The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 24 ｜ Dr. Gad Saad

00:00:00.440 This is a fantastic podcast that you are going to, it's our longest podcast, it ran almost

00:00:06.880 two hours, the interview.

00:00:08.520 You are going to love it.

00:00:11.300 I just made some notes here on just some of the things we touched on in his words, progressivism's

00:00:17.660 kindergarten logic, the socialism of ants, the wisdom of not knowing, the expressionist

00:00:26.540 character of Islam, the courage of responsibility, the humanity of struggle.

00:00:31.520 This guy is amazing.

00:00:34.820 He is currently a professor of marketing.

00:00:37.680 That we talk about in a way is that's not really what he studies.

00:00:45.660 And it's kind of makes me uncomfortable, but I think it made him uncomfortable in the same

00:00:52.960 way.

00:00:53.300 He has garnered a lot of attention online as the gadfather, ushering in an audience of

00:01:00.280 loyal followers.

00:01:01.500 He is a regular on Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin's podcasts.

00:01:05.140 It is a fascinating, I mean, it's just a, it's a roundhouse kick to the brain.

00:01:10.720 In his article for Psychology Today titled Life Advice for Young Adults, he advises, he advises

00:01:17.500 young people to pursue a career that you are passionate about, commit yourself to lifelong

00:01:23.800 learning, never cower to group conformity, and live your life with honesty and dignity.

00:01:31.360 This man lives that.

00:01:34.140 He guides his life in what he calls apostolic humility.

00:01:39.160 He is funny, he is charming, he has an incredible life story.

00:01:47.140 On this episode, the consuming instinct and the morality in a chaotic world.

00:01:54.160 Gad, I want to eventually get, I want to go back in time to the beginning of your life,

00:02:13.520 but I actually want to start at the book Homicide and how the book Homicide influenced you.

00:02:23.740 First, tell me about the book and what you...

00:02:26.640 What a fantastic first question.

00:02:28.360 Great one.

00:02:29.400 So first semester, doctoral student at Cornell University.

00:02:32.880 I take a course with a professor by the name of Dennis Regan.

00:02:36.120 And it's an advanced social psychology course, not an evolutionary psychology course.

00:02:40.560 About halfway through the semester, he assigns the class, the book Homicide, which is written

00:02:46.560 by two Canadians.

00:02:48.300 You can't avoid the damn Canadians.

00:02:50.440 Man, what's up with this?

00:02:51.560 Their husband and wife team, two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, Martin Daly

00:02:56.540 and Margot Wilson.

00:02:57.980 The book Homicide looks at patterns of criminality via an evolutionary lens.

00:03:02.640 In other words, it argues that there are certain types of crimes, certain causes of crimes that

00:03:07.980 happen irrespective of whether they happen in the Amazon or in Detroit or 500 years ago

00:03:13.200 or 500 years from...

00:03:14.000 So we can find a Jack the Ripper all over the world.

00:03:18.780 Or perhaps, let me give you more specific examples.

00:03:22.000 What do you think is the number one greatest threat to a child growing up in terms of the

00:03:27.520 likelihood of him or her succumbing to child abuse?

00:03:31.600 Do you have any...

00:03:32.880 What is the number one...

00:03:34.360 Predictor.

00:03:34.940 For example, is it which zip code he lives in?

00:03:37.260 Is it if his dad was an alcoholic?

00:03:39.380 Is it...

00:03:40.100 What's the best predictor of a child experiencing child abuse?

00:03:45.320 If one of the parents were abused themselves?

00:03:49.560 Good guess.

00:03:50.320 No.

00:03:50.740 It's if there is a step parent in the household.

00:03:54.940 Right?

00:03:55.340 The Cinderella story...

00:03:56.160 Wow.

00:03:57.000 The Cinderella story, it's a universal fable precisely because it plays on this universal

00:04:01.260 evolutionary theme, which is that it is very difficult for people to be placed in a position

00:04:06.840 where they don't differentiate between their biological children and their stepchildren.

00:04:12.540 Now, this doesn't mean that every step parent is a nasty, brutal child abuser.

00:04:16.020 But once you have a step parent in the home, it's a 100 time more likely probability that

00:04:24.720 there'll be abuse.

00:04:26.340 Well, that turns out to be the case in many animal species.

00:04:29.020 So, for example, lions, when the resident dominant males are kicked out by new incoming males,

00:04:34.440 the first thing that the new males do is go around and kill every single cub that exists

00:04:40.580 in that pride because they couldn't have been sired by them and they don't want to waste

00:04:44.260 their evolutionary investments in children who are not theirs.

00:04:48.460 And in a sense, that's what's happening with the abuse that you see with step parents.

00:04:52.780 So, that's one example.

00:04:54.160 Another one is, who do you think is the greatest threat to women around the world?

00:05:01.300 Who would that person be?

00:05:02.500 Who do you think it is?

00:05:03.280 Is it a guy that's hiding in the bushes, a serial killer?

00:05:06.340 Who is the person who's most threatening?

00:05:10.860 I'm going to get it wrong.

00:05:12.100 I don't know.

00:05:12.780 Sorry, I don't mean to put you on the spot.

00:05:13.740 Yeah, no, no, no.

00:05:14.440 I mean...

00:05:15.680 It's very easy.

00:05:16.740 Okay.

00:05:17.020 It's the husband.

00:05:18.520 It's their husband.

00:05:19.740 The number one reason why husbands, whether they be in the Yanomomo tribe in the Amazon

00:05:24.840 or whether it be in ancient Greece or it be 3,000 years from now, if he suspects infidelity

00:05:30.800 or he knows that there's infidelity, he goes into a homicidal rage.

00:05:34.920 And the reason for that is very simple.

00:05:36.660 We are a bi-parental species.

00:05:38.380 Human males invest a lot in their children.

00:05:40.560 And so, you and I are descendants of ancestors who cared whether they're women straight or

00:05:45.520 not because we don't want to be investing in children who are not ours.

00:05:49.160 Now, oftentimes when you give these types of scientific explanations, people hate evolutionary

00:05:52.620 psychology because they think that if you offer a scientific explanation, you're condoning

00:05:56.840 it.

00:05:57.180 Correct.

00:05:57.420 You're justifying it.

00:05:58.280 Or you're using your fancy science to explain why child abuse happens, why women are beaten

00:06:02.900 and killed.

00:06:03.380 Of course you're not.

00:06:04.560 Right.

00:06:04.660 The argument that I always tell people is your logic when they attack me with this kind of

00:06:09.180 nonsense is this is like saying that an oncologist who studies cancer is for cancer, is justifying

00:06:14.980 cancer.

00:06:15.400 In the 1960s, early 1970s, the FBI started up a new program because of the serial killers.

00:06:25.080 And everybody, and I remember because my grandfather was one of them saying, you know, these guys are

00:06:30.200 just trying to excuse them and everything else.

00:06:32.220 And they were saying, no, we're trying to understand.

00:06:34.480 We have to understand them to be able to find the next one before the damage is done.

00:06:39.520 Exactly right.

00:06:40.300 Okay.

00:06:40.620 So, um, so you take this book on homicide and you realize this is the direction for me in

00:06:48.340 my life.

00:06:49.060 Exactly right.

00:06:49.580 So I had gone to Cornell to study decision making and specifically consumer decision making,

00:06:55.280 but thinking that I would do sort of a traditional stuff.

00:06:57.900 I would, I have a background in mathematics and computer science.

00:07:00.340 So I thought I would be a mathematical modeler of consumer choice.

00:07:03.660 Then I really got into behavioral sciences, psychology, and then through serendipity with

00:07:08.240 this, uh, book, I then saw the light.

00:07:11.120 Hey, I will take this evolutionary principle.

00:07:12.840 And in the same way that they applied it for criminality, I'll apply it for consumer behavior.

00:07:17.140 And I then developed, founded and developed the field of evolutionary consumption, which is

00:07:21.660 simply the application of these evolutionary principles to consumer behavior.

00:07:24.900 All right.

00:07:26.240 So, um, let's stay in the evolutionary world of decision making for a second.

00:07:33.920 Tell me how, tell me how that is relevant to us today.

00:07:39.920 Everything that we do, we do it not outside of biological imperatives.

00:07:45.080 Many social scientists, many professors in general think that evolution stops at the neck,

00:07:51.340 right?

00:07:51.700 It can explain everything below the neck.

00:07:53.660 It explains our opposable thumbs.

00:07:55.160 It explains our liver, our heart.

00:07:56.680 Because it's our, it's our thinking that makes us man.

00:07:59.500 Right.

00:07:59.900 But they don't like, they, they like to think that we transcend our biology, right?

00:08:04.620 This is called the human reticence effect.

00:08:06.900 Sure.

00:08:07.480 Explain the behavior of the mosquito, the zebra, and the salamander using evolutionary theory.

00:08:12.280 That's perfectly fine.

00:08:13.160 But don't you dare explain human behavior via the same vulgar biology, which we are cultural

00:08:21.040 animals.

00:08:21.600 Well, that's nonsense.

00:08:22.300 Of course we are cultural animals.

00:08:23.660 But we're also biological animals.

00:08:25.320 We're both.

00:08:26.560 Regrettedly, the social sciences have built these edifices of knowledge for the past hundred

00:08:31.080 years whilst completely abdicating biology.

00:08:34.620 And that's just purely wrong.

00:08:36.520 This is, it's funny that you say a hundred years because it's been about a hundred years

00:08:40.180 of the real impact of progressivism.

00:08:43.180 Right.

00:08:43.420 Um, and progressivism denies the natural state of man.

00:08:49.980 It's why it doesn't work.

00:08:51.920 Exactly right.

00:08:52.480 It takes away, um, your, your will to do better.

00:08:57.800 You know, it takes it, it, uh, uh, it, when it looks at consumerism, it, it tries to take

00:09:06.140 away the free market, which the free market just is, it is what the culture is.

00:09:13.560 So every free market will be different.

00:09:16.340 A really moral culture will have a really moral free market.

00:09:21.300 A really horrible culture will have a really horrible free market.

00:09:25.360 Correct?

00:09:25.900 Yeah.

00:09:26.220 Uh, the great quote to support what you said originally about progressivism being sort of

00:09:31.480 anti-human nature is a quote that I love to use from EO Wilson, who's a Harvard, uh, biologist.

00:09:38.260 His specialty is he studies social ants and social ants.

00:09:42.100 You know, everybody is equal and there's just one queen, right?

00:09:45.560 Otherwise everybody's equal.

00:09:46.820 So he says, communism slash socialism, great system, wrong species.

00:09:54.400 Right.

00:09:54.980 That that's it.

00:09:55.840 That's a mic drop right there.

00:09:57.160 That covers it all.

00:09:58.040 Right.

00:09:58.240 You're trying to impose a political and economic system.

00:10:01.480 On humans, when humans are hierarchical, humans are not interchangeable drones.

00:10:06.820 We're not all equal and so on.

00:10:08.680 And so.

00:10:09.420 But we know that it's not about being equal.

00:10:13.080 It's about shifting the pyramid.

00:10:16.080 Right.

00:10:16.760 Those that are on the bottom are now on the top.

00:10:18.740 Those were on the top are now at the bottom.

00:10:20.660 Right.

00:10:21.060 You know, it's a very vindictive, uh, system.

00:10:24.820 Right.

00:10:25.100 Well, I think it also comes from the idea that if you've been successful, it must have been

00:10:30.940 because you've exploited someone.

00:10:32.560 Right.

00:10:33.000 So there's this kind of faux victimology narrative.

00:10:36.400 You're rich.

00:10:37.500 You've done well.

00:10:39.000 Who did you rape and pillage to get there?

00:10:41.040 And, and that, that's a grotesque view of life.

00:10:43.980 Right.

00:10:44.200 I mean, many of us work hard, very honestly, without exploiting anybody.

00:10:47.760 And we simply work harder than the next guy.

00:10:49.620 And that's why we succeed.

00:10:51.060 Um, so.

00:10:52.060 Is this, do you believe this started at a place of good?

00:10:58.300 Great question.

00:10:59.220 So I've actually argued that all of these nonsensical ideas, all of which start in universities.

00:11:04.560 It, it, it takes intellectuals to come up with such idiotic ideas.

00:11:08.520 And so postmodernism basically says there are no universal truths other than the one universal

00:11:16.880 truth that there are no universal truths, right?

00:11:19.220 Uh, cultural relativism, all cultures are, you know, you can't judge someone else's culture.

00:11:25.660 Who are you to judge someone else's culture?

00:11:27.160 Again, comes from a noble place because you don't want, you want to try to minimize the

00:11:30.980 likelihood of being bigoted against the other.

00:11:32.900 So all of these ideas originally started from a noble place, but the reality is in the pursuit

00:11:38.820 of noble causes, you can't kill truth, but they were willing to do that.

00:11:43.320 So they were consequentialists.

00:11:44.580 It's okay if we destroy truth in the pursuit of justice and noble causes.

00:11:49.280 No, you can't have justice without truth.

00:11:52.360 Exactly right.

00:11:52.980 And you can't have perfect justice because you don't know perfect truth.

00:11:57.100 Right.

00:11:57.900 Indeed.

00:11:58.260 Um, so in your study of, um, evolutionary psychology, you know, Cass Sunstein.

00:12:06.440 I do.

00:12:07.260 Or know of him.

00:12:08.000 I know of him.

00:12:08.540 Yes.

00:12:09.260 So are you familiar with Edward Bernays?

00:12:11.900 I'm not.

00:12:12.600 Okay.

00:12:12.900 He's the father of propaganda.

00:12:14.680 And then later after propaganda got a bad name from the Germans, uh, he changed that to

00:12:21.260 father of advertising.

00:12:22.660 That's right.

00:12:23.220 Okay.

00:12:23.460 Very true.

00:12:23.900 Yeah.

00:12:24.000 So you, you, you, you, yes.

00:12:25.520 Um, I actually think one of my students at one point sent me a link to a documentary to

00:12:31.280 this guy, which I've never watched.

00:12:32.620 So maybe I should.

00:12:33.200 Oh, you should.

00:12:33.700 It's fascinating.

00:12:35.020 You should read about him.

00:12:35.900 Yeah.

00:12:36.400 Um, uh, and what they really learned by combining science, you know, progressive science in the

00:12:44.620 early 20th century science, uh, with, uh, advertising was that you could move people a lot like nudge

00:12:54.260 Cass Sunstein and, um, and I want to separate, for instance, I, I don't fear AI.

00:13:03.080 I don't fear machines.

