they ignore the endless parts that they don't like and that becomes their personal relationship with Islam. | ||
| But most people do that with most religions, right? | ||
| Most people do that with most religions, but you and I and everybody else don't stay up worrying about Seventh-day Adventists. | ||
| So to the extent that Islam is now on the radar, and we have to talk about it honestly, we have to stop trying to give a free pass to Islam. | ||
| But the real problem is something else, some variant of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Islam is codified in the Quran, it's codified in the Hadith, it's codified in the Sira, the biography of Muhammad. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Now, is there a way that I could read those texts and come up with a message of brotherly love and love for Jews? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's not Islamism. | ||
| That's not radical Islam. | ||
| That's Islam. | ||
| Now, as I say this, I also recognize that 95% of all Muslims are just as nice as anybody that you could hope to have. | ||
| That's not because they practice a gentle version of Islam codified in some other set of texts. | ||
| That's because they're decent human beings who decide to Like the rest of us, pick and choose which parts apply to their daily lives and not. | ||
| So we have to be very careful and honest about, and I hope that at some point soon, a greater number of our common friends will actually heed what I'm saying now. | ||
| Yeah, by the way, for the record, because you just mentioned that we said we weren't gonna talk that much about Islam, it's not because we're afraid, I think we both, we both talked about it plenty of times, but we realized that we wanted to get more into some science stuff and plenty of other stuff, so I just want to be clear, because otherwise people go, why didn't they just say they're afraid now? | ||
| All right, so very quickly on that, though. | ||
| So you are writing a new book right now, which deals with this and deals with ostrich parasitic syndrome. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So very quickly, for those that don't know what OPS is, let's talk about that, and then I want to talk about the book, and then we'll move to the show. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Thanks for asking. | ||
| Let me step back and give some analogies. | ||
| If you look in the animal kingdom, there are many cases where you have brain worms or pathogens that enter the brain of a particular species and it renders that species zombified. | ||
| For example, a mouse can be infected by a particular pathogen. | ||
| It loses its innate fear of cats. That's not a good thing if you're a mouse, right? | ||
| There's another type of brain worm that attacks the brains of ungulates | ||
| Let's say moose or elk or deer and they become they become completely zombified where they just circle in the same in | ||
| the same spot Until these looming predators come and eat them, right? | ||
| Think of another example Someone who suffers from anorexia nervosa, right? | ||
| They're thinking now has become so disordered that even though they only weigh 70 pounds | ||
| They look at themselves in the mirror and they genuinely think that they are that they remain grotesquely obese | ||
| And they need to lose a bit more weight, right? | ||
| So there are all sorts of ways, there are all sorts of analogies where, whether it be in the human context or with other species, where our brain becomes hijacked by either disordered thinking or literally a pathogen. | ||
| So I took these ideas and I argued, well, what could explain the collective psychosis, the collective departure from reason that we see being exhibited in the West? | ||
| Not only as relating to Islam, but as relating, for example, to the negation of the idea that humans are biological beings, that there are sex differences, that there are male... So, this ostrich parasitic syndrome is not only applicable to Islam. | ||
| And so that's how I came up with that term, to use the metaphor of the ostrich that buries its head, even though it doesn't truly do that, but it's an apt metaphor of denial of reality. | ||
| parasitic in that it genuinely parasitizes your brain and you lose your ability to think. Now, I | ||
| specifically apply it to Islam because typically the ostriches that succumb to OPS | ||
| engage in all sorts of cognitive distortions to protect Islam, right? | ||
| Which ironically you're talking about people that are not Muslim for the most part, right? Absolutely. | ||
| So many of the OPS sufferers will end up being non-Muslims who, because they've been parasitized by OPS, will come up with all sorts of disordered thinking to defend Islam, right? | ||
| And I give many, many of such examples. | ||
| Now, I take this idea, and it's part of my book, so the book is tentatively titled, Death of the West by a Thousand Cuts. | ||
| This is the idea that We are currently facing this OPS epidemic because of a perfect confluence of faux intellectual movements that have parasitized our brains. | ||
| So it's not one thing, it's radical feminism, it's identity politics, it's cultural and moral relativism, | ||
| it's postmodernism, each of which uses its own machinery to parasitize our brain to move away from reason, right? | ||
| I reject the idea that there's male and female. | ||
| Well, evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists don't, right? | ||
| I reject that there are innate sex differences. | ||
| Well, the average three-year-old knows that there is such a thing. | ||
| I reject that there is any link between Islam and any terrorism. | ||
| Islam is peace, right? | ||
| So how did we lead to this? | ||
| Well, we were led to this by 40, 50 years of these movements chipping away at our commitment to reason. | ||
| And hence, death of the West by a thousand cuts. | ||
| So what was the failure of the side of reason then for the last 40 or 50 years? | ||
| What did the people that were reasonable, that were sensible and trying to deal with things honestly and see the world as it is, not how they wanted it to be, where did they fail? | ||
