Gad Saad and Dave Rubin dissect censorship, focusing on Sargon of Akkad's Patreon removal over ironic N-word usage and the "epistemological dichotomania" driving social justice outrage. They critique Canada's shift from meritocracy to equity metrics, citing Saad's lost research chair and Quebec's extreme taxation as evidence of a quasi-communist academic and economic landscape. Ultimately, the dialogue challenges progressive narratives in science and governance, arguing that emotional heuristics replace rational analysis while promoting Saad's upcoming book and future collaborations. [Automatically generated summary]
right there Joining me today is a professor of marketing at Concordia University, an author and a behavioral scientist, but most importantly, I believe officially right now, the most returning guest to The Rubin Report.
Got a lot of new ground right here, and I know you're working on all sorts of things, and you've got a new book coming, and everything else.
But first, I thought, because you also are on Patreon, and this happens to be the topic that everyone's talking about at the moment, I want to just talk a little bit about censorship and platforming and de-platforming and the rest of it.
Do you want to lay out quickly what happened to Sargon or do you want me to do it?
So just very briefly for people that don't know, Sargon of Akkad, who's a popular YouTuber, he was one of the first sort of from the classical liberal space when I was kind of waking up.
to what was going on with the left related to free speech and sort of the SJW hysteria.
Everyone said you gotta talk to Sargon of Akkad.
I didn't even know if it was a real person or who the hell this guy was.
He was booted off Patreon a couple days ago with no recourse, with no warning, because 10 months ago in February on another channel, not his own channel, a very tiny YouTube channel, With 4,000 subscribers, on an audio interview show with a non-English native speaker, which I only mentioned because the conversation was a little stilted because of the language, he said the N-word.
And he said it, not to be racially pejorative, but he said it because he was sort of using the language of the alt-right against himself.
It's not a lot of money that I'm making on this platform, but it still hurts.
I really think that it stems from, and I think it might be one of the things that you had on the list for us to talk about, You know, oftentimes people pit these binaries against one another.
You're either a thinking person or a emotive person.
Because I want to explain this very quick trigger of outrage that arises in many contexts, in universities, in companies, and when they de-platform people.
So I think people use these fast and frugal heuristics Oftentimes these heuristics work well, but on other cases where you misapply an emotional reaction in a context where it would require a bit more cognitive effort, this is where you get some of these problems.
If I'm walking down, taking a shortcut to go home, and I see three young men that look quite suspicious, my heart starts racing.
I start maybe sweating a bit.
My blood pressure goes up, so I'm getting an emotional reaction that's physiological based, precisely because it makes sense at that moment for this autonomic reaction to take place.
If I'm trying to solve a calculus problem, then calling all of my emotional system into action might not be the right thing.
So the argument is that it's not that we are either rational or emotional being, it's that you should trigger, forgive the term, You should activate the correct system at the appropriate time.
And I think what happens with a lot of these social justice warrior types is that they're very much driven by the emotional system in the wrong context.
And that's where you get the kinds of situations like with Sargon.
So to live life as a functioning human, you need a little push and pull on that, right?
Exactly.
You need the emotive stuff and then you need the cognitive stuff.
Why do you think this is happening?
at these platforms.
Why do you think they are bowing?
I mean, they're really just bowing to the mob every time.
And the reason I'm so concerned about it is not only just because of how I feel about free speech, but we're watching.
I mean, we're just in slow motion watching those lines.
They're coming both ways, but mostly it's coming, let's say, from the SJW left.
So I'll use this hand.
It's moving really fast this way.
Where it's gonna be that everybody is gonna be on the outs, because if a guy like Sargon, who as far as I can tell is just an old school liberal, and you know, he's a bit of a provocateur.
Yeah, and look, he's a bit of a troll, he's a bit of a provocateur, all of those things, but the point is that if a guy like Carl, Carl Benjamin, that's his real name, if he can't be on a platform, then half the people that we know And maybe that includes us can't be on these platforms.
So what do you think is happening at the high levels of that?
I talked about the I'm a victim, therefore I am ethos, right?
It used to be I think, therefore I am.
Now it's I'm a victim.
So, to stay true to a victimology ethos, you have to be outraged, you have to be indignant, you have to self-flagellate at the altar of progressivism.
And people are cognitive misers.
In other words, they're cognitively lazy.
And now I've got this autonomic system.
That where I can draw on my emotional indignation to navigate through the world, well, for the social justice warrior types, it's easy to fall prey to the hyper-activation of the emotional system.
Right?
As you said, it's not that we are this or that, and I think I emailed you yesterday, one of the concepts that I'm developing in my book is this idea of what I call epistemological dichotomania, seeing the world as sort of opposing binaries.
We are rational and we are emotional.