00:13:04.220 I fear the goals because they will be absolutely followed relentlessly by AI.

00:13:13.280 And what are we putting into that machine?

00:13:16.760 You know what I mean?

00:13:17.880 Um, and so I don't, I don't fear advertising.

00:13:21.040 I don't fear, uh, uh, evolutionary psychology at all.

00:13:25.740 And I think this is good, but it is so many times used in such a way to manipulate because

00:13:34.840 so many people think I know better than him.

00:13:38.460 Right.

00:13:39.360 It's funny you say this because oftentimes people, when they hear that I'm housed in a

00:13:42.640 business school, they think I'm basically a propagandist.

00:13:46.040 All I sit all day, I'm in cahoots with Procter and Gamble to come up, which of course is not

00:13:51.460 at all.

00:13:52.080 I don't care about that.

00:13:53.040 I, I simply care about studying human nature and I choose to use the consumer realm to study

00:13:58.980 human nature because the reality is short of breathing.

00:14:02.020 The thing that we probably do most is consume.

00:14:04.980 We consume not just Coca-Cola and Starbucks.

00:14:07.300 We consume friendships.

00:14:08.420 We consume religious narratives.

00:14:09.900 We consume music.

00:14:11.560 So everything is consumatories.

00:14:13.200 You have taken, I, uh, I think therefore I am.

00:14:16.980 I consume therefore I am.

00:14:18.660 Exactly.

00:14:19.600 Meaning, I mean, cause that takes on such an ugly.

00:14:23.380 Yeah.

00:14:24.000 I mean, I think therefore I am makes man.

00:14:29.560 Laudable.

00:14:30.300 Yeah.

00:14:30.580 Yeah.

00:14:30.760 Laudable.

00:14:31.120 Uh, I consume therefore I am is ugly.

00:14:35.280 Right.

00:14:36.280 It depends how you define consumption.

00:14:38.200 I mean, yesterday I was having a chat with some of your, uh, employees, great guys, by

00:14:43.080 the way, and we were talking about spirituality.

00:14:45.800 Uh, and I said to them, you don't need a supernatural agent to feel spiritual.

00:14:50.640 The fact that I'm sitting with them there having a wonderful intellectual conversation for

00:14:54.880 me, that is spiritual.

00:14:56.000 It's communion with a bunch of like-minded people.

00:14:58.740 We're getting to know each other.

00:14:59.840 There is spirituality in that moment.

00:15:01.440 So consumption and consumer behavior need not be considered a sinister thing.

00:15:06.680 Everything is consumatory.

00:15:07.900 Our evolving friendship is a consumatory experience.

00:15:11.300 I'll invite you to dinner.

00:15:12.540 You'll reciprocate.

00:15:13.600 That ritual is part of our reciprocal arrangement.

00:15:16.900 So you're not just talking about consumption of a product.

00:15:20.260 Exactly.

00:15:21.060 Okay.

00:15:21.500 Life is consumatory.

00:15:22.920 And that's why oftentimes people think, again, that there is something sinister of me being

00:15:27.760 in a business school.

00:15:28.740 There is, I'm trying to influence people.

00:15:31.080 No, I'm simply trying to understand human nature using the vehicles of consumption as

00:15:36.460 the...

00:15:37.180 But would you agree that Nudge is a business book to get people to consume what, right?

00:15:45.520 Yeah.

00:15:45.860 And how do you feel about that?

00:15:47.880 By the way, just for full disclosure, I think I mentioned this to you last night at dinner,

00:15:52.560 one of the two co-authors of Nudge was my former professor at Cornell.

00:15:56.640 Actually, the same semester as when I took the course on homicide.

00:16:00.980 It was with Dick Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize in 2017.

00:16:04.380 It depends how you use these principles, right?

00:16:06.660 I mean, if you use some Nudge principle to help you lose weight because your physician

00:16:11.980 has told you it's time to lose 40 pounds, then that mechanism has been used to good use.

00:16:17.280 So it really depends.

00:16:18.520 So how is it...

00:16:21.480 Let's talk about the evolutionary process on socialism.

00:16:30.800 Our founders did a lot of study of all different systems, and they studied the good ones, the

00:16:38.180 bad ones, why they failed, why they succeeded, and they came to the conclusion that power always

00:16:45.780 corrupts.

00:16:46.540 Of course.

00:16:46.920 And so you have to have limits on power, and you have to empower the individual and

00:16:54.280 restrain the government, okay?

00:16:57.960 Progressives don't believe that, and they believe that the government should be able to

00:17:03.860 do all of these things for people and to people to create this utopia.

00:17:10.800 It never works.

00:17:13.320 But you know what they'll tell you as an answer to that?

00:17:15.260 It wasn't true socialism.

00:17:17.260 Correct.

00:17:17.620 Right?

00:17:17.940 Same thing with Islam, right?

00:17:19.200 So if I give you a million instances where the infusion of Islam in a society led to less

00:17:24.920 freedom, more abuse, but bruh, it's because it wasn't true Islam.

00:17:29.840 So this is the last sort of refuge that these guys go to.

00:17:33.280 There's no way to falsify their premise, right?

00:17:35.400 I could give you a million examples where socialism has been tried and failed, and the answer is

00:17:41.040 always the same robotic answer.

00:17:43.240 That's simply because they didn't implement the right, the true, the pure socialism.

00:17:48.300 Had they done that, it would have shown to be the best one.

00:17:51.340 But again, it takes all human principles out.

00:17:57.780 And violates them, yeah.

00:17:58.540 And violates them.

00:17:59.460 So what is it about the evolutionary process that has brought this?

00:18:07.660 Because it's been tried forever.

00:18:09.260 I mean, our pilgrims tried socialism.

00:18:11.900 Jamestown was doing it until it ended up in cannibalism.

00:18:15.440 I mean, so what is it that, where does that come from?

00:18:19.420 I think it's a very, I can't remember the guy's name.

00:18:21.820 There's a guy who a few years ago wrote a book where he argued that much of progressive

00:18:27.240 thinking is akin to kindergarten logic.

00:18:31.340 And I think he's exactly spot on, right?

00:18:34.800 It sounds good to say, can't we all live in harmony, equal to one another, with fig leaves

00:18:41.680 covering our genitalia while singing John Lennon, Imagine?

00:18:44.620 That sounds good.

00:18:45.960 Sign me up.

00:18:46.860 But they're stunted.

00:18:47.940 That's what a five-year-old thinks, right?

00:18:49.840 So I think it's almost as if they're parasitized by a form of utopic thinking.

00:18:55.540 But it's a childlike understanding of the world.

00:18:59.060 And that's why every generation, new morons come up with the same parasite.

00:19:04.580 But tell me what you really think.

00:19:06.260 I'm being diplomatic here, by the way.

00:19:07.920 I'm being on my best behavior.

00:19:10.140 Wow, I'd like to know what you really think.

00:19:13.400 Okay.

00:19:14.620 So, right now, we're going through a shout-your-abortion phase, okay, where people are, it's gone from

00:19:26.500 rare and safe to, I'm proud of it.

00:19:30.360 Shout meaning celebrate it?

00:19:31.580 Celebrate my abortion.

00:19:32.700 I had an abortion.

00:19:33.580 I actually heard a woman say to a crowd in Seattle, and she got cheered, she said, I've had several abortions, and my favorite one was my first.

00:19:44.040 And it happened right here in Seattle.

00:19:45.460 Nothing like the first one.

00:19:46.520 Right.

00:19:47.060 And it was kind of like, I mean, if I had somebody that was putting down my dog, and he was like, ooh, that was my favorite one.

00:19:54.760 You'd run from that guy.

00:19:56.020 He's a serial killer, basically.

00:19:56.660 Yeah, right?

00:19:57.220 You'd run from that guy.

00:19:58.260 And if I understand evolutionary psychology, you know who Velikovsky is?

00:20:07.180 No.

00:20:07.620 Manuel Velikovsky?

00:20:08.300 No.

00:20:08.900 Manuel Velikovsky is a guy who said, hey, let's not reject the stories in the Bible.

00:20:17.860 Let's not reject them.

00:20:18.960 We can reject them because we don't believe in magic or whatever.

00:20:21.540 I'm not asking you to believe the stories in the Bible that that's the way they happened, but they were written down for a reason at that time.

00:20:31.840 Is there any physical things that might have been happening?

00:20:36.260 The sun stands still.

00:20:38.640 We know that's not possible.

00:20:39.940 And it certainly would have been recorded by people on the other side of the earth had it happened.

00:20:45.080 He said, we should look for these patterns to see if there was anything that would scientifically explain the way they interpreted it.

00:20:54.420 There's a story in the Bible about Baal, the god Baal, and he invites them into the grove, and they are a society that is encouraged to have promiscuous sex, stop worrying about rules, to love each other, then to get pregnant.

00:21:16.900 And his price was, bring me your baby when you're pregnant, and we will kill your baby, and we will celebrate.

00:21:27.720 And you can interpret this as, you know, it's in the Bible, so it's nothing.

00:21:35.760 Or you could look at it and say, is there something in there that we are now doing?

00:21:41.800 We just don't have the trappings of a god, but we're repeating this.

00:21:48.400 Is that evolutionary psychology?

00:21:51.240 I wouldn't necessarily link it to evolutionary psychology.

00:21:53.840 I mean, the only way I would link it to evolutionary psychology is the following.

00:21:56.880 There is a field called literary Darwinism.

00:22:00.260 Literary Darwinism is to look at great works of literature, study their contents via an evolutionary lens.

00:22:07.800 So, for example, the fact that you and I can listen to an ancient Greek tragedy or a poem and understand exactly what this particular author was going through 2,500 years ago is precisely because even though he doesn't know what a smartphone is or what a car is or what a plane is, he's operating with the exact same software that you and I operate on.

00:22:29.360 We have the exact same evolutionary heritage in terms of our human minds, and that's what allows us to understand the plight that he was facing 2,500 years ago.

00:22:38.100 So, from that perspective, I think there are certain elements of wisdom, collected wisdom in the Bible that could be studied through an evolutionary lens.

00:22:47.320 But I would argue, perhaps differently from you, that those wisdoms need not be rooted in a supernatural cause, right?

00:22:54.160 No, no, no, no, but that was my point on this, was take away all the God stuff and the bail and the, you know, make it rain.

00:23:03.160 Just, this happened, forget about all the God stuff.

00:23:07.520 There were a group of people that did this and celebrated and shouted their abortion, and they wrapped it in a religion.

00:23:15.100 Now, we've got a group of people who are celebrating the exact same thing, but they're wrapping it in a different religion.

00:23:23.740 Their religion, exactly.

00:23:24.600 Okay?

00:23:25.580 So, isn't that, doesn't that show us a pattern of something that this kind of stuff repeats and ends up destroying itself?

00:23:34.540 Indeed.

00:23:35.340 Indeed.

00:23:36.040 Look, I've argued, and actually I argue in my forthcoming book, that progressivism and all the social justice warrior trappings that come along with progressivism is really a form of quasi-religion.

00:23:47.060 I mean, it's a secular religion, but it has the exact same structure, right?

00:23:51.340 In the same way that there are revealed truths in a, say, Abrahamic faith, there are revealed truths in social justice, right?

00:23:59.020 That are sacred, right?

00:24:02.820 They're sacramental.

00:24:03.340 Sacramental.

00:24:04.100 You cannot argue against them.

00:24:05.900 No amount of science or reason or logic could ever penetrate them.

00:24:10.840 Having immigration policies is racist.

00:24:14.340 That's it.

00:24:15.220 That's the truth.

00:24:16.580 So, if you argue to people, how could that be?

00:24:18.420 I mean, don't you close, don't you have a door that closes your house?

00:24:21.880 Don't you have a password code on your bank account?

00:24:25.040 Don't you, isn't there a concept of, you know, territoriality?

00:24:28.720 It's actually part of our evolutionary imperative to have territorial defenses.

00:24:32.380 So, the idea that there should be, it is racist to have the notion of borders is insane, but that's an absolute truth.

00:24:40.480 So, many of my academic colleagues think that any antipathy towards anything short of open border policy makes you a Nazi.

00:24:48.660 And these are sophisticated thinkers, right?

00:24:51.120 And you try to reason with them, but it's impossible because they've accepted this as a religious revealed truth.

00:24:57.280 So, as a guy who understands nudge, how do you...

00:25:02.460 Nudge them?

00:25:03.100 Nudge them.

00:25:03.640 How do you get that to stop, either in yourself with whatever it is that you're living?

00:25:09.340 I mean, a phrase that really changed my life was Thomas Jefferson.

00:25:15.580 He was talking about how to educate yourself, and he got to religion, and he said,

00:25:20.760 Above all things, when it comes to religion, fix reason firmly, intercede, and question with boldness even the very existence of God.

00:25:28.140 For if there be a God, he must rather prefer honest questioning over blindfolded fear.

00:25:36.900 And that changed my life on everything.

00:25:42.180 And it's true, but most people don't want to question themselves, their existence, their life, their belief, because it's either too hard, too scary, or they're afraid there isn't anything there.

00:25:58.740 So, I've got a slightly long-winded question that I can answer this, if you bear with me.

00:26:03.700 So, there is a concept in evolutionary psychology called nomological networks of cumulative evidence.

00:26:10.820 This is the idea that if you're trying to demonstrate that some phenomenon is due to evolution, you try to come up with as much evidence cross-culturally, cross-temporally, cross-disciplines, all of which point to that phenomenon being of the form that you're saying.

00:26:27.980 In other words, what you do is you build a tsunami of evidence that makes it incontrovertible that what you're saying is true.

00:26:35.660 Let me give you a specific example.

00:26:37.680 Let's suppose I want to argue that the waist-to-hip ratio, the hourglass figure that men prefer in women, is an adaptive preference.

00:26:44.780 There is a reason why men prefer women to have that hourglass figure.

00:26:48.480 How would I go about demonstrating to you that this is an evolutionary mechanism?

00:26:52.260 Well, I could get data from medicine that shows that women who have that hourglass figure are more likely to be fertile.

00:26:59.240 Women who have that hourglass figure are more likely to be healthy, younger.

00:27:03.480 So, that's one box in that network.

00:27:06.780 I could show you studies from brain imaging studies that show that if you show men, women of that hourglass figure, their pleasure center are more likely to light up.

00:27:17.280 I could get you data from congenitally blind men, men who have never had the gift of sight.

00:27:25.080 So, they couldn't have been socialized through Elle magazine and through Oprah and through Hollywood Images.