| So if I speak in the academic ecosystem, I think the fact that we tolerated | ||
| these affront to human decency and human reason, like postmodernism to exist, | ||
| it really came from a place of, you know, we have to tolerate, in this case, | ||
| the intolerable, the intolerable in that nothing could be further from being anti-scientific | ||
| than postmodernism. | ||
| What does postmodernism say? | ||
| There are no objective truths, other than, of course, the one truth | ||
| that there are no objectives, right? | ||
| So they-- | ||
| Other than the thing you really gotta believe. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So postmodernism and all of its endless faux profundity and faux nonsense is really a direct attack on science. | ||
| Science presumes that there are certain universal regularities that we're going to use | ||
| a scientific method to try to better understand. | ||
| Well, imagine if now a-- | ||
| A bunch of nihilists come along who say, there is no such thing as truth. | ||
| There is no such thing as objective truth. | ||
| Well, that chips away at the reason why we all exist in science to try to understand the world. | ||
| But how would academia fight that properly? | ||
| If the idea is we have to battle, you know, I know we both believe in the battle of ideas, so if the idea here is that in colleges you're supposed to have these battles, I know you beat it with better ideas, but how would that have actually happened? | ||
| Well, I think what probably ended up happening, I mean, I'm surmising here, I'm not sure how it happened, but I'm guessing that most people are busy in their daily lives, right? | ||
| For the same reasons why most people don't speak out against Islam, you know, let Dave Rubin worry about that. | ||
| Let someone else worry about that. | ||
| He's thrilled. | ||
| You know, I'm busy preparing for my daughter's graduation. | ||
| I've got to pick up the tomatoes for my groceries today, right? | ||
| And so people diffuse responsibility to others. | ||
| So, in a sense, there is a split within academia from the sciences, the natural and social sciences, by the way. | ||
| It is wrong to presume that the social sciences are any less committed to the scientific method than the natural sciences, which is something that we could talk about. | ||
| Yeah, I do want to get to that, absolutely. | ||
| People are busy, right? | ||
| So the chemist sits in his lab and he sees that there's a bunch of humanities guys uttering utter, you know, gibberish. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, he doesn't necessarily have the time and energy and proclivity to weigh in on it. | ||
| And so somehow these guys found a little niche within the ecosystem called academia, | ||
| and they flourished, and they multiplied, and the cancer spread and metastasized, | ||
| and now 40, 50 years later, you have generations of students | ||
| who've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars being trained to be naturally lobotomized morons. | ||
| Yeah, you know, so the metaphor is perfect of this parasite that gets in there and keeps multiplying, | ||
| and I can picture now the biology professor going, all right, I kinda see that, | ||
| but it's not gonna affect me here, except now what we're seeing is | ||
| it's starting to even creep into that. | ||
| Have you seen this, there's this great picture online of, you know, somebody selling the shirt and it says there are no genders, but you can only buy it in male or female, and it's like, you know, there you go. | ||
| All right, so let's talk about the natural sciences versus the social sciences. | ||
| First, for the layman, what is the difference? | ||
| They both have science in it, Gad. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| The lay person will often use these sort of simplifying heuristics to determine what is science versus not. | ||
| If you're wearing a lab coat, if you have a petri dish, right? | ||
| If you have a couple of chemical formulas, that's science. | ||
| Because to the average lay person, that's impenetrable. | ||
| On the other hand, most people have, for example, a folk psychology. | ||
| They have an innate sense of what psychology is. | ||
| And therefore, to the extent that they feel that they could contribute, even though they might be lay people, somehow that's less impenetrable to them. | ||
| So they then will create this false dichotomy where chemistry and physics, that's real science, but sociology, you know, it's for people who couldn't hack it in physics. | ||
| The reality is that the only difference is what are the phenomena that you're studying across these two general rubrics of science. | ||
| In the social sciences, you're studying psychology, anthropology, economics, sociology. | ||
| It could be as rigorous as the natural sciences. | ||
| So let me give you an example. | ||
| If you're a sociologist, you could study sociometry, which is, for example, how does power diffuse within a network. | ||
| And you could use very fancy mathematics, graph theory, to try to understand this. | ||
| So the type of mathematical modeling that you would use to study how power diffuses within a network is actually a very fancy mathematical approach. | ||
| But sociology has somehow been co-opted by the activists, right? | ||
| So we then view it as being less scientific. | ||
| But science simply means Adhering truthfully to the scientific method. | ||
| I posit a hypothesis, I think about the data that I would need to collect that would either falsify or not a hypothesis, I collect that data, I apply some sort of statistical analysis, some mathematical analysis to analyze the data, and then I go one way or the other. | ||
| That could be just as applied if it's in economics or if it is in physics. | ||
| So it is wrong, because I often get letters and emails from people asking me, well is psychology really a science? | ||
| I mean, of course it's a science. | ||
| Ultimately, what is more laudable than studying the most important organism that we know called humans? | ||
| By the sheer nature of what physicists study, they are real scientists, but the sociologist is not. | ||
