June 2, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:04:15
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| There's an expression in the Arab world, first we come for the Saturday people, then we come for the Sunday people. | ||
| The Saturday people are the Jews, but it doesn't stop with the Jews, then we come for the Sunday people, the Christians, right? | ||
| Or the old, I quote this in the Persi- I don't remember the exact quote, you know, First they came for this, and then I ignored it. | ||
| Then they came for the trade unionists. | ||
| I ignored it. | ||
| So it's the same principle, which is many people, to our earlier point, you only react when the knock comes on your door. | ||
| There is no diabetes. | ||
| No one in my family has diabetes, so it can't be real. | ||
| And so I think the Christians and the other Muslims that are in the West have to wake up | ||
| because the ideology that might first have their sight on the Jews won't stop at them, right? | ||
| I mean, as we both know, in many cases, the biggest victims of Islamic extremism are Muslims, right? | ||
| Because you're not Muslim enough, right? | ||
| So ISIS killed mainly Muslims. | ||
| They weren't able to get to the Jews. | ||
| And so you can't simply say, this doesn't affect me because ultimately anti-Semitism doesn't come to my home. | ||
| I'm Christian. | ||
| I'm living in Arkansas. | ||
| Give it five years, give it 50 years, give it 500 years. | ||
| It will come for you. | ||
| And so act now rather than then. | ||
| I'm here with a man who I think needs no introduction at this point, at least to be | ||
| He is an evolutionary scientist. | ||
| He is an author. | ||
| He is a professor. | ||
| He is a rabble rouser. | ||
| Dare I say a bit of a Twitter troll? | ||
| Can I say a bit, a teeny tiny? | ||
| If it demands it. | ||
| Bit of a Twitter troll. | ||
| My old friend Gad Saad, the first ever. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Guest on the Rubin Report. | ||
| This is probably your dozen, maybe 12, 14, 15th appearance on the show. | ||
| It's also, this is the first time we've done this setup. | ||
| Gorgeous. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| We thought we'd do something a little friendlier, not so oppositional. | ||
| And you are looking trim. | ||
| Should we start there? | ||
| You also have lost a bunch of weight. | ||
| Yeah, I have. | ||
| You're out there kicking the soccer balls, playing basketball. | ||
| We're going to shoot some hoops later. | ||
| I didn't bring any attire, but we'll see what happens. | ||
| We'll get you out there. | ||
| But no, but you are trim and that fits with your last book, which is all about happiness. | ||
| Apparently taking care of yourself has something to do with that. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| You know, the psychological weight of having young children and not putting all the odds in my favor. | ||
| My physician kept saying the blood pressure is starting to inch up, you need to lose weight. | ||
| And there's nothing better than having young children and you want to be around for them as long as possible. | ||
| So when COVID came around, I thought let's turn this really draconian negative into a positive. | ||
| Stopped eating, started training and lost tons of weight. | ||
| Well, I feel you, man, because you just met the two 20-month-olds out there, and I got a couple years that I need to stay in shape. | ||
| So anyway, we could talk about our physiques all day long, but let's talk about things going on in the world. | ||
| Well, you know, at first, why don't we start where I usually start with you when I have you in studio, which is we've been doing this a long time now. | ||
| I mean, that first interview we did was 2015, nine years ago. | ||
| It feels like many lifetimes ago for me. | ||
| Do you feel that somehow all of the things that you and I and a bunch of other people were talking about, Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson and everyone knows the list, that did we somehow miss the mark? | ||
| Because the world has seemingly gotten worse in the nine years. | ||
| It's so frustrating, right? | ||
| Because, I mean, to go back to the earlier point about health, imagine if you go see your physician and he or she keeps warning you screaming from top of the mountain, | ||
| you've got to do X, Y, Z, and you just keep ignoring it. | ||
| And then bad things happen. | ||
| That's exactly what's happened with, you know, the ecosystem that we operate in, | ||
| which is many of us have been standing on top of the mountain. | ||
| Some of us in the media, some of us in academia, some of us in both, saying, | ||
| guys, this is what's coming down the pipeline. | ||
| And yet people don't want to hear it. | ||
| And now I still- Do you think we did anything wrong? | ||
| Do you think there was a way, or is the Warren, is the guy who yells from the top of the mountain, | ||
| is he always ignored, that's sort of repetitive in human history? | ||
| So I've been recently talking about the idea that there is a, | ||
| Unfortunately, a poor design of the architecture of the human mind, whereby you ignore things unless it comes and hits you exactly in your home, right? | ||
| So take someone like Bill Ackman, whom I really respect and I love what he's doing, but Bill Ackman only woke up when it hit his alma mater, hit Jewish-related issues, But had he, you know, been awake to many of these things, maybe he could have entered the fray a bit earlier. | ||
| For people that don't know him real quick, he's basically a tech guy, billionaire tech guy, very influential. | ||
| He's built some great products and sort of woke up after October 7th. | ||
| Although, did you happen to see that just a Four or five days ago, he had retweeted a video of Ron DeSantis saying that there never was a Palestinian state and why you should call it Judea and Samaria and not the West Bank and a bunch of other truths. | ||
| He retweeted it and then deleted it when he got pushback. | ||
| So he's still not there yet. | ||
| I say that with the same sort of respect Exactly. | ||
| That you're referring to. | ||
| Yeah, you always want to encourage people. | ||
| I mean, you don't want to go to people and hammer them and say, hey, you're coming too late to the game. | ||
| You still want to encourage people better late than never. | ||
| But it is frustrating because, look, the problem will eventually get solved. | ||
| But it can either get solved with a lot less violence, a lot less costs, or it can get solved later down the line with more costs. | ||
| Kind of like you catch the cancer early or you catch it when it's metastasized and it's stage four. | ||
| But evolutionarily, do we just always wait till it's too bad? | ||
| I mean, what are societies that were heading off the cliff that didn't? | ||
| Like, is there evidence that groups just don't do the worst thing? | ||
| It depends. | ||
| I mean, there is something called the negativity bias, which would argue against what we're discussing, which is we tend to pay more attention to negative information than we tend to be equivalent And symmetric on the positive side, precisely because ignoring positive information doesn't loom, evolutionarily speaking, as big as ignoring negative information. | ||
| And so you would think, according to the negativity bias, everybody should be attuned to these things. | ||
| But I think it's too scary. | ||
| And hence that's why in the parasitic mind, if you might remember in chapter six, I have a whole chapter on ostrich parasitic syndrome. | ||
| And here again, even though the ostrich doesn't literally bury its head in the sand, the metaphor is very apt because it describes the natural default value of people, which is bury my head in the sand and hopefully, cross fingers, the problem will go away. | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| So are you seeing now, maybe since October 7th, and then also relative to what's going on with our borders and a whole bunch of other stuff, that maybe a few more ostriches are at least peeking out of the sand every now and again? | ||
| It seems like they're getting there. | ||
| That's sort of what you're referring to with Ackman. | ||
| But the question is how to complete the hero's journey with them. | ||
| So, yes, and even in academia I'm starting to see a growing number of academics very gently pulling their head out of the sand, but not at a speed that I would like them to, right? | ||
| So, you know, the monster is coming at you at a hundred miles per hour and you're auto-correcting at two miles an hour. | ||
| It's not a fast enough auto-correction. | ||
| So, yes, there is some optimistic signals out there, but not fast enough. | ||
| Has the academic layer of all of this been the most shocking part of it to you, | ||
| that so many of the academics that you work with, and I want to talk about Concordia | ||
| specifically because you've got a serious headache on your hands over there, but that | ||
