Dec. 14, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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unidentified
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Outro Alright good people of the internet, sorry for the delay | |
| 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. | ||
| Dr. Gadstad, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| So kind of you to have me again, to put up with me yet again. | ||
| All right, well, I thought we'd do this just one more time. | ||
| Let's just finish this. | ||
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unidentified
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You know what I mean? | |
| This every couple months. | ||
| It's been 16 months since my last appearance. | ||
| It's been 16 months? | ||
| I think it was in August 2017, so it's been a while. | ||
| Well, it's sort of fitting. | ||
| So this is actually my last taping of the year. | ||
| We have a couple more shows coming out that we taped earlier this week because of my travel schedule. | ||
| But I thought it's kind of fitting that you're my last show of 2018 because you were the first of the first. | ||
| You did our first test show at Aura TV in August of 2015. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So over three years ago, about three and a half years ago. | ||
| That feels like Freaking lifetime. | ||
| Look at you now, you're like, are you the most famous person in the world now? | ||
| Third most famous. | ||
| Lady Gaga? | ||
| PewDiePie. | ||
| PewDiePie and you. | ||
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unidentified
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And me. | |
| There you go. | ||
| But it does seem like a lifetime ago, and more than anything else, I want to cover a ton of new ground today. | ||
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unidentified
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Let's do it. | |
| That's what I want to do. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No, you go ahead and 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. | ||
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unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| Patreon heard him say this, they don't think about or look into context, and they boot him. | ||
| And this is actually a pretty big thing in our space. | ||
| I usually don't like talking this much at the beginning of a show, and now I hand it to you. | ||
| What do you make of what's going on with platforming, deplatforming, we are both on Patreon, etc.? | ||
| Well, I'll just say that, I mean, I was heavily hit, but my pie of the big Patreon My slice of the pie is very small. | ||
| I had maybe 600 patrons and I think I checked last maybe a day and a half ago and I had lost more than a hundred out of 600. | ||
| So that's a lot. | ||
| So that's a lot. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's either rational or emotional. | ||
| This is one of the things that you're writing about. | ||
| I'm writing about this in the book, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So can you give me an example first? | ||
| When does a heuristic that just is like the immediate reaction heuristic work? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I've been on a show twice, and he never said anything that struck me as unreasonable, he seems like a very reasonable, fair guy. | ||
| 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 mean, it's a combination of many things. | ||
| I think one of the things is that this the the I call it in my Canadian Senate in 2017 when I went to talk about the Bill C-16. | ||
| Lovely bowtie. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Oh, I thank you for remembering. | ||
| 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 we're both. | ||
| Just trigger the right system at the right time. | ||
| 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? | ||
| The hyperactive stuff, yeah. | ||
| As opposed to using a more rational, logical... Although, you're not succumbing to that, right? | ||
| I don't know what's wrong with me. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's very bad business. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, it's unbelievable. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I wonder if there is some I don't know about that, but do you know what is the one industry that is always at the cutting edge of technology? | ||
| Yes, my friend, it's porn. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| I saw Boogie Nights. | ||
| I saw Boogie Nights. | ||
| The guy says, you know, we're not going to do this. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| You guys are moving to tape. | ||
| I'm going to do this on film. | ||
| And right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what's the purpose there? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, if that was true, you'd probably have a lot more money than you have, right? | ||
| If you had mastered that, what the hell would you be teaching for? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I did this live stream last night and I said, and this is completely true, That I've lost about 500 some odd patrons. | ||