00:27:30.160 You're ruling out that possibility.

00:27:32.400 And yet, when you ask them to haptically, by touch, see different women of different shapes, they prefer the one that has the hourglass figure.

00:27:40.720 So, what I can do is, bit by bit, I could construct this nomological network of evidence that makes it nearly impossible for you to not at least be somewhat humble at the counter evidence that I'm giving.

00:27:53.220 But it's tedious.

00:27:55.120 And it's slow-paced because I've got to build that network slowly.

00:27:59.420 And the person that I'm trying to convince has to have the humility to be willing to concede that his position was wrong if my evidence proves that he's wrong.

00:28:10.120 And the problem is, and you pointed to this, most people are not humble enough to accept that.

00:28:14.260 So, even when I build this network to prove to you that my position is correct, you'll just go, la, la, la.

00:28:20.040 And so, one of the things that I'm trying to do in this book is to try to see how I can get through this impasse.

00:28:25.640 So, how can you?

00:28:26.660 There is no other way other than constantly appealing to people's reason, to people's logic, to evidence-based thinking.

00:28:35.500 All I can do is do that.

00:28:38.340 And ultimately, if you are too intellectually dishonest to concede, then there's nothing I can do.

00:28:43.300 You're irredeemable because you are outside the purview of the framework of the scientific method.

00:28:49.260 So, how can I talk to you?

00:28:50.360 But at least I can do my best to create the systems to present you with that evidence.

00:28:55.540 And if ultimately you decide you want to ignore it, well, I can't do anything about that.

00:28:59.100 Back in the early 90s, I was in my 30s.

00:29:25.640 And I was an income poop.

00:29:29.720 And, you know, I finished high school, never went to college.

00:29:34.580 I was working when I was 13 years old.

00:29:36.700 I was working at my dad's bakery when I was eight.

00:29:38.820 So, I was just kind of, and nobody in my family had ever gone to college or anything.

00:29:42.620 And when I sobered up, I realized I didn't know anything, anything.

00:29:48.960 And so, I started to, you know, do my homework and try to figure things out.

00:29:58.960 And it's a terrifying process.

00:30:05.680 Yeah.

00:30:06.180 And it's really, it takes years to know what you actually believe.

00:30:11.300 Right.

00:30:11.580 You know?

00:30:11.920 And then to take them out and say, this doesn't match this.

00:30:16.440 And I believe both of those are true.

00:30:18.660 So, one of them is wrong.

00:30:20.480 And start over again.

00:30:21.460 Yeah.

00:30:22.020 Years.

00:30:22.540 And that takes, I think we touched upon this yesterday during dinner, that takes epistemic humility, right?

00:30:28.200 It's to know what you know and what you don't know.

00:30:31.440 And usually, there's a correlation between epistemic humility and intellectual sophistication.

00:30:36.560 If you are a true intellectual, you're actually quite humble about all the things you don't know.

00:30:41.360 Because you realize that however much you know, you realize how little you know.

00:30:45.960 The ones who upset me the most are the ones that I call, and I'll explain the term, walking Dunning-Kruger effect.

00:30:53.400 Dunning-Kruger is an effect where, and by the way, Dunning was also my professor at Cornell.

00:30:59.980 The Dunning-Kruger effect is when someone is extremely arrogant and self-assured about their stupidity.

00:31:06.920 And when you interact online with people, you realize that 95% of people are afflicted with Dunning-Kruger.

00:31:15.820 That really angers me.

00:31:17.100 And usually, when I lash out at somebody, usually, I'm a pretty affable, fun guy.

00:31:21.160 You're funny.

00:31:21.820 Thank you.

00:31:22.700 When I usually get upset, it's when people exhibit that trait, right?

00:31:26.840 When they, for example, come to you, some guy who is in his mom's basement playing video games all day,

00:31:33.340 who knows nothing about evolutionary psychology, proceeds to write to me to tell me that evolutionary psychology is a pseudoscience.

00:31:40.360 And usually, I respond sarcastically, okay, well, it's time for me to look for a new career now that brilliant gamer Joe has.

00:31:47.880 Right.

00:31:48.560 That angers me because it demonstrates that it's going to be very hard to reach that guy

00:31:53.400 because he is parasitized by the stupidity of his self, by the self-assuredness of his stupidity.

00:31:59.400 Where does it, again, I go back to your evolutionary psychology then.

00:32:05.720 Where does that come from?

00:32:07.460 I understand, I understand what's happening right now is we're in tribes.

00:32:12.780 Right.

00:32:13.300 I understand the need for tribes evolutionary.

00:32:16.960 Yeah.

00:32:17.620 Coalitional thinking, yeah.

00:32:18.760 Okay.

00:32:19.940 I understand, you know, stone the one who's not with the tribe.

00:32:24.720 Right.

00:32:25.020 And cast them out.

00:32:25.920 I get it.

00:32:26.400 When you're under attack, that's our animal instinct, right?

00:32:34.960 And I understand the need for the animal to shut down thinking when it's under attack.

00:32:42.460 But I don't understand how people can adopt such, the Nazis.

00:32:52.080 How can they go to sleep at night and they're not under attack and do something so diametrically

00:33:02.080 opposed to what they believed in when they were raised and maybe even two, three, four,

00:33:06.940 five years ago.

00:33:08.320 And they're fine with it when they're even in power.

00:33:12.500 There's a lot to unpack there.

00:33:14.100 Just regarding the Nazis, one of the reasons why people hate evolutionary psychology, one

00:33:19.360 of many wrong reasons, is they somehow associate evolutionary thinking with a wide range of

00:33:26.400 cretins who have misused evolutionary theory to advance their political agenda.

00:33:31.400 So the Nazis said, hey, look, it's a natural struggle between races.

00:33:34.640 We won.

00:33:35.140 The Jews lost.

00:33:35.880 So what if we kill them?

00:33:36.760 Hey, that's Darwinian.

00:33:37.780 It's got nothing to do with Darwin.

00:33:39.140 But somehow they usurped it because it gives it a veneer of scientific credibility.

00:33:43.000 Kind of what I was saying about nudge is you can do this and then it's taken and twisted

00:33:49.460 and used for nefarious.

00:33:51.380 It doesn't make what you believe and study wrong.

00:33:54.720 It makes the people who take it and use it.

00:33:57.200 Exactly right.

00:33:58.520 But it's very hard for people to, because most people are fast and frugal thinkers.

00:34:03.800 They're cognitive misers.

00:34:05.200 They don't want to spend time studying something.

00:34:08.520 And so they learned in some sociology course that all evolutionists are Nazis.

00:34:12.820 And usually I tell them, congratulations, you've just identified a Jewish Nazi, right?

00:34:16.400 Because I'm Jewish and I'm an evolution psychologist.

00:34:19.380 But it's easy to, you know, simplify the world by coming up with these little sound bits.

00:34:25.900 But earlier you said...

00:34:27.200 But at the same time, the Nazis used it.

00:34:31.300 And a lot of people will claim I'm a Nazi.

00:34:34.120 But at the same time, I'm asking you, how do we wake people up so we don't kill each other?

00:34:43.440 If I could answer that one, I'm booking a ticket to Stockholm right now to receive the Nobel Prize.

00:34:51.480 I wouldn't be here.

00:34:53.300 No, but in all seriousness, I think it is an indelible part of human nature to always create demarcations,

00:35:00.020 to always create...

00:35:01.480 It's just part of who we are.

00:35:03.120 Some of us can transcend that.

00:35:04.360 But for most people, it's very easy.

00:35:06.720 I've seen it in my own family where, you know, they exhibit a clear coalitional thinking.

00:35:12.780 I mean, not let's go kill someone else.

00:35:14.220 But, you know, there's Jews, there's the others.

00:35:16.520 And I've always hated that.

00:35:17.860 Even as a young child, I detested that.

00:35:20.360 My father once said to me, and I shared this yesterday with one of your colleagues,

00:35:25.820 who once told me, you know, I saw regret.

00:35:29.840 My biggest regret with you, God, is I never sent you to Jewish school, to which I responded.

00:35:34.920 That's the main thing that I have to thank you for.

00:35:37.820 Because to me, the fact that I grew up in an environment where I was exposed to a plurality of people

00:35:44.340 created a richness in my personal history.

00:35:47.000 He thought that that was bad.

00:35:48.380 Too bad I didn't grow up in a more insular Jewish environment.

00:35:51.540 So I think it is an indelible part of the human spirit to create these demarcations.

00:35:55.640 By the way, that's why Abrahamic faiths are so successful.

00:35:59.020 Because at their root, all of them create a clear demarcation between us and them.

00:36:03.760 There's the believer and there's the kuffar in Islam.

00:36:06.180 There is the everybody who's with Jesus and the rest of us who are going to hell.

00:36:09.420 There is the Jews and the Gentiles.

00:36:11.260 And so they all play on this tribal mindset that we already have.

00:36:16.040 But everything does that.

00:36:17.560 It does it.

00:36:18.040 Everything is becoming a religion.

00:36:20.000 Right.

00:36:20.180 I mean, Nietzsche was right.

00:36:22.540 You know, good luck with that.

00:36:23.800 You've just killed God.

00:36:24.880 I'm fine with that.

00:36:26.140 What are you going to replace him with?

00:36:27.760 Right.

00:36:28.260 Because we do.

00:36:29.180 We'll replace, you know, the Jew and the Gentile with Republican Democrat.

00:36:34.400 It doesn't matter.

00:36:35.340 We always will do that.

00:36:37.080 And it's whether that it's whether that basic ideology is to try to get people to look up and reach higher.

00:36:50.340 Right.

00:36:51.020 Or lower.

00:36:51.760 And historically speaking, everything has its problem.

00:36:58.580 But when you, the archetype has been Moses or Jesus.

00:37:07.320 Somebody's been listening to Jordan Peterson.

00:37:09.340 I heard the word archetype.

00:37:10.540 No, I, I, I, no, but it's true.

00:37:13.560 When you, when you look at, when you look at who are we striving to be for?

00:37:19.060 Right.

00:37:19.960 Who are we striving to be?

00:37:21.440 Who do we say that is the person?

00:37:24.060 We have no heroes anymore.

00:37:25.340 We have no religious figures anymore.

00:37:27.920 The only religious figure that's off bounds and so can grow is Mohammed.

00:37:32.820 And that's not necessarily a, a.

00:37:36.040 We could get into that if you'd like.

00:37:37.620 Yeah, I, I, we're going to.

00:37:39.060 Because I don't get enough death threats.

00:37:40.620 I need to increase them.

00:37:41.540 I know.

00:37:41.900 I know.

00:37:42.300 But, uh, to me, uh, I revere ideas.

00:37:47.280 There's a quote.

00:37:48.140 I can't remember.

00:37:48.700 I actually use it in my book.

00:37:50.240 Uh, you know, uh, you could tell someone's social class by, if they're lower class, they

00:37:56.620 gossip about people.

00:37:57.900 If, if they're slightly higher class, they gossip about, uh, whatever things.

00:38:01.680 And then if they're upper class, they discuss ideas.

00:38:05.060 To me, what makes this fun is that we're talking about ideas.

00:38:08.920 We're not talking about Joe.

00:38:10.120 Let's gossip about him.

00:38:10.980 We're not talking about the Christian or Muslim guy where we're elevating the conversation.

00:38:14.800 So I pray at the altar of science, of cerebral pursuits, of ideas.

00:38:20.360 And that's what gives me purpose and meaning in life.

00:38:22.760 And if anyone did, if everyone did that, it would be a richer, safer world.

00:38:26.680 I think, and you know, I know you're going to disagree.

00:38:31.160 Um, but, uh, if there be a God, he would have to be a scientist.

00:38:38.320 He would have to be a scientist.

00:38:40.120 Right.

00:38:40.520 And I don't think there is, uh, there is, uh, there is, there are things we don't understand.

00:38:47.140 Like this, this argument on evolution.

00:38:49.740 And that's not God, how God creates.

00:38:52.520 Really?

00:38:53.040 Cause I don't know how God creates.

00:38:54.360 I have no idea.

00:38:56.840 Um, I know what I know.

00:38:59.160 I think I know what I know and I know what I think.

00:39:02.240 And I think he is, um, I think he is, um, above us and started as my father used to call it first cause.

00:39:10.660 Right.

00:39:11.100 He's not God.

00:39:11.780 He's first cause.

00:39:12.960 What is first cause?

00:39:14.520 I don't know till we get to the other side.

00:39:16.280 Now I've got some things that helped me get to the, you know, to the eternities if there is one.

00:39:22.500 Um, but it's gotta be based in science.

00:39:25.660 Right.

00:39:26.060 It has to be.

00:39:26.660 So there, there is one way, and you've probably heard of it to reconcile evolution with sort of a divine narrative.

00:39:33.480 And that is simply to argue and not that I agree with it, but oftentimes I'll get students who come to me, who come to my class religious.

00:39:41.000 Then they get into the whole evolution psychology and you see that there's sort of a fracture in themselves because how do they reconcile both?

00:39:47.580 And usually I want them to not walk away thinking that it's an either or proposition.

00:39:51.580 So I give them, although I disagree with it, I give them a accommodationist way out.

00:39:56.500 And the argument works as follows.

00:39:58.760 You could argue that what makes evolution so beautiful as a process that can create so much biodiversity in life is that that process itself is the signature of the divine.

00:40:09.760 You understand what I'm saying?

00:40:11.500 So, and that's it.

00:40:12.940 That usually makes people feel good because they could still hang on to their divine narrative while also accepting that, of course, it is incontrovertible that evolution is correct.

00:40:24.040 And so now I disagree with it because from my perspective, uh, I don't want it to be accommodationist.

00:40:30.620 I understand the fact that people need religion, but I'm not willing to sell a false narrative.

00:40:37.300 Forgive me here.

00:40:38.160 I say false narrative and explaining science.

00:40:39.980 I don't want to subscribe to a false narrative simply because I could accommodate it.

00:40:44.800 So, um, my atheist friends and I have this conversation a lot.

00:40:49.140 Um, just as I can't prove there is a God to say that that's a false narrative to say intelligent design.

00:40:58.460 Yes.

00:40:58.900 Wow.

00:40:59.460 Look at this.

00:41:00.860 How did this just all come together?

00:41:02.700 We don't know.

00:41:04.160 We have guesses.

00:41:05.580 I could say it's God.

00:41:06.880 You could say whatever.

00:41:08.260 We have guesses, but we don't know.

