Dec. 6, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:07:14
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Yes, it would be great if Guatemalan immigrants had the same opportunities as people in the US, but I don't give them higher, you know, on the pecking order than American vets who went and lost limbs fighting wars to keep the United States free, right? | ||
| I would love for all children to be safe and happy, but I'm much more likely to jump in front of a It's a crazy world, | ||
|
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crazy world Somebody's gotta have to save you All right, | |
| Gad, not only do you get no introduction, but you said to me right before we begin, what are we going to talk about? | ||
| And I said, you'll find out once the cameras are rolling. | ||
| They're rolling. | ||
| I've got stuff on this paper. | ||
| But I guess before we do anything, how are you, my friend? | ||
| Welcome once again to the free state of Florida. | ||
| You have fled Canada, and here you are. | ||
| How's life? | ||
| How's life? | ||
| Life is good. | ||
| I don't know if you know, but I mean, while I'm living in Canada, I'm officially affiliated with a school in Michigan for the next year, Northwood University. | ||
| They've given me all the freedom that I can hope for in order to be able to create and produce work on my next book. | ||
| So I couldn't be happier other than to have the house right next to yours. | ||
| How does it feel to be out of Canada? | ||
| Because Canada is extremely weird right now. | ||
| I mean, every time I put you on the show, something weird is happening in Canada. | ||
| But it seems that the weirdness has sort of now overtaken the streets almost at an endless level, particularly Montreal where you guys are, but also Toronto and a couple other places. | ||
| So many places, as you said, are very bad, but Montreal is certainly, arguably, the worst place, at least from a Jewish perspective. | ||
| I just published an article in the New York Post on the unique dynamics of anti-Semitism in Montreal. | ||
| It's something that, regrettably, I've been warning about people for many, many years. | ||
| The writing was on the wall, and it's really gotten now so bad that it really is a godsend that I don't have to walk in on campus. | ||
| I'm not even sure how it would be possible to do it now. | ||
| Because your university, Concordia, is like kind of ground zero for this lunacy. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| So for at least 20 years, maybe more, it's been colloquially referred to as Gaza University. | ||
| So you may remember in 2002, Netanyahu was actually shut down, maybe one of the early cases of cancel culture. | ||
| At the time I was at UC Irvine, So I wasn't there on campus. | ||
| But this has been a brewing problem that the administration has chosen to ignore. | ||
| As a matter of fact, as I was trying to decide whether to take a leave and so on, one of the senior administrators looked at me straight in the face and said, there's absolutely zero Jew hatred at my university. | ||
| At our university, a few days later, the president of the university was summoned to Parliament Hill to admit that there is Jew hatred. | ||
| So it's the old ostrich parasitic syndrome. | ||
| You bury your head in the sand and hopefully the problem will go away. | ||
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It doesn't. | |
| Let me throw you a quick video of one of the protests in Canada. | ||
| I think if I heard what they said, they said, Say God, say God. | ||
| So it's a religious cry, and usually many of these religious cries end up downstream with bad things happening to Jews. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you're saying this stuff with a smile on your face, and you usually have a smile on your face, and you wrote a book about happiness, but you've seen this before. | ||
| I mean, we've obviously been on the show a million times, and people have heard your story about growing up in Lebanon and Surviving the Civil War and everything else. | ||
| But what do you see as the future for Canada? | ||
| You know, America seems to be turning around right now. | ||
| We seem like we got to the precipice, we looked into the abyss and we're coming back. | ||
| I don't see that moment for you guys. | ||
| Yeah, you're exactly right. | ||
| You really needed a cataclysmic figure like Donald Trump to be able to turn things around. | ||
| Anybody who comes in is going to be better than Justin Trudeau. | ||
| So there is going to be an improvement of sorts, but it certainly will not be anything like what Donald Trump has been able to now, you know, invigorate and so on. | ||
| So I'm cautiously optimistic that things will improve, but unfortunately the demographic realities in Canada in general and in Quebec and Montreal in particular are so astounding that I don't see how, I mean, it'll just be a slow Walk into the abyss of infinite lunacy, really. | ||
| That's gotta be tough to sit with as a Canadian. | ||
| I mean, you lived through this once already. | ||
| I mean, Lebanon was a Christian country. | ||
| Within our lifetime, right? | ||
| Lebanon was about 65% Christian, and now it's flipped the other way around. | ||
| It's about 65% Muslim. | ||
| And it didn't take 500 years. | ||
| It took, you know, 40, 50 years. | ||
| And so things can quickly change. | ||
| And usually you can predict, there's a book by a gentleman by name of, he's a missionary from Africa, his name is Peter Hammond. | ||
| He wrote a book a few years ago where he looked at what happens to a society as a function of the percentage of people who are of the Islamic faith. | ||
| You know, zero to two percent, or they're just a exotic minority, three to five percent. | ||
| They're a bit more politically, you know, motivated, but they're still pretty quiet. | ||
| And you could just, you could predict it as quick, as easily as the trajectory of diabetes, right? | ||
| With more Islam comes more problems. | ||
| And at one point, you close your eyes, you open them, and then the whole society is Islamic. | ||
| What would you do if you were Prime Minister of Canada? | ||
| So certainly no one can stay in Canada who does not share the foundational deontological principles of Canada, right? | ||
| So there can't be a two-tier system where we can criticize vigorously any religion except one. | ||
| Because that would be Islamophobic. | ||
| There is an emotion that was passed at the table called M103 that, you know, can make it very difficult to criticize Islam because you would be spreading hate and division and lack of community cohesion. | ||
| And that was under Justin Trudeau. | ||
| So I would certainly halt immigration from any society that does not share our values. | ||
| Look, I'll give you an analogy from evolutionary psychology. | ||
| And when you're choosing a mate, One of the best ways to ensure that you're going to have a successful marriage is what's called assortative mating, meaning birds of a feather flock together. | ||
| If I share the same values as my mate, I'm much more likely to have, it's not difficult to understand, right? | ||
| Well, you could apply that exact same mechanism. | ||
| I call it cultural homophily, cultural liking of similar others, right? | ||
| You're much more likely to integrate people from Denmark or Sweden or Estonia, not because they may share your skin you or not, but because they are likely to share some of those foundational values that the West was built on. | ||
| Regrettably, many other societies don't. | ||
| And so I would certainly reduce that greatly. | ||
| And I would very vigorously deport anyone who adheres to those kinds of antithetical principles. | ||
| Do you think the average Canadian is just kind of sitting around like, Trump save us at this point? | ||
| I mean, Trudeau showed up to Mar-a-Lago just a couple days ago and basically kissed the ring, and now it sounds like even he's going to do something as it pertains to the border and everything else. | ||
| I hate to say this because I like to always be smiling and optimistic, but I also like to be truthful. | ||
| I'm not very optimistic for the following reasons. | ||
| So I can walk in my neighborhood, in Montreal, which is, there are a lot of Jews, there are a lot of people who support my message, who'll come up to me, who are fans. | ||
| Dear Dr. Saad, I love you for reasons X, Y, Z. The next question I ask him, do you mind if I ask who you vote for? | ||
| Oh, I voted for the Liberal Party. | ||
| So that disconnect, I love you, Dr. Saad, but I voted for the Liberal Party, and I will continue to do so for the next 17 generations, and there will never be any auto-correction in my political voting behavior. | ||
| How could you resolve the problem if I can never get you to change your behavior? | ||
| When Rumble first started in 2013, they built the platform for the small creator. | ||
| They didn't censor or have biases. | ||