| And by the way, I'm not trying to defend sociologists here because often I'm the one who's criticizing sociologists. | ||
| But usually I'm criticizing them for deviating from the scientific method. | ||
| What makes them less scientists is that they become activists and not scientists. | ||
| But you could be just as much as a scientist if you study something in business or if you study something in chemistry. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting that you talk about activists, not scientists, because that's what I've been saying about journalists. | ||
| These people are not doing true journalism and fact-finding anymore and reporting based on evidence. | ||
| What they're doing is letting their own biases slam right into the middle of this thing. | ||
| So one of the things that I will say differentiates the natural sciences from the social sciences and that's very much at the heart of the work that I do. | ||
| The natural sciences have organized trees of knowledge. | ||
| So in physics, people agree on a set of core knowledge that at this point has become unassailable. | ||
| Notwithstanding the fact that they still have the epistemic humility to say, oh, it's only provisional. | ||
| If something now falsifies it, I'm willing to revise it. | ||
| But the bedrock is there. | ||
| There is core knowledge that is now unassailable in physics and chemistry. | ||
| There aren't chemists who are For the periodic table, and chemists who are against it. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Therefore, you could build coherent trees of knowledge, or the term that I love to use, which was reintroduced into the common lexicon by E.O. | ||
| Wilson, the evolutionary biologist at Harvard, is consilience, unity of knowledge. | ||
| So, the natural sciences, by the nature of how they test theories, have these organized Trees of knowledge. | ||
| That's what's lacking in the social sciences. | ||
| And the reason it's lacking is not because the social sciences are any less scientific, it's because it is easier for ideologies to creep into the social sciences, right? | ||
| So if I'm a libertarian or a Marxist, I might study economics in a way that is very polluted by my personal ideology. | ||
| So it's not that the social sciences are epistemologically any inherently less scientific than chemistry, it's that Biases are easier to creep in. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny because I'll hear, and I talk to sometimes, someone's a leftist economist or a libertarian economist or whatever it is, and I always think it's kind of funny, like, we all have our own beliefs. | ||
| Economically, I'm a little more libertarian these days, but if you're studying something within the window of the way you want it to be, it's by default is going to be a little screwy. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And as I said, it is naturally more difficult for your personal ideological biases to come into something that you're studying in organic chemistry. | ||
| Although I should mention that there have been famous cases where even hard sciences have been deeply polluted by ideology. | ||
| So, Lysenkoism. | ||
| Lysenko was a Russian or Soviet Union geneticist who proposed a theory of genetics that he thought was more in line with Marxist philosophy, | ||
| that was a wrong theory of genetics that led to massive famine | ||
| and to the death of millions of people. | ||
| So even, it's not as though hard scientists are inoculated from the possibility of being parasitized | ||
| by some of these ideological biases. | ||
| Do you think it's too late for the hard scientists to be protected? | ||
| Like, is it too late for them to turn their force field on? | ||
| 'Cause we do see this creeping now in biology. | ||
| I mean, Brett Weinstein's been talking about this now, that now it's really reaching its hand into that, | ||
| which could have horrific repercussions for society. | ||
| Well, listen, when a scientist in the 21st century, I'm speaking of myself right now, | ||
| has to appear in front of the Canadian Senate to argue that there is such a thing as male and female | ||
| and that evolutionary biology is based on the recognition that there is sexual dimorphism in human. | ||
| Sexual dimorphism is a fancy term for saying basically that there are Evolved sex differences. | ||
| Humans, men, males are bigger than females, right? | ||
| That's a sexual dimorphism. | ||
| So the fact that I have to appear in front of the Canadian Senate to actually argue these things demonstrates how far the snake has gone into the den. | ||
| Yeah, so in a weird way, your position as an evolutionary biologist is sort of right at the front of the type of person that this ideology would attack, right? | ||
| Just to clarify, I'm an evolutionary psychologist. | ||
| I apply evolutionary and biological principles. | ||
| Yeah, it's craziness, right? | ||
| And the reason why I'm so, if you like, aware of the epistemological dichotomy between the natural and social sciences is because my scientific career of 20 plus years has really been straddling both these fields, right? | ||
| I apply evolutionary biology to study consumer behavior. | ||
| Consumer behavior would be construed as something within the social sciences. | ||
| Evolutionary biology is something that is within the natural sciences. | ||
| So I really am very much steeped in both cultures. | ||
| And I see the extent to which it is easier for people to succumb to their personal biases and the social sciences. | ||
| Let me just give you one example. | ||
| If you start off with the premise that you can't agree on whether there is such a thing as innate sex differences or not, how could you from that starting point ever build a tree of knowledge that's organized? | ||
| If at this most fundamental level we can't agree that there is such a thing as male or female, then we're done, we're cooked. | ||
| Physicists don't suffer from that problem, and that's why they make much better progress | ||
| than social scientists do. | ||
| So as someone that studies marketing and why we behave how we do, | ||
| what turns us on, what turns us off, all of that, in a weird way, you were prepared for everything | ||