There are very clear evolutionary reasons why we've evolved the capacity to think, but also very clear evolutionary reasons why anger and envy and schadenfreude and compassion have also evolved.
So do you think part of it is just that the speed of the internet, the fact that you can be on Twitter so quickly releasing this stuff, that you can learn more faster now, right?
You can listen to podcasts in double speed and that you can take in so much information and shoot out so much information that that maybe is triggering, your word, some of the... The hyperactive emotional stuff?
So, it is really an interaction, perhaps, of the environment that you're describing, but it has to be the right personality who succumbs to that hyperactive emotional system.
You're not succumbing to it.
I'm not succumbing to it.
And so, I'd like for people to develop, I don't know if this is the right term or a good term, but mental hygiene, right?
In the same way that we develop personal hygiene.
I mean, stop for a minute, think about it.
What's the context under which Sargon, you know, uttered that particular word?
And now that there is so much information that suggests that there was a context, why
can't you reverse it?
Why can't you set it correctly?
Well, it's because it's very difficult for people to admit, mea culpa, I was wrong.
And so then they anchor in their position and nothing's going to move them from it.
You know, it's interesting because I do find there are times, especially lately, I've really
been trying to, not that I was ever like over the top hostile to people on Twitter, but
I used to go in and attack people more or not.
not attack people, but usually attack ideas.
But now I do find a lot of times I write a draft and I kind of just take a breath and I'm like,
you know what, maybe just let this go.
Because I sense there's a growing feeling, and maybe it's only online, I hope it's only online,
that people really want to burn everything down.
Do you sense that?
I mean, as someone that studies behavior, you study behavior.
That people who live in the West, you know, I live in the United States, you live in Canada, we live in two of the freest countries in the history of the world.
You can wake up, if you live in America or Canada, and basically do whatever you want.
It doesn't mean you're gonna be successful at it, but you can try at least.
And yet there's this growing feeling that we gotta just tear this whole thing down.
I mean, one of the things that people tell me when they meet me in person is they say, well, you know, I've seen you brawl with people on Twitter, and yet, in the rest of your interactions, you seem to be so lovely and jovial and friendly.
Well, the reality is that Twitter brings out the worst in all of us, right?
I analogize it.
It's akin to two guys brawling in an alley, right?
But oftentimes, those who criticize you We'll commit what's called the Fundamental Attribution Error.
The Fundamental Attribution Error, if I may just say, it's where you... You're here to teach me.
Thank you, you're very kind.
You misattribute something dispositionally to the person when it should have been attributed to the situation, right?
So when I am brawling, usually with a smile on my face, with someone on Twitter, It's the situation that's at hand that's causing me to be combative.
That's not my disposition.
When I tuck my children to bed and I kiss them, I don't troll them and call them castrato, right?
But somehow people attribute that to you dispositionally.
You're a combative person.
Then they meet you and say, my God, you're so warm and smiley and so on.
So I think there are all sorts of Really interesting psychological processes that are causing us to behave in ways on Twitter that otherwise we wouldn't behave that way.
It would be interesting, I don't know if you know anything about this specifically, but just because of the way you've studied behavior, to know that when other technologies came out over the course of human history, if they so quickly changed the way we behave with each other, so say when the printing press came out and now more people had information, did that immediately mean that people were yelling at each other more or something like that?
Well, it's just that they're always trying to find the new ways to deliver that consumatory experience to you.
And therefore they are at they're not just creating pornography, which is not very difficult to explain from an
evolutionary perspective, they are really at the at the front of
Finding new technologies to deliver these systems to us which speaks to another point that I was going to talk
about Oftentimes I get emails from people. Why did you choose to
apply? You know all your you know biological?
knowledge your psychological knowledge to marketing and And the answer to that for me is that marketing and consumer behavior is the perfect place to study human nature.
Short of my breathing, the thing that I do most is consume.
But I don't just consume Coca-Cola and Starbucks.
I consume friendships, we consume ideas, we consume religious narratives.
So everything is consumatory.
So the reason why I love marketing so much, because people think of the term marketing in a colloquial sense.
You're trying to market the next hip party, right?
So they think I sit there and I design restaurant menus as my job.
Marketing is really, so some marketers or marketing professors are anthropologists who study the ethnography of consumption.
Others are psychologists who study the psychological basis of consumption.
Others are applied mathematicians.
So in the same way that a climatologist uses mathematical models to study climate systems, Applied mathematicians study marketing systems.
So people have to understand that there's a different term that's being used when you think about marketing as a colloquial term versus marketing as a scientific discipline.
Marketing as a scientific discipline is simply the application of cognate disciplines to the study of the marketing realm.
Okay, so if we want to bring this back then to the first question about the platforming, as a behavioral scientist, Perhaps we're not doing something right as consumers of these platforms.