| so many professors who are tenured and should not only be teaching the right things. | ||
| I'm sort of past that point. | ||
| Let's say they're going to teach the wrong things, but at least still be able to stand up for some basic principles that we thought they believed in, that they have checked out too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I, and this is not to be facetious, but I really, I often argue that I discovered a new species. | ||
| They're called academics and they're defined by being invertebrate castrati. | ||
| Invertebrate because they have no spine, and castrati because they don't have any testicles, right? | ||
| And it's really regrettable because you would think, as a tenured professor, there is an institutional mechanism that protects you precisely so that you can speak your mind, so that you can do the research that you... It's quite literally the whole point of tenureship, right? | ||
| That's literally the whole point, right? | ||
| I mean, you had Socrates who was executed, you had Galileo who was put under house arrest. | ||
| We decided that we can't have academics not be able to engage in free thought, Therefore, we created a mechanism called tenure that says, I can't fire you unless you do ethical or moral or criminal breaches. | ||
| I can never fire you for anything that you say or write. | ||
| Well, that's great. | ||
| So then why don't you speak? | ||
| But what ends up happening is that most academics, first, they're extremely cowardly. | ||
| Perhaps in part because there is a self-selection bias against what I call intellectual Navy SEALs, right? | ||
| I mean, Navy SEALs, you do pick them because they have to be brawny, they have to be courageous, they have to be athletic. | ||
| In academia, we might pick people who are smart, but they're not intellectual honey badgers. | ||
| They're quite timid, they're tepid, they weren't the jocks. | ||
| I mean, I'm being a bit maybe hyperbolic, but they lack that combative nature. | ||
| But are you surprised that was a It doesn't surprise me because I've existed in that ecosystem my whole life, right? | ||
| Now there are some universities that are a little bit better | ||
| or at least aiming that way, Raulston College and University of Austin, | ||
| but that virtually everybody in the Ivy League chose the timid one instead of going to the- | ||
| It doesn't surprise me because I've existed in that ecosystem my whole life, right? | ||
| So when I go to departmental meetings, we usually have committees to decide on striking a task | ||
| force to study the feasibility of having coffee | ||
| in the faculty lounge. | ||
| So it'll take us five years of feasibility studies before we decide to have a $30 coffee machine. | ||
| How's the coffee? | ||
| Not very good. | ||
| So, you know, it's very, it moves slowly. | ||
| It's glacial speed. | ||
| It's very, you know, there's a lot of niceness. | ||
| People don't speak directly. | ||
| So even if I want to disagree with you, I will preface it by saying, I hear your point. | ||
| I hear you. | ||
| There's kind of this infantilizing that takes place. | ||
| And I, I'm a direct speaker. | ||
| And so it's very, very difficult for me to, in a sense, exist in that ecosystem because it goes against my most fundamental disposition. | ||
| So speaking of your ecosystem, so you're at Concordia University. | ||
| It has become like a bizarre hotbed of the Hamas stuff and the yelling at Jewish students or whoever's left. | ||
| Can't be the most fun place for you to work right now. | ||
| And what do you think has happened at that university? | ||
| So you may or may not know this, but well before October 7th, I'm talking for the past 20 years, my university colloquially has been referred to as Gaza University. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard you say it. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| So in 2002, Netanyahu was stopped, maybe one of the early cancel culture victims. | ||
| He was supposed to come and speak at Concordia. | ||
| They shut him down, Prime Minister of Israel. | ||
| Really, the reality is that it's just a reflection of the demographic situation at Concordia, which is there is an increasing number of students who come from those particular cultures and that particular religious heritage. | ||
| And as those numbers increase, it becomes more difficult to be Jewish at that university and certainly to be an outspoken public Jewish person, right? | ||
| I mean, some students will come up to me privately and say, Hey, Professor, I'm Jewish. | ||
| I don't wear Star of David. | ||
| But the reality is, if that's what they're afraid of, they take off the Star of David. | ||
| Nobody knows that they're Jewish. | ||
| But if I walk in on campus, most people know who I am. | ||
| So it's become an almost impossible situation. | ||
| Luckily, this semester I'm on sabbatical. | ||
| So I have a bit of a reprieve, but September is coming around. | ||
| I don't know how I'm going to go back. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, well, how are you going to go back? | ||
| Because you also, you live in Montreal. | ||
| I mean, I'm seeing these protests are, they're pretty intense there. | ||
| You have a government backed by Trudeau that certainly is not going to do anything to curb any of this. | ||
| I would say actually is fueling an awful lot of it. | ||
| I mean, just personally, for someone that cares about happiness and family and all that, as much as you do, like it's not easy and you have a, you don't have the easiest history, family history, biography. | ||
| I'll give you a, an example that just happened. | ||
| Uh, About two weeks ago, we were talking earlier about Inter Miami and our common friend Jorge Mas. | ||
| Well, he was kind enough to send me tickets for Inter Miami had come to Montreal to play a game. | ||
| He couldn't make it. | ||
| And so I took my family to the game as a beautiful gift from him. | ||
| As we were driving to get to the stadium, we crossed about a six to eight block area where it was impossible for you to know whether it was in Raqqa, Syria, whether it was in Yemen, whether it was in Pakistan. | ||
| It was just an endless sea of what looked like very hostile Protesters and demonstrators and so on. | ||
| And I remember that I sort of tried to put the visor so that people don't see me because I was worried, what if someone recognizes me? | ||
| So that's the reality. | ||
| Now, it didn't take long, right? | ||
| I mean, 10, 15 years ago, I was already warning people that this was coming. | ||
| Well, now we're there. | ||
| What if I was just walking with my family and they recognized me? | ||
| Who knows what would have happened to me? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I drove by one when I did the R Conference in London. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That was late November. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And I had the same exact thought, which was, if I get recognized right now, I don't know, do they literally just ransack the car? | ||
| Like, what the hell happens? | ||
| Alright, so you're in the middle of that in Canada, but Are there any mechanisms for Canada to not fully go that route? | ||
| You guys have let in an awful amount of people, an awful lot of people. | ||
| It doesn't seem like there's anything to stop. | ||
| So it's sort of what I asked you before, but I mean, from a Canadian perspective, it's like, you guys are so damn nice. | ||
| You're just going to fall on the sword. | ||
| Suicidal empathy, the topic of my next book. | ||
| That's literally the title. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So look, I often use the following analogy, and we were talking earlier about our respective weight loss and so on. | ||
| On any given day, one of three things can happen to your weight as a result of the decisions | ||
| you make that day. | ||
| The exercise you do, the food that you eat. | ||
| My weight can go up, my weight can stay the same, or my weight can go down. | ||
| There isn't another possible state of the world when it comes to my weight. | ||
| Well, now let's apply that mechanism, that framework to immigration. | ||
| So if you let in people in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions into your society, and those people are coming from cultures that have endemic Jew hatred, it's actually definitional to their societies. | ||
| We know that in a million different ways, but let me just give you one way. | ||
| Pew surveys demonstrate that when you poll people from those societies, what do you think of the Jews? | ||
| You get 95 to 99% of polled people that have dismal views of the Jews. | ||
| Now just process that. | ||
| Even though virtually no Jews live in the United States. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| So it's not, I mean, if it were 10% of the polled people, that would be a very, you know, difficult Number two, digest. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| When it's 95 to 99, so now we let in 500,000 people and assume we go with the 95% rate, is Jew hatred in the society going to go up? | ||