| that was gonna happen politically right now and what's happening on the academic front, | ||
| because all of these things, they're all marketing in a way. | ||
| Trump, it's marketing. | ||
| Hillary market herself in a certain way. | ||
| So the trends were all there. | ||
| Life is marketing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when people ask me, so what do you study as a professor of marketing? | ||
| And I always answer them, everything you do in life is marketing. | ||
| You market yourself on the mating market. | ||
| We even use the euphemisms of the marketplace, right? | ||
| You position yourself in the marketplace. | ||
| You market yourself in the labor market. | ||
| You market yourself to friends. | ||
| You position yourself depending on whether you wish to belong to a group or not. | ||
| Animals communicate with each other, right? | ||
| When animals advertise, for example, when the peacock is literally engaging in conspicuous | ||
| advertising. | ||
| So, everything in life is marketing. | ||
| So one of the reasons why I was very much interested in applying all of my training | ||
| in marketing is because that's, I think, where all the sexy stuff is, right? | ||
| We take all of these principles from psychology, from economics, from biology, and then I apply them in areas that are of greatest import to most people. | ||
| Is there something kind of scary about that, though, that it's not that the best ideas will necessarily win, it's that the best marketed ideas will win, and those often are not the same things? | ||
| Very good point. | ||
| Listen, I'm right now working on my next book and I just connected with a what appears to be a wonderful literary agent and he actually made this exact point. | ||
| He said, look, what's really important as we move forward with your book is how to market it because there'll be people who will be very resistant to the ideas that you propose in that book. | ||
| So again, everything is marketing. | ||
| So basically if you want to, so did Trump do you think have, not to bring everything back to him, but he must have had, I guess as a businessman and putting his name all over these things for the last 30 years, he had an innate understanding of exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I could speak to one thing that he knew very well. | ||
| He could completely read that many people, the silent majority, or certainly a sizable minority if we're going to use the popular vote and all that, were fed up with political correctness and said, I'm going to be the anti-PC guy. | ||
| And he bet pretty much everything on that, and it turns out that People responded to it, right? | ||
| He could have equivocated. | ||
| He could have been more careful with his words. | ||
| But he flies off the handle because he realized that the general atmosphere was most people, whether they're having chats on Facebook or at their workplace by the water cooler at the university, are tired of feeling stifled, are tired of feeling scared of the next syllable that they might misutter that might ruin their careers. | ||
| And he said, I am the anti-PC warrior. | ||
| People responded to that marketing position. | ||
| So as someone that studies all this stuff, what do you think really drives people at the end of the day? | ||
| I mentioned before, as I say often, I think it's just a couple things. | ||
| You wanna have a job, you wanna have some money, hopefully a house, maybe a family, maybe some sex, whatever. | ||
| Just the basic stuff that we all want. | ||
| Do you think those are really just the underliers? | ||
| So in several of my books, I actually answer that question in the following way. | ||
| I map consumption acts onto four key Darwinian modules. | ||
| So think about how Maslow's hierarchy, if you know it. | ||
| So at the basic level, there's the physiological needs and then belonging, safety needs, belongingness needs, | ||
| all the way up to self-actualization. | ||
| Well, his theory was really based on his humanistic philosophy. | ||
| In other words, he had this bias, this ideological bias of how humans should be. | ||
| It wasn't necessarily grounded in an understanding of biology. | ||
| So I took this principle and I said, "No, let's see what actually drives people | ||
| "based on biological principles." | ||
| And so my four Darwinian modules are. | ||
| The survival module. | ||
| So a lot of the things that we do are related to our survival instinct. | ||
| So our preference for fatty foods, right? | ||
| Why is it that it's easy for us to succumb to the dessert effect, having an extra piece of dessert when we've already had more calories than we need to? | ||
| Well, that comes from the fact that our gustatory preferences have evolved in an environment of caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty. | ||
| So your taste buds and mine are vestiges of an environment long gone, but that we've evolved to have. | ||
| But can your brain evolve to override that? | ||
| Let me answer that in a second. | ||
| That's actually called the mismatch hypothesis. | ||
| I'll come to it in a sec. | ||
| So first we've got survival, then we've got reproduction, everything related to sex. | ||
| Why are 99% of Ferrari owners male? | ||
| Because that's the form of peacocking. | ||
| So the peacock's tail is literally the Aston Martin that men drive, right? | ||
| And of course, both men and women engage in sexual signaling. | ||
| So first we've got survival instinct, we've got reproduction, then we've got kin selection. | ||
| Kin selection is the mechanism that explains why is it that I would jump into the river | ||
| to save three of my brothers. | ||
| If all I care about is my survivability, why would I ever take the risk on them? | ||
| Well, when you realize that natural selection operates at the level of the gene, then saving | ||
| three brothers, each of whom share half the genes with me, makes sense. | ||
| Now you might say, well, how do you apply that to consumer behavior? | ||
| Well, gift-giving practices, right? | ||
| So how I modulate the size of the gift that I give to different people turns out to be perfectly correlated to the genetic relatedness with each of these people. | ||