00:41:10.520 Wouldn't that make you an, uh, an agnostic?

00:41:13.480 Uh, can I be direct?

00:41:15.620 Yeah.

00:41:16.100 To me, uh, to be agnostic is to be an intellectual coward.

00:41:19.760 I respect more believers than I respect the agnostic because the agnostic is a fence sitter.

00:41:25.880 I don't know if he exists.

00:41:27.200 I don't know if he doesn't exist.

00:41:28.400 And so I sit on the fence equivocating.

00:41:30.440 Wait, wait, wait.

00:41:31.540 You told me last night at dinner that you are a seeker of truth.

00:41:37.120 You don't care what it is.

00:41:38.240 It's the truth.

00:41:39.360 If you don't know the truth, if you're saying, I think.

00:41:44.220 So why am I not open to the possibility?

00:41:45.820 Are you not, yeah, for instance, you could be an atheist, are you, and I don't know what

00:41:50.480 it would be, but if something happened and you were like, wow, then I would revise my

00:41:57.720 beliefs, but I'm going to be waiting for a long time for that to happen.

00:42:00.740 Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:42:02.300 But you have to be open to that.

00:42:04.540 Just like I have to be open to, mm-mm.

00:42:06.640 By the way, this is exactly why very serious scientists will actually test paranormal ideas.

00:42:14.160 Or, for example, touch therapy.

00:42:16.040 There's a paper that was published, I think it still is a record, a little girl, maybe

00:42:21.280 10 years old, Emily Rosa, I mean, she's not much older, but she holds the record for being

00:42:26.560 the youngest person to publish a paper in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association,

00:42:32.040 a very prestigious journal.

00:42:32.960 She published a paper there based on her grade four or grade five science project where she

00:42:40.420 wanted to test scientifically, using the scientific method, the validity of touch therapy.

00:42:46.200 For your viewers who don't know what touch therapy is, it's the idea that you could cure

00:42:50.080 things like cancer simply by, you know, hovering your hand over the afflicted area because there's

00:42:57.200 some cosmic energy and so on.

00:42:59.660 And so to test that idea, she basically constructed a very simple experiment.

00:43:04.400 She asked these touch therapy healers to guess.

00:43:08.620 She would put either her right hand or her left hand out.

00:43:12.240 They couldn't see.

00:43:13.740 And they had to, by hovering, guess whether it's the right hand or left hand that was.

00:43:18.600 So that's a very easy.

00:43:19.480 If you're able through your energy fields to cure pancreatic cancer, you should certainly

00:43:24.640 be able through the energy field to tell if it's right hand or left hand.

00:43:28.420 Well, they guessed at lower than chance level.

00:43:32.820 In other words, if you had flipped a coin, you would have done better than these charlatans

00:43:37.560 and scammers.

00:43:38.860 Guess what their rebuttal.

00:43:39.840 So now I have proven to you.

00:43:41.340 So I was open to the possibility of touch therapy.

00:43:44.240 I used the scientific method.

00:43:45.820 If the data had come out that there is something to it, I would have revised my beliefs.

00:43:50.720 It didn't.

00:43:51.700 Guess what the touch healers argued.

00:43:53.420 Can you guess?

00:43:54.920 No.

00:43:55.760 Putting us through that process interferes with the energy bullshit.

00:44:02.980 Right?

00:44:03.740 So how can I falsify your position?

00:44:05.680 This is why it is in the domain of the non-scientific.

00:44:09.580 Because a fundamental principle in science, this is Karl Popper's falsification principle.

00:44:14.240 The way you establish the veracity of a scientific theory is you put up the theory and then you

00:44:20.140 put all your weapons up against the theory, trying to shoot it down, trying to falsify

00:44:24.380 it.

00:44:24.760 If at the end of the day, it's still standing, then it is provisionally true until something

00:44:29.800 else comes along.

00:44:30.700 So as a scientist, I'm perfectly humbled to the possibility that God might exist, but I'm

00:44:36.580 still waiting for him to show up.

00:44:37.780 Okay.

00:44:39.160 And I think that's, I think that's reasonable.

00:44:43.840 And I, let's get into your childhood.

00:44:46.160 Sure.

00:44:47.500 Can I drink some water while we're doing this?

00:44:49.100 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:44:49.660 Of course you can.

00:44:50.500 No, you may not.

00:44:51.620 But, um, the, uh, I am, uh, I'm, I'm, uh, a puzzlement to many Christians because I

00:45:07.700 like to go to different services.

00:45:10.520 I like to see how people are worshiping and I just love it.

00:45:13.500 You should come to our synagogue.

00:45:14.760 I would love it.

00:45:15.660 Arabic Jews.

00:45:17.300 I would love it.

00:45:18.600 But that's, yeah, that's, uh, that precedes Jesus by a few thousand years.

00:45:22.640 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:45:23.640 Um, so, uh, and I love it.

00:45:26.580 Yeah.

00:45:26.860 I've been all over the world.

00:45:28.420 I've, you know, been in Buddhist temples.

00:45:30.480 I've been in the, the, the great synagogue and, and went, uh, on, on, uh, Shabbat.

00:45:37.960 Um, so love it.

00:45:41.660 Um, where I have a problem and I think we, you probably have the same problem except

00:45:48.500 in reverse is how, let me say it this way.

00:45:57.760 I think if we would just stop saying, no, I have the full picture.

00:46:02.420 I have the full picture.

00:46:03.600 Your picture is wrong.

00:46:04.940 And if we would all just shut up and sit our pictures down on the table, they might snap

00:46:10.680 into a puzzle and we'd see the whole picture.

00:46:13.740 You know what I mean?

00:46:14.220 But we can't do that.

00:46:16.380 You, for me to be right, you must be wrong.

00:46:19.900 It's a zero sum game.

00:46:20.900 Absolutely.

00:46:21.700 And, and the people I respect, and I mean, you, you are the, the father, the grandfather

00:46:28.020 of the intellectual dark web, uh, or dark, uh, intellectual, yeah, dark web.

00:46:33.980 Um, and what I like about that is you don't have to agree on everything.

00:46:41.480 Right.

00:46:41.780 You just have to be cool with other people thinking differently.

00:46:46.260 And as a matter of fact, I think most of the people who are, who are part of that group

00:46:49.960 actually disagree on quite a few very serious.

00:46:54.040 I mean, uh, Sam Harris and I are in perfect disagreement when it comes to Donald Trump.

00:46:58.140 He thinks he's ushering nuclear Holocaust.

00:47:00.620 I don't.

00:47:01.680 Uh, so there are many, but what we do all share is a commitment to intellectual conversations,

00:47:09.200 a disdain for intrusions against freedom of speech, a disdain for political correctness.

00:47:14.640 So that's sort of the bedrock on which all else, uh, can be built.

00:47:19.460 Except, and, and I want to get into your story because you're not like this.

00:47:22.680 I don't think, um, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, they, I mean, they talk about religious people

00:47:31.220 like they are, you know, the scourge of the world.

00:47:35.980 And, you know, uh, I happen to agree, I, I happen to agree with Gandhi, you know, I love

00:47:43.660 this Jesus of yours.

00:47:45.120 I just, I'm not so, such a big fan of his followers.

00:47:48.820 Uh, you know, they're good people and bad people in, in all of it.

00:47:52.620 Uh, there are good things that come out of it, bad things that come out of it.

00:47:55.740 I actually know a few good Muslims.

00:47:57.800 Now they're the first to be killed by radical Islam.

00:48:02.800 Um, but I, you know, they say they're Muslim.

00:48:06.600 I believe that they, you know, follow the path of Islam as they define it.

00:48:11.960 Right.

00:48:12.440 Uh, and they're great and they tolerate me and I tolerate them.

00:48:15.900 Right.

00:48:16.000 There are others, Christians, Jews, uh, atheists, all of them that just demonize.

00:48:25.040 And that's the thing that sets, I think sets you apart, at least in our interaction.

00:48:29.760 Yeah, absolutely.

00:48:31.260 With others.

00:48:31.680 Look, I, I, I absolutely don't mind that people are very religious because I truly appreciate

00:48:37.620 the functional utility of the religious mind.

00:48:41.840 I, I get that there are endless benefits that could come from being a believer.

00:48:47.100 What bothers me is when religion becomes intrusive.

00:48:51.180 You understand what I mean?

00:48:52.060 It could be intrusive in that you better be.

00:48:53.840 The difference between Islam and an Islamist.

00:48:56.320 Uh, right.

00:48:56.900 Although, although, just to be clear that there are, there is no codified way by which Islam

00:49:03.520 is different from Islamist.

00:49:04.720 An individual might decide to ignore the 73,000 tenets that are part of Islam.

00:49:11.200 There is no book of Islamism that is distinct from Islam.

00:49:15.300 Correct.

00:49:15.960 It's, it's, it's, it's a lack of a reformation to codify.

00:49:21.280 Exactly right.

00:49:22.000 Yeah.

00:49:22.280 But there are those who are not Islamists.

00:49:25.540 In that they don't take seriously all the content of their book.

00:49:29.540 It's not that they're praying to a different book called gentle, sweet Islam.

00:49:33.740 Correct.

00:49:34.040 Right.

00:49:34.160 Uh, so, uh, so from my perspective, when, for, and it doesn't have to be as intrusive

00:49:40.000 as when Islam comes in to try to kill everybody else.

00:49:42.160 If you try to make claim as a religious person in science, you're being, in my view, intrusive.

00:49:50.040 Stay in your lane, right?

00:49:51.880 Don't have the lack of epistemic humility to try to explain why that rock looks like it

00:49:57.800 is 4 billion years old, but it's really young earth creationism.

00:50:01.520 Now you're being intrusive against the truth that pisses me off.

00:50:05.040 So I'm perfectly willing to tolerate, let that left, let everyone, including the most

00:50:11.880 religious, as long as you don't intrude on other people's rights.

00:50:15.560 But the way I define intrusion.

00:50:17.880 Wait, wait, wait.

00:50:18.360 Yeah.

00:50:18.500 Intrude on other people's rights.

00:50:21.540 Including truth.

00:50:23.760 Right.

00:50:24.340 Um, uh, the example that you used, um, and you said, stay in your lane.

00:50:29.640 Again, if, uh, for instance, uh, the guy who invented radar, I can't remember his name,

00:50:35.640 but he was a weatherman.

00:50:36.780 Okay.

00:50:37.360 And everybody in England, you know, that was in power, you know, they're very hierarchical.

00:50:43.680 Um, no, yeah, yeah, you're a weatherman.

00:50:46.980 You're a weatherman.

00:50:47.540 No, I'm telling you this idea will work.

00:50:49.480 Right.

00:50:50.220 He created it.

00:50:51.500 He proved that it worked.

00:50:53.200 And then the government stepped in and said, okay, we're going to have real people work on

00:50:56.760 this now.

00:50:57.180 Oh, I, okay.

00:50:58.440 I get it.

00:50:58.780 I get your analogy.

00:50:59.800 There, there is.

00:51:01.040 I don't mean stay in your lane in that, uh, I'm an elitist.

00:51:04.920 Only an intellectual should say this and not a common person to the contrary.

00:51:08.600 I am.

00:51:08.880 I'm a professor of the people, as I always say, not at all.

00:51:11.520 What I'm saying is the epistemology of religion does not provide a workable framework for understanding

00:51:20.240 natural laws.

00:51:21.640 That's not its domain.

00:51:22.920 Therefore, it shouldn't pretend that it could contribute to scientific truth.

00:51:27.540 Maybe it can help you understand how to behave or not.

00:51:29.860 We can debate that and that's fine.

00:51:31.200 Maybe it, it has a place to play in terms of moral codes and we can disagree or not with

00:51:35.960 that, but it doesn't, there is no way to study natural mechanisms either through the

00:51:42.460 epistemology of religion or the epistemology of science.

00:51:45.660 Science is the only game in town when it comes to studying natural phenomena.

00:51:51.120 No, you're not happy.

00:51:53.600 I think, no, no, no, no.

00:51:54.820 I think, I think I agree with you.

00:51:56.980 The Bible is not a science book.

00:51:59.620 But it does make science claims.

00:52:01.340 It does make very clear scientific claims that are, that are disproven.

00:52:06.180 Anyone, I think any thinking human being will look at the scriptures and say, what were they

00:52:17.180 trying to explain in their language?

00:52:20.240 What were they, what were they saying?

00:52:22.580 And you can look at the arc of the story and go, okay, the arc of the story I get.

00:52:31.060 Did God create in seven days?

00:52:33.460 That's ridiculous.

00:52:35.060 It's ridiculous.

00:52:35.700 Now, you could say his days are different than my days.

00:52:40.100 Exactly.

00:52:40.500 Fine.

00:52:40.880 That's where the Olympic mental gymnastics start.

00:52:44.480 If you want to say that a book that is written 5,000 years ago, those guys had an idea of,

00:52:52.760 you know what I mean?

00:52:55.320 But Olympic gymnastics or not, you can look and say, okay, well, his days aren't the same

00:53:01.660 as mine, but science will tell me how old this planet is and, and, you know, the Big Bang.

00:53:11.740 I don't have a problem with the Big Bang.

00:53:14.140 Okay.

00:53:14.320 Don't know if it, that's the way it happened.

00:53:15.880 Right.

00:53:16.540 Looks like it, but okay.

00:53:19.100 What I'm concerned about is what caused the Big Bang?

00:53:22.440 Right.

00:53:23.020 What happened a millisecond before the Big Bang?

00:53:26.320 But it's almost the last place now where God can hide, right?

00:53:29.500 It, you know, you've heard of the God of the gaps argument.

00:53:32.820 The God of the gaps argument is basically whenever there is an explanatory gap in our

00:53:37.540 scientific knowledge, that's where God goes to hide, right?

00:53:40.320 So there used to be a time when an eclipse was God, but now he can no longer hide there.

00:53:44.440 Then thunder was God.

00:53:45.700 Then he can't hide there.

00:53:46.560 That's a scientist.

00:53:47.640 There is nothing.

00:53:49.280 There is nothing.

00:53:50.400 I don't believe, I don't believe, boy, that's going to get me in so much trouble.

00:53:55.880 I don't believe that the waters parted, okay?

00:53:59.240 I do believe the Jewish oral tradition that the winds might have swept and swept the water

00:54:07.760 to leave a path, but not like this, okay?

00:54:13.300 Velikovsky theorized that maybe the asteroid belt was from a, and he was wrong on all this,

00:54:21.020 but maybe there was an, maybe a moon spun off, caused some gravitational pull, something

00:54:27.480 came, made the water stand up.