We're really the product, but as the users of these platforms, is there a behavioral modification we should be doing to get these companies to behave differently towards us?
I think as long as there are no direct consequences to their behaviors.
I mean, really, when people boycott Patreon, I mean, yes, they're sending a message to Patreon, but the most immediate effect that is felt is by you and me, right?
And I have to agree with you because one of the sort of the signature things that I sign off with often times is I tell people, don't sit idly, you have a voice, get engaged.
And so it's difficult to then get upset at people for getting engaged simply because you take a financial hit, right?
So in the bigger picture, I agree with you, I understand the frustration and I hope that Jack Conte is watching this.
What do you make of the behavior of people that live in free societies that are afraid to actually be free?
Because, you know, I just traveled the world all year with Jordan, and the amount of people that I met, especially in the Scandinavian countries, but all over the world, and including America, and we did probably 15 stops in Canada, people that live in free societies that actually are afraid to speak.
Number one, I truly believe that those who come from societies that weren't free, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Myself.
Yeah.
We really do understand what magical reality the West is.
And the whole totality of societies that have ever existed, and the compendium of societies in the world, we're nothing but a small bleep.
We've really done something right.
I think most Westerners don't know that there is, I mean maybe sort of at the abstract they know that there are some really bad places out there, but they take things for granted.
But Reagan had said, I'm going to paraphrase, I don't remember the exact quote, you know, every single generation you have to be standing, you know, at the gate defending freedoms.
Because in every generation there's going to be intrusions of some really nefarious characters trying to take away those freedoms.
And so maybe in your book, maybe in mine, we have to find ways to come up with prescriptions to get the silent majority to speak.
But do you know what the secret is to get them to speak?
I don't know what the secret is, other than you've gotta keep telling them that that's the answer.
Because that's the question I probably get more at any Q&A that I do than anything else, is I wanna get involved, but I don't know what to do.
And it's like, you don't have to make a YouTube channel tomorrow, although I tell people, get on all of these platforms and do those things, but just in your own life, don't be afraid of having these conversations.
If you're truly afraid that you're gonna say, I'm for low taxes, and your cousin's gonna tell you you're a racist, That's not going to magically get better.
You know what I mean?
Actually, it'll magically get worse.
So I think it's just on you, person watching this now, to do it.
Earlier today, I was at Baboa Island in Newport Beach with my family, and we ran into an older gentleman.
I think he's 80 years old.
We had seen him around here.
We're often in California.
And we love his dog.
He's got a Shetland Shepherd.
So we stopped to pet the dog and we ended up talking at one point.
You know, so I guess he's finding out what I do and so on.
And he tells me with a lot of hesitation, as if there's going to be this great repercussion on him.
He admits to me this very, very dark secret.
He's a Trump supporter.
And I said, oh, why do you say that with such hesitation?
Why?
So here's an 80-year-old gentleman who lives supposedly in the most free society, sitting on a free street in Newport Beach, yet he felt sufficiently tepid about simply saying that he supports the current sitting US president.
The other thing that I find very interesting is that, so I was speaking actually with Jordan and a few others at an event.
This was the event in 2017 where we were going to speak about the stifling of free speech on university campuses that was shut down and then it was rescheduled.
So in the Q&A, someone asked who is, of each of the people who were in the panel, Who is your sort of freedom hero?
And my answer was, well, it's all the people who do what we do, but they do it in the Middle East, right?
Where the repercussions on them is they might be taken in the middle of the night, and you'll never hear from them again.
Now, what upsets me is that if you ask people in the West, as you were saying earlier today, who are too afraid to speak, well, what are you afraid of?
It's unbelievable the banality of their fears.
So if they're a professor, well, I'm afraid that the chair of my department might give me my course load on Tuesdays, but he knows that on Tuesdays my son has soccer practice.
That's what you're basing the whole edifice of your defense of freedom on the fact that he might screw around with your teaching.
So there is a misalignment between what people fear I mean, I get a million death threats.
I mean, all my parents, my siblings who are much older than me, myself, we're all born in Lebanon.
We were part of the last group of Lebanese Jews who were still in Lebanon.
The civil war broke out in the mid-70s, where it was no longer possible to be Jewish in Lebanon, and so we had to leave, you know, very, very quickly.
So, my personal history, of course, is part of the reasons why I do what I do, but I really think it's the unique, random combination of genes that makes who Gadsad is, which is, I'm genuinely, and I say this without any hyperbole, I'm genuinely offended by BS.
I said, how could it be that the same society that created Martin Luther King, this is not 4,000 years ago.
This is within, well, not maybe you being alive, but I was maybe two, three years old.
The same society that created Martin Luther King, 40, 50 years later, is the same society that Rejoices, right?