| They were fair and treated all creators equally. | ||
| No one thought platforms would censor political conversation or censor opinions around COVID, but they did. | ||
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| So do you see any way, I mean, not just with Canada, but with, say, Germany and France and Denmark and some of these other countries going through this, do you see any solution that ultimately is not violent to this? | ||
| Because it seems to me that the people who either have suicidal empathy or ostrich parasitic syndrome— That it's almost too late. | ||
| It might have not been too late 10 years ago to have dealt with this appropriately, but now, as you've mentioned, it's a numbers game that I don't see a real way to get out of. | ||
| I don't either. | ||
| And when I, you know, you and I have known each other now for probably about a decade, and certainly a decade before that, if not more, I've been saying that if we continue on this trajectory, we're going to have a repeat of the Beirut that I escaped. | ||
| And people would say, that's such an exaggeration. | ||
| That's so hyperbolic. | ||
| That's so silly. | ||
| I understand you had, you know, this childhood trauma, you know, don't project it onto the West. | ||
| It'll never happen. | ||
| Well, you have to have the imagination to be able to extrapolate these patterns, right? | ||
| It won't happen next year. | ||
| It won't happen in 10 years, but give it enough time and it has to happen. | ||
| There's no, right? | ||
| We won't amputate your legs the first day you get diabetes, but let it rage far enough and it will lead to the amputation of your limbs. | ||
| That's what's going to happen. | ||
| So what do you make about what happened here in America? | ||
| Because again, I think we really looked at the abyss and decided not to do it. | ||
| I think that's really what this election was. | ||
| So I'm very optimistic that, of course, I'm elated that Trump won, but I keep, right away I started warning people, don't be complacent, because that could just be a little bleep, but then the wokster come back even stronger than ever before. | ||
| So it took about 50 to 100 years for many of these cultural values to lead us to where we were. | ||
| Hopefully it won't take 50 to 100 years to reverse them, but it won't begin and end with Trump. | ||
| So evolutionarily, what do you do? | ||
| If you're on the winning side right now, which let's say we are, people watching this are on the winning side of this thing, we want to widen the tent as much as possible, but we don't want to dilute it with, say, the people that have been pushing all these bad ideas for so long. | ||
| How do you decide where to put the markers on that? | ||
| Because I've been seeing a lot of this lately. | ||
| Suddenly the progressives that had everything to do with all of this are pretending they had nothing to do with it and they're trying to make amends. | ||
| I'm all about making amends. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But I just don't know that we're there yet in the game. | ||
| Well, occasional cortex removed her pronouns, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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By the way, I'm AOC for those who are not playing along with your humor. | |
| But literally, I mean, right after the election, she removes her pronouns. | ||
| It's like, so what was this? | ||
| You're all going to pretend you had nothing to I mean, I think we've both used the term performative, right? | ||
| That demonstrates to you that it's, right? | ||
| I didn't, in the darkness of the night when no one was looking, remove tweets where I defended freedom of speech. | ||
| I defended them yesterday, I defend them today, and I'll defend them tomorrow. | ||
| If you truly have internalized those principles, you never take them off your bio. | ||
| They're part of your foundational principles. | ||
| So the fact that she removed them exactly when she realized that the winds were changing demonstrates that it's complete nonsense. | ||
| But to your point, and you're gracious to admit that, I think we have to have a door for redemption for people, right? | ||
| If you say, nah, nah, nah, you lost, now get lost, that's probably not a good idea. | ||
| So hopefully we can strike the right balance between the righteous indignation that we felt, but also being welcoming to those who want to join the tent. | ||
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Right. | |
| And that's never easy when you've had people calling you a Nazi for 10 years and then suddenly be like, okay, okay. | ||
| Because it's weird because right now what seems to be happening is it's the people who lost who are asking for unity. | ||
| And you'd think it would be the other way around, and yet there's a strange backwardness to all of this. | ||
| And I love, speaking of sort of being gracious, although I think it was a bit Machiavellian, the amount of, you know, glee by proxy that I felt when Mika and Morning Joe went down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring while he's kind of caressing their hair going, good boy, good girl. | ||
| I thought, oh man, I was happy all day long. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And all it does is it buys them maybe a couple more months of having the job until the network gets sold or something like that. | ||
| But during those couple of months, they make more money than I make 10 years as a professor. | ||
| So something is off in the cosmic justice. | ||
| Ah, therein lies the rub. | ||
| Why didn't you become a cable news host? | ||
| Well, I'm hoping that our mutual friend Elon buys MSNBC and I get the 9 o'clock slot. | ||
| What do you think is going on with Elon? | ||
| That's actually where I wanted to go now. | ||
| I mean, he's been a big supporter of yours and he's sharing your stuff all the time. | ||
| He's telling people to buy your books and all of those things. | ||
| This is a guy who was largely apolitical two years ago. | ||
| What do you make of sort of the psychological makeup of someone who goes all in to the extent that he has? | ||
| So, Elon is a visionary, right? | ||
| He can put patterns together. | ||
| He can see where things are going. | ||
| And for various reasons, some of which are personal reasons that happen within his own family's dynamic, which I think at first he shared it privately with some of us, but I think now he's come out and shared it. | ||
| His son became his daughter and disavowed him and so on. | ||
| He suddenly was kind of awakened out of the stupor that many people had been in, right? | ||
| Where, you know, you You're busy with your daily life, and few people are as busy as Elon, but when he saw the problem, when he recognized what it is, when he recognized some of the people who are offering solutions, including yours truly, I think he went all in, and that's what makes him Elon. | ||
| But what do you think that is? | ||
| What do you think it is about him as a person? | ||
| Because a lot of people see the problems and they don't bury their head in the sand. | ||
| What do you think it is about the type of person? | ||
| I've been very interested in that lately because I'm seeing a lot of people suddenly wake up to the things that we've been talking about for years. | ||
| And by the way, people were talking about them well before I was or you or anything else. | ||
| But the type of person who's just like, I see something, I'm going to do it. | ||
| So I'm going to... | ||
| I recently did a... | ||
| A clip on my show where I said, what do Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Donald Trump have in common? | ||
| Now, the premise of that show was authenticity, that they're all authentic. | ||
| But to your question, I think they're also all honey badgers, right? | ||
| And as we know, colloquially, honey badgers don't give a F, right? | ||
| So Elon sees it. | ||
| To your point, just like others see it, but the others will modulate their behavior, but not, I mean, Elon not only has FU money, I mean, he's got cosmic FU money, and so he doesn't need to modulate or temper his speech or his behavior. | ||
| Sure, but plenty of people do, and they, you know, I know several other billionaires, and they're very quiet about all of this stuff. | ||
| Because they suddenly feel like they have more to lose than anyone else. | ||
| You don't want to mention any names, right? | ||
| No names. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Although many of the... | ||
| I'm not talking about Teal, though, because everyone always thinks I'm talking about Teal. | ||
| But it's not him. | ||
| He's on the Elon side. | ||
| But a lot of the... | ||
| This is not my term. | ||
| I heard it first from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and maybe it's not her term, but a lot of the tech bros have come around, right? | ||
| David Sachs and... | ||
