Oct. 18, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| It is in every nook and cranny of academia. | ||
| A lot of people said exactly what you were saying. | ||
| Well, this is just some esoteric nonsense that a few bozos in the humanities and the social sciences are doing. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| Right now, most of the granting agencies that fund, you know, research in the natural sciences, | ||
| in physics and chemistry and biology and the neurosciences, will require the grant applicants | ||
| to submit a, what I call a, "Di religion statement." | ||
| "Di" stands for diversity, inclusion, and equity, where you literally have to state | ||
| right up front, irrespective of what you're studying, what is it that you've done to, | ||
| you know, promote Di principles, and what are you going to do if you were to win the | ||
| grant in promoting Di principles. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| Quick reminder, everyone, to subscribe to our YouTube channel, and then resubscribe when the subscribe gremlins unsubscribe you. | ||
| And joining us today is an evolutionary behavioral scientist, a professor of marketing at Concordia University, and author of the new book, The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. | ||
| Gadsad, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Oh my God, it's so good to see you again. | ||
| I wish it were being done in person in California, but second best. | ||
| I wish we were doing this in person. | ||
| I know that you have a love of Southern California and the sun that is almost unrivaled by other human beings. | ||
| One time we had you in here after you had been in SoCal for a few weeks, your glow, the color that you can achieve, the bronze, it almost blew out our whole system, but you have a very nice tan right now. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Not bad for up in Canada. | ||
| So before we do anything, I had to count beforehand and we were trying to figure it out. | ||
| This is either your seventh or eighth appearance on the Rubin Report. | ||
| You are now the most returning guest of the Rubin Report. | ||
| Would you say basically in terms of you've got a pretty impressive CV, your resume is looking pretty good, but where does that fall in the scheme? | ||
| I think if I only put that on my CV, I've already made it. | ||
| So you're taught. | ||
| All right, so look, I want to obviously dive into the book. | ||
| You guys sent us the book a couple weeks ago, and when I was reading it, I kept thinking that what you're explaining in this book is what about 20 of us have been yelling about for the last five years, and a whole bunch of mainstream media people kept saying, oh, this is just a college campus thing, this ain't real, you're all overstating it, you're overblowing it. | ||
| And now it's everywhere, and some of these people have actually had mea culpas. | ||
| We're seeing some people who used to mock us kind of go, oh, maybe they were kind of right about some of this stuff. | ||
| So let's try it this way for the first question. | ||
| Oh, and I can see you're putting your glasses on, so you're ready to be a learned professor. | ||
| When did the ideas Wendy, did you first notice that these bad ideas were creeping into society? | ||
| And then we'll sort of talk about what the ideas are. | ||
| So I call them, of course, in the book, idea pathogens and drawing a corollary to how animals could be parasitized by actual brain worms. | ||
| I argue that human beings can be parasitized by another class of pathogens, idea pathogens. | ||
| And hence, this is why it's called the parasitic mind. | ||
| So I first noticed it when I was a doctoral student at Cornell. | ||
| I was taking a course with my eventual doctoral supervisor, J. Edward Russo, who is a mathematical and cognitive psychologist. | ||
| And in the course, he assigned to the students some postmodernist reading that was absolutely insane. | ||
| Now, this was published in the top, the most prestigious journal in the field, Journal of Consumer Research, you know, very high impact factor amongst the social sciences. | ||
| And it was complete insanity. | ||
| It was basically What is often referred to as a, you know, the guy was talking about his consumatory experience when he gets a warm erection, thinking about his wife. | ||
| And I'm thinking, this is science? | ||
| Well, of course it's science, because according to these guys, postmodernism is my truth. | ||
| So if I share with you my truth, in a Dear Diary sense, it is just as valid as, quote, the scientific method. | ||
| And so when I was first exposed to this postmodernism, I thought it was absolute insanity. | ||
| Once I became a professor, I got my PhD in 1994, became a professor, I started seeing this postmodernist thinking throughout the halls of academia. | ||
| And it was usually coupled with a rejection of biology. | ||
| So biology is great in explaining the behavior of every single species except human beings. | ||
| So this was the first instance about 28, 30 years ago when I first faced the insanity. | ||
| So one of the things I find interesting and why I think you're such a good communicator about this stuff is a lot of people think, oh, these bad ideas and identity politics and all this stuff, well, it only is in the arts and it's only in, you know, the It is in every nook and cranny of academia. | ||
| A lot of people said exactly what you were saying. | ||
| Well, this is just some esoteric nonsense that a few bozos in the humanities and the social sciences are doing. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| Right now, most of the granting agencies that fund Uh, you know, research in the natural sciences and physics and chemistry and biology and the neurosciences will require the grant applicants to submit a, what I call a D.I.E. | ||
| religion statement. | ||
| D.I.E. | ||
| stands for diversity, inclusion, and equity, where you literally have to state right up front, irrespective of what you're studying, what is it that you've done to, you know, promote D.I.E. | ||
| principles and what are you going to do if you were to win the grant? | ||
| In promoting Dai principles. | ||
| Now, a colleague of mine at a fellow university here, a sister university in Montreal, a very prestigious university, one of my alma maters, is a physical chemist. | ||
| His grant application, he's a very, very accomplished physical chemist. | ||
| His grant application was stopped at the Dai statement because they felt that it wasn't sufficiently adhering to the Dai tenets. | ||
| So those who think that this is just some esoteric anomalous thing are absolutely wrong. | ||
| Can you go further with that? | ||
| Because I think a lot of people hear that and they're like, oh, but the statement means well, and if that helps more black or trans or whatever people get into these fields, that is somehow good. | ||
| But can you explain why that is actually antithetical to the type of research that people like you are trying to do? | ||
| Look, the scientific method liberates us from the shackles of our identity. | ||
| That's what makes it so wonderful, right? | ||
| Listening to Transcendental Experience, because I don't listen to Barry White thinking that I have a certain quota of black singers that I need to listen to. | ||
| He transcends whether he's black or white. | ||
| He gives me goosebumps because he's Barry White. | ||
| So art, literature, music, the scientific method are the laudable endeavors that they are, precisely because they remove those shackles of identity. | ||
| I come from a world of identity politics, as we've discussed on the show before, When I escaped Lebanon. | ||
| So the fundamental principle on which classical liberalism, as you well know, and many of your viewers know, is a commitment to individual dignity. | ||
| When you now say, no, your individual dignity must be tied to some tribal identity. | ||
| I don't care how accomplished you are as a physicist. | ||
| Are you a transgender person of color? | ||