| Is it going to stay the same or is it going to go down? | ||
| So it didn't require a fancy professor evolutionary scientist to connect the dots. | ||
| You just had to be wedded to reality. | ||
| But is the brazenness of the protests and the things that they're screaming for and then the way they use words in Arabic that can be sort of And that comes from the confidence of now having strength in numbers, right? | ||
| doesn't exactly mean destroy Israel. | ||
| Like it's the way they're doing everything that's quite duplicitous and to some extent deserves credit | ||
| because they're fooling an awful lot of people. | ||
| And that comes from the confidence of now having strengthened numbers, right? | ||
| When you're zero to 2% or you're just a exotic minority, when you're three to 5%, | ||
| you start being a bit more emboldened in your political demands, when you six to 10%. | ||
| And so there is kind of a trajectory in the exact same way that a physician can tell you with very, very clear | ||
| accuracy what is the trajectory of having diabetes, | ||
| what's going to happen with very clear timeline. | ||
| The same thing applies when a society is getting Islamized. | ||
| Now, again, I hate to do this prefacing. | ||
| Many Muslims are lovely, and I know more Muslims who are my friends than most people will ever meet. | ||
| We're not talking about individual Muslims. | ||
| We're talking about, does Islam, once it takes a hold in a society, does it promote greater liberties, greater individual dignity? | ||
| If you own black dogs and you're a gay Jew, should you feel more, and the reason why I say black dog, because- Well, my dog Stan. | ||
| But he's not black, so he's a bit safer. | ||
| But Mohammed had a particular repulsion towards dogs in general, but black dogs in particular. | ||
| So it doesn't take much to realize what's going to happen. | ||
| I have many Muslim friends who will tell me that they're concerned about the rate at which many of these societies are getting Islamized. | ||
| They escaped those societies, and now they find themselves amidst the same societies from which they escaped. | ||
| So I guess I, or I suspect I know the answer to this, but you've told your biography many times in many different places, and we'll link to the original story that you told from many, many years ago. | ||
| But growing up in Lebanon, Jewish family, Christian Lebanon. | ||
| I mean, it was largely Christian at the time. | ||
| I think it was about 80% Christian at the time, right? | ||
| Maybe a bit less, maybe 65, 70. | ||
| Something around there. | ||
| Now it's, oh, I think now it's about 80% Muslim. | ||
| So it's basically done this bizarre flip. | ||
| And do you remember, was the feeling the same? | ||
| Do you think if I was talking to your dad in Lebanon in 19, give me a year. | ||
|
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72. | |
| 72, as he was watching the turn, is that sort of what you're describing right now in your country? | ||
| Or maybe in my country? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| People have the wrong understanding of tolerance in the Middle East. | ||
| You're tolerated until you're no longer tolerated, right? | ||
| You're healthy until you drop dead of a heart attack, right? | ||
| Five minutes ago you were smiling and now you're dead. | ||
| So the concept of Toleration or tolerance in the Middle East simply means that, yes, we're not going to execute you today and you can thrive and live for 30 years, but be quiet. | ||
| Don't wear the Star of David too big. | ||
| And then maybe one day one of us will have designs for your beautiful daughter. | ||
| and when we come knocking, don't scream too loud when we take her. | ||
| So that's what it means to coexist in the Middle East. | ||
| Even in the golden era of Andalusia, you may have heard that, right, | ||
| where Christians, Muslims, and Jews were supposed to walk hand in hand, | ||
| singing John Lennon, Imagine. | ||
| That's not really what happened, right? | ||
| Jews were dhimmis, right? | ||
| They're third-class citizens. | ||
| That doesn't mean that they are exterminated every day, all day long, but it means that you don't know when the beheadings are coming. | ||
| It could be tomorrow, or it could be in five years, or it could be in 50 years. | ||
| But they will be coming, right? | ||
| And so... | ||
| In the context of us growing up in Lebanon, I tell of many stories, and I'm happy to repeat some of them if you like, of what I saw growing up in tolerant, progressive, modern, you know, Paris of the Middle East, Lebanon. | ||
| So when I was five years old, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was the president of Egypt, who was very much revered and loved in the Arab world because he was a pan-Arabist. | ||
| He was trying to unite all of the Arabic countries. | ||
| Very charismatic kind of populist. | ||
| When he passed away in 1970, I hadn't yet turned six, there were demonstrations in the streets as often happens in the Middle East. | ||
| Everybody's lamenting to God, why, why? | ||
| And as they're Proceeding down my street, they're screaming, death to Jews, death to Jews. | ||
| And as a young boy, I was horrified. | ||
| I'm asking my mother, why are they screaming death to Jews? | ||
| You know, we have nothing to do with this. | ||
| So that's one story. | ||
| A second story, I'll tell two other quick ones. | ||
| It's Lebanon 1972 or Concordia 2024. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| So I was about eight or nine, so this would be about 1973-74, about a year before the Civil War started. | ||
| The teacher asks us in class to each get up and tell the class what we want to be when we grow up. | ||
| I want to be a soccer player. | ||
| I want to be a policeman. | ||
| I want to be a nurse. | ||
| And one of the kids, and I still have a photo and I can point to that kid, gets up and says, when I grow up, I want to be a Jew killer to the rap, you know, raucous applause and laughter of all the kids who knew that I was Jewish. | ||
| Were you the only Jew in the class? | ||
| There was another one that I can remember. | ||
| But of course we're a small minority. | ||
| And it's not, it wasn't a secret that we were Jewish because you just had to go to the synagogue on Saturday and you would know who's Jewish. | ||
| But you certainly didn't advertise it, you know, loudly. | ||
| My brother was Lebanese champion in judo for many years in a row. | ||
| And it had become a bit of a shameful reality for a Jew to constantly be winning these combat sports. | ||
| So he was visited by some men who said that it was time for him to retire. | ||
| Lest there might be an unfortunate accident that happens to him. | ||
| So he ended up moving to France to pursue his judo career. | ||
| This is before the Civil War. | ||
| And then, incredibly, ironically, in 1976, he ended up representing Lebanon in the Montreal Olympics. | ||
| So he was too Jewish to stay in Lebanon in 1973-74, but then he was We're gonna overlook you being Jewish so that you can have the flag of Lebanon. | ||
| So that was the reality. | ||
| And now there's none left in Lebanon. | ||
| So I've heard there's about 40, some say 10, some say 90, but they're not practicing Jews, right? | ||
| There's no minion, there's no, it's just some Jew got married in 1963 to a Muslim woman and he stayed back in Lebanon. | ||
| Can you explain a little bit why, you know, one of the things that I'm concerned about lately is because since October 7th and that there's all these protests and everyone on all the shows and you just did an unbelievably wonderful job going on Rogan talking about all of this Jew hatred and everything. | ||
| And I think he's been a little confused about some of the Israel stuff. | ||
| So it was nice to see you clean a bit of that up. | ||
| But I think one of the things that I'm feeling, even as doing my show and as an interviewer, is I wish we were not talking about the Jews at all. | ||
| That would be much better. | ||
| It would be much better for the Jews, but it would be much better for society. | ||
| Can you sort of link that to why this is not good for general, for the Christian that's watching this, or the atheist that's watching this, or the Muslim that doesn't want to live under Islamic theocracy that's watching this? | ||
| Why they should care right now about this thing? | ||
| So there are several ways I can answer this. | ||
| Number one, There's an expression in the Arab world, first we come for the Saturday people, then we come for the Sunday people. | ||
| The Saturday people are the Jews, but it doesn't stop with the Jews, then we come for the Sunday people, the Christians, right? | ||
| Or the old, I quote this in the Parasitic Mind, I don't remember the exact quote, you know, First they came for this and then I ignored it. | ||