| We've lost about, I think it's around 5,000 bucks a month already. | ||
| But as I'm watching the number drop, I'm honestly, truly yet, I'm inspired in a way. | ||
| Because it's like, oh, people are standing up for themselves. | ||
| So it's like, and a lot of them are finding me on my website now and doing it there. | ||
| So it's not like I'm taking a complete financial hit. | ||
| But people are messaging me and saying, I'm not gonna take it anymore. | ||
| And for that, I'm like, so it's weird. | ||
| I'm like kind of inspired on one hand, and then my business Dave is like, oh shit. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It drives me absolutely crazy. | ||
| I respect jihadists more than I respect people in free societies who refuse to speak. | ||
| Because the jihadists, at least, are really committed. | ||
| They wake up every morning and they have a goal. | ||
| It's a goal that you and I might find it to be execrable, but they are committed. | ||
| Those who sit quietly while, you know, the ugly, the tsunami of lunacy is coming upon us, I have nothing but disdain for them. | ||
| And it really isn't... | ||
| So what is that? | ||
| Behaviorally, what is that? | ||
| Is that just a function of our excess in the West? | ||
| We've done it right, basically. | ||
| We're basically free. | ||
| We got PlayStation, we got Coca-Cola, we got Nike, and we've been lulled into nothingness. | ||
| I think it's many things. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That captures it all. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| I mean, to be free and to be, well, you're your own hostage at some level. | ||
| You really are. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| I had last semester, by the way, in fall 2017, I had to be escorted on my university with security. | ||
| I had to file a police report with the Montreal police. | ||
| I mean, that's a lot worse than you didn't give me the right schedule to teach on Tuesday. | ||
| But that's the banality of their fears. | ||
| They're unfounded. | ||
| Just speak up. | ||
| I always ask a lot of my more courageous guests this, but what do you think it is about you? | ||
| Do you think it's just because of what happened to you in Lebanon growing up? | ||
| Which if people don't know the story, they absolutely should check out our other interviews because your life story is incredible. | ||
| Do you want me to summarize it? | ||
| Yeah, if you want to do that. | ||
| I mean, we're Lebanese Jews who lived in Lebanon. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So sometimes my wife will see me, I have my head in my hand, and I'm like, oh my God, what did somebody write? | ||
| And it'll be something that I just read. | ||
| There is a retreat in Costa Rica where whites are not allowed. | ||
| Yeah, this was like the hot thing that Vice was tweeting. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And then I watched it. | ||
| I went absolutely berserk. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, just look at my tone now. | ||
| It upsets me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, possibly because I also come from the society where I come from, where I know what real hatred is. | ||
| There is no such hatred in the US. | ||
| Stop pretending that there is such a thing. | ||
| Yeah, well we're looking for it all the time. | ||
| We're looking for it. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And I've spoken to a few senior administrators, and it kind of relates back to what we talked about earlier, this kind of emotional mechanism. | ||
| Some of them are upset at the fact that I called someone a schmuck on Twitter. | ||
| So all of your... You've never called anybody a schmuck. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I've actually had some. | ||
| I'll tell you another quick story. | ||
| There was a gentleman with whom I was communicating on Twitter, a random person. | ||
| I have no idea who this person is. | ||
| And at one point I called him a degenerate Retarded schmuck. | ||
| Twitter banned me. | ||
| I found out it's because I used the R word. | ||
| I get a call from a university human resources person, after hours, to discuss the fact that a complaint had been filed against me. | ||
| Now I was thinking, oh, this must be in the context of my job as a professor in the university, | ||
| and there's absolutely no way that anybody could have any reproach against me, | ||
| because I conduct myself in a very, very austere, professional, professorial manner. | ||
| No, no, no, they were referring to that interaction with a random person on Twitter, | ||
| to which I told the person who I was speaking to, so let me just make sure that I get this straight | ||
| so that when I repeat it on high-profile platforms, I don't get it wrong. | ||
| You think that it is within the purview of the university to contact a professor and determine what he or she | ||
| can or can't say using which tone on Twitter when they're engaging another person as a private citizen? | ||
| So if I were to hear you speaking to your daughter coming out of the pharmacy in a tone that I didn't approve of, Can I report you to the university? | ||
| The conversation ended very quickly after that. | ||
| So the fact that universities are even emboldened, that they have the reflex to feel that it is okay | ||