| I give larger gifts to my brother than I do to my second cousin. | ||
| I may not do this consciously, I may not know all these fancy theories when I'm doing it, but our brains have evolved to recognize that people are not of equal genetic relatedness. | ||
| And the fourth module is reciprocal altruism. | ||
| Okay, I jump into the river to save three brothers, but why would I jump in to save Dave Rubin? | ||
| He's not my brother. | ||
| Well, that comes from this evolved idea of tit for tat. | ||
| I scratch your back, you scratch mine. | ||
| I might jump to save you with the expectation that tomorrow when I'm drowning, hopefully you'll come and save me. | ||
| So this idea of reciprocity has evolved for social species, and again it explains why I will invite you out for dinner when it's your birthday, and you will hopefully reciprocate when it's mine. | ||
| From a strict economic perspective, there's no point to this, right? | ||
| Let's not invite each other, we'll be at the same final position. | ||
| The reason why we do this exchange is to oil our friendship and our bond. | ||
| So I argue that much of consumer behavior could be mapped onto these four modules. | ||
| So now to your other question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it is very difficult for our brain to catch up to a current reality. | ||
| So, for example, men have evolved sexual territoriality as a strong element of their psychology, right? | ||
| They don't like women to be promiscuous if they're with them. | ||
| They get sexually jealous if another man touches their woman and so on. | ||
| Well, why would that have evolved? | ||
| That goes both ways, right? | ||
| For men and women? | ||
| Interestingly, this is not my work, this is David Buss's work, a colleague, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas, Austin. | ||
| He looked at, with some of his colleagues, romantic infidelity versus sexual infidelity. | ||
| So he brought in people to the lab, he set them up with all sorts of physiological measures to measure their stress, and had them read one of two vignettes. | ||
| Your husband right now is having sex with the gorgeous secretary, versus your husband is developing an emotional bond with his co-worker, she laughs at his jokes, they get along. | ||
| So in one case, you trigger sexual infidelity, and the other one, romantic infidelity. | ||
| Well, it turns out that women respond much more adversely to romantic infidelity than to sexual infidelity, and that effect is reversed for men. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean that women appreciate sexual infidelity or are tolerant of it, but it's less so. | ||
| Now, what are the reasons for it? | ||
| Well, it turns out that sexual infidelity is a profoundly important evolutionary problem for men, because we're a bi-parental species where males invest a lot in their children. | ||
| It doesn't make a lot of sense for me to invest for many, many years until little Johnny grows up to be sexually mature to then find out that it was the sexy Greco-Roman gardener who sired that guy. | ||
| Therefore, I evolved the psychological apparatus to try to protect against this possibility. | ||
| So I am very intolerant of sexual infidelity. | ||
| If a woman cheats on a man, it almost guarantees the end of the solution. | ||
| The other way around, it doesn't. | ||
| On the other hand, what's the greatest threat to a woman's interests? | ||
| It's not that he has a sexual dalliance one time. | ||
| This is why men very naively often will say, I just had sex with her once, she meant nothing to me. | ||
| They actually think that this is helping because there is no emotional bond between us. | ||
| It's a one time thing, right? | ||
| On the other hand, if a man develops an emotional with a woman, that's a much greater predictor | ||
| of him leaving the relationship, and that's why women respond so adversely | ||
| to emotional infidelity. | ||
| But if a man says, well, it was just a one-time thing, isn't he then, let's assume it's the truth for a second, | ||
| the guy does it one time, he's telling the woman what she wants to hear, right? | ||
| I mean, if it's true for him, it's also what she does wanna hear, because she doesn't wanna hear, | ||
| well, it's emotional. - Oh, absolutely. | ||
| It's certainly much better for him to say, it was a one-time thing, rather than, | ||
| I think I'm falling for her, and we're planning on having sex another 37 times. | ||
| But he genuinely, honestly is trying to convey to her that she literally meant nothing to him. | ||
| He's perfectly able to decouple the sexual act from any emotional investment, right? | ||
| When you think about Johns who go see prostitutes, what do they typically tell you? | ||
| It's perfectly unencumbered sex. | ||
| I'm able to have sex with her and walk away. | ||
| I pay for that walking away, right? | ||
| So, again, that speaks to evolved sex differences. | ||
| This whole conversation that we've had might be transphobic systemic violence under Bill C-16 because, look, I didn't talk about the non-gender or non-binary. | ||
| I must be a genocide supporter. | ||
| Naturally. | ||
| But I'm glad you just mentioned that, because as you're saying this, I'm not even exactly sure what my question is, but is there an element, as you're sitting across from a gay person, that enters some of this stuff? | ||
| Great question. | ||
| I don't think we finished the mismatch question. | ||
| Oh, okay, wait, let's get to that. | ||
| Let me finish that, then we'll talk about homosexuality. | ||
| You're giving me a lot here. | ||
| That's why I wanted to do the science. | ||
| That's why we're here. | ||
| Beautiful, thank you. | ||
| Our brains don't catch up as quickly as we otherwise would want. | ||
| So, for example, the fact that, look, the top killers, the top medical killers are colon cancer, heart disease, diabetes. | ||
| From an evolutionary medicine perspective, the argument is that it stems from the fact that today we live in an environment of plenty, but Our gustatory preferences have evolved in an environment of caloric scarcity and uncertainty. | ||