| Then they came for the trade unionists. | ||
| I ignored it. | ||
| So it's the same principle, which is many people, to our earlier point, you only react when the knock comes on your door. | ||
| There is no diabetes. | ||
| No one in my family has diabetes, so it can't be real. | ||
| And so I think the Christians and the other Muslims that are in the West have to wake up because the ideology that might first have their sight on the Jews won't stop at them, right? | ||
| I mean, as we both know, in many cases, the biggest victims of Islamic extremism are Muslims, right? | ||
| Because you're not Muslim enough, right? | ||
| So ISIS killed Mainly Muslims. | ||
| They weren't able to get to the Jews. | ||
| And so you can't simply say, this doesn't affect me because ultimately anti-Semitism doesn't come to my home. | ||
| I'm Christian. | ||
| I'm living in Arkansas. | ||
| Give it five years, give it 50 years, give it 500 years. | ||
| It will come for you. | ||
| And so act now rather than then. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And again, the question just remains, do people ever heed the warning? | ||
| And I guess that's just the question that just hangs out there, right? | ||
| Like, that's just the thing. | ||
| I don't think people heed the warning until it really is at your doorstep. | ||
| I mean, the folks who are in the public eye who become known, it's precisely because they're an outlier, right? | ||
| Because they are rare in their capacity to forecast and extrapolate. | ||
| If this were something that was an inherent part of the architecture of the human mind for everybody, then you wouldn't find a public profile. | ||
| I wouldn't have... | ||
| I would quite literally rather talk about almost anything else in a bizarre sense, but | ||
| how can we not talk about it? | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like I almost have no ability not to because it's civilizationally important. | ||
| And I've actually, so a lot of people who send me hate stuff will say, you're such a hypocrite. | ||
| You rail against identity politics. | ||
| And then you spend all the time talking about Jew, Jew, Jew all day long. | ||
| Well, I only do the Jew, Jew, Jew because it matters so much to you that I'm Jewish, right? | ||
| If you go through my Twitter feed before October 7th, you probably would find 1% of tweets that, I mean, almost nothing will be related to Israel. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Being Jewish is part of my history. | ||
| It's part of the tragedy of my childhood. | ||
| But I'd much rather talk about evolutionary psychology and about the scientific method. | ||
| But I only talk about Jewish issues because the haters care so much about the fact that I'm Jewish. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Well, then let's shift to the scientific method for a moment, | ||
| because I feel like the other, I mean, look, we're seeing all of our institutions under assault | ||
| and our countries are under assault. | ||
| The scientific method is under assault. | ||
| Science, you know, it's a weird thing to say. | ||
| Science is under assault. | ||
| That sounds like a Fauci thing to say. | ||
| But now when I listen to any of the people who are the so-called experts, | ||
| you're on the short list of people that I roughly trust when it comes to things. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| But that's got to be a bizarre thing as a man of science, as a man of rationality, to see so many of your colleagues, now I'm not talking about the political part, just the scientific part, just completely collapsed too. | ||
| So I saw this before the woke stuff. | ||
| Inherently, in my research, because I apply evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology to the human condition, that itself was very contentious within the social sciences. | ||
| Because in the social sciences, one of the things that unifies all social sciences is that evolution might be relevant for the zebra, for the mosquito, and for your dog, but don't you dare say that evolution matters in explaining human behavior. | ||
| And certainly, if it applies for human phenomena, It might apply to explain why we have opposable thumbs. | ||
| It might apply to explain why my pancreas worked the way that they do. | ||
| But don't you apply it for anything above the neck, right? | ||
| And so already- So the reasoning that they wouldn't like that is because what? | ||
| It basically, it takes, in their eyes, it sort of takes away the individuality or their- So there are many reasons. | ||
| That's a great, yeah. | ||
| So in The Consuming Instinct, which was my 2011 book, in the first chapter, I go through all of the key points that the detractors have. | ||
| So I'll mention a few here for you. | ||
| So one is the biological slash genetic determinism. | ||
| So many of the detractors think that if our behavior is biologically inscribed, that literally means that you are a blind executor robot of your genes, which of course, that's not at all what it means because all behaviors are ultimately an interaction between your genes and your environment. | ||
| As a matter of fact, genes themselves get turned on or off as a result of environmental inputs. | ||
| And so the idea that if you believe that humans are biological beings, it means that we are just these executors of our genes, is simply false. | ||
| As a matter of fact, evolutionists talk about the interactionist framework. | ||
| Interactionist means interactions of genes and the environment. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's also depressing. | ||
| It's a depressing way of looking at the world, right? | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| Many miscreants and cretins misused evolutionary theory. | ||
| So, for example, British social class elitists, just shortly after Darwin, said, hey, there's a natural struggle between the classes. | ||
| We're the upper class, you're the lower class. | ||
| Who cares if you all die from tuberculosis in your shitty neighborhoods? | ||
| That's just natural selection. | ||
| Which, of course, had nothing to do with evolutionary theory. | ||
| That became known as social Darwinism. | ||
| The Nazis came along and said, hey, there's a natural struggle across the races. | ||
| It's Darwinian, it's evolution. | ||
| We're Aryan, you're the Jews, you're the gypsies, you're the homosexuals. | ||
| If we call you from the population, hey, that's just Darwinian, right? | ||
| Eugenicists came along, said the same thing. | ||
| So a whole long line of really nefarious folks misused evolutionary principles to advance their political ideologies. | ||
| And so the social sciences decided in their infinite wisdom Why don't we build edifices that are void of biological thinking? | ||
| Because then hopefully we can curtail the possibility that someone might use them. | ||
| But as I explained the Parasitic Mind, you can't, in the pursuit of some noble goal, murder and rape truth, right? | ||
| You still have to be wedded to reality. | ||
| And so, So for these reasons and many others, it's very, very difficult for professors in the humanities and the social sciences to accept that we are evolutionary minded creatures. | ||
| What would you want to happen to the institutions at this point? | ||
| I mean, the academic institutions? | ||
| I'm emperor of the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that, well, I mean, do you think they can be repaired? | ||
| Do they need to be blown apart? | ||
| Is it a case by case basis? | ||
| I think they can be repaired. | ||
| I mean, look, At its fundamental reality, universities serve a great purpose. | ||
| And it's not as though they are populated with a majority of blue-haired maniacs, right? | ||
| But it's the blue-haired maniacs that are the loud ones, that are the activists, that get the attention of the administrators, that keep the rest of us in check, right? | ||
| And so all you need to do is find a way to get the silent majority to Invoke their courage to find their spines, and then I think it could be turned around. | ||
| So I'll give you a few examples. | ||
| Now there's a big pushback, as you probably have seen, against the DICOL, diversity, inclusion, equity, right? | ||
| Well, I made the very difficult decision. | ||
| That I would no longer apply for scientific grants, which I need to apply because that's how I fund my research. | ||
| How can I pay a postdoc? | ||
| How can I run studies that cost money to run if I don't have research funds? | ||
| Because I wasn't willing to sacrifice my integrity by having to sign and write a diversity inclusion equity statement. | ||
| Quite literally, they were forcing you to do that if you wanted to get a grant. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That was just in Canada or that was? | ||
| Well, I mean, it's also in the U.S., but I certainly know that it had really spread in Canada, right? | ||