| Well, it's easier now. | ||
| Saks, I think, was one of the leaders of it, too. | ||
| But it's a hell of a lot easier. | ||
| But from your view, without mentioning any names, there are others that you would love to see them throw their hat into the arena, but they're not doing it? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Or that are doing it now when it's safe. | ||
| And again, I want to be welcoming to all of that. | ||
| I think there's, I'm just curious about the psychological makeup. | ||
| You know, if you have two people who have the exact same bank statements and roughly the same lives, yet one is willing to walk right into the fire, and the other one's always waiting for the guy to walk into the fire, I just think there's something interesting there. | ||
| Just honey badgers. | ||
| They're absolute honey badgers, right? | ||
| Joe Rogan does not, and we both know him personally, he doesn't give a damn. | ||
| He won't modulate a single... | ||
| You know, syllable to please or placate anybody. | ||
| Certainly Donald Trump doesn't. | ||
| First reaction of Donald Trump when he's shot in the head is fight, fight, fight. | ||
| So I think they all have those qualities. | ||
| And I always say, by the way, you know, the trajectory of history, whether it be for the good or the bad, is always led by people who are not fence sitters, right? | ||
| It's not the equivocators and the let's see things on both sides. | ||
| It's the guys who see something for better or worse and say, I'm taking that road. | ||
| And so, Elon epitomizes that more than most people. | ||
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| What do you think all the craziness that we've seen over the last couple of years means as it relates to truth in general? | ||
| It seems to me that this had to have happened. | ||
| That Trump losing or us all feeling like the West is done and all freedom of speech is over and all these things, it would have been so out of whack with truth That it couldn't have worked in a way. | ||
| I mean that in sort of like an existential way. | ||
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Existential sense. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But it amazes me that we even got that far, right? | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| For some of your viewers who may not know some of my previous interventions, in 2017, both Jordan and I appeared in front of the Canadian Senate separately, on separate days, where we had to use all of our professorial expertise to... | ||
| Provide the imprimatur that no, no, there really is something called male and female. | ||
| In my case, I use the framework of evolutionary psychology. | ||
| And you had a bow tie on, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
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unidentified
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I did have a bow tie. | |
| So you looked very professional. | ||
|
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I did, indeed. | |
| Thank you for remembering. | ||
| And by the way, well, I shouldn't mention this because I don't usually release any images of my wife, but you could see her in a few, but people don't know that it's my wife. | ||
| Ah, well, you do realize we put this on the internet. | ||
| Oh, now I'm screwed. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, that's okay. | ||
| But anyways, they're probably going to see her tomorrow at Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| So anyways, maybe the cat will be out of the bag. | ||
| So the fact that in 2017, we had to appear in front of... | ||
| I don't know if you actually watched my testimony. | ||
| Yeah, I know I did. | ||
| We played clips of it. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| But when they were... | ||
| Asking me questions after I gave my... | ||
| The smugness, the obnoxiousness. | ||
| It's difficult to... | ||
| If you told me that that was in the 16th century when we were going to be throwing prospective witches into the pool to see if they... | ||
| I would think it would be ridiculous. | ||
| And so to your point, it shows you the fallibility of the human mind that even in the 21st century, once those parasitic ideas get in, even the smartest of people can become. | ||
| So what does that tell you then about suicidal empathy and sort of where or how it relates to groupthink in general? | ||
| That these people with a lot, you know, they tell you how great they are while they're also trying to get you fired and all these things. | ||
| They seemingly only surround themselves with people who are exactly the same and then also are always trying to take out the rather mild-mannered professor who's just saying there's differences between boys and girls. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So I'll give you an example that just happened a few days ago. | ||
| I put out a tweet, a post. | ||
| Now we can't say tweet anymore. | ||
| A post where I said, Dear Donald Trump, could you please invade Canada? | ||
| It won't require more than 10 to 15 men to do so. | ||
| Right? | ||
| There was a whole movement that was started, undoubtedly including some of my colleagues, seeking to have me fired from Concordia because I'm a Canadian citizen who's arguing for the overthrow of the Canadian government. | ||
| I'm calling for it, but I'm not a Canadian. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| To imagine that someone could be so unhinged, so humorless. | ||
| I mean, if it wasn't already clear that me saying to Donald Trump, please invade Canada was a joke. | ||
| If I then add, it won't take more than 10 to 15 soldiers to do so. | ||
| In what world should a professor not realize that I'm being facetious? | ||
| But you can go and see many, many taggings of my university where they're saying, how can you tolerate such a guy who is seeking the overthrow of the government? | ||
| So the people that are going for you on this, do you think they mean it? | ||
| Or do you think they believe what they are saying? | ||
| So I'm of two minds. | ||
| And here, let me introduce an evolutionary twist to it. | ||
| Robert Trivers, has his name ever come up? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Robert Trivers, I think he's still alive. | ||
| He's arguably one of the greatest evolutionary biologists since Darwin. | ||
| That's saying a lot. | ||
| One of the theories that he came up with Was to explain why self-deception has evolved. | ||
| Why is it that human beings, so to your question, do I really believe my lies or not? | ||
| And he proposed an unbelievably elegant explanation for self-deception. | ||
| So you and I are caught up in an evolutionary arms race. | ||
| I'm trying to manipulate you to serve my best interest. | ||
| And you're trying to read my cues to see if I am trying to manipulate you or not. | ||
| Usually when we engage in deception, there are micro cues that we emit that allows my interlocutor to know that I am BSing. | ||
| Now imagine if I could shut off those cues of deception. | ||
| So that you can no longer read them in me. | ||
| Well, the best way for me to shut those off is to believe the lie first, right? | ||
| Or as we both are fans of... | ||
| It's not a lie if you believe it. | ||
| It's in my first book, by the way. | ||
| The Evolutionary Basics of Consumption. | ||
| And you're wearing velvet. | ||
| And I'm wearing... | ||
| You wanted to be ensconced in velvet. | ||
| I'm kind of... | ||
| You're basically the George Costanza of our cultural revolution. | ||
| Thinner and taller. | ||
| And much better looking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And with more hair. | ||
| That's what he would have said! | ||
| But no, but seriously, so to your original question, I think that Consciously, they will tell you that they believe it. | ||
| And the deep recesses of their minds, when they put their head on the pillow late at night, they know they're full of BS. So what does that tell you about the type of people that will literally, in the name of tolerance, import the people that will kill them? | ||
| I mean, what's the... | ||
| They're diabolical, they're evil, they're pigs, they're buffoons, they're imbeciles, they're the Democrat Party, they're Justin Trudeau. | ||
| I mean, that's history, right? | ||
| There's always two camps. | ||
| Truth and light, and debauchery and degeneracy. | ||
| But at least, Biden has... | ||
|
unidentified
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So we have that at least. | |
| Well, that's a good philosophical question for you. | ||
| So, you know, when I was covering it on the show, there were sort of two pieces to this. | ||
| One is that his son has done terrible things. | ||
| I mean, you know, beyond the firearm verification, that that was clearly illegal. | ||
| You know, forging something. | ||
| And then, obviously, there's all the stuff with Burisma and the smoking crack on camera. | ||