| And if yes, we give you the grant or not. | ||
| What could be a greater cancer to individual dignity? | ||
| It's grotesque. | ||
| Have you seen How it sort of works its way up in institutions in terms of actually destroying the work. | ||
| So it's not just, okay, so you hire, you know, some of these people not based purely on skill. | ||
| So, you know, people can understand that. | ||
| Okay, so now you have a less qualified group of people at the bottom. | ||
| But have you seen it sort of really go up the chain of command until it's really just wiped out everything? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So in the book, I talk about one effort right now. | ||
| in Canadian universities, which refers to what's called indigenization of the university. | ||
| So the indigenization of the university has many levels. | ||
| So on one level, you have to hire more indigenous people. | ||
| So that's kind of what we've been talking about. | ||
| But this indigenization reflex goes much, much further. | ||
| There is a professor at the University of British Columbia who was denied tenure because she hadn't published a sufficient number of papers to get tenure. | ||
| She filed a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of British Columbia, arguing that she's an indigenous woman, that in her culture, the oral tradition supersedes the written word. | ||
| Therefore, by forcing me to have to publish things in tenure, that is violating my culture. | ||
| So imagine how insane that is. | ||
| But there's even a more pernicious effect of this indigenization. | ||
| This goes to the root of epistemology, philosophy of knowledge. | ||
| The scientific method is the only game in town when we're trying to adjudicate whether a hypothesis is correct or not. | ||
| There is no indigenous way of knowing. | ||
| There is no Lebanese Jewish way of knowing. | ||
| There is no gay way of knowing. | ||
| There is the scientific method. | ||
| So once we start We start saying, well, if we want to study the environment, we can't only rely on the scientific method. | ||
| We need to go to this tribe and learn from their ancestral Bugabuga. | ||
| You are violating a central tenet of the scientific method, and it is grotesque. | ||
| Okay, so that gets us to why I love the title of the book, because the word parasite, that In effect, this awful thing has attached itself to all of us. | ||
| No matter how clear-thinking you are on this, this is affecting your life in a negative way as much as it's affecting someone who believes in it in what I assume they think is a positive way. | ||
| Why the title? | ||
| Why the word parasite? | ||
| So, as an evolutionary psychologist, I often look to other animals to draw comparisons when I'm making some statement about human cognition. | ||
| That field is called comparative psychology. | ||
| Comparative in the sense that you are comparing across species. | ||
| So that's one of the tools that evolutionary scientists use when they are studying the evolution of the human mind. | ||
| So as someone who has looked at other animals, I noticed that there was this incredible field called neuroparasitology, whereby these parasitologists study how parasites can enter the host's body. | ||
| But instead of going, for example, to your intestine, a tapeworm goes to your intestine, Neuroparasites seek to infect and alter the circuitry of a host's actual brain. | ||
| So the classic example would be Toxoplasma gondii. | ||
| This is the one that many of your viewers might know. | ||
| It can infect humans, but the classic example is with mice. | ||
| So a mouse that is infected with Toxoplasma gondii loses its innate fear of cats, and it actually becomes sexually attracted to the cat's urine. | ||
| Not a very good sexual attraction to have if you're a mouse, because that helps the parasite to complete its reproductive cycle. There's | ||
| another type of parasite that attacks the brains of ungulates, moose, elk, deer, and when they are | ||
| infected with this parasite, they start engaging in circling behavior. They start going around in | ||
| circle, unable to extricate themselves from this motor pattern, so even if the predators are | ||
| coming, they won't flee. | ||
| And so I took these ideas and I said, well, you know, in a sense, that's what's happening to many people who are parasitized by these bad ideas. | ||
| Instead of going around in circle like the helpless, the hapless moose, it leads us to the abyss of infinite lunacy. | ||
| I'll just give you one other quick example. | ||
| There is something called the spider wasp. | ||
| The spider wasp will parasitize spiders by stinging them. | ||
| It then takes this much larger spider into its burrow. | ||
| It lays an egg, and then as the egg hatches, it eats the spider in vivo. | ||
| Basically, the spider is alive, but zombified. | ||
| Well, I argue that political correctness is exactly akin to the spider wasp's sting. | ||
| It keeps us lulled, and it leads us to the abyss of lunacy. | ||
| So in a weird way, do you admire it? | ||
| Do you admire the genius behind it at a certain level? | ||
| Not the ideas specifically, obviously, but it's sort of, when you were talking about that, what was ringing in my head was the movie Alien, and there's this scene where one, you know, and you can think of the alien as the parasite, right? | ||
| But one of the scientists, they really admire the beauty of it, the ingenious Well, I'm glad you mentioned aliens because it literally is a manifestation of invaders of the body snatchers. | ||
| In this case, of the mind snatchers, right? | ||
| That's exactly what it is doing. | ||
| to send them out into the universe, there's a certain beauty as horrific as it is, right? | ||
| Well, I'm glad you mentioned aliens because it literally is a manifestation of invaders | ||
| of the body snatchers, in this case, of the mind snatchers, right? | ||
| That's exactly what it is doing. | ||
| And if you read the neuroparasitology literature, it really reads like science fiction | ||
| because there's this incredible evolutionary dance between the host and the parasite | ||
| where the parasite is trying to always find ever clever ways, as you said, admirable ways | ||
| to dupe the host into its own reproductive pursuits. | ||
| So in that nefarious diabolic sense, yes, I admire these incredible mind viruses. | ||
| So do you think that the host, in this case, just the average social justice warrior walking down the street or the average person who gets infected through fake news, bad news, whatever it might be, the part that they're getting from this is somehow like, is it an ego stroking that they're getting? | ||
| Or is it a, I understand the way the world really is and nobody else? | ||
| What is it that the host is actually getting? | ||
| It seems to be a replacement for religion or belief or something like that. | ||
| I mean, I think it's a combination of those factors. | ||
| One of the things that I talk about in the book is that all of these various idea pathogens share a couple of things in common. | ||
| One is they are ways by which we can free ourselves from the shackles of reality. | ||
| I mean, literally so, right? | ||
| So militant feminism frees us from the shackles of biology. | ||
| Postmodernism frees us from the shackles of universal truths. | ||
| Trance activism. | ||
| You put trance on anything as a prefix and it frees you from your genitalia. | ||
| It frees you from your race. | ||
| I just need to put trance and that's it, right? | ||
| So, for example, I trance self-identified that yesterday I fasted on Yom Kippur. | ||
| I didn't, but I self-identified as having done so. | ||
| Therefore, I was a trance Yom Kippur faster. | ||
| You get it? | ||
| So, all of these different idea pathogens liberate us from the shackles of reality. | ||
| But they also do something else. | ||
| They all start from a noble place. | ||
| And I mean noble not in the satirical way I often use on social media. | ||
| I literally mean it. | ||
| They start off with a good intention. | ||