| So I'll just give you another example. | ||
| University of Waterloo, which is sort of known as the MIT of Canada. | ||
| They're very good in engineering and computer science. | ||
| They had a call for two chaired professorships, which is the highest level, right? | ||
| It's an endowed chair. | ||
| And I mean, I could literally show you the screenshot of their call for professors. | ||
| The number one qualification was non-binary, you know, whatever, two-spirit and all that stuff. | ||
| So you really, I mean, it's difficult to believe that that's real, right? | ||
| So in artificial intelligence and complexity theory and all of these analysis of algorithms, you need to be non-binary, but it's all over the place. | ||
| Now, most people can go about their lives trying to ignore it, but I wasn't able to ignore it because If I had played the game as part of a careerist calculus, then I would have felt as though I am a fraud. | ||
| How can I go on Dave Rubin's show and talk about the diversity inclusion equity being a scam, but then quietly when nobody's seeing, I just play along. | ||
| So I think most professors Regrettably don't have that sense of code of conduct. | ||
| And so they say, well, you know, let Gadsad be the hero. | ||
| I need to get my money so I can pay my graduate students. | ||
| I'll play along. | ||
| Once we can get them to stop playing along, I think the problem can be resolved rather quickly. | ||
| Where do you think social media falls into this? | ||
| Like, do you think evolutionarily you have sort of hysterical young people that have been, let's say, taught the wrong things, and then you have this I don't know, middle management version of administrators | ||
| and everybody else that should be standing up for the right things but aren't. | ||
| But it's, I think partly because it's so fueled by social media and that group doesn't know how to deal with it. | ||
| Is that just another X factor in this bizarre old game? | ||
| You know, I'm careful not to blame social media too much because like most things it can be used for good or bad. | ||
| The number of connections that I have made through social media, well, are common for you and I. Your Game Mass, the owner of Inter Miami, is reaching out. | ||
| Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, my all-time favorite soul singer, From the 1970s. | ||
| Oh, I remember. | ||
| Lead singer of the stylistics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How am I hanging around with this guy in Philadelphia when he was singing in my ears when I was 12 years old? | ||
| So. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, I know. | |
| I've met, I've met basically anyone I ever wanted to meet in my life because of Twitter and the internet. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So you can't, you know, it's a tool that can be used for great, uh, nefarious purposes, or it can spread great ideas and cause people who are like-minded to connect. | ||
| So it's, you know, it depends how you use it. | ||
| But do you think that there's, the weird thing I think right now is that one side knows how to really use it for the negativity, and as Jordan would talk about, Jordan Peterson, they're fueled largely by narcissism and have been fed all the wrong ideas, and now these guys, they didn't grow up with these tools, so that is a bit of the agenda. | ||
| So they didn't grow up with those tools, and to my earlier point, they're invertebrate castrati, right? | ||
| So you just go boo, and then they say, okay, whatever you want. | ||
| I will completely fold, I will completely acquiesce, because there is nothing more threatening to me than, I'm speaking as them now, than having a bunch of rabid maniacs coming at me. | ||
| Whereas my personality is, when you come after me, it only emboldens me, it only makes me angrier. | ||
| I double down on everything. | ||
| I remember at one point, I don't know if you saw this thing, Valerie Bertinelli came after me. | ||
| Oh, Valerie Bertinelli, 70s sitcom star. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, I was a bit older than you, but so here's what had happened. | ||
| I had posted a tweet meant to demonstrate how lovely and sweet my wife is and that we were going, we were at a cafe and she went to order from the barista. | ||
| The barista looked like they were a non-gender, non-two-spirit, whatever. | ||
| And so when she came back to me, she said, oh, you know, I felt uncomfortable | ||
| because I didn't know how to address them and I didn't want to make a mistake and hurt them. | ||
| So I tweeted that as a demonstration of how lovely my wife is, that she doesn't wanna hurt me. | ||
| She was sensitive. | ||
| She was sensitive. | ||
| So like you would think that the pink coalition or whatever they call it would be erecting statues of my wife. | ||
|
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Right, right. | |
| So that was flipped into, Gad Saad talks about how his wife was so threatened by the trans thing. | ||
| So for the next two, three days, you know, 20 million of these guys all spearheaded by this Valerie Bertonelli come after me. | ||
| Well, Now, if I didn't have a strong personhood, I wilt, I troll more, I hid under my desk, I did self-flagellation, and guess what? | ||
| They go away because they feel as though you're untouchable, like nothing that they can see. | ||
| But those administrators that you're speaking about don't have that ability, and therefore, Isn't that a bizarre thing if you would have said in 1978, boy, Valerie Bertinelli is going to go after me on this thing called Twitter one day. | ||
| You know, I had some, it doesn't even matter who, there was a former NBA coach who was going after me one day a couple of years ago. | ||
| A guy who I think was Jeff Van Gundy or Stan Van Gundy, one of them, like he was coach of the Knicks. | ||
| And I was just like, this is so insane. | ||
| I spent 20 years watching this guy coach and all the basketball that I've ever watched, and now this guy's basically calling me racist or something to that effect. | ||
| Like, you can't make this stuff up. | ||
| But that's the weird reality that we're in right now. | ||
| Indeed, indeed. | ||
| But I mean, to our earlier point, I wake up every day and I can't believe how Fortunate I am that I had the type of personality that didn't make me be a stay-in-your-lane professor. | ||
| So that's actually a tension which I talk about in the Happiness book. | ||
| Hyperspecialization versus being a generalist, right? | ||
| Academia teaches you to be a stay-in-your-lane hyperspecialist. | ||
| Know a lot about a very, very small thing. | ||
| Make your mark there and never deviate. | ||
| Kind of like the horse with the, is it the blinkers they're called? | ||
| Right? | ||
| So that you can never look sideways, right? | ||
| Whereas I don't have that temperament, right? | ||
| I want to sample everything in life. | ||
| So my research demonstrates that. | ||
| I publish in medicine and psychology and evolutionary theory and marketing and politics. | ||
| I just go wherever a problem interests me. | ||
| When I started doing public engagement and going on the Joe Rogan and so on, all my academic colleagues would say, what are you talking about Joe Rogan? | ||
| Who talks to such a guy? | ||
| I'm like, He's got 20 million. | ||
| I mean, are you kidding me? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Shouldn't you be promoting such outreach? | ||
| And so the fact that I have this kind of polymath approach to life, and hence that's why, by the way, I love Leonardo da Vinci because he's the ultimate Renaissance man. | ||
| He did it all. | ||
| Allowed me to meet people. | ||
| Glorious like you. | ||
| And I'm going to take you to dinner. | ||
| And you're going to take me there. | ||
| And you're going to pay for it. | ||
| I was going to say, and you can get anything you want under $20. | ||
| Pretty good. | ||
| Let's talk about the happiness part of this for a second because it seems to me that we're in this bizarre moment | ||
| now where people have more than they've, | ||
| that humans could have ever imagined. | ||
| And we've all got this thing and access to the world and all the goodness and the badness that comes with that | ||
| and everything else. | ||
| But we know we now have basically an epidemic of neuroses and paranoia | ||
| and all sorts of psychological problems and depression. | ||
| And I think a lot of this has to do with COVID also. | ||
| Um... | ||
| And yet we have so many ways to find happiness that maybe we didn't have before. | ||
| People that we can learn something about happiness from. | ||
| That's a strange dichotomy. | ||
| So I'm going to give a bit of a technical answer from evolutionary theory. | ||
| So there's something in evolutionary theory called the mismatch hypothesis. | ||