00:54:29.500 I don't believe that, but at least it's a scientific way of looking for what is happening.

00:54:36.180 You know, faith, people will say, well, that wasn't a miracle.

00:54:40.540 Well, um, I don't know.

00:54:43.440 I think a CAT scan is.

00:54:46.460 Right.

00:54:46.620 I think that's a cat.

00:54:47.640 I think that's a miracle.

00:54:48.740 In any other time, that would have been called a miracle.

00:54:51.320 Right.

00:54:52.000 Now, we're just learning how to do things.

00:54:54.980 And what brought about the CAT scan?

00:54:57.040 Yeah.

00:54:57.800 I have no problem.

00:54:59.140 Science, you know.

00:55:00.760 But by the way, if God comes and he says, no, uh, two plus two equals five, he's not God.

00:55:09.840 That's called postmodernism, by the way.

00:55:11.300 Yeah, I know it is.

00:55:12.380 I know it is.

00:55:13.180 You said earlier, uh, God is a scientist.

00:55:15.440 I actually wrote an article where I argued that God is a Darwinist.

00:55:19.040 And let me make the argument here for you.

00:55:21.280 So there's a great paper written by a Darwinian historian.

00:55:24.680 So this is a historian who studies historical patterns using the evolutionary lens.

00:55:29.980 And she did a content analysis of the Old Testament.

00:55:34.100 So this is a way where you can study scientifically the Bible with an evolutionary lens.

00:55:40.580 Here's, and here's what she did.

00:55:41.760 So there's a lot of research that shows that with higher status, men have more access to

00:55:47.600 women.

00:55:47.820 Right.

00:55:48.100 So the reason why men fight to other men for status is because the downstream consequences

00:55:52.340 is I get more women.

00:55:53.320 Right.

00:55:53.700 And so what she wanted to do is test this exact idea by looking at characters in the Bible.

00:55:59.480 And so what she did is she coded each individual in the Bible, his rank.

00:56:04.240 So for example, he's a prophet, he's a king, he's a general, he's a slave, he's a farmer,

00:56:09.340 and then counted the number of women mates that are associated to him.

00:56:15.680 And it was the exact prediction that you would expect from evolutionary theory with greater

00:56:20.600 status of men in the Bible comes greater reproductive benefits.

00:56:25.500 And so therefore I call that God is a Darwinist.

00:56:28.540 So again, the Bible does contain certain universal truths, certain evolutionary truths, but those

00:56:34.900 truths can exist from my viewpoint simply because they are a manifestation of human beings having

00:56:40.580 written those things, not of a supernatural agent.

00:56:42.820 Last question on this, then I want to get to your history.

00:56:45.200 But last thing on this, can we agree on maybe two out of the four?

00:56:50.940 Ben Franklin was asked, what is the American religion?

00:56:54.820 And they were trying to trap him.

00:56:57.580 And he said, well, the American religion is that there is a God.

00:57:03.360 He's going to judge us.

00:57:04.360 So we should serve him.

00:57:06.520 And the best way to serve him is by serving our fellow man.

00:57:10.680 If that's what religion did.

00:57:14.980 Is it good?

00:57:16.020 Yeah.

00:57:16.220 Yeah.

00:57:16.700 Is it good?

00:57:17.380 Yeah.

00:57:18.320 The only thing, though, is I would say, my God, is it more impressive for me to serve you

00:57:24.040 without it being an exhortation from God?

00:57:27.920 Exactly.

00:57:28.120 In other words, if I am good to Glenn Beck simply because I am innately virtuous and I

00:57:34.080 think it's the right thing to do without worrying whether a sky daddy is judging me or not,

00:57:38.820 I'm more pure for that.

00:57:40.260 And it's more pure.

00:57:41.660 It's when you, you know, people try to go baptize people.

00:57:47.940 I got to get you baptized in the faith.

00:57:49.700 Oh, would you stop?

00:57:50.820 So you're not baptized?

00:57:51.540 Yeah, I am baptized, but I despise the push to get people into the waters of baptism.

00:58:00.200 I believe in this, et cetera, et cetera.

00:58:02.820 I believe what I do.

00:58:04.260 However, how about I just love somebody with no ulterior motive?

00:58:11.560 I just want to love you because anything else is crass.

00:58:16.380 Anything else does not come from God.

00:58:18.120 Well, it's more impure because it has an ulterior motive.

00:58:20.500 Correct.

00:58:20.900 And that's what we were talking about.

00:58:22.160 God's not like up there going, you know, if we befriend this guy, then this guy will

00:58:26.980 do that.

00:58:27.580 It's not going to, it doesn't work that way.

00:58:29.060 If there is a God, he's not doing that.

00:58:31.380 Right.

00:58:31.600 He's like, hey, can, can you guys, he is come to me like a child.

00:58:35.380 He is very childlike.

00:58:37.420 Guys, just get along.

00:58:39.560 Right.

00:58:40.020 Love each other.

00:58:40.800 Right.

00:58:41.040 Right.

00:58:50.900 Personal history.

00:58:55.920 I want to talk to you about, um, because how much of your feeling on religion comes from

00:59:02.180 your childhood?

00:59:03.420 Right.

00:59:03.820 It was frightening.

00:59:05.500 I would imagine.

00:59:06.320 Yes.

00:59:06.820 Want to talk about that?

00:59:07.900 Yeah.

00:59:08.240 So I was born in Lebanon in the sixties.

00:59:11.120 Uh, I was part.

00:59:12.920 Those were trouble free for Jews in Lebanon.

00:59:16.200 Yeah, of course.

00:59:16.480 Uh, well, as the Middle East goes, we were tolerated.

00:59:22.220 In other words, it, it wasn't as though every single day you had to fear for your life, but

00:59:27.240 you always understood that you had to know your place.

00:59:31.880 Be, be pretty and be quiet and don't flaunt your religion.

00:59:35.160 Don't push it in some way.

00:59:36.420 Right.

00:59:36.600 So where's your, where's the, where's the, where's the heritage, your genealogy?

00:59:40.260 Where did your, so I think three of my four grandparents are originally Syrian Jews.

00:59:46.480 Uh, all, so my parents and all the, my siblings are all Lebanese Jews.

00:59:51.200 Okay.

00:59:51.460 So in Lebanon, we were part of the last remaining group of Jews that had stayed in Lebanon.

00:59:58.000 As the antipathy between Israel and the Arab countries grew starting from 1948, it became

01:00:05.620 less tenable to be Jewish and Arabic lands.

01:00:08.600 And so there would be these sort of waves of exodus out of Lebanon.

01:00:13.140 And did your family feel about the creation of Israel?

01:00:15.580 So supported it.

01:00:17.120 I mean, we didn't really talk.

01:00:18.260 I mean, although, frankly, although we have a lot of family in, in Israel, uh, my, my

01:00:22.680 father comes from a family of 11 children.

01:00:24.240 My mother comes from a family of seven children and almost all of them, many of them went to

01:00:29.280 Israel.

01:00:29.940 So we certainly had a connection with Israel, but we're Lebanese.

01:00:34.660 I mean, we're Arabic.

01:00:35.680 We, our mother tongue is Arabic.

01:00:37.640 Our, our, our culture, our ethnicity is all Arabic.

01:00:40.560 That's what people don't understand.

01:00:42.340 They think somehow, no, we're diabolically Israeli.

01:00:44.800 No, we're, we're Lebanese.

01:00:46.260 Okay.

01:00:46.580 Now we ended up being part of the last group of Jews that remained in Lebanon when the writing

01:00:52.740 on the wall was that you should probably get the hell out of there.

01:00:55.640 And then in 75, when the civil war broke out, uh, between everybody, I mean, everybody was

01:01:02.900 killing everyone.

01:01:04.180 Uh, the one that almost all groups agreed in terms of their animus towards were the Jews,

01:01:10.220 right?

01:01:10.480 Uh, now in Lebanon, you, you, you carried an internal ID, not unlike a passport.

01:01:16.540 So if the cops stop you, they say, show me your ID.

01:01:19.100 That ID has your religion written on it because through in Lebanon or in the middle East, everything

01:01:25.380 is viewed through the prism of your religious, you know, tribal identity.

01:01:29.600 Now, the reason I'm mentioning this is because when the civil war broke out, uh, different

01:01:33.780 militia groups would set up these roadblocks throughout Lebanon.

01:01:36.720 And if you were stopped and you were of the wrong religion, then you would be taken to

01:01:43.560 the side and executed.

01:01:44.520 And then they would do this to each other.

01:01:46.040 Now, there weren't many roadblocks that Jews were going to clear.

01:01:51.540 Some Christians would let you through, uh, but almost all of them, we would have been shot.

01:01:56.400 So we were Christians would have shot you too.

01:01:58.240 No, I've said, that would have been probably the only way.

01:02:02.500 Now, now, incidentally though, although we escaped execution from Islam, it was all actually

01:02:08.560 also Muslim militia who helped to get us out of Lebanon, uh, some PLO militia.

01:02:17.560 I remember very clearly on the day that we were leaving Lebanon, PLO militia came to our

01:02:21.500 house fully dressed in the way you see the ISIS guys today.

01:02:24.920 That's the world that I grew up in, uh, took us in their car because there's no way for you

01:02:30.580 to get to the Beirut international airport at the time without having the clearance of

01:02:34.620 the Palestinian militia because all of their camps surrounded the airport.

01:02:39.080 And so there was no way for you to get through that unless they, they were protecting you.

01:02:43.460 The reality is when they picked us up, we didn't know if they were going to take us to a field

01:02:47.720 somewhere and put a bullet through our head or to the airfield or to the, but so, so the

01:02:53.860 same Muslim faith that was trying to kill us.

01:02:57.380 Also, it was Muslim guys who saved us.

01:02:59.640 And so this is, and this is how I explain to people that I never demonize an individual

01:03:04.480 Muslim.

01:03:06.060 They are phenomenally beautiful Muslim people and they are nasty, just like they are

01:03:10.620 phenomenally beautiful Jews.

01:03:11.920 Exactly.

01:03:12.640 But Islam itself always ends up, the trajectory is always that at some point, those who are

01:03:19.960 not Muslim are going to be persecuted.

01:03:22.120 Sometimes it might take five minutes.

01:03:23.360 Sometimes it might take 500 years, but the trajectory is always the same.

01:03:27.020 Once the demographic changes tip in a society in a certain way, it becomes very precarious

01:03:32.380 for you to be non-Muslim.

01:03:34.220 And I see you wearing a noon thing for the, for Christians in the Middle East and so on.

01:03:39.740 That's what's happening with them.

01:03:41.080 So we had to leave Lebanon because it was simply impossible for us to remain there as

01:03:46.040 Jewish people.

01:03:46.680 Then my parents, when we moved to Montreal, kept returning to Lebanon because they still

01:03:53.240 had business there.

01:03:54.840 And so in 1980, they ended up being kidnapped by Fatah and they disappeared.

01:04:00.180 And everybody thought that, I mean, your life is not worth the bullet to kill you.

01:04:04.440 And yet miraculously, after about, I think, eight days of captivity, they were rescued.

01:04:09.520 And again, those who rescued them, many of them were Muslim folks.

01:04:14.140 Okay.

01:04:14.720 But the ones who were torturing them were also Muslim folks.

01:04:18.740 And so in 1980, my parents then left Lebanon and none of us have ever gone back since.

01:04:24.540 So that's my personal history with the Middle East.

01:04:26.660 Um, so how has that shaped you with religion?

01:04:30.680 That's a great question because I could see how you might think that that would definitely

01:04:35.620 send me on the trajectory of animus towards religion.

01:04:38.280 But I also think that my unique, that unique combination of genes that constitute Gatsad also

01:04:46.220 yielded an animus to religion because I'm someone who from a very young age exhibited intellectual

01:04:52.620 love.

01:04:53.660 And so when I would ask my father, when we were at the synagogue in Beirut, it's called

01:04:58.200 Wadi Abu Jumil.

01:04:59.160 That's where the main Jewish synagogue is.

01:05:01.260 And apparently they're trying to revive it now, but it's been many years they're trying

01:05:04.080 to do that.

01:05:04.940 Well, when we would be at that synagogue and I'm a little boy and now we stand up for

01:05:08.680 the prayer.

01:05:09.120 Now we sit down for the Macarena.

01:05:11.040 Now we stand up.

01:05:11.860 Now we go left.

01:05:12.560 Now we go right.

01:05:13.240 And I would ask him, why are we doing this?

01:05:15.500 Why are we doing that?

01:05:16.500 And his answer was always a very dismissive one.

01:05:19.340 Just shut up.

01:05:20.080 Just follow.

01:05:21.000 Do.

01:05:21.160 And I remember right then I felt an antipathy.

01:05:25.100 I hated the fact.

01:05:26.780 Maybe, and then look at me now, 50 years later, the irreverence I have towards groupthink,

01:05:33.760 towards herd mentality, whether it be in science, whether it be in public discourse.

01:05:38.700 So religion to me felt wrong because it felt as though there were no intellectual answers

01:05:45.820 that could satisfy my intellectual curiosity.

01:05:48.900 Even as a very young child, so I got turned off by it.

01:05:51.260 It struck me as one big sort of tribal scam.

01:05:54.720 So I think it's part, it's just my personhood and part my personal history that have resulted

01:05:59.940 in me not being religious.

01:06:02.540 Your thoughts on Islam?

01:06:06.220 You have how many, how much time we have for another four hours?

01:06:09.800 You can talk about it or not.

01:06:11.460 I mean, I know you're Canadian and also you're already in trouble with everybody.

01:06:17.280 Look, Islam is ultimately an expansionist religion.

01:06:23.380 It is not the tolerant religion that people are sold in the West.

01:06:30.400 You just have to crack a book and study the 1400 year history of Islam.

01:06:34.720 I mean, again, using nomological networks of cumulative evidence, is there any evidence

01:06:39.840 that I could provide you that suggests that Islam is peaceful or not?

01:06:44.000 And the answer would be quite unequivocally clear.

01:06:47.180 Now, usually I'm actually the nightmare for a lot of the Islam apologists because usually

01:06:51.440 if you're speaking to them, they'll say, oh, but Glenn Beck, you're some white guy from

01:06:57.280 America.

01:06:58.260 You don't speak Arabic, so you don't know.

01:07:01.520 They can't say that to me.

01:07:02.540 Arabic is my mother tongue, so no.

01:07:05.040 And you heard it.