| So, for example, if you look at all of the social constructivists, social constructivists are those that reject biology as being relevant in explaining human affairs. | ||
| Everything is due to a social construction. | ||
| Well, that penchant began as a noble desire to free the human condition from biology because all sorts of really nefarious evil folks had misused Darwinian theory, right? | ||
| The Nazis said, It's a natural struggle between the races. | ||
| The Jews lost. | ||
| We're the Aryans. | ||
| Hey, that's Darwinian. | ||
| What's wrong with killing the Jews, right? | ||
| Eugenicists say the same thing. | ||
| Hey, if you are gay, we sterilize you so that you don't reproduce. | ||
| We get your genes out of the pool. | ||
| Hey, it's Darwinian. | ||
| Well, of course, it's got nothing to do with Darwinian theory, but the ones who were promulgating these idea pathogens were coming from a noble place. | ||
| If we create a new reality, hopefully we can forestall these bad things. | ||
| So they start off with noble causes. | ||
| I can't do one show without saying the road to hell is paved with good intentions. | ||
| That's what it always seems to boil down to one way or another. | ||
| So do you think that for those of us that were on YouTube and podcasts and everything else and with the whole You know, intellectual dark web phenomenon and that whole thing that largely has sort of disappeared, oddly, when we sort of need it most. | ||
| Do you think in a way, I want to word this correctly, do you think we failed in a way? | ||
| Because we were talking about all of this stuff, a bunch of us were, Jordan and Peterson, obviously, and Ben Shapiro and the Weinstein Brothers and a whole slew of other people. | ||
| It's not that we weren't discussing these things and Sam Harris, of course, But it still all happened. | ||
| It's still all here we are. | ||
| Do you think we missed something? | ||
| Was there something else that we could have done that would have been a better defense against the pathogen? | ||
| No, because I think that to eradicate these pathogens, it's a long-term game. | ||
| It took 40, 50 years of brainwashing, of parasitic infestation in academia. | ||
| I always say, by the way, it takes intellectuals to come up with The truly dumbest ideas. | ||
| This is why all these idea pathogens start within the university ecosystem. | ||
| So it took 40, 50 years before we ended up with Justin Trudeau as prime minister, who basically embodies all of the idea pathogens that I discuss in the book. | ||
| So the fact that the IDW came up was certainly a good thing because you had some people with large platforms who were calling, you know, alarm, you know, ringing the alarm bell. | ||
| It really does require the involvement of every single individual to truly win this battle. | ||
| So when I tell people, you know, I get millions of emails, and so do you, where someone says, well, I don't have your platform. | ||
| I'm not the fancy professor. | ||
| I'm not Dave Rubin. | ||
| I'm not Joe Rogan. | ||
| What can I do? | ||
| Well, you can do a lot. | ||
| When someone, when your professor says something in class that you find is objectionable, challenge them politely. | ||
| If someone says something on Facebook that you disagree with, challenge them politely. | ||
| In other words, It's trench warfare. | ||
| It's not just Ruben and Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad who are holding the mantle of, you know, killing these idea pathogens. | ||
| Everybody who has a stake in this battle, which is everybody who wants the commitment to reason, logic, science, and common sense, should be engaged in the battle. | ||
| The problem is most people, because of cowardice, because they diffuse responsibility on others, don't get engaged, and therefore the idea pathogens keep eating away at us. | ||
| Well, that would sort of make you admire the pathogen in a double fashion, wouldn't it? | ||
| Because it's using their own fear against them. | ||
| It's using their nobility. | ||
| They think they're doing something good at some level. | ||
| And then it's also using fear to keep them quiet once they wake up to it. | ||
| Pretty clever. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| No, it's beautiful, right? | ||
| I mean, that's why propagandists are so desired because They know how to construct the machinery of the meme so that it can have maximal impact, right? | ||
| So they are virologists of the human mind. | ||
| One of my endorsers, by the way, in the book is Paul Offit. | ||
| The reason why I chose him, I mean, first, he's a great guy. | ||
| He's a virologist. | ||
| He's a pediatrician who's developed some vaccines for child, you know, viruses. | ||
| The reason why I wanted him to, because in the same way that he combats Actual viruses that go around your body, I'm combating viruses of the human mind. | ||
| So we're both parasitologists, just dealing with different organs and different types of pathogens. | ||
| Yeah, do you think there's a limit? | ||
| We got into this a little bit when you interviewed me on your show about my book. | ||
| Do you think there's a limit to how the human mind can fight this? | ||
| So one of the things that I've sort of come around to is that the people that rely purely I just don't believe it anymore. | ||
| that just logic and reason in and of itself are enough to coordinate a society that can fight | ||
| all these horrible ideas. | ||
| I just don't believe it anymore. | ||
| I think that's why we've seen these ideas just infect everything. | ||
| Do you think that logic and reason in and of itself are enough? | ||
| Because I think we've sort of watched a lot of our crew, let's say, sort of become irrelevant in this fight, because relying on logic and reason sometimes isn't enough. | ||
| Yeah, so in chapter two of my book, the book is about thinking versus feeling, right? | ||
| Truth versus hurt feelings. | ||
| And the reason why I set up that dichotomy is precisely to address, in a sense, some of your points, which is it's not so much that these two systems should be pitted against each other. | ||
| It's not that we are a thinking animal or a feeling animal. | ||
| It's that depending on the condition, we should trigger the right system. | ||
| So when I'm walking down an alley to take a shortcut to get home and I see four young men loitering around, my heart will start pounding. | ||
| I'll start getting nervous. | ||
| I'm getting a evolved fear-based response that makes perfect sense. | ||
| In this case, my affective system has kicked in, and it makes sense that it would do so. | ||
| On the other hand, my affective system will not help me get an A-plus on my calculus exam. | ||
| I need to trigger, in this case, my cognitive system, right? | ||
| My higher-order cognition. | ||
| And so, you're exactly right. | ||
| You can't always, when you're trying to change hearts and minds, only use reason and logic. | ||
| Although, in Chapter 7 of the book, I do talk about How we can construct nomological networks to try to convince people of our position, which we can talk about. | ||
| But I also use satire. | ||
| I use sarcasm, as you know. | ||
| That's really getting to your emotional-based system, right? | ||
| So really, you have to be someone who's got a whole toolbox of persuasion strategies, and you pull out the right tool depending on the context. | ||
| So it's not reason or emotions. | ||
| Use the right one in the right context. | ||
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Right. | |
| So with that in mind, though, does it surprise you that your allies these days would line up more on the right, even though I know you consider yourself an old school liberal and that was sort of your home? | ||
| I know a little something about that. | ||
| Are you surprised or do you think that this was just the natural extension of where this was all going to go? | ||
| Well, it more than surprises me, it makes me indignant because the word liberal has been usurped. | ||
| The word progressive has been usurped. | ||