| The mismatch hypothesis basically argues that many traits that would have been evolutionarily advantageous in our ancestral past, in the modern environment, if there is a mismatch between the ancestral environment where that behavior was adaptive and today's environment where it no longer is adaptive, you have that mismatch. | ||
| So, for example, when it comes to the top health killers, Colon cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and so on. | ||
| Many of those diseases, you don't typically find them in hunter-gatherer societies that mimic our evolutionary past, because here's what happens. | ||
| We evolved in an environment of caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty, therefore we gorge foods, we eat a lot of high-caloric foods. | ||
| That's perfectly adaptive in that evolutionary environment, but today, where the only uncertainty is how long is it gonna take me to get to McDonald's, Then I get overweight, my blood pressure goes up, I develop colon, and so on. | ||
| Well, the same principle applies for the happiness calculus. | ||
| We've evolved to be in small bands of people that really matter to us. | ||
| So, for example, in the happiness book, I talk about the longest longitudinal study in, I think, the history of the social sciences and the health sciences, is the Harvard study on adult well-being. | ||
| And the number one thing they found After 80 years of research in terms of what is the biggest predictor of happiness is the quality of the social relationships you have. | ||
| But not only does it affect your mental well-being, it actually serves as a protective shield even for physiological things like heart disease. | ||
| So your cholesterol levels at age 50 are lesser predictor of heart disease than if you have high quality relationships. | ||
| So if we're spending all day on the internet not building these meaningful relationships, We could live in New York City, surrounded by eight million people, and yet we're very, very lonely. | ||
| And so the loneliness epidemic, coupled with the mismatch hypothesis, results in the happiness problems that we see today. | ||
| How much of that do you think has to do with our genes, that just some people just have a disposition that might lend themselves to wanting to be around people more, thus they then get the benefits of that versus the other version? | ||
| No, that's a fantastic question. | ||
| So in the first, very early in the happiness book, I start by talking about 50% of your happiness scores, or individual differences in happiness scores, stem from our genes. | ||
| So at first thought, you might say, oh, so it's genetically inscribed, but that leaves 50% up for grabs. | ||
| So I may start off having a much sunnier disposition than you, but then if I make wrong decisions, if I adopt poor Mindsets, whereas you don't, you might end up summiting Mount Happiness much more quickly than I do. | ||
| And so, in a sense, that's a hopeful message, because if I had told you that the research shows that 95% of our happiness differences come from our genes, then that doesn't leave us much to play with. | ||
| I think we talked about this when I had you on to discuss the book last time, but do you think too many people are aiming at happiness? | ||
| That society put too much aim at happiness as opposed to purpose? | ||
| And if you're just chasing happiness, you're never going to be happy, where purpose, happiness is the byproduct? | ||
| So I, in the last chapter of the happiness book, I take a quote from Viktor Frankl. | ||
| Where in his case, he's talking about the pursuit, the willful pursuit of success. | ||
| And he's saying, I'm paraphrasing his word, don't pursue success. | ||
| It has to be something that is a consequence of you making the right decision. | ||
| And I said, take that quote and just replace success by happiness. | ||
| And that's exactly what it should be, right? | ||
| So I don't wake up in the morning and say, I need to be happy today. | ||
| But rather, if I wake up next to a person that I really love, well, I'm well on my way to being happy. | ||
| Preferably your wife. | ||
| Preferably my wife. | ||
| Although I just watched a documentary on Ashley Madison. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Oh, I haven't seen it, but I know it's on Netflix. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And actually I came close to being hired as their scientific advisor back in 2015 as the hack was going to happen. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, so anyways, so if you wake up next to a person that you really appreciate, and then as you kiss them goodbye and you head off to your job, it's one that gives you, you know, you rub your hands in existential glee, you're excited about the looming day. | ||
| And then you return home to that person that you really enjoyed waking up next to, well, you're already well on your way to being happy. | ||
| So I have a whole chapter on the two most important decisions that you can make that either give you great happiness or misery, choosing the right spouse, choosing the right profession. | ||
| And of course, the devil's in the detail. | ||
| How do you go about doing that? | ||
| But then I talk about life as a playground. | ||
| Having a playful mindset is incredibly important. | ||
| And I even talk about the most dire of circumstances. | ||
| People who were in the Holocaust engaged in play. | ||
| I was in the Lebanese Civil War, which was just a butcher shop, killings everywhere. | ||
| We still played, right? | ||
| I mean, my parents would tell me, if you're going to go outside, don't cross this particular line because that would open you up to the sight, to the scope of the snipers. | ||
| So imagine your parents telling you, yeah, go play, but just don't cross this line because then those guys will blow your brains. | ||
| We still went out and played. | ||
| And so having that mindset, variety seeking is very important to my earlier point about being a generalist. | ||
| Don't only read one type of book. | ||
| Sample from many types of book. | ||
| Don't always go to the same vacation spot. | ||
| There's a whole world to discover. | ||
| I'm an intellectual variety seeker. | ||
| I do research in many areas, as I said earlier. | ||
| I read many different types of books. | ||
| So I also talk about regret, if you want, we could talk about that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So in the book, I talk about the two sources of regret that most people suffer from is either, this is actually from one of my former psychology professors during my PhD. | ||
| His name is Thomas Kilovich. | ||
| So he pioneered the study of the psychology of regret, specifically regret due to action versus regret due to inaction. | ||
| Regret due to action. | ||
| I regret that I cheated on my wife and now I'm divorced. | ||
| Regret due to inaction is I regret that I never pursued my interest in the arts. | ||
| I became a pediatrician because my dad was a pediatrician and his mom was a pediatrician and therefore it was expected of me. | ||
| Then I wake up at 55 and I say I hate medicine. | ||
| Are there numbers on which people usually suffer from? | ||
| What can you predict? | ||
| Which is the one that... I'm probably gonna get it wrong but my gut feeling would be most people predict fear or regret The things that they did not do more than the reaction. | ||
| You're exactly right. | ||
| Because I know people obviously do a lot of bad things, but I think the thing that you sit with more is, oh damn, I should have done that. | ||
| Your intuition is exactly right. | ||
| The biggest looming regrets over the long haul are the roads not taken. | ||
| I should have, I wish I would have, right? | ||
| And therefore I talk in the book about what are some mindsets that you can adopt that hopefully can forestall the likelihood of that happening. | ||
| For example, I'll tell you two quick stories of guys where it's not even, you would have thought it's too late for them to pursue these things, but they did. | ||
| So one guy, this was probably two years into my professorship at Concordia, so maybe mid-90s. | ||
| He got his PhD, he was 91 or 92. | ||
| He left Nazi Germany as the Nazis were coming in. | ||
| He was a Jewish guy, so maybe 1939, 1933, around then, 1934, before the start of the war. | ||
| around then, 34, before the start of the war. | ||
| He moves to Canada, has a career. | ||
| In his 60s, he retires. | ||
| His biggest regret had been that he had never had an opportunity to go to university. | ||
| He'd always been someone who was interested in education, but life didn't allow him. | ||
| So in his 60s, he decides, I'm going to pursue my bachelor's. | ||
| In his 60s, he'd be grandfather to most of the kids in those classes. | ||
| Finishes his undergrad, begins his master's in his 70s. | ||
| Finishes his masters, starts his PhDs in his 80s, gets it at 91, 92. | ||
| Within a year after that, he passes away. | ||
| So he's the ultimate lover of learning, because he did it for no other reason other than the pure pursuit of knowledge, intrinsically motivated. | ||