| for them to be questioning which word you use on Twitter is a problem. | ||
| 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. | ||
| See, that's the irony of where we're at with the platforms too, because you could also argue, | ||
| well, wait a minute, Sargon did something off platform and he's getting banned. | ||
| They said it's only if you do it on platform. | ||
| Now he did saying off platform. | ||
| So that's why all of these things are so confusing and intertwined. | ||
| Can I share one other story of, not mine, although I wanna maybe mention one other example. | ||
| I'll mention my story first, and then I'll mention another guy. | ||
| Another thing that struck, because you're asking what's happening on universities in my personal experience. | ||
| So now the equity and diversity stuff is spreading like wildfire across all institutions in Canada. | ||
| Because we have, you know, Justin Trudeau, who's really pushing this everywhere, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're not happy. | ||
| Well, I can't say they, but I did about 15 shows this year in Canada, and every time I mentioned Trudeau, people would boo. | ||
| He was the punchline of all my jokes. | ||
| It was da-da-da-da-da Trudeau, and everyone goes nuts. | ||
| Do you know how many people have written to me now saying, I wish we would have heeded your warnings about Trudeau in the past? | ||
| So yes. | ||
| Stephen Harper's looking pretty good these days. | ||
| Although my prediction, regrettably, I think he'll win again. | ||
| Because there isn't anybody who can beat him on the charisma factor. | ||
| The current guy is not going to do it. | ||
| I've got Maxine Bernier coming in. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, do you? | |
| Okay, very nice. | ||
| So the equity and diversity stuff, the Canadian government now, they endow this thing called | ||
| the Canada Research Chairs, which is the highest chaired professorship that the Canadian government | ||
| can bestow on a professor. | ||
| Now equity and diversity is a central metric that is looked at. | ||
| So in the context where meritocracy should be the defining ethos of everything, right? | ||
| I mean, when you run the 100 meters dash, there is no equity and diversity. | ||
| Who crosses the line the furthest, right? | ||
| The size of my CV and how many people consume the material in that CV are the metrics. | ||
| No, it's equity diversity. | ||
| So I've been a chaired professor. | ||
| I held a university-wide chair for 10 years. | ||
| And again, I got this chair in 2008 where my dossier would have been much, much less than what it is today. | ||
| I now applied for the next chair. | ||
| I lost it. | ||
| The person to whom I lost it, let me just do it. | ||
| This is her CV. | ||
| This is my CV. | ||
| I don't ovulate. | ||
| So in this case, perhaps it had something to do with the fact that she's a woman. | ||
| So you're, even though you're a refugee and an immigrant and technically, although you look just nice in bronze, you are brown. | ||
| I mean, you are brown. | ||
| You're from the Middle East. | ||
| I mean, but all of those things get thrown out the window because you don't play that card. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| When it comes to those particular identity politics calculus, the one that matters right now is that one. | ||
| I mean, or if you were indigenous or something like that. | ||
| But being brown, escaping decapitation in Lebanon is not as important as ovulation. | ||
| Yeah, I think you're going to be writing a little bit about this as well, but what do you make about what's going on right now? | ||
| There seems to be like a gender war starting or something. | ||
| What are you referring to? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So that was thought of as sexist basically because men and women like different products? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Can you give me an example of that? | ||
| 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? | ||
| I think universities will eventually adapt, but it will take much longer than 20 years. | ||
| So, and I say this somewhat facetiously, but it's actually a quite, pretty good description. | ||
| You know, we have meetings to set up task forces to hold meetings, to have a motion, to have a task force that will brainstorm, right? | ||
| That's to decide whether we should have more coffee in the mail room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's the pace at which things... The mail room, see what I'm saying? | |
| The mail, M-A-L-E, there you go. | ||
| That was toxic masculinity, exactly. | ||
| 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? | ||
| What's causing... So that the monetization of these conversations is more lucrative? | ||
| 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. | ||
| What's the behavior pattern for the people that are pulling all the levers? | ||
| So you're right that I haven't thought about it, so I'm doing it on the fly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That didn't sit too well with him. | ||
| How did the rest of the dinner go? | ||
| 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! | ||