Vice News was not saying, look at these idiots.
There's how progressive it is that there is a American woman who has started a retreat where whites are not allowed, where they take breaks from white people.
If you want to find racism everywhere and bigotry everywhere, Guess what, you will find it.
And if you don't, you'll just make it up.
So what's it been like for you?
So you just mentioned having to be a scorer off campus.
So in the couple of times that we've done this, obviously your public profile has grown and you're extremely outspoken.
What's it been like just on campus in general, colleagues?
I'm guessing you probably get a lot of silent support and probably not a lot of public support.
I mean, it's the same old story with everybody.
That's the either, Depressing or at some level inspiring part of this that maybe there are many more of us which would be inspiring but the depressing part is it's like You're just a man.
Yeah, you're just one guy doing what you think is right how you have about four hours So let me summarize a few of the things that have happened over the past year So my university, and I'm saying this not to be diplomatic, but there are many, many great things about my university.
They truly have given me an environment to flourish.
They don't get in my way.
They've never come and said, don't say this and don't say that.
But I think my public profile now is scaring them.
So I know for a fact, for example, that the media department at my university, I used to be their hero.
Every five seconds, they used to call me.
I mean, I won the president's award, the president of the university's award, for the guy who gets the most International media coverage.
That was in 2015.
Well from 2015 to now, my profile has grown about 13 trillion times.
So if I won in 2015, you would think that I'm certainly up there.
I've completely become invisible to the university.
So they don't actively come and stop me from saying something, but it's as if they want to hope that I go away.
And the fact that you fought back boldly probably made them scatter very quick
because they don't expect anyone to fight back, right?
So do you think universities have a different responsibility when it comes to speech?
So of course in the United States where we have the First Amendment, which is about the government coming for your speech, I think is being now confused with generally your right to free speech.
Anyone can say whatever they want with the very limited exceptions of fire in a crowded theater, etc, etc.
But you know something like Mark Lamont Hill a couple weeks ago, he gave that insanely over-the-top and truly racist speech.
River to the sea.
Palestine should be free from the river sea.
Palestine should be free from the river sea.
That is literally what Hamas says.
I mean, it is a call for genocide.
Everyone knows what it is.
Now, in my view, the school, Temple, and CNN, his network, can do whatever they want.
They can associate or not associate.
But I know there's a little bit of a, and I say that as a free speech guy.
It's like, he can say what he wants.
The school can associate with who they want.
I don't want the government forcing him to stay or forcing him to go, but that, to me, is what freedom is.
It's the messy exchange of freedom.
In a case like that, do you think universities have an extra responsibility to protect free speech when it's speech that they don't agree with?
So the way I would answer it, and although I'm very conflicted about it, I don't think that Temple should fight, and I say this as a Jewish person who has a lot of family in Israel, I don't, despite the fact that I don't agree with what he said, and he is aping the exact slogan of Hamas, I don't think that they should fire him.
I think the only thing that should make you, that should, a fireable offense is that within your role as a professor in the university, if you do things that violate the dictums of your job as a professor, short of that, I'm a free speech absolutist.
Well, just that there's this weird tension suddenly between men and women, I think, that seems to be bubbling up everywhere that obviously is somehow connected to this new version of feminism.
Well, I mean, listen, I've been dealing with this even before all the social justice warriors.
Just the fact that I've been trying to Darwinize the behavioral sciences in general and consumer behavior in particular, that itself was a heretical idea.
Well, just that men and women have different... Look, there are many things that make men and women similar, there are many things that make men and women different, and the only framework that explains the cataloging of similarities and differences is evolutionary psychology.
There is no other game in town, right?
But the fact that you even recognize that men and women might have evolved sexual dimorphisms, that itself is heretical.
in much of the social sciences.
So even before the sort of culture wars that you hear about, just in science itself,
you know, I'm an interesting guy in terms of my academic background
in that I really do straddle the natural sciences and the social sciences, right?
So I could say the exact same sentence, if it's heard by natural scientists,
they go, yeah, no kidding.
The exact same sentence heard by the social scientists, boo, boo, Nazi.
Well, just for example, saying that there are evolved sex differences,
just that, right?
I mean, the fact that in the 21st century a professor has to appear in front of the Canadian Senate to say the things that I had to say and then be accused of being pro-genocide, what more do I need to say?
I mean, that captures the zeitgeist of lunacy that exists.
What do you think has to happen to turn this around?
Because on one hand, it's like, look, all of these conversations that so many of us are happening, they're growing, there's live events happening all over the place that people are attending, and so there is an awareness of this, but I still sense we're just the frog in the pot right now.
That thing is just getting warmer and warmer, and we're looking around, and we're realizing, oh, there's other frogs in here, but they're looking at us going, oh, you're getting warm too?