| Again, it's a propagandist game, right? | ||
| So, by the way, most people are such cognitive misers that if you ask them, why are you voting for the liberal party, let's say Justin Trudeau, it will literally end at the fact, well, I'm liberal. | ||
| That's the liberal party. | ||
| I'm not conservative. | ||
| I mean, it's literally that. | ||
| It's fast and frugal, right? | ||
| The Democrats seem progressive. | ||
| The conservatives seem like mean and old fashioned. | ||
| That's the level of cognition that people attribute to these types of decisions. | ||
| So in that sense, I'm not surprised that I'm now tied to the conservative values because that's really where the home of true freedom lies today. | ||
| So I don't care to be in... I'm in the tribe of truth. | ||
| I don't have a home. | ||
| Yeah, but do you see a moment, I mean I guess this is what I'm trying, because I'm still trying to parse this out for myself, do you see a moment or a weakness in liberalism? | ||
| So I think what you're saying is you see the weakness as too much of a reliance on only one piece of the toolkit, right? | ||
| Like you're saying it's just too much based in logic and reason and that their toolkit, whether it's about belief or satire or something else, they needed some other tools, something like that? | ||
| Sure, and I mean, I think you probably have seen this, that when they talk about, you know, who does, which of the two parties is better at creating memes, viral memes? | ||
| I mean, in a sense, right? | ||
| Who is better at comedy, right? | ||
| I have a section in the book where I talk about all sorts of professors, incredibly, you know, prominent professors who were all canceled because of a misplaced joke. | ||
| I mean, Having a Nobel Prize does not protect you from the ire of the angry humorless ones, right? | ||
| Then I refer to a book, well, originally a book, but then a movie, The Name of the Rose. | ||
| If you remember The Name of the Rose, did you see it, Dave, by the way? | ||
| I didn't see it, no. | ||
| Well, it's an amazing movie that takes place, I think, in the 11th or 12th century, starring Sean Connery and a young Christian Slater. | ||
| Where a whole bunch of monks are dying and it turns out that they're dying. | ||
| I don't want to give it away in case anybody wants to see it because one monk is trying to stop them from reading a book that has satire and comedy. | ||
| So satire and comedy is exactly forbidden whenever a dictator comes to town | ||
| because it is so incredibly powerful to try to show the holes in a particular ideology. | ||
| That's why I use it. | ||
| By the way, some of our common friends who are highfalutin and so highbrow in the ivory towers, | ||
| they're actually fraudulent because by not using all of the tools | ||
| that are at your disposal to try to shape hearts and minds, you're losing an opportunity. | ||
| So, I never consider myself above the use of all sorts of tools. | ||
| So, for example, you've seen me use the... I don't know if you've seen my hiding under the table routine. | ||
| What am I doing there? | ||
| I am mocking the hysteria. | ||
| Now, this hysteria, by the way, It's not something that I'm making up. | ||
| You could go to my personal page where these incredibly accomplished female professors are literally saying to one another that they are now going to be afraid to go to campus because this new justice might come into, you know, might be nominated and confirmed and therefore it will be too dangerous for them. | ||
| I mean, do you genuinely believe that? | ||
| I mean, are you this idiotic? | ||
| So it's frustrating. | ||
| That's why I'm often so indignant. | ||
| I think you probably saw a little bit of it, but I know most of my audience has seen it, when I did a talk at University of New Hampshire, and they're screaming at me and heckling me and the whole thing and pulling fire alarms, and this woman, or girl, student, starts screaming, we could be killed when we walk out of here! | ||
| And I said to her, I was like, what are you talking about? | ||
| I mean, it's New Hampshire. | ||
| We're in New Hampshire at 5 p.m. | ||
| as if people are just being mowed down on the streets. | ||
| But what I realized was the way she yelled it to me shows how the parasite, to bring it to this conversation, had overridden all of her logic and reason. | ||
| And certainly humor was really off the table. | ||
| And what was left was just sort of this screaming lunacy. | ||
| Does that also show you the emotional state? | ||
| It's all tied into their emotional state, too. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The one who is most hysterical wins. | ||
| Just like I have a section in the book where I talk about the one who has the highest victimology score wins. | ||
| Now, many people that have probably come on your show have talked about the victimology currency and what I call victimology poker, but I may or may not have discussed on a prior show when I came on your platform, I offer the actual psychiatric Explanation for why this victimology currency has become the most important metric by which we adjudicate debates, right? | ||
| It's no longer about, here's my argument, please give me yours and let's see who wins in the battle of ideas. | ||
| It's who screams louder, who's more hysterical, who's the bigger victim? | ||
| And I argue, so 10 years ago in 2010, I had written a scientific paper published in a medical journal where I was talking about Munchausen syndrome. | ||
| And Munchausen syndrome by proxy. | ||
| Munchausen syndrome is where someone feigns a medical condition so that they can garner sympathy and empathy. | ||
| Munchausen syndrome by proxy is when you take someone who's under your care, your biological child, your pet, your elderly parent, you harm them willfully so that you can then garner the empathy and sympathy by proxy. | ||
| And so I argued that the hysteria that we see today, the Jussie Smollett, who is no longer satisfied with making a million dollars | ||
| per episode, he needs to be the biggest victim. If he doesn't have a victimology narrative, he hasn't | ||
| succeeded. Well, the mechanism by which this instantiates itself is through what I call collective | ||
| Munchhausen and collective Munchhausen by proxy. How do you think Trump possibly understood this? | ||
| It seems very obvious to me that he understands, you know, he may not understand every scientific principle you're laying out there or the research behind or something, but just that he intuitively understands, and if he was watching this, would say, oh yeah, that's the stuff I'm fighting against. | ||
| I think it's, so one of the things that I teach my students, whether it be at the undergraduate, MBA, PhD, and I'm trying to explain to them the biological roots of consumer behavior, I say, look, Ultimately, a good marketer is one who understands human nature. | ||
| And exactly what you said. | ||
| They may not have taken my courses or read my books to know the scientific mechanisms behind the principles, but they know if this product X will work or not as a function of whether it is congruent with human nature or not. | ||
| So what Trump has is a good understanding. | ||
| He's an evolutionary psychologist. | ||
| He may be a crass evolutionary psychologist. | ||
| He may be a vulgar one. | ||
| He may not use the right vernacular. | ||
| He may not have a big lexicon. | ||
| But he certainly understands human nature, and that allows him to win in these exchanges in ways that the other idiots don't. | ||
| Do you think there's a way that they all sort of need him? | ||
| One of the things I've been thinking about lately is how, if you take the real never-Trump conservatives, the people who he's doing the stuff that they always wanted done, the conservative stuff, he's doing it, but yeah, they don't like his affect and all that. | ||
| And then you take the, you know, sort of the disaffected lefties who can't support him, even if he's saving the republic in some odd way, because they want to go to nice parties, that they both need Trump. | ||