| And there's definitely some stuff with prostitutes, probably overstate. | ||
| There's a slew of things that The Sun did, right? | ||
| And many of them are probably connected to shady things that Joe Biden did. | ||
| And he also pretends he doesn't know anything and all that stuff. | ||
| But it seemed that there were two pieces to it. | ||
| One piece was all the bad things that he did. | ||
| But what I saw most people focusing on was that I thought that was interesting. | ||
| They're really, they're a family of degenerates, right? | ||
| I mean, they exude, right? | ||
| I mean, you look at, and again, look, I'm Canadian. | ||
| I don't need to keep reminding people that, so I don't vote here. | ||
| I don't have a direct dog in the fight. | ||
| But if you're coming with universalist principles, you look at Trump's kids. | ||
| And you look at Biden's kids, right? | ||
| You look at, you know, in Arabic you say shahsi, like you have dignity and personhood. | ||
| Which family exudes that more? | ||
| And yet you've got all of my colleagues who are supposed to have the progressive lisp and put the finger out when they sip, and yet they will tell you that the Bidens represent American ideals, whereas Trump is this cantankerous buffoon. | ||
| It's grotesque. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| Well, I had Laura Trump sitting in that chair just a couple days ago, so I know his children fairly well and his children-in-law, and it's like, these are good people. | ||
| Well, maybe that's an interesting thing to discuss, that you have somebody whose gruff on the outside was the only person that could have done the thing that we needed to be done. | ||
| I think we probably discussed this in the past, this distinction between affective processing and cognitive processing, right? | ||
| Most of the people that have this aversion to Trump, it's because of the affective-based processing, right? | ||
| They expect a leader to speak with a certain cadence, with a certain affectation, with a certain... | ||
| You know, eloquence. | ||
| And Trump is not necessarily the sort of the most sophisticated speaker. | ||
| And so, but on the other hand, Barack Obama, I'm speaking now as them. | ||
| He's tall. | ||
| He has a radiant smile. | ||
| He speaks with the cadence of a Southern Baptist minister. | ||
| He has a mellifluous voice. | ||
| That's enough for me. | ||
| I'm already intoxicated with the Obama, you know, wine spirits, right? | ||
| On the other hand, Trump is grotesque. | ||
| That's where it ends with most of these people. | ||
| And actually, and I don't think they'll mind me saying this, I was speaking to Trump's team before he got elected, and he was going to possibly come on my show. | ||
| And I completely understood that after he went on Joe Rogan, there's no need to come on my little tiny show. | ||
| But one of the things that one of his aides had told me, well, what would you talk about? | ||
| And so what I had pitched was exactly that point, which is, I think if people get to know him in the way that At the time, the Rogan thing had not happened yet, but when he went on Gutfeld, where he wasn't sucking all of the air in the room, where you just saw him as actually a pretty cool guy, really nice and personable with a very good sense of humor. | ||
| If you can get people over that original aversion, people might actually like him. | ||
| And I think part of the reason he won, maybe not hardly all of it, Imagine how many people saw him on Joe Rogan and said, wait a minute, I've been sold a complete bill of goods here that he's Hitler, he's disgusting. | ||
| He's actually a really cool guy. | ||
| And so I think people are coming around, but boy, we came close to losing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
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| How worried are you that things are just going to get even wackier for the next 50-some-odd days? | ||
| Oh, here. | ||
| Yeah, meaning before he takes office. | ||
| It seems like there's a lot of reordering of the world. | ||
| I mentioned Canada's already doing things differently, and Trudeau's coming to Kiss the Ring. | ||
| He put out a great post about getting the hostages back. | ||
| I don't know if you saw that. | ||
| I did. | ||
| That was today, from when we're airing this. | ||
| It seems like good things are happening, but are you worried that the system always has some tricks? | ||
| I mean, behavioral psychologists, it's like... | ||
| Evolutionary biology, the system doesn't just give up, right? | ||
| Yeah, and as we know, the old maxim, the wounded animal is most dangerous at the end. | ||
| So I suspect there'll be some kind of response. | ||
| Actually, we were listening to a podcast coming down here from Palm Beach, and they were talking about DOGE and how likely will they be able, Vivek and Elon, to implement some of this stuff. | ||
| And I thought that they raised some good points in that. | ||
| Well, maybe I'll turn it to you. | ||
| Do you think that they will be able to institute the kinds of changes that are needed? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think they can do it, and I think they can do it- Argentina level. | ||
| Yeah, I think they have a limited window of time that they can do it in, but I think if they are ready, and there's just no reason to think that Elon will not be ready to do it, and Vivek- That they will just go in and within weeks you fire thousands of people. | ||
| You send, I heard, was it Vivek that was talking about it the other day? | ||
| You basically take 7,000 FBI agents that are all in D.C. for no reason and send them back. | ||
| They're police officers for the most part. | ||
| Send them back to the states that need them. | ||
| I think things can happen very, very quickly. | ||
| And they have an absolute mandate to do it. | ||
| I mean, it's either now or never. | ||
| I guess I would put it that way. | ||
| And I think they're supposed to disband the whole thing on the anniversary, the 250th anniversary. | ||
| So it's like an 18-month clock. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they want, you know, 450 days to do it on July 4th, the 250th anniversary of the United States. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty beautiful. | ||
| See, I... I think it was Sachs who said it on the podcast I was watching, that it won't be as big as the Argentina fixings, and it won't be as big as what Milton Friedman would have hoped for, but it will be a lot better than what it is now. | ||
| And I think that's a conservative but reasonable prediction to make. | ||
| Well, it's interesting that we never fix any of these things, right? | ||
| So at least we have a chance to fix some of these things. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| And as you know, by the way, I mean... | ||
| Canada is probably the worst when it comes to a lot of these inefficiencies. | ||
| We're a socialist country, social welfare country. | ||
| So every single thing that I could compare how it was 40, 50 years ago when I first moved to Canada to now, healthcare, how quickly we remove the snow when it snows in Montreal. | ||
| Every single social service has gotten exponentially worse over the past four or five decades. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because we know exactly what happens to the social welfare state. | ||
| Eventually, you do run out of other people's money. | ||
| So I'd like to think that there's going to be an autocorrection in all these nations, but we'll have to wait and see. | ||
| So we talked about the sort of misguided motives, let's say, of some of these people, but then someone like Trudeau, if he was hearing you say that right then and there, do you think in his heart of hearts he would disagree with that and say, no, no, things are actually better, and we don't have a mosque members running on the streets, and we do get the snow out pretty quickly and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Yeah, I actually truly think he is beyond repair parasitized. | ||
| I don't think, and this is completely speculative, so I don't know him personally, so I'm just speculating. | ||
| I don't think he's an innately evil, diabolical guy. | ||
| Many of the people that we both know who despise Trudeau will actually disagree with me. | ||
| They think he's an evil dictator who's trying. | ||
| Do some He strikes me as more than that. | ||
| Trudeau strikes me as more of like an utter buffoon who has been taken to evil or something? | ||
| Exactly, right? | ||
| So his brain is literally made of jello, right? | ||
| And so because it's jello, I can parasitize it with ease. | ||
| He comes from like a milieu in Montreal that is very, very kind of uppity progressive. | ||
| So all of the parasitic ideas that I would have enumerated in the parasitic mind are exactly what he has been inculcated with. | ||
| He has swam in that educational ecosystem. | ||