| Yeah, Rogan is, you know, it's insane how huge he is. | ||
| That might have something to do with, that might be good for business, perhaps selling a book or sharing an idea. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Why would I turn it down? | ||
| I want to promote my ideas. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's unbelievably fun. | ||
| I wake up every day like a kid in a candy store. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I think they will eventually. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's actually a perfect segue. | ||
| Can you mention a couple of the other academics that you've had on your YouTube channel lately? | ||
| that are in some hot water because they dare speak the truth. | ||
| Yes, thank you. | ||
| I'm going to be plugging them now. | ||
| Maybe people will listen. | ||
| So I don't know if you know, but you do know that I'm quite satirical | ||
| and quite sarcastic. | ||
| So one of the- Your video hiding under the- | ||
| That's it! | ||
| Oh, is that the one you're gonna talk about? | ||
| All right, so go ahead. | ||
| So now I have a series where I hide under the table because I'm so afraid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| A lot of the freedoms that we have in the West, a lot of the feminist virtues have been pushed and supported and defended by white men. | ||
| So maybe they deserve some credit. | ||
| My God, what a Nazi. | ||
| I mean, it's almost, she's almost indistinguishable from Himmler himself. | ||
| So that's one case. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How many people came to her defense? | ||
| Very few. | ||
| The second one is a gentleman I just had last week on. | ||
| His name is Alessandro Strumia. | ||
| He is an Italian physicist at the University of Pisa who is also associated with the research center | ||
| called CERN, C-E-R-N, which is an acronym in Geneva. | ||
| This is where they're doing the colliding. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| So he's a very... | ||
| The colliding thing. | ||
| That is the extent of my scientific knowledge right now. | ||
| They're going to blow up the universe. | ||
| They're going to blow up the universe, exactly. | ||
| And so he was invited to speak at a... | ||
| Do you know what that is? | ||
| in theoretical physics or some identity politics event, basically to support the narrative | ||
| that women are deeply discriminated against in physics. | ||
| And so rather than buy into the narrative, what he decided to do is actually present bibliometric data. | ||
| Do you know what that is? | ||
| Help me out here. | ||
| Bibliometric data is, if you like, it's the scientific study of science. | ||
| For example, if you want to study which field cites which other field, you could look at citation patterns. | ||
| So it's like building networks, but a scientific network. | ||
| So you're quantifying, you're taking a snapshot of science itself. | ||
| It's the science of science. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But that data is publicly available. | ||
| That people thought of it as gauche, but originally when... Okay, so that might have been gauche, or in poor taste, but that doesn't deny the facts. | ||
| The science, exactly. | ||
| So these complete idiots, particles for justice, What an obnoxious name. | ||
| Particles for Justice. | ||
| Wait, that's actually the name? | ||
| That's actually the name. | ||
| So, which is a constellation of castrated scientists. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| About 1,600 of them. | ||
| So if I didn't have enough enemies, now I have 1,600 new enemies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Give me five more minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll see. | |
| Let's get it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They came up with a letter, an open letter. | ||
| You know, saying how bad he is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So it takes a burden on you. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Oh, particles for justice. | ||
| Yeah, particles for justice. | ||
| So let's try to steel man their argument. | ||
| What do you think they actually want? | ||
| Do they actually want that physics departments should have the exact breakdown of females? | ||
| So let's say females are like 52% and males are 48%, something like that? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Let's really give the devil his due here. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Okay, so let's take that section of them, and that's probably a huge amount of them, right? | ||
| That's just sort of the weak hostages, let's say. | ||
| So let's move those people out. | ||
| Now let's take the true believers in this. | ||
| You think they truly believe, even though they're educated, these are physicists. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They believe that that would produce, or are they putting physics aside for the purposes of equity? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Well, it's funny because I actually... Like, what do they think is more important, equity or physics, I guess is my question. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| 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? | ||