| Do you think that there's like actually a reasoning behind that? | ||
| Like they need to point to somebody else to sort of inflate their own value? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, I think, I do remember on a previous show, I talked about Trump representing an aesthetic injury, right? | ||
| So I walk around the world, you know, highfalutin language and sipping and looking at those great unwashed people. | ||
| And therefore I expect those around me to speak with that, you know, affectation, to, to speak with that vernacular and so on. | ||
| And then here comes this brash, is he from Queens? | ||
| Where is he from? | ||
| Queens, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So he's from Queens, he's vulgar, he's brash, he's a guy, you know. | ||
| Yes, he's wealthy, but he seems like he's got an eighth grade, eighth level, you know, vocabulary. | ||
| And he repudiates all the things that stroke my ego. | ||
| I'm speaking now as, let's say, the highfalutin lefty, right? | ||
| How could this guy ascend to the highest office when I've made a career out of repudiating all that he stands for? | ||
| If he is successful, I am a fraud. | ||
| Therefore, I have to put him up on top of this mountain and constantly enunciate how much he disgusts me, how much he is an existential threat. | ||
| I mean, the people who have said that he is an existential threat for four years, every day they reset the counter. | ||
| Today is when the earth will end. | ||
| Then it's like the doomsday cults, right? | ||
| What did they say? | ||
| On July 7th is when the day ends, the world ends. | ||
| When it doesn't end that day, they change the date. | ||
| That's what the existential- They forgot to carry the one. | ||
| That's what usually happens. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's so interesting because as I see this all unfold and then I do now, it's a weird thing. | ||
| It feels like sci-fi to me, but I see Trump as sort of a bulwark against it. | ||
| I also see sort of that they wouldn't, it's almost as if they wouldn't know how to define themselves. | ||
| I think that's what you're getting to, that if they didn't have that thing, but yet at the same time, to me, that's like, you know, the barbarians are at the gate, they're about to push the gate down. | ||
| There's one guy guarding the door and you're mocking that guy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Doesn't end well for you, probably. | |
| Was it Douglas Murray? | ||
| I haven't read his book yet, but I think he's the one who said something like, You know, as the folks are coming to take over, you're worried about their gender pronouns or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like I said, as the barbarians are at the gate, we'll be debating what gender pronouns they use. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Sorry, I just closed the printer. | ||
| So that's exactly it. | ||
| And so, look, I think on a previous show, you and I had discussed what are some of the reasons why a whole bunch, you know, 63 million people voted for him, right? | ||
| And one of the reasons I gave at the time, which is worth repeating, is that people, Trump might fail if you put a whole bunch of attributes together. | ||
| In other words, his whole package might be inferior to someone else or not. | ||
| We can debate that. | ||
| But if you use, for example, a lexicographic rule, lexicographic rule basically says, I look at my most important attribute and I choose the one that scores the best of that most important attribute. | ||
| Well, if I use that decision rule, There's an endless number of ways by which I can choose Trump. | ||
| If I care about authenticity, well, whether you like his authenticity or not, he's more authentic than other candidates, therefore he would win. | ||
| If you don't like open borders, and that's the only attribute you care about, he would win. | ||
| So there is an endless number of perfectly rational decision rules that I could apply, and it could come out perfectly rationally for Trump to win. | ||
| What upsets me about some of our common friends is that they're not willing to entertain that conversation. | ||
| Which, by the way, speaks to an important thing in my book, which is the fact that you are educated and intelligent doesn't serve as an inoculation against you being parasitized by idea pathogens. | ||
| Because many of our common friends have PhDs, and they're accomplished, and they've written great books, and guess what? | ||
| They're some of the biggest sufferers of ostrich parasitic syndrome. | ||
| Yeah, and that's not to throw anyone under the bus. | ||
| I mean, this is purely just to, I think continue to try to wake people up to some of this stuff. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Look, some of our common friends with whom I have, by the way, yesterday I put up a thing where I was defending Richard Dawkins for having been de-platformed at Trinity College Dublin. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| People were sending me angry emails saying, well, why are you defending him? | ||
| You know how he was going crazy about Trump or how he's going crazy about Brexit. | ||
| The fact that I defend him because of a universal principle doesn't imply that I have to agree or disagree with him on every other issue. | ||
| And the fact that I have to enunciate this clearly to you shows you how parasitized most people are. | ||
| 20 years ago, when you were first teaching about this stuff, and even before that, when you were in school learning about all this, did you ever think that you were going to be talking about politics? | ||
| Because you spend a lot of time, you know, it's not that you're talking about politics all the time, but everything is now political, and you talk about politics on Twitter, and when I bring you on, or you go on other shows, people ask you your thoughts on politics. | ||
| Does that seem like it was going to be the obvious end of all of this, that because of the way it spreads, that it would end up there? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I would be lying if I said I had the foresight of where my engagement was gonna go. | ||
| What was clear from my training is I was studying psychology of decision-making. | ||
| So one of the things when you study psychology of decision-making, one of the things you do is you study what's called rational choice. | ||
| So for example, if I prefer car A to car B, and I prefer car B to car C, it has to be that I prefer car A to car C. | ||
| That's called the transitivity axiom. | ||
| If I violate this order of preference, then I am being, quote, irrational. | ||
| So part of my training in my doctoral studies was to study psychology of decision-making or behavioral decision theory, which, by the way, led to a Nobel Prize to one of my professors at Cornell, Richard Thaler. | ||
| And so I come from a group of folks, several of whom have won the Nobel Prize, for demonstrating that economic decision making is sometimes faulty. | ||
| So it was already part of my training to study irrational behavior. | ||
| But what was a surprise to me was that the irrationality would seep its way from this very circumscript, you know, mathematical axiom to politics, to popular culture. | ||
| So in a sense, I was trained to look at human irrationality. | ||
| I just didn't know that I would go into all these different fields. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We've talked about this a little bit but since I haven't had you on for probably maybe it's eight or ten months or something around there. | ||
| Maybe even longer. | ||
| Can you just talk a little bit about what it's like just sort of in the world of academia right now and just dealing with other professors and have you been ostracized by other people and other kind of headaches because I think humanizing some of that stuff, you're not just some spinning neuron out there. | ||
| You're a human. | ||
| You've got a family and people you work with and the rest of it. | ||