| That mismatch between our current environment of plenty and the environment in which we've evolved causes some of these top killers. | ||
| So to answer your question in a long-winded way, no, our brains don't catch up. | ||
| If there were selection pressures for the next X number of years to cause evolutionary trajectory to change, then it would happen. | ||
| But typically for even the most basic genetic selection, it might take say 5,000 | ||
| years. Right, so I guess what I'm talking about then is for the person that | ||
| never goes for the dessert or never binges on this or that. | ||
| That's not an evolutionary thing as much as it's someone that's aware, it's someone that's educated and aware that these things can cause health problems. | ||
| And you might be, like I live here in L.A. | ||
| where everyone doesn't eat this or that or doesn't want gluten. | ||
| Everyone has celiac disease, which no one has celiac disease. | ||
| I mean, so that's not evolution. | ||
| That's just sort of doing something different with the information you have, right? | ||
| It's not, on the macro level, an evolutionary thing. | ||
| Well, and sometimes you have multiple Darwinian pulls pulling you in different directions so that the net effect is zero. | ||
| So for example, when I explain why there are evolutionary pressures for both men and women to cheat on their long-term partners, That doesn't mean that it's a fatalistic argument. | ||
| It's not biological determinism. | ||
| We're doomed to cheat. | ||
| Because we also have evolved the moral calculus, right? | ||
| Our morality, unless you're a religious person that thinks that it comes from God, | ||
| our morality has also evolved through the exact same evolutionary forces | ||
| that explain why we have opposable thumbs. | ||
| And so, on the one hand, I'd like to very much cheat on my wife. | ||
| On the other hand, I've got this moral calculus that stops me from doing. | ||
| The net effect is that I might actually not do it. | ||
| So, this speaks to a really important point, which is the fact that you explain something | ||
| from an evolutionary perspective doesn't mean that it is biologically fatalistic. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Alright, so... Homosexuality. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now, if we add that into this mix that you're talking about here... So the top theory that has been proposed that has not Data has not cooperated comes from actually kin selection. | ||
| So let me explain. It's a bit technical Yeah, so you could increase your fitness. In other words, | ||
| you could you could extend your genes through direct reproduction | ||
| That's called direct fitness, right? If I have children, I'm extending my genes | ||
| but I could also if you like increase my Inclusive fitness by investing in those who are related to | ||
| me when I when I invest in my nephews. I am indirectly extending my genes, correct? So the argument then is that | ||
| Homosexuality need not be a Darwinian cul-de-sac meaning a Darwinian dead end because even | ||
| Even though you may decide to not have children, by investing in your kin, you could still be extending your genes. | ||
| Now, how would you test this idea? | ||
| Well, you would take, for example, homosexual uncles and heterosexual uncles and see if the homosexual uncles invest more in their nephews and nieces. | ||
| And if the answer would be yes, then that would be one data point that supports the idea. | ||
| I have taught my nephew everything I know about Star Wars, and I am very proud. | ||
| So that supports the theory. | ||
| This kid knows everything, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the data has not supported that. | ||
| So the bottom line is, the top argument, the top evolutionary... Wait, the data has not supported that? | ||
| Has not supported that that actually happened? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| In other words, the kin selection-based argument for homosexuality, while at the theoretical level Conceptually speaking sounds good. | ||
| Yeah, the data has not supported that So that's as far as I know about the nexus between homosexuality and evolution Although I think we might have mentioned this when you came on my show I do have a current doctoral student who is actually planning on studying in his doctoral dissertation the intersection between I'll get ready for this homosexuality Evolutionary psychology and consumer behavior. | ||
| How is that going to work? | ||
| So we're going to look at phenomena that typically happen between men and women. | ||
| For example, if you go out on a first date, the best way to never have a second date in the heterosexual context is for a man to be cheap on a first date. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And even if the woman is a billionaire, if he exhibits cues of frugality, It's dead. | ||
| So then, let's take this idea and see whether within the context of the dynamics of homosexual relationships, when two men go out on a date for the first time, could we see a replication of this phenomenon? | ||
| But now, there isn't male-female here, so what would be the proxy measure? | ||
| Top-bottom. | ||
| So could, for example, your sex role as either a predominantly top or predominantly bottom Replicate the sex differences that we typically see at the interactions between men and women. | ||
| What do you think of that, by the way? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| It's so interesting because I don't know that your sexual position has anything to do with how you necessarily on a date would say, I'm going to pay or not pay. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I get what I get this. | ||
| You're saying that basically the top is mimicking the masculine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, I guess. | ||
| That's what I would have guessed if you had not said that. | ||
| Let's take another example of exactly this idea. | ||
| So when men and women mate, there's what's called assortative mating, so birds of a feather flock together. | ||
| So typically women, it's not that women want necessarily tall guys, it's that they want a taller guy. | ||