So to go back to an earlier point that we talked about, we said how do we get people to get engaged?
There's really, it's not rocket science.
You have to marginalize the voices of lunacy.
And you do that by having the tsunami of reason overtake the tsunami of lunacy.
The problem is that a few highly committed Intellectual terrorists can hold the rest of the people hostage, right?
On 9-11, it only took 19 people.
It didn't take 19,000.
It didn't take 19 million.
It took 19 people who were very committed that morning to cause a level of destruction that is unimaginable.
By the same token, it doesn't take too many miscreants in universities to cause damage.
But if everybody gets up and says, look, I'm indignant about these constant injuries to truth, I won't accept you saying the things that you're saying.
Challenge your professor when he or she says BS.
Challenge your Facebook friend.
If you get enough people to marginalize the voices of lunacy, then very quickly, the tide will be overturned.
Do you think that universities, let's say 20 years from now, are gonna be completely different?
I mean, the amount of access to information and to great minds that you have on YouTube is incredible.
I mean, you can learn about psychology from Jordan Peterson.
You can learn about behavior from Gad Saad.
You can learn about evolutionary biology from Brett Weinstein.
I mean, I could go on and on and on.
That people are learning in a new way now.
And it almost, for as much fun as I had in college and as much as I learned in college, it's like, At some level, it's like, with this hysteria, if I was a parent, why would I want to pay money to have my kid reprogrammed into something that has nothing to do with any of my beliefs?
So you can't have an institution that is supposed to have great velocity and its ability to adjust to... I mean, we teach this in the business school, yet we don't apply it.
It takes us 50 years to adjust to market conditions.
So regrettably, I think more and more people will look for alternative sources of information, as you said, on YouTube and everywhere else.
So I got one for you that just popped into my head that I wasn't planning on asking you, and I have no idea if you've put any thought into.
But one of the things I've been thinking about lately, especially because of what's happened here with Patreon, and I want to figure out how to move ahead with my business, is that the numbers related to what's happening online and on television seem incredibly out of whack.
In that there are millions and millions of people ingesting all of this online content, watching for extremely long times.
So the example I'll use is my chat with Shapiro and Peterson from two weeks ago.
It has over a million views.
The average watch time is over 40 minutes, which is unheard of on YouTube.
This is way more than NBC nightly news gets, let's say, on an average night, or certainly more than CNN gets on.
CNN's a better example.
So you take Anderson Cooper, 8 o'clock, whatever he's getting, whatever numbers he's getting, that brings in millions of dollars of revenue.
A two-hour conversation that we do here, I think it's made about 5,000 bucks or something like that.
What's the behavioral or marketing aspect of this thing that needs to be flipped?
And I don't even mean this within the lens of so that we make more money.
Yeah, I don't even mean it that way.
I mean it like something seems wrong with me with the structures right now.
That people are paying, that old school companies are paying a ton of money for things that have just existed forever that nobody watches and nobody cares about.
Then there's this new thing that everyone's watching, young people really care about, and yet it's getting pennies on the dollar of the other thing.
And maybe the best way that I'll describe it is by telling another story.
Okay.
What's going to be common about my story and what you asked is the fact that most people, once they are anchored in a particular way of behavior, it's very difficult.
The inertia is very difficult to shift.
So I was invited to speak at Stanford University Business School.
I mean, it doesn't get more prestigious than this, okay?
The gentleman who took me out to dinner the night before my talk at Stanford Business School is a pretty well-known consumer psychologist who is now one of the editors of one of the major journals, so he's a serious academic.
And at one point he says, you know, I didn't know you were such a celebrity and you appear on Joe Rogan and all this.
I said, yeah, you know, yeah, I try to do it all.
And so he says, yeah, well, you know, at Stanford, we don't really promote, you know, this kind of stuff.
I said, what do you mean?
And he picked sort of the wrong guy to act this way.
He goes, well, you know, we don't do research so that we can be, have sexy findings that we can repeat on Joe Rogan,
that we can discuss on Joe Rogan.
I said, well, I'm not suggesting that you either do scientific research or appear on Joe Rogan.
I'm saying do scientific research and appear on Joe Rogan.
Surely you, as a professor of marketing, you would appreciate the fact that appearing on Joe Rogan
and having 10 million people consume your ideas might be as valuable as a paper
that you publish in a scientific journal that's read, this is maybe why I'm not,
I don't get invited to some of these parties, that's read by you, the editor, two reviewers, and your mom.
I mean, it was a bit frosty, but... He didn't pay for the steak.
No, he did pay.
He was hospitable in that sense.
But that speaks to the point that you're at, which is, even a place like Stanford Business School, which is supposed to have the brightest minds possible, Well, you'd think that it would understand, as a business school, that having your ideas heard on a platform that is... 10 million people!