| It's not that this has no cost. | ||
| Some might say a very good-looking human, but yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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A gorgeous bronze man. | |
| So I'll answer this in several ways. | ||
| So one of the things that people often tell me, well, you know, you're protected by tenure, Professor, so it doesn't take such courage, Dr. Saad. | ||
| Well, in 2017, I had to Whenever I would go to teach courses on campus, I had to be accompanied by security who would then lock the door of my class so that if people left the room, they'd have to knock to be let back in because of the number of death threats I was getting. | ||
| When I would leave campus, when my wife would come to pick me up, I would literally have something akin to kind of a deflation from an anxiety attack because I didn't know when they were going to come at me. | ||
| Are the three guys that are in the elevator with me, are they the ones who are going to decapitate me? | ||
| So tenure doesn't protect you from that. | ||
| Tenure doesn't protect you from all of the opportunities I would have had as an academic. | ||
| Other job offers, higher salary. | ||
| I've been denied now several years in a row a chaired professorship, which I had held for 10 years, and it would be a cinch for me to get it renewed. | ||
| But because now how outspoken I am, and as known as I am now, a lot of people who would be sitting on the committees to decide whether to give me the chaired professorship or not, are not very happy with my Supposed big mouth and irreverent attitude, and therefore I don't get that shared professorship. | ||
| That shared professorship comes with a lot of money. | ||
| But do you think it's because they are so infected that they're against the ideas, or that they perhaps subtly agree with you? | ||
| I suspect some of the people in your department probably agree with you, but don't want to publicly, you know, if they're the ones that vote on you getting in, well now they're screwed. | ||
| And that goes to the cowardice thing that we were talking about earlier. | ||
| I get that a lot. | ||
| You're absolutely right that the silent majority, I think even within academia, is not on board with this lunacy. | ||
| But again, the fact that they are a minority doesn't suggest that their diabolical destruction is not something to worry about, right? | ||
| I always tell people, how many committed zealots did it take to bring down the Twin Towers. | ||
| Was it 190,000 people? | ||
| No, it took 19 people, right? | ||
| So I don't need 9,000 blue-haired social justice warriors on campus to keep the rest of us be quiet. | ||
| I just need a few of them that are a lot more vociferous and committed than the rest of us and then they will cow us into silence. | ||
| So I think many professors are exactly what you said. | ||
| They write to me, thank you so much. | ||
| You're keeping me sane. | ||
| I don't know how you have the courage to do this. | ||
| I would have left academia were it not because of you. | ||
| And then they will often write, so what do you suggest I do? | ||
| Because I'm afraid. | ||
| And then I always tell them the same thing. | ||
| It sounds harsh, but it really is. | ||
| It cuts to the truth. | ||
| The 18-year-old guys who landed on Normandy were not granted safe passage. | ||
| They knew that 60-70% of them would be mowed down like little mosquitoes, and yet they did it so that Dave Rubin and Gad Saad could sit here and speak freely today. | ||
| So whatever it is that you are afraid of, it is a lot less than the guys who landed on Normandy. | ||
| So stop being a coward and speak out. | ||
| It's so interesting because I don't come from the world of academia, so I think one of the things that has harmed some of our friends' ability to talk about this stuff is they still want to be liked in those circles. | ||
| You come from those circles and you've paid a price. | ||
| I don't come from those circles, so that cost is very low for me, but what I find is I'm very frustrated that By the people, right now it's like, look, Trump is getting critical race theory out of the federal government. | ||
| That is incredible, right? | ||
| That's what everybody, what we've all been talking about, identity politics. | ||
| It's like he's getting it out of the federal government and the contractors the feds can work with. | ||
| He got rid of Title IX. | ||
| That meant where, you know, in effect there was no due process anymore. | ||
| I thought liberals were for due process. | ||
| But it's like they can't give him that credit. | ||
| So my frustration these days is so aimed At what was my side, that it's not a comfortable spot to be in, actually. | ||
| Well, because their tribalism supersedes their desire to be truthful. | ||
| So there is a tension that I discuss in The Parasitic Mind between two types of ethical systems. | ||
| There's deontological ethics. | ||
| Deontological ethics is absolute truth. | ||
| It is never okay to lie. | ||
| That would be a deontological statement. | ||
| A consequentialist ethical If your wife or husband asks you, do I look fat in those jeans? | ||
| You might lie to protect their ego. | ||
| Therefore, it is consequentialist, okay, to lie in this case because it's a better cause. | ||
| Well, a lot of- You might just want to get laid that night, Gad, as long as we're being truthful. | ||
| Which is an evolutionary thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So as an evolutionist, I could perhaps don't lie. | |
| But when it comes to the truth, and certainly important elements of truth, Then you should never be a consequentialist. | ||
| So you should never negate biological realities in the pursuit of social justice. | ||
| I could both walk and chew at the same time. | ||
| I could be for social justice in the true sense. | ||
| I am for trans rights. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I take great flak for supporting trans rights in the Middle East, which they have a much more difficult reality than trans rights on Oberlin College, right? | ||
| But I don't support, because of my support for trans rights doesn't mean that a 270-pound guy who is 6'4", who decides that he is now a woman, can compete with biological women who are half his size and to say otherwise would make me a transphobe. | ||
| So I could chew and walk at the same time. | ||
| Yeah, well, it seems that a lot of people can't do that these days. | ||
| What do you think it will take truly to get us past this? | ||
| That seems to be the next step of this conversation. | ||
| Okay, we talked about it for a while, we understand it, now the masses see a problem. | ||
| But what is the thing beyond just the courage part? | ||
| I mean, what would be a societal way to actually put some of this stuff behind us? | ||
| So certainly having sort of a cataclysmic savior, Trump, come along. | ||
| But the reality is Trump is gonna be out either in a few months or in a few years. | ||
| So you can't just rely on Trump because he ended critical race theory, | ||
| then the problem, that idea pathogen is gonna go away forever. | ||
| But you certainly need some-- | ||
| I'm mad, I thought he's never gonna step down and he's gonna be president until 2064 or something. | ||
| I could have, I thought-- | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| So certainly having someone who was able to come from the outside and redress many of these things is great, but I truly think it's a long game, you know, war. | ||
| There has to be involvement for every... So I'll give you an example. | ||
| One of my children, her science teacher has a BLM sign as an avatar. | ||
| So I could do one of two things at that point. | ||
| I could say, well, forget it. | ||
| Or I could write politely, without being too bombastic, without engaging in all sorts of gadisms, you know, cutting satire. | ||
| I could write to her politely and say, you know, is it appropriate for a science teacher who is educating my young child To espouse a particular position? | ||