| The book is about parasitic ideas that infest our brains, causing us to behave maladaptively. | ||
| A lot of these ideas are ultimately abdication of reality, because they make me feel good in some way. | ||
| So for example, the tabula rasa premise, the empty Empty mind premise, you know, you know I'm talking about | ||
| This is basically idea that we are born with empty minds and it's only socialization | ||
| This is sort of the blank slate the blank slate exactly. So the fancy term is tabula rasa. Okay in Latin the empty | ||
| slate Okay. Well, I thought we were doing the show in English. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That makes me feel great. | ||
| It would sort of be a beautiful thing. | ||
| It's a beautiful world, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| It just is! | ||
| If my nose was all the way this way and I had one eye over here... | ||
| I wouldn't be as attractive. | ||
| But if that were true, that would smell of fatalism. | ||
| That means I'm doomed to that asymmetry. | ||
| But if you tell me, no, don't worry about it. | ||
| In the right context, people will judge your sagging breasts, your wrinkled face, your asymmetry to be as beautiful. | ||
| Look, there's the movement Fat Acceptance, for example. | ||
| Fat Acceptance Sorry. | ||
| No, no, go ahead. | ||
| This is just a doozy of one because now you have people that are in... It is not healthy to be fat. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| That is not a controversial statement. | ||
| Have we noticed that I've lost 30 pounds? | ||
| You've lost some weight, by the way. | ||
| You've lost about 30 pounds, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| Very good, very good. | ||
|
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Not bad. | |
| Well, thank you for noticing. | ||
| I sense this will work well for you in your career and life at large. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| So, physicians can be parasitized by an inability to think and detect sarcasm. | ||
| 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, | ||
| your confidence level, those are not determinants. | ||
| What is determined is the fact that women are attracted to those traits. | ||
| But you could score here on them now, and through hard work, through personal responsibility, | ||
| you could move here. | ||
| Now, my facial symmetry, I can't change. | ||
| And so in that sense, if I'm a bit- This is Los Angeles. | ||
| This is Los Angeles. | ||
| We can do anything here. | ||
| Plastic surgery, true. | ||
| So yeah, you're right. | ||
| But there are many attributes, even though we know the evolutionary roots of those attributes, it doesn't mean that we are doomed. | ||
| It simply actually informs us about those things that if we take personal responsibility, we could improve on. | ||
| I wanted to talk to you about, I asked you right before because I didn't want to screw it up, the indigenization. | ||
| Indigenization. | ||
| At the universities. | ||
| At the universities. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Every now and again I get one word that I can't quite knock out. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is their moment to shine. | ||
| This is their moment to be celebrated. | ||
| We start off by saying, you're bad. | ||
| You're on stolen land. | ||
| Admit it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So, that's one example. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| Symbolic. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| But it's not just symbolic, right? | ||
| Because doesn't that just leak into everything else? | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| You're absolutely right. | ||
| So here's what bothers me more. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You have a lot of transmitted data. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| You accept this as true? | ||
| I accept this as true. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Can you explain to me a way that they would say, how would they make the counterargument to that? | ||
| What would they be talking about? | ||
| What would be an indigenous way of knowing? | ||
| I'm not talking about the legitimate part. | ||
| Not everything is material science. | ||
| Not everything is materialism. | ||
| Not everything can be captured. | ||
| By conducting an experiment using white man science, hashtag science must fall, right? | ||
| You have to decolonize your mind, man. | ||
| You have to accept that there are, you know, Central African way of knowing, where you understand the rain to be that God is crying. | ||
| You have to, you understand what I'm saying? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| So, you have to incorporate people's mythologies and folklores into ways of knowing. | ||
| Shamanism is a way of knowing that is very different in terms of how you cure cancer that has nothing to do with Western science. | ||
| It's BS. | ||
| There is only one way of knowing, and it's called the scientific method. | ||
| By the way, people who do, for example, touch therapy. | ||
| Touch therapy is, I have an energy state and I could cure your pancreatic cancer simply by hovering, right? | ||