| And so what do you expect him to come out as? | ||
| He's going to be a product of his education. | ||
| So I think, but at this point, he is so brainwashed in that stuff that there is nothing, there's no amount of evidence that I could ever show him that suggests that he would make an auto correction. | ||
| I really, so I'll give you an example. | ||
| A few years ago, they had caught some ISIS guys, or I can't remember what it was, and his response as Prime Minister was, well, clearly this is someone that we have failed in being able to... | ||
| Oh, I remember that. | ||
| Remember that one? | ||
| A couple years ago, yeah. | ||
| How could that be, right? | ||
| I mean, how much evidence would you need? | ||
| Meaning it was a Canadian that went to, wasn't it a Canadian that went to Afghanistan and joined ISIS and the blame, suicidal empathy, lay with us, right? | ||
| It wasn't, we could look at him and say, what a pig, we gave you all the opportunities in the world and you did this. | ||
| It's, what is it that we did wrong that we failed him? | ||
| Which by the way, it's that exact same reflex that applies for soft on crime, criminal thing, right? | ||
| Let's not punish the criminal because he's already a victim of society. | ||
| Now you're going to incarcerate him for having just raped seven or eight women? | ||
| That would be so grossly unfair. | ||
| Just give him a 74th chance and maybe this time around he'll turn his life around. | ||
| You think if we were doing like a Greek mythology version of this that the gods would be looking at us like what a bunch of idiots you are? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Like it would be something like that. | ||
| And they would say you deserve all of the calamities and the pestilence and the locus that can befall you. | ||
| So how do we restore, let's say, unsuicidal empathy? | ||
| If a huge amount of the world, even though clearly people are waking up to it and maybe some tides are turning, but in the countries that it hasn't turned just yet, or even as we said, the United States is still in a precarious position here— How do you wake people up about it? | ||
| And then what do you do? | ||
| What do you actually do to right the ship? | ||
| So I'll give you first kind of the academic answer. | ||
| It's not that empathy is an inherently bad emotion to have, right? | ||
| We've evolved the reflex of empathy because we're a social species, right? | ||
| It's a good idea for me to be able to put myself in your shoes, to be able to empathize and sympathize with your plight. | ||
| It builds bonds and so on. | ||
| So that makes perfect sense. | ||
| But it shouldn't be the most important thing in your life, Gad? | ||
| Is that what you're telling? | ||
| Well, number one, and it shouldn't be directed to the wrong targets, right? | ||
| So yes, it would be great if Guatemalan immigrants had the same opportunities as people in the U.S., but I don't give them Higher on the pecking order than American vets who went and lost limbs fighting wars to keep the United States free, right? | ||
| I would love for all children to be safe and happy, but I'm much more likely to jump in front of a... | ||
| To save my own biological children than random children. | ||
| That doesn't make me a callous person. | ||
| It makes me an evolutionary animal that has evolved the strategic ability to met out my investments in ways that advance my genetic interests. | ||
| That doesn't make me evil or diabolical, right? | ||
| It's called evolution. | ||
| So I think that once we're, so now I gave the evolutionary answer, but the simple answer is, look, follow common sense, right? | ||
| What's the point of having national borders if national borders are meant to be open and no human is illegal? | ||
| Those two statements don't make sense. | ||
| You can't be both a virgin and be pregnant. | ||
| Once you've become pregnant, you've lost the title of virgin, right? | ||
| So you can't have a country that allows 10, 15, 20 million people to come in, most of whom are lovely and want to work and so on, but no, you're violating a deontological principle in the sanctity of... | ||
| So I think... | ||
| People realize that deep down, they just need folks like us to give them the courage to speak out. | ||
| And then, okay, so we get a bunch of them to speak out. | ||
| They start waking up. | ||
| What do you want to happen to the institutions? | ||
| Do you want the institutions to be reformed or do you want them to burn at this point? | ||
| I don't think it's reasonable to expect that we're going to burn down all the institutions. | ||
| I think, as I said earlier, when I said, hopefully it won't take 50 to 100 years to reverse all the ideological trends. | ||
| I think from within, we could do a lot of good, right? | ||
| So, I mean, because, look, think about it. | ||
| Even at my university, which is supremely woke, I don't mean Northwood where I'm at now. | ||
| I mean, Concordia. | ||
| It's supremely woke. | ||
| It's incredibly progressive. | ||
| It's very socialist. | ||
| We'll play some B-roll of some of the things that are going on at Concordia while you're talking right now. | ||
| It's very, very driven by Islamists and anti-Judaism, Jewish stuff and so on. | ||
| But yet 95% of the students that go there just want to study neuroscience and business and classics and they just want, right? | ||
| But it's a small minority that keeps the rest of us hostage, right? | ||
| So I think you can pretty quickly change the ecosystem to reinvigorate reason and logic and science into the institutions. | ||
| I don't think you have to burn them all down and start from zero. | ||
| Although There are some institutions that are starting from zero, University of Austin, right? | ||
| So, I think you can follow both paths equally well. | ||
| Are you afraid that we'll start doing some things right here in America, say, deporting some of the people who are radically anti-American and don't have, you know, aren't even supposed to be here in the first place? | ||
| And so we start cleaning up some things, but that the optics of it will just not be good. | ||
| There will be bad optics. | ||
| That's just part of reality. | ||
| They're going to grab some of the wrong people. | ||
| There will be some situation with a mother and a young child that's separated. | ||
| There will be issues, whatever they might be. | ||
| And that because still so many of us put empathy in such a high spot on that hierarchy, it'll derail the progression. | ||
| I very much worry about that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because I think even someone who is as much of a catalyst for change as Trump, and he is a once in a multiple generation kind of figure, I think even someone like him might lose his resolve once you start getting the crying children and so on. | ||
| In an ideal world, if I am emperor of the universe for... | ||
| A year, I would shut off my empathy module and I would make sure to get it done. | ||
| Whether he's able to or not, I don't know. | ||
| I'm cautiously optimistic. | ||
| Yeah, it seems to me that that's going to be the tricky part, that they're going to start doing it. | ||
| Most people will be for it. | ||
| That's why he won. | ||
| There's a mandate. | ||
| Then there's going to be some weird story. | ||
| And the mainstream media has lost cred, so that's good. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But they'll start getting people to freak out. | ||
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| What else do you make of just sort of like the general sex war that seems to be happening right now that... | ||
| That it's largely women who were supporting Kamala and the Democrats, and it was largely men, obviously not totally, that were more willing to shift towards Trump. | ||
| That there seems to be some play there, maybe because of years of wokeness and everyone's got confused genitals and everything else. | ||
| Well, I mean, yeah, this is something that has been, I've been fighting this kind of stuff, not just in the political arena, but in academia, where, so you're talking specifically just about the gender gap, political voting difference? | ||
| Yeah, that men and women, you can present them with the exact same current events, and they're just, in many ways, looking at them completely differently. | ||
| So I think part of that stemmed from the kind of second and third wave feminism of we need to have a woman break the glass ceiling. | ||
| So a lot of my academic colleagues who are women, and even some of the male feminist sneaky effer colleagues, they were very excited about the prospect of creating history by having a woman. | ||
| I think that could be easily defeated. | ||
| Which one was greater gender difference? | ||
| Was it more women voted for Kamala than men voted for Trump, or was it roughly the same gender difference? | ||
| Off the top of my head, I don't know, but it's got to be more women voted. | ||