| What if we don't agree with this position, right? | ||
| So I can, at that point, I have a bifurcation. | ||
| I can either get involved or not get involved. | ||
| That has to happen 300 million times a day in every interaction and every exchange. | ||
| If that happens, the wall of bullshit will collapse quickly. | ||
| If it doesn't, it will be a long, drawn-out, needless war. | ||
| So this is why I implore people, get engaged. | ||
| Your voice matters. | ||
| It's not only up to Dave Rubin to change the course of culture. | ||
| Each of you is important. | ||
| Obviously, I have to ask you, did you ask the teacher to do anything? | ||
| I know we all pick our spots, we pick our fights. | ||
| What would you do? | ||
| I haven't yet because, you know, My wife was worried that I might engage in some sort of cutting positions that might not be modulated well enough and that might cause sort of a retribution to my daughter. | ||
| So in that particular case, I've yet to do it, but I can tell you that my daughter has often come up to me and said, Daddy, the BLM is still up. | ||
| So I think she's kind of almost egging me to get involved. | ||
| And in a sense, look, by my children being around me and seeing the positions that I take, That's one of the ways by which I fight, right? | ||
| So if I do that and you do that with your children, he does that with his... By the way, the Cretans are always trying to introduce the idea of pathogens ever so earlier. | ||
| So it starts with the universities, then we go to the high schools, then we go to the elementaries. | ||
| Because the best time to reach a mind, to make it as malleable as you can, is when it doesn't have yet the cognitive defenses to protect itself against the idea of pathogens. | ||
| By the way, she's the one who made the joke yesterday, she was eating something during Kippur, and she said, well, don't worry, daddy, I self-identify as... Right? | ||
| So, this little child who has heard my satire was able to construct that satirical moment. | ||
| I was told a story by a friend of mine who has a five-year-old that the school year just started, and that the parents sent around a note to the other parents in the class that the biological boy, he's a boy at home but wants to be a girl at school, and so they want everyone to refer to him as whatever the girl name is, the female name at school, but then he goes home and he's a boy again. | ||
| And again, this is not mocking trans people or anything like that, but it's sort of the way it all spills over so that everyone else has to behave the way you want them to behave. | ||
| But also, could this possibly have come from the five-year-old? | ||
| I want to be a girl at school, but a boy at home. | ||
| Like, it doesn't really sound like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| And listen, I have my younger son, who's younger than my daughter, once came up to me and I did a sad truth clip on it on my channel. | ||
| Where he saw something, I can't remember the exact details, but it was something like the futurist female, male toxicity, toxic masculinity. | ||
| And he was sitting with me watching, and he kind of looked at me, and I don't remember his exact words, but he said something like, Daddy, are boys really bad? | ||
| It was really with the innocence of a young child. | ||
| And imagine that you are inculcating to half the world's population known as boys, this kind of pathological stage, right? | ||
| You're pathologizing masculinity. | ||
| It's grotesque. | ||
| We could be feminists, in the truest sense of the term, in the Christina Hough Summer sense of the word, without being pathologizing half of the world called boys. | ||
| Yeah, I know Jordan wrote a blurb, Jordan Peterson wrote a blurb for the book. | ||
| That's really what he was hitting on, more than anything else, right? | ||
| I mean, he was trying to, well, I can't say more than anything else, but in conjunction with many other big things, That you can't say to all these boys, you're inherently evil. | ||
| And now he's been gone for a year and a half, and I think a lot of people are lost without that. | ||
| Yeah, and I gotta say, since he is a common friend, when I wrote to Jordan, it was to get from him the endorsement for the book, it was literally at the worst possible time when he was going through all his stuff, and he writes right back to me and says, you are literally the first person I'm responding to You know, since opening my laptop, this is the kind of friendship that matters, right? | ||
| Jordan and I can disagree on some things. | ||
| We disagree on Jung. | ||
| We disagree on... But even if we disagree on points A and B, when it comes to going into the trenches together, you want to have guys who have your back. | ||
| And at his lowest moment, he was willing to take time. | ||
| So, love the guy. | ||
| Dad, are you telling me that academic people could have different beliefs, come to different conclusions, and not try to get each other fired or kicked out of the university or out of all the social clubs? | ||
| Incredible, isn't it? | ||
| Who knew? | ||
| It's just bizarre. | ||
| What else can the average person do? | ||
| I mean, that to me is where this all comes together. | ||
| The average guy. | ||
| I mean, because what it always comes down to also is the person going, forget the tenured part that you talked about at whatever, and that certain people's makeup isn't to be combative. | ||
| But just the person who's going, you know, I'm just at whatever my job is, you know, I'm a decent, hardworking person. | ||
| I've got kids. | ||
| I've got all these other responsibilities. | ||
| And for me to do that little jump, even though I think most people agree with you, most people heard what you said and they go, well, if 300 million people all did it once, we really could change something overnight. | ||
| But in their own life, they just can't do it. | ||
| Are there any other tricks? | ||
| This is the question I get all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, so in Chapter 8, the last chapter, I do have a set of prescriptions. | ||
| The chapter is called Call to Action, so I'll give you a few. | ||
| One of them does address the fact that you said, oh, some of them are not combative. | ||
| The reality is you can't have your values and principles murdered and raped without ever being combative. | ||
| If I'm walking down the street with my wife and three guys come to gang rape her, I can't Sorry, sweetie, I'm not combative, so good luck, right? | ||
| So, I have to, and then one of the prescriptions I have is activate your inner honey badger. | ||
| Now, the reason why, again, I use this animal comparison, because honey badgers don't give an F, right? | ||
| Honey badgers, you can have a pride of lines, six lines. | ||
| You can go on YouTube and see those clips. | ||
| You can have six lines approach a honey badger. | ||
| A honey badger is the size of Emma, may she rest in peace, a small dog. | ||
| The response will be so ferocious that the six lines will look at each other and go, what the hell? | ||
| I don't want part of this, right? | ||
| So you can't really fight in a war, in this case, a war of ideas, without ever triggering your ire, without ever being indignant. | ||
| So you can't be passive. | ||
| You can't be castrated. | ||
| So unfortunately, you have to at once, once in a while, be kebab. | ||
| So activate your inner honey badger. | ||
| I also have another one where I say, be the penalty kicker. | ||
| In soccer, there is, If there's a foul inside the box, the goalie box, there's a penalty kick from 12 yards away. | ||
| Someone has to step up and take a penalty kick. | ||
| Now, it's a very harrowing experience because the goalie expects to not be able to save it. | ||
| If the guy who misses it, misses it, he's an asshole. | ||
| He's a loser. | ||
| So, really, the one who steps up to take it is the one who says, I want this coach. | ||
| Put the responsibility on me. | ||
| It's the one that has the fortitude to do it. | ||