| Now, when you actually do a study to check the efficacy, it obviously fails. | ||
| What do you think they rebut? | ||
| Well, by putting us through the vulgar tests of science, it... That in itself removed the magic. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| So there is no indigenous way of knowing. | ||
| There is very valuable indigenous knowledge that should be maintained, preserved, and shared. | ||
| But there is no different epistemology. | ||
| There is no way to get at the truth other than the scientific method. | ||
| It's the only game in town. | ||
| How is this leaking into academia? | ||
| I mean, is this now a discipline that's being taught, or it's just sort of the lower layer of everything? | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| In curricula, it gets imported. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He was clobbered. | ||
| No, there isn't just a scientific matter. | ||
| What kind of racist pig are you? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Is there something in the water? | ||
| Yeah, well, Peterson, obviously, I think, is the pinnacle of this. | ||
| But you, but Lindsey Shepard. | ||
| There's a series of other people. | ||
| Janice Fimengo. | ||
| Janice Fimengo had in here. | ||
| Just off the charts phenomenal. | ||
| There's something happening in Canada. | ||
| Perhaps you guys had it pretty good and stayed out of world affairs enough or something, but now the internet has made us all feel the same. | ||
| I don't think there's anything. | ||
| I think it's just a statistical anomaly that a few of the forefront people happen to be from Canada. | ||
| I don't think there's anything. | ||
| This is completely, I'm not sure, but maybe the fact that we are actually getting parasitized by some of these idiotic ideas so much more quickly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So there's a weird dichotomy there? | ||
| I mean, maybe. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, it's free healthcare, other than the fact that I pay 50% of my income for it. | ||
| So if you exclude the 50% that I pay for it, it's free. | ||
| For some reason, that upsets people. | ||
| When you tell them that something that's free is actually paid for, that really upsets people. | ||
| Yeah, because they live in that utopia where the blank slate premise is the theory de rigueur. | ||
| They're idiots. | ||
| You got one more good one for me before we sign off? | ||
| I mean, we could do this forever. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Unfortunately, I got some more stuff I got to do. | ||
| Anything else that I can tell you? | ||
| Well, my book will be out next year. | ||
| I'm supposed to deliver it in October. | ||
| I'm feverishly working on it. | ||
| There was a bit of a snag last year where I wasn't able to work on it as much. | ||
| Now I'm back full throttle. | ||
| I have about half the book written in somewhat disorganized fashion. | ||
| Our books are going to come out at about the same time. | ||
| I know, that's bad news for you because of course I'm going to overshadow you. | ||
| I was about to say that we could tour together. | ||
| You see? | ||
| You're diplomatic, I'm Middle Eastern. | ||
| I have to learn from you. | ||
| Yeah, see, I try to impart a little wisdom at the end of the show. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| It's been a pleasure, as always, my friend. | ||
| Thank you, likewise. | ||
| Okay, so Patreon, obviously, but where else can people support you? | ||
| This is the thing that everyone's talking about. | ||
| So I just signed up on Subscribestar. | ||
| Also, they could follow me. | ||
| I have a YouTube channel, TheSadTruth. | ||
| At Gadsad is my Twitter handle. | ||
| Oh, I had to pimp you out. | ||
| I was just going, how can they support you? | ||
| Oh, support me fine. | ||
| Paypal? | ||
| Subscribe, star, and Patreon. | ||
| I normally don't end the show with the pimping out of that nature, but I just think people are trying to figure it out now. | ||
| They want to support good ideas in strange times. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Good for you, buddy. | ||
| Well, I love that you're doing it right alongside me. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We'll say more nice things to each other off camera. | ||
| So yes, so just very quickly, I'm trying to figure out what to do with the Patreon situation. | ||
| If you are not happy with what they're doing there, and I'm still trying to Get more information on everything. | ||
| You can go to daverubin.com slash donate if you'd like to do that. | ||
| All right, this is my last taping in the studio for 2018. | ||
| It was a completely bananas year. | ||
| I did about a hundred stops on the road, got back into stand-up. | ||
| I think we did some good stuff here. | ||
| We do have shows coming out on Monday. | ||
| I think we have Imam Tahiti, which we taped just a couple days ago. | ||
| It's really wild. | ||
| Great interview. | ||
| And then we've got Rabbi David Wolpe and Bishop Barron. | ||
| I think that's on Wednesday if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| We've got a clip show at the end of the year and a couple other things. |
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