| It's very rare for a woman to date someone shorter than her. | ||
| So there's actually a study that was done with 720 naturally occurring couples. | ||
| Only one of the 720 was the woman taller than the man. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, it's quite extraordinary rare. | ||
| So, now let's apply that to homos. | ||
| Now, I haven't done the research, but here's my hypothesis. | ||
| I bet that the top-bottom distinction will determine the height thing. | ||
| In other words, if the bottom guy will be in a long-term union, and not meeting in the gay sauna for quick sex, but a long-term pairing, a marriage, he'll be the shorter guy. | ||
| So a lot of the phenomena that we would pick up from evolutionary psychology as applied to heterosexual context will replicate in the homosexual context. | ||
| So I'm curious, all this being said, and as you said, you're hypothesizing about some of this stuff, and obviously your student's gonna work on some of this, and other people are gonna work on some of this. | ||
| Is there a complication that links everything else we've been talking about, where if you talk about gay anything, that this could get you in some sort of trouble? | ||
| I don't sense you feel that as you're talking about it, but that there would be some piece of this that you might find something that would lead you to somewhere uncomfortable or something. | ||
| In the context of academia? | ||
| Yeah, I don't mean you personally are comfortable, but I've... I actually think that if you do any research right now on any of the LGBTQ things, that would be a very good thing, because you would be somehow labeled as a progressive. | ||
| So, in the context of the ecosystem... Unless that you came to a conclusion that they didn't want. | ||
| Oh, a conclusion that was not politically correct. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So that speaks to actually an issue that I've discussed with several folks, and I think perhaps maybe Sam Harris mentioned it when he had me on his show. | ||
| He was asking me, is there any research that you would consider to be... And I wanted to ask you this very same question. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So maybe we can get into that. | ||
| And the term that I had used with him then, which came from a paper that was published in Nature, forbidden knowledge. | ||
| No, I am a strong non-proponent of the idea of forbidden knowledge. | ||
| If research is done honestly, assiduously, with full adherence to the scientific method, then there is no question that is too taboo to ask. | ||
| That actually speaks to something in philosophy. | ||
| The difference between deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics. | ||
| Deontological ethics is the following. | ||
| It is never okay to lie. | ||
| That's a deontological statement. | ||
| A consequentialist ethics statement would say, well, it might be okay to lie depending on the consequences of the lie. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If it's going to cause 20 people to die. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So one is an absolutist perspective, one is it's a situational, depends on the consequences. | ||
| So I will use that framework to answer the forbidden taboo question of what kind of research is okay or not. | ||
| If you are a purist, a deontological epistemological person, | ||
| I do research wherever it takes me, then you don't care about the consequences. | ||
| If you are consequentialist bent, then you say, well, but if we do race differences | ||
| and the results come out in a way that it could be used to harm a racial group, | ||
| then we should stay away from it. | ||
| I actually think that that's a profoundly dangerous position to take, | ||
| because it's precisely this type of argument that led the social sciences to reject biology | ||
| being important. | ||
| The early anthropologists, cultural anthropologists, who said biology doesn't matter for humans, were coming from an honorable place. | ||
| Because they saw how cretins could misuse biology, right? | ||
| The Nazis can say, hey, there's a battle between the races, it's a Darwinian struggle, we're Aryan, we won, who cares? | ||
| Let the Jews die. | ||
| The British social class elite has said there's a battle between the social classes, the lower classes lost, screw them, it's a Darwinian struggle. | ||
| Of course, this has nothing to do with Darwin, but because these folks misappropriated "biological thinking," then the cultural anthropologist | ||
| came along and said, "Let's get rid of biology "because then nobody could misuse it." | ||
| And now we're in the quagmire where we are today where we have to appear in front of the Canadian Senate | ||
| to argue that there is such a thing as male or female. | ||
| So no, if you are a purist, you pursue knowledge wherever it takes you, unencumbered by the consequences. | ||
| Is the problem that I suppose a certain amount of people, scientists included, | ||
| probably think that they're purists but actually aren't? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So Mengele probably thought that, you know, he was doing all sorts of... You went all Nazi on me, right? | ||
| Yeah, I went Nazi. | ||
| In this particular case, I feel a Nazi reference is actually sensible as opposed to Nazi references that are thrown around all day long. | ||
| But if you think about that, I mean, Mengele was doing horrific experiments on twins and just all sorts of things that were considered Beyond imagination, horrible. | ||
| Probably believed that he was doing it for the good of truth and the good of science and all that. | ||
| I don't, you know what I mean? | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| He may have been a horrific person. | ||
| I don't think he, in his heart, he probably thought he was doing good though, which is. | ||
| So the only thing that I would say that would stop that from happening now | ||
| is that we do have institutional review boards or ethics boards now that ensure that there is a boundary | ||
| on the scientific pursuits that you could, well, pursue. | ||
| And that is, you can't frivolously harm animals. | ||