| Well, you have to do that. | ||
| You can't You know, you can't subcontract and diffuse the responsibility onto others. | ||
| There is no magic recipe. | ||
| You all have to get engaged. | ||
| That's the bottom line. | ||
| So as a behavioral scientist, have you ever met anyone who did some of these things, found their honey badger, took the penalty kick, the rest of it? | ||
| Anyone who did some of these things and regretted it long-term? | ||
| Oh, well, that's a good question. | ||
| No, I thought you were going to ask me, do you know anybody other than myself who is a honey badger? | ||
| No, I've got my short list of people here. | ||
| No, but really, because that's one of the things I find. | ||
| I always say to people, you know, there's pain, your family members are going to turn on you, friends are going to turn on you, co-workers, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But I still, to this day, I personally have never met anyone that regrets it. | ||
| No, and I tell you, I think I can answer it for myself. | ||
| The reason why I never regret it is because at the end of the day, I have a very exacting code of personal conduct. | ||
| So when I go to bed at night and I put my head on the pillow, I have to feel before I go to sleep, otherwise I'll have insomnia, that I've done all that I could, however big or however small, to contribute to the battle. | ||
| If I walked away tepidly from a place where I could have intervened, then I will feel like a fraud. | ||
| So in order to forestall insomnia and feelings of being a fraud, I have to always be the honey badger. | ||
| I have to always walk into the proverbial You know, ideological fight. | ||
| And I think that once you are driven by that passion, then you never regret it because you're living a true life, right? | ||
| I'm very authentic. | ||
| Whether you like me or not, I am who I am. | ||
| And if you don't like it too bad, if you like it, great. | ||
| And therefore, I feel good in myself. | ||
| And so I think most of the people who rise to that challenge probably have a similar makeup, so they don't regret it. | ||
| Yeah, I wanted to ask you something that was sort of off-book topic, but kind of there too, that as we deal with COVID and watching, you know, the spread of misinformation and we're supposed to wear masks, we're not supposed to wear masks, lockdowns work, they don't work, you know, flatten the curve becomes eight months of don't go out of your house, etc, etc. | ||
| That feels very relevant to the book, actually, in terms of the way we take in information, the way our fear centers operate and everything else. | ||
| What do you make about what's going on generally with all of this? | ||
| You know, it's so interesting because I was just having this conversation with my wife. | ||
| We went for a walk and I said, you know, usually I can very quickly get a sense of what is the information that I need to know so that I can form an opinion. | ||
| And if I don't know something, I have epistemic humility. | ||
| I'll say, you know, I don't know enough about legalization of marijuana to take a position. | ||
| And I feel dumbfounded at this point regarding this COVID because I simply can't, I'm, I'm getting so, you know, it's not like I'm an idiot who can't synthesize information, but precisely for what you're saying, I'm getting so many mixed signals. | ||
| Even if I try to read the literature that I can't make sense of what's up, what's down. | ||
| I mean, I've, I've had on my own show, You know, virus experts who have said that it is a complete overreaction, that the lockdown has been, and these are very serious virologists. | ||
| These are not like quacks and so on. | ||
| So I really, the best answer I can give you is I truly don't know whether this is one big conspiracy. | ||
| I don't mean conspiracy in that COVID is not real and so on, but that whether our reaction to it has been grossly You know, over the top or not. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So as a behavioral scientist, though, like one of the things that I think all the time is when I go, you know, I'm in SoCal, it's warm and sunny every day. | ||
| Everyone looks good and is in tank tops and, you know, basically healthy. | ||
| And you go into the supermarket and we wear masks. | ||
| Now I've noticed people don't look at each other also, because when you can't see part of someone's face, you sort of don't even see another human. | ||
| And what I'm worried about is the ways it will change our behavior. | ||
| I think that could be your next book, is the way that the lockdowns and masks changed our behavior, or just how quickly we just accept things, which I suppose has a evolutionary answer. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, dear leader says jump. | ||
| You say how high I mean, I earlier when I was chatting with my wife, I gave an analogy. | ||
| So if you look at, you know, a healthy environment for a child to grow up in, they should have consistent parenting. | ||
| In other words, if a child runs to you when you come home at night, and because he wants to hug you, And you slap him because you've had a bad day. | ||
| That's not a very healthy, right? | ||
| Because then the child can't predict statistical regularities. | ||
| They don't know when you're going to spank them versus praise them, right? | ||
| So you have to have consistent parenting. | ||
| Well, then I analogize this with the COVID reality that we're facing. | ||
| Most of us are sort of these children who don't know when the next edict is going to come so that I can try to start making sense of What are the statistical regularities that I should look for in order to create a trajectory? | ||
| Should I get married next year or will it be on lockdown? | ||
| Should I go on vacation next year or will it be on lockdown? | ||
| And I think it is one gross sort of misparenting experiment that we are facing and the consequences are going to be quite nefarious, I think. | ||
| Yeah, well, I can tell you for sure where I live in California, the parents ain't doing a great job. | ||
| If Gavin Newsom is my dad and Eric Garcetti is my mom, although you got your own problems with Trudeau, so we could have a different therapy session about our parents. | ||
| But how come you haven't, to continue with the parenting analogy, how come you haven't escaped and ran away from home to Texas or Nashville or wherever the rest of the good folks are running to? | ||
| Because I want to fight. | ||
| I believe it's worth saving, and I think there's a chance. | ||
| And maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, but I said to David before, you know, we moved, but we stayed in LA, and I said, if I can't live here, I mean, if someone like me, it would be like you being like, if someone like me can't live in Canada, I can't live in this country. | ||
| Like the thing has gotten so crazy, I can't live in Canada. | ||
| Well, for a certain period of time, and I suppose, I know this is a, it's an awful analogy in a certain level, But there were many stories. | ||
| Anne Frank's neighbor, they kept saying, you should get out of Germany, get out of Germany. | ||
| And she said, but we have a nice house and it'll blow away. | ||
| And I'm not comparing this to that as much as some people, I think you're either wired to fight a little bit longer and some people you aren't. | ||
| But who knows, maybe I'll be moving in with Shapiro in Nashville not too long. | ||
| So you're already a honey badger. | ||
| You've already activated your inner honey badger. | ||
| Honey badger. | ||
| From one honey badger to another. | ||
| All right, Gad, we're gonna link to the book, The Parasitic Mind, right below. | ||
| And, you know, we could talk forever, so next time in person, my friend. | ||
| You're the best, sir. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about academia instead of nonstop yelling, check out our academia playlist. | ||
| And if you wanna watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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