But I think, so now, not to get too psychoanalytical, but I will, look, it's an ego-defensive strategy, right?
So I'm speaking as him now.
I have mastered the set of skills that I need to succeed in publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals.
I don't think I could appear in front of Joe Rogan and 10 million people, therefore I will denigrate those who do it.
So it's a classic ego-defensive strategy, whereas the truly intellectually secure person would say, no, I am going to find all of the possible mediums Where I can share my ideas.
Academics are in the business of creating memetic knowledge and spreading it, right?
So I create the knowledge in my scientific research.
But if Dave Rubin asked me to come on a show, I would be a lunatic to turn it down.
Is that the fun part of what's going on right now?
That everything is kind of upside down, so while it does seem scary, it's also like, oh, if you have your head on right and you're willing to suck up your ego a little bit and maybe do some things that maybe you wouldn't have done 10 years ago, it's like, wow, there's a ton of opportunity out there.
I'm excited by all of the endless possibilities that await me.
And I love everything.
I love doing very, very hardcore scientific research.
I love appearing on Rubin or Rogan.
I love speaking in front of students in class.
Anything that allows me to spread ideas I'm going to sign up for and I only wish I could convince a lot of my academic colleagues who remain quite highfalutin in their ivory towers to join.
So the last installment of that series was because I was very, very afraid because a white supremacist, in quotes, Rachel Fulton Brown, who is a professor of medieval history at University of Chicago, was coming on my show.
And, you know, as a brown Middle Eastern person, I was very afraid of her white supremacy.
Now, what is it that caused Her to receive the appellation of white supremacy?
It's that she wrote a very, very short blog post where she said, you know, three hails to white men.
It's the science of science, and it's called bibliometrics.
Probably the most famous journal within that genre is called Scientometrics, and I've published a few papers in that journal.
So, what he did is, he did a bibliometric analysis, so let me give you an example of that so that we can give you a concrete thing.
So, if you have men and women applying for a particular job in physics, what is the average number of citations?
So, citations, for your viewers who don't know, if, for example, I've published 50 scientific papers and you've published 50 scientific papers, Your 50 papers might have been cited 10,000 times.
My 50 papers might have been cited 2,000 times.
Even though we've both published the same amount, your papers have been cited a lot more than mine.
You're more influential in that sense.
So it's one measure of scientific prominence.
And so what he did is he looked at, for specific jobs, what is the average number of citations that women candidates who got the job had versus men.
And he found that men had a lot more citations, right?
Well, that's just data, right?
Now, because he presented data that seemed to contradict the narrative, and he did one other thing that some would argue is a faux pas.
I'm not sure how much of a faux pas it is.
He actually compared his citation record to two other women and named them.
We do not support any physicist who dehumanizes someone based on their religion, their ethnicity, their gender orientation, their race.
He did no such thing.
He didn't mention race.
He didn't mention gender orientation.
He didn't mention ethnicity or religion.
But somehow, he's now a Nazi on all fronts, simply because he shared bibliometric data.
Well, nobody would touch this guy.
Guess who would touch him?
This guy.
And for better or worse, I've become the central repository of every academic, every student, every administrator, every staff who is aggrieved will end up writing to me.
And frankly, on the one hand, it's very exciting because you feel like you're helping.
On the other hand, it takes a tremendous emotional toll on you
because you have to go about your business being a professor, writing your grants
and writing your papers and supervising your doctoral students,
but every day you're overcome by 10 stories, each of which upsets you, but you can't address each one.
Well, not that you wanna be more overwhelmed than you are, but I could probably send you
easily probably four or five hundred stories exactly like this.
People who want to come on my show, and obviously I've had some of these people as they've sort of bubbled up.
You know, I've had more of the higher profile ones, like a James Damore, let's say, or what happened to Brett Weinstein, but Lindsey Shepard from Canada.
You know, we helped put her on the map, I think.
But the amount, I get these stories from everybody.
I'm talking about, I'm getting them from elementary school teachers.
I'm getting them from, obviously from professors, but I'm getting them from people that have nothing to do with academia.
I'm getting them from, You know, people that are in engineering and all sorts of other things.
So it's just endless.
But what?
Okay, what do you think these, what were they, equality and... Equity and diversity?
They think that actually the best way to move physics forward in the future Is to have 52% females, 48% males, regardless of that men and women like different things and that studies are studied differently and all things, they truly believe that.
Or they don't believe it in the deep recesses of their minds when they're about to go to bed in the privacy of their thoughts, but to the public they certainly must demonstrate that they do believe it.
So whether they truly believe it or not is up for debate, but they're certainly signaling that they believe that.
Equity, which speaks to another point that I talk about in my forthcoming book, which is, you know, there are oftentimes mission statements that don't go hand in hand.