| The way you treat them in the lab is important. | ||
| You can't frivolously harm both physically and/or psychologically human subjects, right? | ||
| But interestingly though, now they've gone overboard. | ||
| So the institutional review boards now have become so aware to want to be the antithesis of Mengele, so that now if I ask you, what is your sex? | ||
| Right, so that could be traumatizing. | ||
| If I ask you, what is your income? | ||
| Well, wait, in some cultures that's an affront and that could send the person into a tailspin of suicide because I asked him what his income is. | ||
| And so now the most banal Innocuous questions have to be discussed for 73,000 years in these institutional review boards. | ||
| So I think the fulcrum now has swung too far the other way so that it is now stopping good science from being done because we are so afraid of harming any third party. | ||
| So the good intention of we actually don't want to harm this animal or we don't want to inject a dye into a human's eye that might blind them has become now we don't want to offend this person. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| This is a huge jump that's dangerous for science. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And frankly, I see the fear in my graduate students when they're about to apply for a thesis grant because they've heard all these horror stories and they come to me and say, Professor Saad, how long is the process going to take? | ||
| And I always answer them, it really depends on the makeup of the folks that are going to review your application. | ||
| If they are Perfectly reasonable people, it might go through in a session. | ||
| If they are absolute maniacs, it might take us three months of rewriting this damn thing for some guy to finally accept that we're not injecting dye in people's face. | ||
| And the reality is, most of the research that I get involved in, although it's very rigorous and scientific, really has no downstream harm that's going to be caused. | ||
| But it's unbelievable the types of concerns that people raise, and we need to rein that Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about robotics, which I've never even mentioned the phrase robot to you or any of that stuff, but there is something about, we're getting into this time with incredible automation and we know about cars that are driving themselves and we know that iPads are going to put McDonald's employees out of business and all of this stuff. | ||
| How will that affect the way we evolve? | ||
| Now that we're going to add this thing that is completely artificial and outside of us, is there an evolutionary piece to that? | ||
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Or is that something else altogether? | |
| For evolution to work, there has to be a selection environment that is For your viewers who may not know how evolution works, let me explain in three seconds. | ||
| A male and a female get together through sexual reproduction. | ||
| They have an offspring. | ||
| This random combination and shuffling of genes results in their offspring having a blue dot here. | ||
| If that blue dot is heritable, it could be passed on. | ||
| And if that blue dot confers a survival advantage to the animal, then the selection pressures are in place for eventually that blue dot to become part of the makeup of that species. | ||
| So to answer your question, you would have to explain to me how there are specific selection pressures that affect the survivability of an organism or its reproductive viability for me to be able to offer an evolutionary argument. | ||
| Right now I can't think of one. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| That does make sense. | ||
| I feel I can't end this on a question that we would say doesn't make sense perfectly, so I will ask you this, and we're gonna do this many more times. | ||
| You'll do this again? | ||
| Anytime, I'm here. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Taking everything that we've discussed here, are you hopeful or not for the future of the West? | ||
| Do you think we are just caught in sort of this leftist post-modernist stuff versus a nationalism or a populism that could be dangerous? | ||
| Or do you think that the enlightenment values that you care about and liberalism and all that actually has a chance to turn this stuff around? | ||
| So here's now where I need to put on my marketing hat on. | ||
| Sell it, brother! | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Sell it! | ||
| If I'm going to If I speak about some of the times when I see the tsunami of ostrich thinking that comes my way, then I feel very pessimistic. | ||
| I feel as though an utter disaster has to happen before people wake up. | ||
| On the other hand, because I'd like to peddle hope and market hope, I think that it doesn't take too much to redress the ship. | ||
| If enough silent people, silent voices, rise up in every ecosystem, on Facebook, In the media, in academia, at the bar, and actually, you know, trigger the courage that is necessary for them to weigh in, I think that the voices, the enemies of reason, will become marginalized. | ||
| But we need to rise up. | ||
| And that's why I always tell people when they ask me, well, what can I do? | ||
| I say, well, you don't have to have the voice of Dave Rubin, or the platform of Dave Rubin. | ||
| You just have to have enough courage to take on your friends when you're engaging them on Facebook. | ||
| When your professor says something that seems like it's an affront to reason, challenge him or her. | ||
| Don't be silent. | ||
| So I think that if enough people do that, then the ship can be redressed. | ||
| If we remain apathetic, then I think we will lose. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| And as I always say, I'm one guy that started a channel on YouTube. | ||
| You're one guy who started a channel on YouTube. | ||
| We came from very different places. | ||
| And if our voices have done a little something, then there's plenty of other people that can replicate that. | ||
| Amen, brother. | ||
| As well. |
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