| Second story, and I actually had this guy, the other guy passed away, but this guy that I'm gonna talk about, I had him on my show. | ||
| His name is Memphis Steiner. | ||
| He got his MD degree in the mid-50s in Vienna. | ||
| His parents said, do something, you know, practical, become a physician. | ||
| That's what we expect of you. | ||
| His love had always been physics. | ||
| So he gets an MD in 1955. | ||
| In 1967, on his way of becoming a hematologist, blood doctor, He picks up a PhD in biochemistry, I think at MIT, has a full career as a hematologist, and I think around 2000 in his 70s maybe, retires, decides now I'm going to pursue my real love, which is to study physics. | ||
| Starts studying physics, gets his PhD at Brown University at 89, and comes on my show to talk like a young graduate student about his desire to publish the work from his dissertation. | ||
| What does this guy have to prove? | ||
| He's 89. | ||
| So for many things, it's never too late. | ||
| So don't live in regret. | ||
| Do it. | ||
| Do you think there's a bizarre moment we're having where the entire, because so many people see problems with the system, That it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy that their lives won't work. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| There was, I don't know if you saw just a few days ago, Joe Biden gave a speech at Morehouse College. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| And it was one of the most disgusting speeches. | ||
| You're going nowhere. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Here, we'll throw to it. | ||
| It's natural to wonder if the democracy you hear about actually works for you. | ||
| What is democracy? | ||
| If black men are being killed in the street, what is democracy? | ||
| Betrayal or broken promises still leave black communities behind. | ||
| What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot? | ||
| Most of all, what does it mean, as you've heard before, to be a black man who loves his country, even if it doesn't love him back in equal measure? | ||
| In America, we're all created equal. | ||
| Extremists close the doors of opportunity, strike down affirmative action, attack the values of diversity, equality, and inclusion. | ||
| I never thought when I was graduating in 1968, as your honoree just was, we talked about, I never thought I'd be a president of a time when there's a national effort to ban books. | ||
| Not to write history, but to erase history. | ||
| They don't see you in the future of America, but they're wrong. | ||
| To me, we make history, not erase it. | ||
| We know black history is American history. | ||
| I mean, to me, that is one of the most vile things you could ever say to a young person when you're giving a commencement speech that's supposed to be about, wow, you just learned something, go take on the world. | ||
| And he said, the world, the world hates you, basically. | ||
| Well, I mean, the stories that I just told you about those two guys, the first guy, the one who got his PhD in 91, I've been telling that story to my students. | ||
| So a student knocks on my door during office hours. | ||
| I'm 27 years old. | ||
| I'd really like to pursue an MBA or I'd like to do, but I'm 27. | ||
| I'm too old. | ||
| And so I usually say, sit down. | ||
| I have a story to tell you. | ||
| Then I tell them that story. | ||
| You see the fire in their eyes, right? | ||
| I'm motivating them. | ||
| Look at this guy. | ||
| He's 91. | ||
| He just finished his PhD. | ||
| You're 27. | ||
| You're thinking you're too old. | ||
| So you inspire people. | ||
| You elevate them. | ||
| Biden does the exact opposite. | ||
| You're going nowhere. | ||
| The system is against you. | ||
| It's actually nauseating in a way. | ||
| I just compare that to any commencement. | ||
| You know, we played a Jerry Seinfeld commencement speech the other day at Duke where he talked about, yeah, you've got privilege. | ||
| Enjoy it. | ||
| Go get out there. | ||
| Anyone would kill to be at Duke. | ||
| But just that that divide in the mental state that people are in right now, you know, the sort of you're a victim and the system's horrible versus go do something. | ||
| That seems like it's indicative of what's happening across the board here. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And maybe that's a good segue. | ||
| So I, in the happiness book, I talk about the research linking political orientation to happiness. | ||
| So to the point of Biden and the progressive. | ||
| And the research is unequivocal. | ||
| Many, many researchers have found that conservatives score higher on happiness than liberals slash progressive slash walksters. | ||
| And so I offer a speculative explanation, but I think it's, you tell me what you think of it. | ||
| So I argue that when the conservative wakes up in the morning, by the sheer nature of the term conservative, there's something to conserve. | ||
| So I wake up, yes, society may not be perfect, but there's a lot of good stuff here worthy of conserving. | ||
| The progressive wakes up in the morning with complete existential gloom and doom. | ||
| We live in a transphobic, misogynistic, land acknowledgement, Islamophobic, everything is bad. | ||
| We need to eradicate everything. | ||
| And if only I had enough power. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And around the corner is where we're going to find unicornia. | ||
| And therefore, that explains why the progressive is doom and gloom and the conservative is not. | ||
| Well, actually, not only do I agree with that, I can tell you from my life when I started interviewing conservatives, my main thing that I was shocked by was not the political part. | ||
| It wasn't that, oh, Ben Shapiro is pro-life. | ||
| It wasn't that Dennis Prager is for states' rights or low taxes. | ||
| Is that it was that they were nice and happy. | ||
| And we're like, would you like to have dinner and break bread and discuss this further? | ||
| And let's, you know, be in each other's homes. | ||
| That was the part. | ||
| Or Glenn Beck, I thought he was supposed to be this evil scandal. | ||
|
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Larry Elder, all these guys. | |
| Isn't he charming? | ||
| No, I love all these guys now. | ||
| But I think that was the most shocking thing to me. | ||
| And having been in progressive circles, I mean, quite honestly, they weren't that nice and they weren't that generous of spirit or of heart or anything else. | ||
| No, I am not surprised, I suppose. | ||
| But where does that leave you, then, as someone that I think probably still in your true self considers yourself a classical liberal? | ||
| I just had Pete Boghossian, our friend, in here, and I asked him the same question. | ||
| Where does that leave you? | ||
| Now, you find yourself in common cause largely with conservatives. | ||
| I have to vote Republican at this point, not because I'm a traditional Republican or Conservative by any measure, but it's just pretty damn obvious if I want to save Western society to the extent that your vote matters. | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| And sort of related also to being a Canadian where the politics are a little bit different. | ||
| So you're exactly right. | ||
| I would consider myself a classical liberal. | ||
| Oftentimes people have thought that I'm being coy and not advertising well. | ||
| And it's not because I'm trying to be cryptic or coy. | ||
| Meaning like, oh, get there, guy. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's because I'm very much of an issues guy. | ||
| If you ask me about immigration or about the death penalty or just justice system in general, then you'd say, oh my God, he's super conservative, right? | ||
| Yes, countries should have very tight borders. | ||
| Yes, if your DNA is found on the bodies of five raped and killed children, I have no moral problem with executing you. | ||
| Oh, that makes me a super right-wing conservative. | ||
| On the other hand, when it comes to social issues, I don't care who you sleep with, I don't care about your transgender stuff, dress how you want, then you would think I'm super socially liberal. | ||
| Which is really just libertarian from a policy perspective, but yeah, people somehow think that that's left. | ||
| So yeah, so I would consider myself, if you have to pigeonhole me, then classical liberal. | ||
| But then in the weird sense, is so much of what we're seeing the problem right now, the failure of the liberals to defend liberalism? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This has been my main ethos for the last couple of years. | ||
| By the way, To the point that we're talking about labels. | ||
| So my last two books were with Regnery. | ||