If you do more of one, you have to give up on the other.
Universities exist for the pursuit of truth.
If in the pursuit of truth, feelings are hurt, so be it.
This is exactly when Sam Harris on his podcast, when I appeared a few years ago, one of the first things that he led with was, in your scientific work, Gad, is there anything that you consider to be forbidden knowledge?
And my answer was an unequivocal no.
If you are an adherent, truthfully and honestly, to the scientific method, then it's not my job as a scientist to worry about how that knowledge might be misused.
Because then it truly is a slippery slope, right?
We shouldn't have done physics research because, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, right?
That's, by the way, what caused One of the reasons that caused the abdication of biology from the study of human behavior was precisely because some social scientists thought that by biologizing human nature, that could be misused, like by the eugenicists, by the Nazis, by British class elitists.
And therefore, let's create a new edifice that's completely removed from reality, but where biology is no longer relevant.
What these physicists are doing is they've been parasitized by idiotic ideas.
Physicists could be just as moronic as anybody else.
As a matter of fact, I've met quite a few physicists, short of whatever they know in physics, they're fully lobotomized.
So it's not as though being in physics affords you, you know, greater knowledge and greater life.
Right, I guess that's just depressing at some level or something.
But isn't the other inherent problem with that, if you're afraid To go where science will lead you because of whatever the politically correct notion of the day is, that you're going to leave scientists to a lot, you're going to leave science to a lot of bad people?
I mean, that's, that's exactly why I get so frustrated, right?
I mean, I've had reviewers, and I've kept the reviews.
I send the paper to a journal.
If I show you some of the reviews I get back, you would think, although this is God being satirical, Right?
Why is he studying sex differences?
Does he not know the danger of... I mean, do I really in the 21st century have to explain to you that there is inherent value in studying evolved sex differences?
The fact that you get a reaction of indignation and disgust and you call yourself a scientist is like being in the 13th century.
It's breathtaking.
But that's because they believe, they place on sort of the hierarchy of ideals, they place Hurt feelings or the the the refusal to have hurt feelings above truth Do you think all of this like almost everything we're talking about here and sort of everything that we're all fighting?
Yes all the time Simply if we were to just boil it down to it's like, you know Let's go to first principles sort of thing that it's just because of an abdication of personal responsibility That people are just sort of afraid of their shadow They're just afraid that it's a little bit of a scary idea to just get up every morning and go I got to do a little better today I mean, definitely there's a bit of that, but I think that what unites a lot of these, what in the book I call idea pathogens, right?
Yeah, I could break it up for you in Arabic and Hebrew and French
But hey, by the way, Obama says Pakistan in this way, so he's the worldly guy.
Right, right, right.
But the Tabula Rasa premise really comes from a very hopeful place.
Why?
Because it says that we are all born with equal potentiality.
Had I simply been hugged Better by my mother.
I too could have been Michael Jordan.
But there was something, right?
There was something in my environmental trajectory that caused it that that realization happened for Michael Jordan but not me.
But there was nothing inherent at the start at t equals zero that would have led Michael Jordan to have greater likelihood of becoming the NBA star that he would have become rather than me at five foot six and a half, right?
Well, that's hopeful.
I'd like to believe that.
I'd like to believe that we are all born with zero biological, no innate differences in intelligence, for example.
Well, I think a lot of these parasitic ideas all stem from a very noble place.
It stems from a place where you try to sanitize the ugliness of reality.
So, for example, to link it back to marketing, the Dove campaign, that's probably the most successful campaign of their genre, is one that basically says, look, we're all equally beautiful.
There is no Beauty is a social construct.
Well, if I'm a woman, do I want to hear that message?
Or do I want to hear Gad Saad telling me that no, across all cultures, facially symmetric people are judged as more beautiful than facially asymmetric people?
But fat acceptance basically says, look, it's a conspiracy from the medical establishment to argue that being overweight is a bad thing.
And so I actually troll my physician.
I say, hey, don't you dare tell me that I need to lose weight.
As a matter of fact, at one point I had gone to see him, and I actually mentioned this in the book, and he pulls out, he doesn't bring out my cholesterol scores, he pulls out a couple of tweets of mine.
I'm guessing he follows me, doesn't realize that I'm being sarcastic.
I write, you know, my physician is a complete fattest.
He said that I needed to lose weight.
Doesn't he know that this is a social construct?
I'm transgravity, blah blah, whatever.
My usual God stuff.
And then he points to them, and actually my wife was in the room with me, and he points to them and basically he's questioning my emotional state and my sanity.
So I won't say his name, I go, uh, Doc, I was being sarcastic.
Yeah, but so I think there is the root of that, though, is again, it's personal responsibility, right?