| More women than that. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's also driven by a lot of the emotional-based processing, right? | ||
| Even though she was hardly joyful, but she was the party of joy, and it was going to be fun and exciting. | ||
| Maybe here I'm playing into stereotypes. | ||
| Maybe it's a bit easier for women to get channeled into emotional-based processing. | ||
| But if you're asking me to predict whether in the future these patterns will remain the same, I suspect that probably women will continue to be more likely to vote Democrat than Republican for the foreseeable future. | ||
| And you think that that's directly connected, is that directly connected to empathy, like misguided empathy, or is it directly connected to, is there some hunter-gatherer portion of that? | ||
| I don't know about hunter-gatherer. | ||
| So there are several ways I could go with this. | ||
| So for example, socialism, right? | ||
| When you hear the idea that when you, I don't know who first said it, you know, if in your 20s, you're not a socialist, you don't have a heart. | ||
| In your 20s, if you're not a liberal, you have no heart. | ||
| In your 30s, if you're not a conservative, you have no heart. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because a lot of the principles that appeal to people in terms of socialism, you know, if I'm 17 and I see there's a lot of inequity in the world, and imagine if there was a benevolent, magnanimous leader who would create lesser inequity. | ||
| Wow, that sounds nice. | ||
| But then if you play the second and third order effects of what happens under such a system, which typically you may not be familiar with when you're 17, then you realize at 30 that that was probably not a good idea. | ||
| So I think for many people, irrespective of whether they're male or female, intuitively when I'm very young, those principles appeal to me, but then I grow out of them because actually my prefrontal cortex develops and then I become mature. | ||
| Do you remember, is it Evan Syed? | ||
| He's going to be happy that I mentioned him. | ||
| Do you know that guy? | ||
| The name comes across my Twitter every now and again. | ||
| He's a comedian. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Evan Syed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| S-A-Y-E-T, I think. | ||
| S-A-Y-E-T. Yeah. | ||
| He wrote a book maybe 12, 13 years ago about sort of kindergarten logic. | ||
| And he had even done a lecture, I think it was at the Heritage Institute. | ||
| Is it Institute? | ||
| Foundation. | ||
| Foundation. | ||
| Where he talked about exactly what we're saying now, which is a lot of these principles really are part of the utopia when you're in kindergarten. | ||
| Caring is sharing. | ||
| That sounds good. | ||
| Socialism, right? | ||
| But as you know, and I've probably mentioned this on this show before, E.O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist, you know where I'm going with this? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Please take me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he studied social ants. | ||
| Social ants have a unique... | ||
| Social structure, you have a reproductive queen, then you have indistinguishable worker ants and soldier ants, right? | ||
| So when he was asked to comment on socialism slash communism, he said, great idea, wrong species. | ||
| Meaning that you can't impose a social structure on a species if the evolutionary trajectory of that species does not expect that social form, right? | ||
| So communism is wonderful for ants, it's not wonderful for human beings, because human beings, Have heterogeneity of preference, of talents, of aggression, of- You mean we might like different things and we might work differently to get them? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Well, but when I'm 12, I like the idea of all of us ending up at the same place. | ||
| As Kamala Harris told us, right? | ||
| It's not fair. | ||
| We have to end up at the same place. | ||
| And so, I don't know. | ||
| It's incredible how thin it is. | ||
| It's unbelievably fair. | ||
| The fact that she put that video up, that we'll all end up in the same place video, the day before the election that Biden got elected to be president. | ||
| So now that's, you know, four plus years ago. | ||
| She puts up this cartoon, it says, and we'll all end up in the same place. | ||
| I mean, that's Marxism 101. It also just, it stands up to no scrutiny. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| So we're all going to be millionaires? | ||
| We're all going to be baseball players? | ||
| We're all going to be We're all going to be vice presidents. | ||
| Well, that's really what it means. | ||
| But you would just think that we've evolved to the point where you couldn't get away with such mindless drivel. | ||
| And yet, here we are. | ||
| But what bothers me is that no amount... | ||
| Look, I'm in the business of trying to change people's opinions, right? | ||
| I mean, I studied psychology, decision-making, and even in my public interventions, that's what I do. | ||
| And yet, I hate to say this, I fear that the architecture of the human mind is not necessarily amenable to Getting you to change your opinion. | ||
| So in chapter seven of The Parasitic Mind, I lead off with a long quote from Leon Festinger. | ||
| Leon Festinger was the pioneering psychologist who developed the theory of cognitive dissonance, right? | ||
| So cognitive dissonance is, you know, there's tension in my head. | ||
| How do I hold two opposing polar ideas, right? | ||
| Well, usually what I'll do is I'll, Implement a whole bunch of cognitive processes to try to soften that cognitive dissonance, right? | ||
| I bought the Mazda, but not the Toyota. | ||
| So now how can I try to reduce the dissonance of not having bought the other car, right? | ||
| And so I go through all kinds of machinations. | ||
| Well, the human mind does not regrettably Alter its positions, despite the fact that I show you a tsunami of evidence that suggests that you should be changing your mind. | ||
| And so on the one hand, from this side of my mouth, I spend all day trying to get you to change your opinions. | ||
| But then from this side of my mouth, I know that it's going to be a Herculean effort to be able to do so. | ||
| So do you think that one day they'll be able to actually diagnose Trump derangement syndrome as a psychological order? | ||
| I mean, I'm not even fully kidding about that. | ||
| It's called the Sam Harris complex, no? | ||
| That's psychiatrically what it's called. | ||
| The Malibu meditator. | ||
| The Malibu meditator. | ||
| Well, what do you make of somebody like that? | ||
| I mean, we've talked about it a little bit over the years, but you know, so... | ||
| I was on Jordan Peterson's 500th podcast a couple weeks ago, and we were saying how it was eight years to the week of when we first met. | ||
| And boy, the world has so significantly changed in so many ways since then. | ||
| And we were discussing basically, could we all have done something a little bit different? | ||
| Those of us who are out here on the, let's say, frontier of the internet thing, could we have done things differently so that we wouldn't have gotten close to this precipice? | ||
| And I think we both think it's an open-ended question. | ||
| Maybe we could, maybe we couldn't have. | ||
| Right. | ||
| My guess is we couldn't have. | ||
| I don't know what else we could have done. | ||
| I think we did quite a lot to try to get people to change. | ||
| But, you know, people think that I... It's idiotic. | ||
| I have Sam Harris derangement syndrome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Nothing could be further from the truth. | ||
| I wish Sam and all these other guys nothing but the best. | ||
| I'm attacking the exemplar that they represent, right? | ||
| So when Sam Harris takes the positions, for example, I'm going to write a book Literally called lying, where he extols the virtues of not lying and how important it is to live an honest life and so on. | ||
| Yes? | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| Sign me up for that. | ||
| But then, fast forward, he's on trigonometry, or I can't remember which show he is, where he says, no, it was perfectly fine to have hidden and suppressed the information on Hunter Biden because consequentialist ethics, which is, I mean, he didn't use those words. | ||
| Right, but... | ||
| Well, in essence, it got... | ||
| Well, the ends justify the means. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The end justifies the means. | ||
| And therefore, wink, wink. | ||
| Don't buy it when I tell you don't lie. | ||
| Lie when it's expeditious for me to lie, right? | ||
| If it serves my purposes. | ||
| Well, that gets my goat, right? | ||
| Because I am authentic and truthful to a fault. | ||
| And so I felt a bit of a... | ||