01:07:06.000 And I heard it every day in every, you know, taking the taxi on the bus, the politician

01:07:11.900 in the sitcom, in the mosque.

01:07:14.380 It's everywhere.

01:07:15.620 It's the definitional DNA of the society to have endemic Jew hatred.

01:07:21.640 Now, again, this doesn't mean that they go around all day killing all Jews because if

01:07:25.440 that were the case, we couldn't have survived for the years that we did.

01:07:27.620 But the reality is that it is part of the narrative of Islam to view the other as, in Arabic, the

01:07:34.880 word is nejus, impure.

01:07:36.760 It's like you're like urine.

01:07:38.340 You're like sperm.

01:07:39.480 You're like spoiled blood.

01:07:41.480 Right?

01:07:41.720 That's not something I make up.

01:07:43.420 You just do a Google search.

01:07:44.600 Right?

01:07:44.720 So if I show someone 20,000 imams coming from 50 different countries, each of which is preaching

01:07:54.040 stuff that is astonishing, then they'll usually answer, oh, no, but he's no true Muslim.

01:07:59.480 So who's the true Muslim?

01:08:00.700 Saudi Arabia is not the true Muslim.

01:08:02.240 Iran is not the true Muslim.

01:08:04.240 Osama bin Laden is not the true Muslim.

01:08:06.260 The head of ISIS is not the true Muslim.

01:08:07.760 But your friend, Ahmad, who eats prosciutto and drinks alcohol and is a fornicator, to

01:08:13.460 use the religious term, he's the true embodiment of Islam.

01:08:17.460 Right?

01:08:17.680 So the reality is that Islam is an expansionist religion.

01:08:21.600 Most Muslims don't adhere to most of it.

01:08:25.660 And that's why they're perfectly lovely and peaceful people.

01:08:28.100 But they're perfectly lovely and peaceful people not because of Islam.

01:08:32.280 They are that despite of Islam.

01:08:34.920 So what do I think of Islam?

01:08:36.440 If there's a way for it to be practiced peacefully, then do what you want.

01:08:41.440 The problem is that history suggests that there isn't a way to practice it.

01:08:45.040 What's the world look like in 10 years?

01:08:47.340 What's Europe look like?

01:08:48.300 What's Canada look like?

01:08:49.900 Not good.

01:08:51.200 Because as relating to Islam, look, here's the analogy I always give.

01:08:56.120 If on any given day, whatever path I took that day in terms of the food that I've ingested,

01:09:03.200 three things can happen that day.

01:09:04.480 I've either put on weight, my weight hasn't changed, or I've lost weight.

01:09:08.520 There's no other possible state of the world.

01:09:10.680 Right?

01:09:11.620 When it comes to Islam, when it comes into a society, only one of three things can happen.

01:09:16.400 More freedoms can ensue, no changes, or less freedoms.

01:09:20.460 Now, do we have enough data to answer that question?

01:09:22.960 And the answer is an outlandishly, phenomenal, incontrovertible, yes, we have the answer.

01:09:30.220 More Islam is less freedom.

01:09:32.180 So how do we navigate through that?

01:09:33.980 I'm not sure.

01:09:34.700 Now, I had a conversation with Andy McCarthy, who's a federal prosecutor, who used to...

01:09:40.040 A friend.

01:09:40.640 Right.

01:09:41.040 He's a lovely guy.

01:09:41.720 He worked on the first 9-11 case.

01:09:43.920 I asked him, as a lawyer, could you consider a case where maybe ever Islam could be considered seditious?

01:09:52.780 And, you know, he kind of didn't answer, but I think that might end up having...

01:09:56.920 That's what will happen.

01:09:58.140 You will have to have, officially, imams repudiating, through some new magical theological process,

01:10:04.920 the endless passages of violence and intolerance.

01:10:07.840 And until that happens, and I'm not holding my breath, then we're going to always have problems.

01:10:12.940 You are creating that which I escaped in Lebanon 40, 50 years ago.

01:10:17.280 You're going to have it in every street corner in the West.

01:10:20.140 It might take 10 years.

01:10:21.100 It might take 100 years, but it's coming.

01:10:23.980 Well, that's not happy.

01:10:27.060 That's not happy at all.

01:10:29.040 Let me take you back to, again, evolutionary psychology.

01:10:36.620 But I want to talk about tech and evolutionary psychology.

01:10:40.120 I saw you speak in front of Google.

01:10:45.020 Right.

01:10:45.320 And...

01:10:46.300 I was in the Vipers then of social justice warriors.

01:10:48.780 I know you were.

01:10:49.540 And it was funny because everything you said is basically what James Damore said.

01:10:56.480 Is it not?

01:10:57.180 It's so funny you say this because the rumor was when Damore had his memo thing

01:11:03.580 that he was in the audience listening to my lecture,

01:11:07.560 and that's what kind of gave him the courage to send it.

01:11:11.220 And so right after the memo went out, him and I started communicating.

01:11:14.560 Really?

01:11:14.800 And I asked him the question.

01:11:15.820 He said, actually, no, I was away.

01:11:17.600 I wasn't...

01:11:18.200 I'm a fan of your work, but I wasn't at the talk.

01:11:20.740 He was traveling somewhere.

01:11:22.040 But you're exactly right.

01:11:23.720 He said nothing in that memo that wasn't exactly what I would have covered in my talk.

01:11:29.740 So how did you get away with it and him not?

01:11:33.220 It's funny.

01:11:33.880 It's funny you say this.

01:11:35.080 And I hope the guys who, if they end up watching this, won't be upset at me.

01:11:38.480 The internal guys at Google who were supporters of mine who invited me warned me

01:11:43.520 that if I were to have him on my show before the talk went up,

01:11:48.960 that talk would never see the light of day.

01:11:52.060 And so if you go to my YouTube channel,

01:11:53.920 you'll see that I only ended up talking to James Damore several months after the memo had come out.

01:12:00.600 But that was on purpose because we had to make sure that the...

01:12:06.120 The algorithm.

01:12:07.120 Well, and the talk would be uploaded on their platform because otherwise they were going to kill it.

01:12:12.800 And so I waited till they posted it.

01:12:15.640 And only when they posted it, I invited him on the show.

01:12:18.780 So it was a strategic move on our part.

01:12:20.680 But it's amazing that we even have to engage in such strategizing in the 21st century in the United States.

01:12:27.020 So I saw you just had Jack Dorsey on from Twitter.

01:12:34.580 You're in this and you're also...

01:12:37.060 You're actually in it.

01:12:38.920 You're in Google.

01:12:40.720 Your work is in Google.

01:12:43.800 You are also on the outside receiving end of the things that Google or Twitter are doing.

01:12:52.740 The testes are massive, Glenn.

01:12:55.080 They really are.

01:12:56.280 So what have you learned that we should know?

01:13:06.180 Don't diffuse the responsibility to speak out onto others.

01:13:10.680 Because every single person has a valuable voice in the battle of ideas.

01:13:15.820 Some of us have bigger platforms.

01:13:17.360 Not everybody's Glenn Beck.

01:13:18.500 Not everybody can reach 10 million people.

01:13:20.500 But even if you could only reach your fellow students in the classroom,

01:13:24.640 when your professor says something that sounds like BS to you, politely challenge them.

01:13:29.180 When a Facebook friend says something idiotic, challenge them.

01:13:33.380 Don't leave it to get sad to combat you on Twitter.

01:13:36.620 So what I try to always do is tell people, I implore them, I beg them to get engaged.

01:13:42.340 But it's very easy for people to diffuse responsibility onto others.

01:13:46.440 You know, I have my job to worry about.

01:13:48.100 It's my daughter's high school graduation.

01:13:51.180 Let Glenn Beck worry about it.

01:13:52.580 Let Dave Rubin worry about it.

01:13:53.740 Maybe Peterson will get involved.

01:13:55.800 They're holding down the fort.

01:13:57.400 No.

01:13:57.680 If every one of the silent majority were to speak up, all that stupidity would get squashed.

01:14:05.400 The tsunami of clear-thinking people would squash these idiots.

01:14:09.220 The problem is that most people are apathetic.

01:14:12.080 Most people are cowardly.

01:14:13.460 And therefore, they diffuse the responsibility for a few of us to bear the burden for everybody.

01:14:18.480 And so the way that I would tell them is, please get engaged.

01:14:21.240 So they are taking the same kind of thinking that, you know, is in nudge.

01:14:31.220 And they're nudging the other direction.

01:14:33.280 Right.

01:14:34.620 And they think they have a moral responsibility to do it, which is, you know, again, progressives

01:14:41.940 see themselves as ranchers and everyone else as cattle.

01:14:45.540 Exactly.

01:14:45.940 And so the rancher knows what's best for the cows.

01:14:50.340 And so he's going to herd those cows.

01:14:55.600 We have this happening everywhere.

01:14:59.100 Let me take it one step beyond.

01:15:03.580 And you tell me where you think the reality is here.

01:15:07.140 Sure.

01:15:07.520 I've heard talk about, you know, we found the anger gene.

01:15:11.540 We've found the reason people are progressive or people are conservative.

01:15:20.420 I mean, we're entering an age now where we just have better equipment than Mengele did.

01:15:27.500 Right.

01:15:28.580 And we can gene splice.

01:15:30.680 We think we know what's causing everything.

01:15:32.980 And we can just turn these things off.

01:15:36.120 Is that reality at all, do you think, as a scientist?

01:15:39.940 No, not nearly as much as what you're saying.

01:15:43.560 It's very, very difficult to have a one-to-one mapping between a specific manifestation of a gene.

01:15:51.920 So a gene can take one of several forms.

01:15:53.740 It's called a polymorphism, right?

01:15:57.320 Sometimes you could say if you have the longer version of that gene, you're more likely to be a risk taker.

01:16:01.940 If you have the shorter version, you're less likely to be a risk taker.

01:16:04.380 So at this point, we can do these types of mappings between how a gene manifests itself and a particular behavior.

01:16:10.600 But for something as complex and multifactorial as your political ideology, whether you're a conservative, to link it to a set of genes is a bit of...

01:16:22.000 So how about then just risk-taking?

01:16:27.380 If society felt that risk-taking was bad, should we be able to do that?

01:16:34.400 Isn't there something...

01:16:36.780 I mean, I know God doesn't play dice.

01:16:40.960 Isn't there something, though, into the dice that we all are different?

01:16:45.720 Tell me again what you're asking.

01:16:48.940 Should we be intervening to alter the risk?

01:16:51.900 Let me take...

01:16:53.560 You brought up, you know, taking more of a risk.

01:16:57.240 If society thought that that was bad.

01:16:59.160 Let me take a real-life thing.

01:17:01.160 Iceland says that they have eradicated in Helsinki all...

01:17:08.720 You mean Finland, if it's...

01:17:13.760 No, no.

01:17:14.820 Helsinki?

01:17:15.220 Is it Helsinki?

01:17:16.300 No, what's the one in Iceland?

01:17:17.840 Reykjavik.

01:17:18.500 Reykjavik.

01:17:19.000 Okay.

01:17:19.540 So Reykjavik has eliminated all Down syndrome.

01:17:24.360 Yes.

01:17:24.680 Well, no, they didn't.

01:17:25.900 They just went in and either aborted, and now they're going to be gene splicing.

01:17:32.800 And there is something to be said for the Down syndrome person.

01:17:43.280 And...

01:17:44.120 So should we be intervening at the genetic level to alter realities?

01:17:48.200 Is that the question?

01:17:49.380 I guess, yeah.

01:17:50.540 I mean, where is that line?

01:17:51.960 The danger with that is that, remember, eugenics.

01:17:54.500 I don't know if you...

01:17:55.040 Oh, no, I'm very well.

01:17:56.200 And actually, of course, one of the reasons why people hate evolutionary theory.

01:17:59.140 Earlier, I gave the example of the Nazis.

01:18:01.240 Another reason is to say eugenics.

01:18:03.200 Oh, evolution psychologists are just the new instantiation of eugenics.

01:18:06.220 Look, if there is a way to intervene genetically to maybe eradicate a reality that is truly problematic, perhaps.

01:18:19.100 But should you be altering the distribution of how many risk takers there are in a society or not?

01:18:25.220 Then you're entering into a dark science fiction.

01:18:29.300 Well, I mean, I...

01:18:30.480 I mean, look, I struggle with this because my daughter has cerebral palsy.

01:18:35.640 Oh, wow.

01:18:36.120 And had I been told before she was born what I was told right after she was born, she'll never walk, she'll never eat, she'll never think, she'll never understand, she'll never be able to speak, she'll be in bed for the rest of her life.

01:18:52.700 Oh, my gosh, if they would have told me that at 19 years old, I would have said, yeah, let's abort that sight.

01:19:00.160 She's going to have a miserable life.

01:19:02.220 She works here.

01:19:03.940 She went to college.

01:19:06.120 You know, she is differently abled, to use the politically correct term, but she's not what they said, and she changed me for the better.

01:19:19.800 She has changed many things, many people.

01:19:24.300 Can we be who we are really meant to be without any struggle in our life?

01:19:30.600 Right.

01:19:31.320 Well, if you...

01:19:32.140 I don't know if you've asked her, and I don't know if you have asked her whether you want to share this.

01:19:35.200 Have you ever asked her whether, despite all of the difficulties that she's faced, she's happy to be here?

01:19:43.600 She is happy to be here.

01:19:45.500 She...

01:19:46.060 And that's all that matters.

01:19:47.120 She would love to have a cure.

01:19:50.380 And so would I.

01:19:51.960 You know, I don't know if there ever would be.

01:19:54.100 But she is tired of being different.

01:19:58.200 But she is happy she was born.

01:20:04.040 Right.

01:20:05.280 She's glad she wasn't...

01:20:06.300 Yeah.

01:20:06.600 Glad she wasn't born in Germany.

01:20:08.820 Right.

01:20:09.360 You know, it's funny because one of the things that I struggle the most with in terms of what position I should hold, although I consider myself to be a pro-choice person, when I hear these stories, it does.

01:20:22.120 And I think Dave Rubin, whom we both know well, and he's a good friend of mine, I think he also very honestly admits that that's probably the issue that sort of...

01:20:29.960 Yeah, he told me that.

01:20:30.040 He told you that.

01:20:30.700 And I think I also struggle with that because I truly can see the value in both sets of arguments.

01:20:39.700 And so while I still am tilted towards the pro-choice side...

01:20:44.020 So you're a bit agnostic on this.

01:20:46.840 Yes.