| Regnery is historically the most famous conservative imprint, and that even put a greater imprimatur on me as a conservative writer, but I never thought myself as a, I mean, defending freedom of speech and the scientific method should not be conservative values, but apparently, and even I often see, my book is number one in conservative, Conservatism, why? | ||
| Why isn't it just in rationality? | ||
| So yeah, it's... Well, I guess you gotta give the devil his due. | ||
| The progressives took over the word liberal, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| They took over the word liberal. | ||
| What else is on your mind before we wrap up and go have, well, we'll play some basketball and then we'll have some drinks and eat dinner. | ||
| What else is on your mind these days? | ||
| What else is on my mind? | ||
| The desire to, and you and I have talked about this publicly and privately, to get out of Canada. | ||
| People think that somehow I'm being an ingrate and that Canada accepted me as if I owe them my entire life and future generations to stay in Canada. | ||
| Canada has become really an insufferable place to be. | ||
| I hate the taxes. | ||
| So that's always on my mind. | ||
| And it especially became even more so on my mind with the book royalties realities where they steal everything from me. | ||
| But that always existed in Canada. | ||
| That's not really what's driving you right now. | ||
| No, but here's the difference. | ||
| When the taxes are built into your salary as a professor, it's an invisible rape, right? | ||
| Because I get used to, I'm going to make $100, you're going to steal $50 from me, and so I just get $50. | ||
| The difference with book royalties and so on is that they come to my bank account untaxed for a while because they're not taxed by Regnery | ||
| because I'm a Canadian citizen and resident. | ||
| So for a while, I live under the illusion that the neuronal firings of my brains belong to me. | ||
| But then Justin Trudeau, with a really nice cigar and a cognac, he goes, hey, Jew, 58% of your life | ||
| and your thoughts and your ideas and your jokes and your words belong to me. | ||
| And so there is a line inside my bank statement that it's written the Canadian government, the Quebec government, there's this big number, then I press send and that big number disappears. | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| So if you get worried about a Nigerian prince scammed taking $1,500 from you, What should I feel when my entire life's work is taken? | ||
| Sure, but that's not what's driving you. | ||
| To leave? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's that. | ||
| It's the weather. | ||
| It's the wokeness. | ||
| It's feeling like a fish out of water. | ||
| I don't belong there, right? | ||
| When I'm in Texas or when I come to Florida or just in general in the United States, I feel... I've always felt that, by the way. | ||
| I mean, I studied in the US, right? | ||
| I was a professor at many American universities. | ||
| In my disposition, in my values, I'm much more American than I am Canadian. | ||
| Canadian is a nice place where we all get along, where we all hug, where we should all be equal. | ||
| It's soft socialism. | ||
| Right, but does it feel that, so I agree with that from the temperament of all of the Canadians I've met, and when I toured with Jordan, when I've done other things up in Canada, I've always loved the crowds all over Canada, but that seems to have been used again, their own temperament has now been used against them by the government. | ||
| So do you sense that Canada has a real reckoning coming with this? | ||
| I think there's a lot of really angry people in Canada right now. | ||
| I mean, I mean it angry in the right sense of why you should be angry. | ||
| I mean, in part because of the COVID draconian stuff, in part because of the unchecked immigration. | ||
| So to go back to our earlier point, imagine you wake up and within a very short time period, you no longer recognize the city that you live in, right? | ||
| You see what I mean? | ||
| Imagine if I'm a Hasidic Jew and I live in an environment with all other people who look like me and dress like me. | ||
| That's sort of my reality. | ||
| And suddenly I bring people that are completely different from me, that don't dress like me, that don't. | ||
| That's a shock, right? | ||
| Because it's very difficult to assimilate so many. | ||
| And it's, it's happened at the speed of light so that Again, people are gonna say, oh, he's Islamophobic. | ||
| No, I'm for liberty and freedom, right? | ||
| 25 years ago, I had seen a single woman veiled in Montreal. | ||
| One time. | ||
| Okay, from 1975, when we emigrated to Canada, till about 2000, I saw one woman. | ||
| Today, if I walk out of my house, Out of 50 women that I see, 25 are veiled. | ||
| So it's a speed at which that it's impossible to feel any... Am I living in Canada or am I living in Syria? | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Well, also the other reason that it's, first off, Islamophobic is obviously just a canard, an irrational fear. | ||
| I mean, you should fear things that could take away your liberties. | ||
| That's one part. | ||
| But the other part is you have to wonder about Well, are these going to be the people that will defend the liberal democracy that Canada has long been or not? | ||
| I mean, that's just a reality that people seem afraid to address. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so that's, so in addition to the taxes, in addition to the bad weather, in addition to the socialist system, the fact that my wife and I no longer feel as though our children's future is really there. | ||
| That's what I've been driving Yeah, exactly. | ||
| As a father of young kids, that's what I've been doing, because I think about it all the time, that I happen to right now live in the, I think, the freest place in the world, in essence, you know, in Florida, in a flourishing place that's doing it right, despite all the problems for America. | ||
| I've actually, I find it very charming, maybe charming is not the right word, but I see the happiness that you express often publicly at having moved from California to Florida, and in a sense, frankly, I'm envious of that, because you really are the master of your destiny, and that when place A was no longer tenable for you, you moved to place B. The unique factor of being a tenured professor makes it so much more difficult to be a master of my destiny, and that's been very difficult for me to handle, because I am an agent of change. | ||
| I do things, and yet here I'm in this golden cage because of tenure. | ||
| I was about to say, you know that all the comments are gonna say, again, rip off your golden handcuffs and just do it, right? | ||
| It's easier said than done, though, when you, first of all, it takes a long time to build an academic career, you have all these infrastructural constraints, and we have young children. | ||
| If our children were, let's say, 10 years older than they are now, then my ability to take risks would be much greater. | ||
| But now, when I'm guaranteed a job, when I'm getting, it's hard to be a risk taker. | ||
| Not to get too morbid on you, but is the irony of what you're saying for someone that's as learned and historically knowledgeable as you are that, you know, you also don't want to be Anne Frank's neighbor who famously they thought, ah, we'll be okay. | ||
| We'll be okay. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And so we are getting closer and closer to leaving. | ||
| So inshallah, I will be your neighbor soon. | ||
| Was that your way of telling me you want to just drive around the neighborhood for a little bit? | ||
| There's a lot of houses. | ||
| Let's see what we can do for you. | ||
| Although, I'm only willing to come here if you can resolve the mosquito problem, because my biggest fear in life are mosquitoes. | ||
| No, but that's literally true. | ||
| I turn into a crying five-year-old if there's a mosquito in the house. | ||
| It hasn't been that terrible this season, but I can't Sit here and honestly tell my- Don't Jews control everything? | ||
| Not the mosquitoes apparently. | ||
| I can't truly tell you that it's mosquito free here, but I would say it's a small price to pay for freedom and the rest of it. | ||
| More importantly than anything we've discussed here, we're going to shoot hoops for a few minutes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And you've been practicing, I understand. | ||
| I am good trying to. | ||
| What should I expect from you? | ||
| We're playing horse. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| Horse seems appropriate. | ||
| We're going to be just like, I mean, what do you want me to wear? | ||
| I'm wearing wool and I'm wearing sexy black dress shoes. | ||
| This Canadian sucker. | ||
| You see what we did? | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Nice talking to you. | ||
| If you're looking for smarter conversations about academia, check out our Academia playlist. | ||
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