| Maybe I'm getting too personal, but I felt a bit of a conundrum internally. | ||
| Because on the one hand... | ||
| Having known him, you know, we had dinner together. | ||
| I've been on his show. | ||
| I mean, we weren't best of friends, but I knew him personally. | ||
| So there is the Middle Eastern code of conduct that says, don't go after people you know personally. | ||
| I felt that very strongly. | ||
| You felt the same way. | ||
| I tried not to do it for a long time. | ||
| But then I started getting these kind of bouts of angst of, but I place authenticity and truth above all else. | ||
| So am I being inauthentic and untruthful by biting my tongue when I hear him spouting Pure nonsense all day long. | ||
| And then finally, that one won, right? | ||
| And so I came out. | ||
| At first, I came out in my usual jocular way. | ||
| I was hiding under the table and doing all these things. | ||
| So where I'm trying to communicate to Sam that maybe you're being a bit obnoxious in some of the positions you're taking, but then he didn't respond well to that, and therefore the gloves were off. | ||
| So without making this about him specifically, just to do something a little more broad, it seems to me that largely what happened to him is parallel to what happened to the atheist movement across, really across the world, I would say, because he was obviously deeply tied into that. | ||
| And I think he had those debates with Jordan, and I think, well, I guess you can't say it objectively, but close to objectively, I think Jordan won, or at least in terms of the public reaction to it, let's say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where do you place the atheist movement these days? | ||
| I mean, it seems like there's either been some sort of belief revival or it's happening right now. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| The epidemiology of lack of belief over the past 15, 20 years has really gone up a lot. | ||
| So I don't know if there's been a slight shift down. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| I don't know that empirically there has been, but it does. | ||
| It seems like within the zeitgeist, suddenly people are talking about religion and belief again. | ||
| I think post-COVID, people started waking up to different things, stopped believing the system. | ||
| And certainly Jordan has contributed a lot to that, to a lot of sort of young men who were kind of floundering aimlessly. | ||
| And then he comes in with a somewhat clinical psychologist, somewhat spiritual, quasi-religious. | ||
| So... | ||
| Certainly the new atheist movement is dead, right? | ||
| Rest in peace. | ||
| For those of you who don't know, there was, I mean, of course you know well about, I mean, well, Dennett recently passed away, so he's gone. | ||
| Well, Dawkins is still kind of holding the candle, right? | ||
| He's had a few run-ins with Jordan. | ||
| He is, except he's made it very clear that he's very happy to live in a Christian country, to whatever extent you could call the UK still a Christian country. | ||
| Yeah, not much. | ||
| And that tells you something. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I actually watched a few of the interactions with Jordan and I almost felt a bit uncomfortable about them because it seemed as though they couldn't find a place where they could have a meaningful dialogue, right? | ||
| Because Jordan speaks in the sort of the biblical narrative metaphor, and whereas Dawkins is all about everything has to be scientifically vertical. | ||
| And I felt as though they were speaking over each other. | ||
| Is that a right perception? | ||
| I mean, I couldn't say it better. | ||
| Well, how do you feel about that? | ||
| How do you try to integrate those parts? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| So, I get one. | ||
| One per show. | ||
| No, you've had many. | ||
| There is an evolutionary explanation for religion, actually. | ||
| So, in a sense, and this is not a cop-out answer that I don't want to answer you personally. | ||
| I will also answer personally. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So, there are several ways to answer why religion exists from an evolutionary perspective. | ||
| So, let me break them down. | ||
| There is what's called the Adaptive argument, does it serve any adaptive function for us to be believers? | ||
| So David Sloan Wilson, who is an evolutionary biologist, he's now retired, wrote a book called Darwin's Cathedral, where he argued that groups that are more religious than groups that are less religious end up Out-surviving the less religious groups, because inherently religion creates greater commonality, greater cohesion, greater cooperation, greater delineation of in-group, out-group. | ||
| So for very earthly reasons, being religious pays off in the evolutionary game of life, yes? | ||
| Okay, so that's one argument. | ||
| There is an exaptation argument Exaptation means a byproduct of evolution. | ||
| So for example, the fact that our skeletal system has the color that it does, there is no adaptive function to that. | ||
| It's just an engineering pathway. | ||
| So it's a byproduct of other engineering decisions, okay? | ||
| So the exoptation argument for religion is that it piggybacks on evolutionary mechanisms that already exist in us. | ||
| Evolution simply rides that wave. | ||
| Example, we've already evolved the mechanism of coalitional thinking. | ||
| We view the world as blue team, red team. | ||
| Look at Judaism. | ||
| Christianity and Islam, they all have an us versus them. | ||
| Now, with varying degrees of intolerance, but we all, there are the Jews and the Goys. | ||
| There is the believers who accept Jesus in their hearts and the rest of you who are going to burn in hell. | ||
| There is the believers and the kuffar in Islam, the dirty non-believers, right? | ||
| So, what religion does is it takes this computational system that's already in our brain and it piggybacks on it. | ||
| It uses it. | ||
| So, As an evolutionist, I think that it is the default value for human beings to be believers. | ||
| It is an anomaly when you are an atheist as a human being. | ||
| Now here though, I side with Dawkins in the following sentence. | ||
| The fact that religion offers us tons of functional benefits doesn't mean if I'm a purist, I should believe it for those functional reasons. | ||
| Do you follow what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look, if my child is four years old and gets, God forbid, stricken with leukemia and dies, It makes a lot more sense for me to be a believer. | ||
| You know, it's because God works in mysterious ways. | ||
| It's because God calls His most pure angels to be with Him. | ||
| That gives me solace. | ||
| To imagine that shit happens and leukemia is just a random thing and too bad that Timmy's dead doesn't feel good. | ||
| Right, or there are no atheists in a foxhole. | ||
| Or there's no atheists in a foxhole. | ||
| So there are so many functional reasons to be a believer and so few to not be a believer. | ||
| So my view is religion is here to stay accepted. | ||
| Now, do I necessarily buy into... | ||
| So I'm very, very Jewish. | ||
| I'm very much tied to my Jewish identity. | ||
| Yet, I don't necessarily subscribe to many of the rituals of Judaism, and I don't think I'm going to... | ||
| As a matter of fact, I always joke with rabbis that I know that I have paid a lot more to be Jewish than they will ever pay in 500 years of prayers. | ||
| How do they take that, usually? | ||
| Well, they kind of sit back, right? | ||
| Because I had to wear really good running shoes and run fast so that my head is not detached from the rest of my body because I'm Jewish, whereas you just put on... | ||
| Literally, you mean that? | ||
| I mean, literally, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Now, by the way, I also put on Tefillin. | ||
| Did you know this, by the way? | ||
| I'm breaking new ground here. | ||
| So, at Cornell, so I did my PhD at Cornell. | ||
| There was a Chabad rabbi, Lubavitch rabbi. | ||
| I became very good friends with him. | ||
| Rabbi Eli Silberstein, gave him a shout out. | ||
| We got to know each other very well. | ||
| He would invite me over for Shabbat dinner. | ||
| You know, hardcore stuff, right? | ||
| Lubavitch rabbi. | ||
| And we'd have very philosophical conversations. | ||
| As I was about to leave Cornell, he said, God, I said, uh-oh, here comes the ask. | ||
| You know, these guys are very sly. | ||
| They're smiling assassins, as we say. | ||
| So he said, can I ask you to do me a favor? | ||
| I said, shoot, Rabbi. | ||
| He said, how about you wear tefillin for me? | ||
| You have a pure Jewish soul, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| He played on maybe my vanity. | ||
| And for the next 10 or 11 years after I made that promise, Dave, I put on tefillin every day. | ||