01:20:47.400 You're a bit of a fence-sitter.

01:20:48.820 Well, I am agnostic on issues that can be testable.

01:20:53.320 When it comes to God, my view is we could never test these things, and therefore I don't want to be a fence-sitter.

01:20:59.460 But you're right.

01:21:00.480 I am agnostic.

01:21:01.300 We can test that that is never going to grow into a shoe.

01:21:05.300 How long did you wait before you came back with something about the agnostic?

01:21:09.120 No, no, no.

01:21:09.760 It just got to happen.

01:21:10.840 The, you know, we're arguing now about insanity, I think.

01:21:21.340 We're now arguing whether we can kill a child shortly after birth, keep it comfortable until mom decides.

01:21:29.040 That's insane.

01:21:30.320 Did you see my satirical piece on my YouTube channel where I talked about fourth trimester abortions?

01:21:36.720 I actually said, I found a way to eradicate murder around the world, and it involves two steps.

01:21:47.020 Step one, so let's say I kill person B.

01:21:50.820 Well, person B is not my child, but I use trance offspring by proxy.

01:21:57.500 Because if you use trance, it changes any reality.

01:21:59.780 So through trance offspring by proxy, he becomes my child, even though he's 37 and I don't know him.

01:22:07.740 Then, since I aborted him in the fourth trimester, since murder is just fourth trimester abortion, through these two processes, you eradicate murder.

01:22:16.340 You're clean.

01:22:17.400 You're clean.

01:22:18.360 You're absolutely clean.

01:22:18.880 So help people think this out, because I think this is, I am a guy who, I was pro-choice.

01:22:29.340 I'm pro-life.

01:22:31.040 What made you change?

01:22:32.300 Is it because of the experiences with your daughter?

01:22:36.620 Yeah.

01:22:37.360 Okay.

01:22:37.860 Yeah.

01:22:38.080 The, but I, I understand compassion.

01:22:50.220 If my daughter was raped, I can't imagine going to my daughter and saying, you have to keep, you have to keep the job.

01:22:57.460 Um, and so I just can't bring myself, even though I believe it's life.

01:23:03.720 So I'm stuck in this ugly place of, oh crap.

01:23:07.680 Yeah.

01:23:07.960 But I just, I can't get there yet.

01:23:09.760 And Dave Rubin and I have talked about this, you know, he's kind of stuck in that place.

01:23:13.420 Well, when it's viable.

01:23:14.900 And I asked him, well, viability keeps moving back.

01:23:18.200 So either truth is changing or, you know, that's not a baby now, but it will be soon.

01:23:24.500 And, um, uh, what does it say about us that we are, that the vast majority of people, um, agree that, you know, in the first trimester, it's like 54% of Americans say, you know what?

01:23:45.400 Okay.

01:23:46.880 Second trimester, it goes way down.

01:23:48.920 Third trimester, it's almost, it's like 5%.

01:23:51.440 Is that what it is?

01:23:51.980 Okay.

01:23:52.080 Yeah.

01:23:52.180 It's like 5%.

01:23:52.960 Um, and, uh, it's, it's a little crazy and almost zero when it comes to afterbirth.

01:24:02.500 What does it say that we are going this way and people are still trying to look at it?

01:24:10.240 It certainly shows that there's a huge incongruity between the official ultra left progressive positions and what most people think.

01:24:18.240 Right.

01:24:18.740 There, there, there, if, if, if you, the number that you gave is accurate, which there's no reason for me to expect that it isn't, if 5% of people are thinking that that's the viably appropriate, you know, option, but that's the default value of the progressives.

01:24:32.320 Right.

01:24:32.520 I mean, most of the ultra progressives are celebrating as the, the woman is having contractions.

01:24:39.240 What was the, what was the, uh, the, uh, the governor in Virginia, right?

01:24:44.900 Uh, what do you think about what, what he said?

01:24:47.240 Um, I think that, um, do you know who baby an hour is?

01:24:52.880 No.

01:24:53.900 Baby an hour was the first victim of the Holocaust, a child born with no arms, no legs, blind and deaf, had no life.

01:25:02.720 Parents freaked out, didn't know what to do.

01:25:04.960 Um, Hitler immediately came out and said, compassion for the child, uh, and then said, but the mom and dad are really suffering.

01:25:15.980 And so is this baby.

01:25:17.440 Maybe they say that, but maybe I'm going to send my personal doctor to see baby an hour and examine myself.

01:25:24.480 Cause we can't kill somebody who, you know, is, is, has, has potential.

01:25:29.400 This is life.

01:25:30.060 Um, and then he said, uh, uh, I got, just got back.

01:25:35.580 My doctor just got back.

01:25:36.900 He informed me, we got to kill the baby, but it's good for compassion.

01:25:41.180 Well, that set off the T4 program, which required three signatures from a doctor.

01:25:47.240 Okay.

01:25:49.060 And when that happened and people started seeing their local doctor kill newborn babies, they stood up.

01:25:58.840 So here's what I take from it.

01:26:01.300 The people who voted for Adolf Hitler thought that was so bad.

01:26:07.480 They stood up and said, no, Adolf Hitler said three signatures are required.

01:26:16.560 Virginia, New York, one.

01:26:18.540 It's one.

01:26:19.100 It was three.

01:26:20.200 It's now one.

01:26:20.720 Yeah, right.

01:26:22.040 I mean, that says something more about us.

01:26:25.820 So what is, what, what do you think drives that particular position?

01:26:30.280 Is it just the celebration of the freedom of a woman to decide for herself at any point?

01:26:37.700 And so that her rights always supersede.

01:26:40.240 I mean, what, what, what's driving in your viewpoint that position?

01:26:42.800 You mean of the people who are pushing for it?

01:26:45.120 Who are pushing for it, who are ultra progressive on that division.

01:26:47.480 So I think the ones who are accepting it either don't want to look at it, don't believe that that's what they really mean.

01:26:54.240 They can't fathom it.

01:26:55.980 And, you know, the people I voted for, they'd never do that.

01:26:58.340 So that can't be right.

01:26:59.360 Okay.

01:26:59.620 Um, the people who are pushing for it, uh, I, I am not sure, uh, perhaps they worship, uh, the God of the environment.

01:27:13.320 Um, but why would that result in him holding?

01:27:17.680 More people.

01:27:18.620 Earth is unsustainable with a number of people.

01:27:21.320 We have to reduce our carbon footprint.

01:27:24.180 So it's an overcrowding argument?

01:27:25.980 Yeah.

01:27:26.380 And the carbon footprint, a lot of, a lot of real diehard global warming people are like, you should only have one child.

01:27:34.660 Um, you know, all of that possibly.

01:27:37.760 Um, the reason I asked that is because I, you know, it's one thing to critique someone's bad ideas, but it's a lot more satisfying to try to understand them.

01:27:47.840 Exactly.

01:27:48.320 Yeah.

01:27:48.480 So to use theory of mind, to put yourself in the mind of the other, because then you're able to build, build better counter arguments to try to persuade them to come.

01:27:55.960 Do you have any idea for that one?

01:27:58.800 I don't, I think maybe it is feminism gone completely on steroid where the, remember many, many feminists told women, you have the right and the obligation to be as sexually unrestrained in your behavior as men.

01:28:14.040 If men do it, you should do it too.

01:28:15.700 And then a lot of women took that culture and then they realized they weren't satisfied with having unrestrained, meaningless sex.

01:28:26.040 And they're different than men.

01:28:27.720 Exactly.

01:28:28.300 There are evolutionary pressures that would make men and women, uh, view sexuality differently.

01:28:33.120 And just to get fancy for a moment, uh, the costs of making a poor mate choice loom much larger for women than they do for men.

01:28:41.420 This is called parental investment theory.

01:28:43.240 Therefore you expect women to be more judicious in their mate choice.

01:28:46.540 So it's basic evolutionary biology 101.

01:28:49.160 Yet feminism said, no, don't abide by this BS.

01:28:52.560 You have every right to be no different than men in your sexual behavior.

01:28:56.860 And so I think maybe this is simply the downstream effect of this empowering argument to feminism.

01:29:03.860 That's the only thing that I can think of.

01:29:05.160 Freedom of speech.

01:29:16.360 Yes, sir.

01:29:16.740 You've said some powerfully, I don't want to use the word crazy, but some people would say crazy things because you're being politically incorrect.

01:29:26.280 You're just being honest.

01:29:27.360 Um, uh, more and more in the United States, uh, millennials are saying, no, you don't have a right to, to speech that, uh, makes me feel unsafe.

01:29:40.440 I think we have a real problem with the word unsafe.

01:29:44.540 I think they mean uncomfortable and that's a gravely different word than unsafe.

01:29:50.340 Yes.

01:29:51.440 Um, where does this, where, how do you see this shaping up?

01:29:56.800 It's not good.

01:29:57.360 Uh, I mean, I'm an absolute free speech absolutist.

01:30:01.560 I believe that anything short of a direct exhortation to violence, libel and defamation, everything goes.

01:30:10.360 And the way that I demonstrate my commitment to those principles is I pick the most grotesque possible instance, which is Holocaust deniers to a Jewish person.

01:30:21.220 Right.

01:30:21.420 What could be more offensive than taking the historical event that is probably the most documented in history where people were systematically, you know, exterminated and allow someone to say, no, it never happened.

01:30:35.160 But if you are a free speech absolutist in a free society, then you have to tolerate the most grotesque.

01:30:41.280 So I tell people, I am a Jewish person and I support the right of Holocaust deniers to reject that the Holocaust ever happened.

01:30:48.420 So I walk the walk, talk the talk.

01:30:50.380 So your hurt feelings, frankly, I don't give a blank about life is anti-fragile to use the term of Nassim Taleb.

01:30:58.580 Right.

01:30:59.300 You grow by being that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

01:31:04.400 Correct.

01:31:05.200 Therefore, postmodernists say that which doesn't that way.

01:31:09.720 How is this the turn of the phrase on this?

01:31:16.140 That which I can't remember.

01:31:19.240 I've never heard the postmodern.

01:31:21.360 They've twisted it and turned it turned it around.

01:31:23.680 So so it really I find it very frustrating because it is a perfect way to stifle discussions.

01:31:29.100 Right.

01:31:30.040 Don't criticize Islam because that's my religious faith.

01:31:33.600 That hurts me.

01:31:34.720 What do you mean?

01:31:35.400 In a free society, you you can go on Twitter and say what a bunch of crock Judaism is.

01:31:40.840 If I'm strong in my beliefs, I shouldn't worry about what Glenn Beck thinks.

01:31:44.620 Isn't that the scientific method?

01:31:46.600 Really?

01:31:47.160 Shouldn't that be kind of a scientific method?

01:31:49.400 I should.

01:31:49.920 You you're a scientist.

01:31:51.800 You've said something.

01:31:52.960 I'm coming to you with facts.

01:31:54.960 That's the key.

01:31:56.040 I'm coming to you with facts and saying, what are you dumb as a box of rocks?

01:32:00.240 Exactly.

01:32:00.820 Here's how it works.

01:32:02.140 Show me where it's wrong.

01:32:03.460 And I'll tell you, I've become, for better or worse, the central repository for endless

01:32:09.480 people in academia coming to me, reporting their horror stories within academia.

01:32:14.280 I'll just give you a very quick recent example.

01:32:16.500 Alessandro Strumia is a professor of physics at University of Pisa, who also works at CERN,

01:32:23.000 the nuclear center outside Geneva.

01:32:25.800 He had been invited to give a talk this fall about gender and physics.

01:32:30.560 The argument being that women are being discriminated against in physics, and that's why they're not

01:32:36.160 advancing enough.

01:32:37.340 So he used bibliometric data.

01:32:39.580 Bibliometric data is a scientific data that allows you to test these things.

01:32:43.600 For example, on average, when female physicists are hired versus male scientists, what's the

01:32:49.120 average number of citations each of these two groups have?

01:32:51.500 So we don't have to engage in hyperbole.

01:32:53.720 We can test these ideas.

01:32:55.460 And what his data analysis showed is that contrary to the narrative, women were not being

01:33:00.400 discriminated against.

01:33:01.360 As a matter of fact, women were getting jobs where they were much less qualified than the

01:33:06.640 equivalent men.

01:33:08.200 He was suspended.

01:33:10.120 Now, he was completely confused because he thought, naively, as a scientist, truth.

01:33:15.840 Data speaks.

01:33:17.020 If it supports your narrative, so be it.

01:33:19.140 If it doesn't support it, so be it.

01:33:20.580 Let the data speak for itself.

01:33:23.000 And then the hammer came down on him.

01:33:26.080 Well, the only one, as far as I know, that was willing to speak to him was yours truly.

01:33:30.380 As a matter of fact, there were 1,600 physicists who wrote an open letter, which they obnoxiously

01:33:37.280 called it Particles for Justice, where they were attacking him for being a Nazi, for denying

01:33:46.720 the personhood of the transgender.

01:33:49.140 And he had said nothing about transgender.

01:33:51.180 He had said nothing about anything.

01:33:52.380 All he did was report objective, quantifiable data that didn't seem to support the politically

01:33:58.840 correct narrative.

01:33:59.700 This is something that should be happening in North Korea and in Yemen, not in the West.

01:34:03.320 But it happens on a daily basis.

01:34:04.780 In 1995, I read Immanuel Kant, there are many things that I believe that I shall never say,

01:34:10.220 but I shall never say the things that I do not believe.

01:34:12.200 I memorized that, not because I thought it was such a great quote, but because I pondered

01:34:16.680 it for so long on what kind of world were you living in where you felt it necessary to

01:34:23.520 say that?

01:34:24.460 Right.

01:34:24.660 I couldn't, 1995, I could not fathom that world.

01:34:29.520 We're in that world.

01:34:30.920 And it's, it's, it's worsening by the minute.

01:34:33.340 By the minute.

01:34:34.420 Yeah.

01:34:34.620 By the minute.

01:34:35.380 And hopefully these types of conversations will compel people to get engaged.

01:34:42.040 So, um.

01:34:44.700 We're on page two.

01:34:46.160 Yeah, I know.

01:34:46.820 And I've skipped a lot of stuff.

01:34:48.500 Let me, let me go to, um, the university of the future.

01:34:51.720 Sure.

01:34:51.820 Um, everything is changing.

01:34:55.620 Yeah.

01:34:56.180 Um, people who are looking at, you know, I got to send my kids to college.

01:35:00.380 My wife and I have this, this argument quite often.