Because isn't it, it's very easy to be like, all right, well, I'm fat or whatever it is.
Right.
I have no reason to... It's not about me to get myself in order.
It's not about any of that.
It just strikes me that almost every problem that we're seeing in society right now is due to the ultimate abdication of people of just that it's their life.
They seem to have forgot that it's their life or something.
By the way though, the fact that something is determined by some evolutionary mechanism doesn't mean that it is biologically deterministic.
I had, and of course I won't mention the name of the person, I received probably like you do, a million emails of people asking me for advice.
And unfortunately I can't answer everybody, but once in a while someone... I can forward them to you.
There you go, that's why I receive so many yeah And so one gentleman wrote to me who's a guy of a certain age in his late 20s saying basically that he He had never had sex and he feels very distraught by it and is there any hope for me?
Dr. Saad blah blah blah and you know, I didn't know exactly what to answer, but I said look the reality is that many of the attributes that women look for in men are are actually attributes that we could improve on.
So for example, your economic status, your social status, your educational level,
So one of the things that's happening in Canada, as you know, there's been a lot of historical friction between the Canadian government and the native people, the indigenous people.
And so now we've gone on hyper drive where everything is getting indigenized.
So for example, when you start any ceremony at the university, you have to Self-flagellate.
I'm evil.
We are standing on stolen land, and so on.
Which, that itself, I find quite grotesque.
Because, not to imply that there haven't been historical grievances that should be addressed, and so on.
But, here are students who have nothing to do with those historical grievances.
As someone who is a dogged defender of truth, we now have what's called indigenous way of knowing.
Okay?
So here's where it's appropriate to talk about indigenous knowledge versus inappropriate.
Indigenous people have lived in certain environments that makes them more privy to the local knowledge of the flora of the fauna, right?
It's content-specific knowledge.
If you've lived in a particular region for 10,000 years, you might have some statistical regularities that you've noticed as part of your cultural transmission that the guy who's sitting at Harvard may not have been exposed to.
And we should turn to the indigenous folks for their locally specified knowledge.
On the other hand, if you say, no, but you know, I could look at the shadow of my ancestor, whatever, some booga booga stuff, because that's an alternate way of also knowing.
It's not just the white man, sexist, racist, colonial science that we should abide by.
No, there is no, Extremely good-looking Lebanese Jew way of knowing.
There is no indigenous way of knowing.
There is just the scientific method.
So once you try to argue that there are multiple ways of knowing epistemologically, you're entering into BS land, and I won't put up with it.
I think it was the Environment Minister of Quebec who questioned, when talking about some environmental policy, he basically said something similar to what I'm saying here, where he's saying, there is only the scientific method.
Is there something unique or something bizarre about what's happening in Canada right now that so many of the fighters right now that the world is looking at are coming from Canada?
So I think, yeah, so maybe that's it, because I think there's some connection to Trudeau, who's so slick and says all the right things, but everyone knows he's not doing the right things.
And when we were in Western Canada, there was a lot of people,
almost all the questions when we do these Q and A's were about what's going on with the oil pipeline
and all that and taxes and all these things.
But he looks good and he wears nice socks and he can dance.
And so people just think it's good.
So maybe it's something like that.
Like Canadians, I think generally are a little more, it's odd, correct me if I'm wrong on this.
My gut feeling about Canadians is you guys are a little more inherently live and let live,
say libertarian, except you have a government that gives you your news and a whole bunch of other things.
Although I can tell you that in Quebec, we're one of the last functioning deeply communist places in the world.
I say this somewhat facetiously but not quite facetiously.
One of the reasons why I've always wanted to move to the United States is because this socialist ethos is really great for people who don't do much and it really punishes those who are Producers yeah, and so you're constantly getting the government who comes at you and says hey everything you do 50-50, right?
So it's not enough that I my salary is taxed at a level that is unimaginable That would make most of the people viewing the show have heart attacks Is that anything that I try to do beyond that?
To make a bit if I go give a talk if I write a book if I'm on patreon the government says whatever you do forevermore if it's world income if it's on Mars we're 50-50 partners and As a matter of fact, it ends up being much more than 50-50 because your income is about 50%, but then the 50% that's left to you, they tax you 15% on what you spend.
So the amount that I'm left with, I mean, so how could it be that someone who, it's not that I'm very rich, it's not that I make it, but if you look at sort of that, I probably am in the top 5%, I'm left with very little at the end of the year because You know, we are a gentle, sweet society, where you have free healthcare.
And I should say, every day that I see your success, you know, there is an old expression that says, whenever I see my friend succeed, something in me dies, which is the ugly emotion of envy.
I feel the opposite for you, and I truly mean that.
As I see you flourish, I say, I knew this guy when he was a fetus, and I love that you are this big Herculean guy now.