| Now, I didn't put it on necessarily because every single element of that rich, but I did put it on as a Overt signal of my belonging to a shared group with a shared genetic heritage and historical heritage and persecution heritage. | ||
| And by doing that for five, 10 minutes in the morning, I was reaffirming that I belonged to that group. | ||
| And so I think there are beautiful elements of religion that I could subscribe to without necessarily being tied down to the minutia of every word. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Yeah, so if we were splitting hairs there, for the type of person that maybe needs belief, you're basically saying there's a utilitarian version of it, and then there's the sort of more mystical version of it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you think that the decision between, to whatever extent people are making a decision on those two things, you think that's just built into them? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| It is built into them. | ||
| I think what bothers me, by the way, is when there is an overlapping of the influence of one into the other, meaning I'm talking now science versus religion. | ||
| So for example, Stephen Jay Gould, who was a famous paleontologist at Harvard, Proposed something called Noma. | ||
| Noma is non-overlapping magisteria, meaning that he was what's called an accommodationist. | ||
| He didn't want to be hostile to religion the way Dawkins is. | ||
| He said, look, religion serves a purpose here. | ||
| Science serves a purpose here. | ||
| Let them not overlap and everybody can sing Kumbaya together. | ||
| I'm not quite as accommodationist because the problem is that you do get overlap. | ||
| You don't get non-overlapping emergency area because religion does make statements that should be only within the purview of science. | ||
| No, I cannot tolerate that a young earth creationist tells me that the earth is that age Contravening what the geologists told me. | ||
| Because now you're demonstrating religious hubris that is frankly incorrect, right? | ||
| I can see the value of religion, but please stay in your lane. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, also, in a world where everything's become political, I mean, how are you going to have a debate about abortion, let's say, without crossing up science and religion? | ||
| But you've, if I may, I don't know if we were, but I think you've become a bit more of a believer in the last few years, yes? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what, I mean, I know that, of course, you've hung around with Jordan and so on, and that helped. | ||
| Are there other things that cause you to become more of a believer? | ||
| Well, I think there were a few things. | ||
| I mean, I think spending the amount of time that I spent with Jordan and then seeing the, and I guess this is the utilitarian argument for it, seeing the literal transformations that he was doing with people's lives. | ||
| So I always say, if people ask me about Jordan, like, you know, if I'm at the supermarket and someone says something about Jordan, like, to me, he's a prophet in the sense, I don't know if I mean that in the most literal biblical sense, but if we're to believe that some people, you described Elon as a visionary before, | ||
| If some people have, through hard work and dedication and education and everything else, or some spark that existed before them, if they have some ability to communicate something that is so transcendent that it literally is changing the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people all over the world, I'll grant, I'll jump on that train, I would say. | ||
| I would also say being a father probably also altered some of that stuff because then you start seeing an unbreakable chain and I think you probably don't want to be the one to break it. | ||
| Actually, you'll appreciate this. | ||
| One of my friends who is modern Orthodox Jewish. | ||
| So he's fairly religious. | ||
| I asked him about it, and he's had a pretty, lost his father very young. | ||
| He's had some real difficult stuff in his life. | ||
| And I asked him about why he's still so religious despite so much tragedy in his life. | ||
| And he said that his grandfather survived the Holocaust and still was a believer till he died. | ||
| And he felt that he couldn't break that chain. | ||
| So I think that that probably is a piece of it. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Just before we came to, we were flying out of Montreal, I had some Lubavitch guys come up to me and recognize me. | ||
| So it's kind of fun. | ||
| You think that they never check the internet and they're stuck reading the Torah. | ||
| Don't they have their own internet or something? | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| And so, oh, thank you so much for your work. | ||
| And so even the ultra-Orthodox pay attention to some of our work. | ||
| What else is on your mind these days before I make you two giant tomahawks? | ||
| By the way, people, should I look at this camera? | ||
| I saw the tomahawk. | ||
| Do you remember what I told you? | ||
| I will twerk for those tomahawks. | ||
| You don't have to twerk. | ||
| Well, we'll see. | ||
| Let's leave it open. | ||
| Maybe a couple of tequilas will twerk. | ||
| I'm Can I say that I was almost as excited about the Tomahawks as I was in holding this conversation? | ||
| Well, we've done this. | ||
| We've done this many, many times. | ||
| You've never had the Dave Rubin Tomahawk. | ||
| I'm very, very excited. | ||
| What's keeping me? | ||
| Yeah, well, what else is on your mind right now? | ||
| I mean, you've got a new book coming out. | ||
| You're obviously happy with the new gig. | ||
| There's a lot of wacky stuff going on in Canada. | ||
| You're sometimes occasionally hiding under the desk still. | ||
|
unidentified
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There's a lot going on, but what else? | |
| Just trying to be the best father and husband to my family. | ||
| I always love when I travel with them because all of these experiences become that much more enriching when they can see it. | ||
| And I know you're not going to show the camera, but my daughter and wife are sitting over there. | ||
| And so it's nice to expose them to these new experiences. | ||
| So hopefully I can be the best husband and the best father I can be and the rest will take care of itself. | ||
| And your son, who's 13, is about to kick your butt. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I want to be very clear about this, Gad said, and it's on video. | ||
| I am not letting no 13-year-old, maybe that was a double negative, but no 13-year-old would be beating me in basketball. | ||
| Although his handle's pretty good. | ||
| I saw some stuff out there. | ||
| You said, what's been on my mind? | ||
| I'm not liking the fact that very, very soon, he will be literally looking down on me. | ||
| Which is not a difficult thing to do because I'm not the tallest guy in the world. | ||
| But it looks like he's going to be well taller than me. | ||
| I guess that's a good thing. | ||
| Is that the end? | ||
| It's a strange ending to a fine... | ||
| He'll never have my green eyes. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| That's still not good? | ||
| I don't think we can end a little stronger. | ||
| Give me some deep piece of wisdom. | ||
| We can't just end on the fact that your son might be taller than you. | ||
|
unidentified
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That doesn't seem like the proper ending to a show. | |
| Well, how about an evolutionary explanation for why your son might be taller than you, but you'll tolerate him despite that, or something? | ||
| Well, okay, I'll tell you this. | ||
| There is an expression, it's a Hebrew-Arabic. | ||
| Maybe that's probably not a good way I should end it. | ||
| Hebrew-Arabic? | ||
| No, not a Hebrew-Arabic. | ||
| It's like an Arabic spoken by Jews. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| So they create their own little dialect. | ||
| The term is called sin sh'alut. | ||
| Sin means the era. | ||
| Sh'alut means The era of obnoxiousness. | ||
| So you will see this when your boys become that age. | ||
| When the kids hit teenage years, they become a bit, they could be, you know, they try different personas and so on. | ||
| He's hit that, but, but, I'm proud to say that both of my children have hit the teenage years with a lot of poise and grace, and so my wife and I probably are doing something right. | ||
| I'm gonna beat your son in horse, and then I'm gonna cook you a steak. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| If you're looking for smarter conversations about academia, check out our Academia playlist. | ||
|
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And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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