01:35:03.440 Kids have got to go to college.

01:35:04.840 No, they don't.

01:35:05.800 Right.

01:35:06.220 No, they don't.

01:35:07.040 If you want to be a doctor, you want to go and you want to open up a body.

01:35:12.520 Yeah.

01:35:12.920 You're going to have to go to medical school, but you, you, you don't go to college to

01:35:18.160 find yourself.

01:35:19.780 Right.

01:35:20.540 You go because you want to pursue an idea and you find the right college, university,

01:35:26.960 you find the right people, but a certificate means nothing in the future.

01:35:31.620 Do you agree with that?

01:35:32.600 Uh, I do.

01:35:33.580 Uh, Jack Dorsey did not finish his undergrad at NYU.

01:35:38.560 Glenn Beck, I don't think went.

01:35:40.580 Uh, Bill Gates didn't, uh, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs didn't, uh, Zuckerberg didn't.

01:35:45.680 Now I'm in a difficult position in that on the one hand, as a professor and as, as someone

01:35:49.980 who, who, who is a, who's committed to knowledge, I say lifelong pursuit of knowledge, but.

01:35:57.680 I went to college when I was 30.

01:35:59.000 Exactly.

01:35:59.820 As a matter of fact, I have a great story.

01:36:01.080 There's a guy who was, who had escaped Nazi Germany as a Jew, moved to Montreal, had a business

01:36:08.960 career, retired in his sixties, had never gone to university, decided to start his undergrad

01:36:14.140 in his sixties, did his master's in his seventies, finished his PhD.

01:36:19.020 I think he was in his late eighties or early nineties in our university newspaper.

01:36:22.520 It was written finally a doctor at 89 or 92 or whatever.

01:36:25.820 And within a year after that, he passes away.

01:36:28.020 That's a pure scholar because he did it for no other purpose than the sheer pursuit and

01:36:34.160 joy of knowledge.

01:36:35.420 He wasn't doing it to become a professor.

01:36:37.000 He wasn't doing it for a career.

01:36:38.300 He was doing it just because.

01:36:40.340 And so I agree with you.

01:36:41.820 There are many ways to seek knowledge.

01:36:43.700 As a matter of fact, many people write to me and I say this with all due modesty.

01:36:47.580 They'll write to me and they'll say, I watched your show for the past four weeks when you

01:36:52.620 were speaking to X, Y, Z, and I've probably learned more than my undergraduate degree.

01:36:58.340 So I think there are many ways by which people can now seek knowledge and it doesn't have

01:37:02.380 to be strictly through the confines of university.

01:37:04.460 You know who David Glertner is?

01:37:05.840 No.

01:37:06.140 Dr. David Glertner, he's from Yale university.

01:37:08.640 And he asked me one time, he said, uh, Hey, who, who, who is the, uh, do you know the name

01:37:15.160 of the person that is the biggest, um, expert and scholar on D-Day?

01:37:21.840 And I said, no, who he said, exactly.

01:37:26.260 Nobody does.

01:37:27.320 Nobody does.

01:37:27.940 All the universities will say it's this person or that person.

01:37:30.440 He said, but it might be a cab driver, might be a cab driver who has dedicated his whole

01:37:35.640 life to, to this.

01:37:37.660 Well, and especially today where you have such a democratization of knowledge, right?

01:37:41.540 I mean, you could now get on YouTube and all of the great minds that currently exist are

01:37:47.000 all there for your pleasure.

01:37:48.920 Right.

01:37:49.220 And so I agree with you.

01:37:51.560 University should be where you go to get knowledge, which would have been otherwise very difficult

01:37:56.340 for you to get on your own.

01:37:58.020 Correct.

01:37:58.500 And short of that, but just commit to knowledge, whether it be through university or not, commit

01:38:05.160 to knowledge, I hate to, I hate to bring up another reference, uh, but, uh, come to me

01:38:11.460 like a child, uh, to me, that phrase, um, in, in the Bible to me and probably to very few

01:38:19.360 others means you have children.

01:38:23.540 How many children do you have?

01:38:24.280 Two.

01:38:24.500 Two.

01:38:25.660 Uh, what were they, what was their favorite word when they were little?

01:38:29.920 Mommy.

01:38:30.360 Why, why, why, why they said, Oh, why that's true.

01:38:36.100 They said, why more than mom had one face when they were, and you know, what makes you

01:38:41.080 humble is when you realize that half the questions they ask, you don't have an answer for.

01:38:46.220 Yes.

01:38:47.260 Daddy, why is the cloud?

01:38:48.620 I'm like, I don't know.

01:38:50.020 My, my father, I knew he was going to die.

01:38:53.500 He always had a book in his pocket and always just learning.

01:38:55.680 And, uh, he said to me at one point, I said, dad, you've got to read this book.

01:39:00.780 He was like 81 or so.

01:39:03.600 You got to read this book.

01:39:04.720 This, this, this idea is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:39:07.680 He would always say, Oh my gosh, I'll go get it right away.

01:39:10.900 I'll read it.

01:39:12.060 Um, and he said, yeah, that sounds good.

01:39:16.140 And I said, that sounds good.

01:39:19.200 You're not going to read it.

01:39:20.380 And he said, no, I'm kind of tired of learning new things.

01:39:25.740 And I knew that's, I knew that day.

01:39:28.680 That was the end.

01:39:29.320 That's the end.

01:39:29.880 Yeah.

01:39:30.260 Like once you stop asking why you're done.

01:39:34.360 It's funny you say this because in evolutionary theory, do we still have a bit of time?

01:39:37.940 Yeah.

01:39:38.680 Uh, in evolutionary theory, there is a distinction between two types of scientific explanations.

01:39:44.280 There's what are, what are called proximate explanations.

01:39:47.160 These are the explanations that explain the how and the what of the phenomenon.

01:39:51.580 How does diabetes work?

01:39:52.920 What are the factors that affect the severity of the symptoms of diabetes?

01:39:56.800 So much of science operates at the proximate level.

01:39:59.940 Ultimate explanations are what are, are the Darwinian whys.

01:40:04.880 Why would the mechanism have evolved to be of that form?

01:40:08.820 So to fully understand something, you need both levels of explanations.

01:40:12.080 You need to understand the mechanics of the phenomenon, but then you have to unfold the Darwinian

01:40:16.820 why.

01:40:17.660 So when the two year old is asking why, why, why, in a sense, he is, he is a Darwinist.

01:40:23.880 He is trying to seek that ultimate explanation for the phenomenon.

01:40:27.660 So you were just pushing Darwinism.

01:40:29.960 Just every chance you get.

01:40:32.200 Hey, you want to have a soda?

01:40:33.340 You know, Darwin liked soda.

01:40:35.060 Let's do one piece of political stuff.

01:40:42.480 Do it.

01:40:43.540 What do I think of Trump?

01:40:44.580 Is that where you're going?

01:40:45.340 No.

01:40:45.920 Yeah.

01:40:46.380 Trump.

01:40:46.840 You want to do that?

01:40:47.100 And, uh, and what's happening in the media and with people because of Trump?

01:40:56.160 Uh, the hysteria, the collective Munchausen.

01:40:59.200 So in 2010, I think mentioned this briefly on your radio show in 2010, I wrote a paper

01:41:05.020 in a medical journal where I talked about something called Munchausen syndrome.

01:41:09.520 Munchausen syndrome is where you've got to smirk on your face.

01:41:12.120 No, I just, I just, I just love you.

01:41:14.920 I wish I was your neighbor.

01:41:16.500 I reciprocate, uh, uh, the, the, the warm feelings.

01:41:20.200 Uh, so Munchausen syndrome is where someone feigns a medical condition so that they can

01:41:24.480 garner empathy and sympathy.

01:41:26.000 Oh, poor me.

01:41:26.620 Look at me.

01:41:27.120 I'm sick.

01:41:28.260 Munchausen syndrome by proxy is where you take someone who's under your care, your biological

01:41:32.880 child, your pet, your elderly parent, and you harm them so that you can get and garner

01:41:38.800 the sympathy and empathy by proxy because they're, they're damaged.

01:41:42.520 Right?

01:41:42.920 So this is called Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

01:41:44.860 And by the way, the ones who suffer most from that are usually women who harm their biological

01:41:48.780 children to garner the sympathy.

01:41:50.860 So I had written a paper, you know, talking about the psychiatric disorder.

01:41:54.400 And then when I started seeing the full victimhood, the screaming, the fake hysteria associated

01:42:01.040 with Trump, that's when I coined the term collective Munchausen, because it was a way

01:42:06.100 for people to seek attention in grotesque ways and truly what seemed to me in false sounding

01:42:12.500 ways, right?

01:42:12.960 I mean, I would see on my Facebook page, people sort of testifying to their looming victimhood.

01:42:18.880 I am a woman of color.

01:42:20.540 I attend the university of Maine.

01:42:22.520 Will it still be safe for me to go to college now that Trump, well, what do you think?

01:42:28.060 There's going to be roadblocks and the, the Trump storm patrol patrols are going to be

01:42:33.400 ushering you for, to gang rape centers.

01:42:35.340 I mean, what can justify this level of idiotic hysteria?

01:42:39.100 And so that's why I called it collective Munchausen because it truly was a confabulation of faux

01:42:44.260 hysteria.

01:42:45.460 What upsets me is that it's one thing for this idiot on my Facebook page to write this stuff.

01:42:50.500 It's another thing when many of my supposedly sophisticated intellectual friends were succumbing

01:42:57.740 to the same hysteria.

01:42:59.600 That's what upsets me is when you, so I won't mention any names, but one of my good friends

01:43:04.420 whom you probably know is one of the type who will say things like, you know, there's

01:43:08.580 going to be food shortages.

01:43:09.800 Now that Trump, there's going to be to be a nuclear Holocaust.

01:43:12.680 He's the worst thing since Hitler.

01:43:14.080 And this is a guy who otherwise you would have thought is a terribly sophisticated and

01:43:18.360 dispassionate thinker.

01:43:20.240 And so it's a real mystery to me why they are.

01:43:22.960 What causes that?

01:43:24.280 What caused that in him?

01:43:25.380 Yeah.

01:43:25.900 I think I know who you're talking about.

01:43:27.460 Very smart guy.

01:43:28.740 Very reasoned.

01:43:29.980 Very.

01:43:30.580 I mean, he's sort of the model of the very dispassionate, right?

01:43:33.860 Um, so I, I pitched an idea on the Rubin report as to why I think this is happening.

01:43:41.540 I think that the intellectual class views Trump as a, what I call an aesthetic injury, right?

01:43:49.280 He lived, I mean, you know how this, this beautiful place that you're in, I mean, gorgeous aesthetics,

01:43:53.940 right?

01:43:54.120 You have a, you have a nice aesthetic sense.

01:43:55.860 Well, academics and intellectual types have a sense of the types of aesthetics that they

01:44:00.500 seek in their leader.

01:44:01.740 Barack Obama exemplar fit that he's tall.

01:44:06.140 He's got a beautiful smile.

01:44:07.520 He speaks with a certain cadence of a Southern Baptist preacher.

01:44:11.000 He seems noble and majestic.

01:44:13.020 So it doesn't matter what he says that most of it is complete bullshit, but he, my God,

01:44:17.580 he sounds noble and intellectual.

01:44:20.040 Donald Trump is an ogre.

01:44:22.840 He speaks in an ugly way.

01:44:24.640 He's grotesque.

01:44:25.700 He's a brawler.

01:44:26.700 He's a New Yorker.

01:44:27.740 He's swearing.

01:44:28.700 He's grabbed this, right?

01:44:29.780 So on every possible aesthetic metric, he offends my sense of aesthetics.

01:44:36.760 And so I think they are disgusted by him.

01:44:39.480 They are repulsed.

01:44:40.020 It's visceral.

01:44:40.940 And that's why it is no longer within the realm of the rational, because they really

01:44:44.940 are responding at the most visceral level.

01:44:47.800 He disgusts me.

01:44:49.700 And so I think that's...

01:44:50.320 Well, there were, because I was against Barack Obama, and for the same, many of the same

01:44:57.260 reasons, I warned about Donald Trump.

01:45:00.460 It's, don't get into a cult.

01:45:03.240 Don't get into a cult.

01:45:04.500 Um, and, uh, I was called a racist for saying, look at the way he views white people in his

01:45:14.480 book.

01:45:15.200 Well, that's just the way white people will do you.

01:45:17.500 Well, uh, you know, my grandmother was white and she was the typical white church.

01:45:21.160 Well, the church that he used to go to, which was...

01:45:23.080 Yeah, right.

01:45:23.920 Okay.

01:45:24.160 And to just take those out and say, you know, what does, does that mean anything?

01:45:31.840 Racist.

01:45:32.500 Right.

01:45:32.880 He's a socialist.

01:45:35.080 Racist.

01:45:36.460 Um, and they saw race in everything, even though I think I had some pretty good logical

01:45:44.180 reasons to point out that had nothing to do with race.

01:45:47.420 That's all they saw.

01:45:48.080 Now, is this, how do they not see that they're doing exactly the same thing and, except they

01:46:00.040 don't always have the best solid reasons, you know, you look at Donald Trump and you can

01:46:05.660 say he's a, he's a mess, you know, he's, he's bad for culture, he's bad for this, he's

01:46:12.140 bad for that, but they are not doing that.

01:46:19.320 Right.

01:46:19.640 They just despise the man.

01:46:22.220 Yeah.

01:46:23.400 How do they, how do they walk that?

01:46:27.160 Well, I think...

01:46:27.880 Or is it just okay?

01:46:28.680 Well, I think cognitive inconsistency and moral hypocrisy is easy to support when you

01:46:35.500 are so ideologically driven, right?

01:46:37.460 I mean, there's a thing in behavioral decision making called axioms of rational choice.

01:46:42.140 Which Dick Thaler, by the way, the guy who wrote Nudge is a big guy of.

01:46:46.020 So for example, if I prefer car A to car B and I prefer car B to car C, I should prefer

01:46:50.260 car A to car C.

01:46:51.360 This is called the transitivity axiom.

01:46:53.280 If you don't do that, you're being irrational.

01:46:56.140 So a hallmark of good thinking is to be cognitively consistent.

01:47:00.720 And yet these buffoons are never cognitively consistent because they are so parasitized by

01:47:06.900 their ideological disdain towards this man, right?

01:47:09.560 So for example, when I went on Sam Harris's show, and I'm not saying that the guy that

01:47:15.240 I spoke of a few minutes ago was Sam Harris or not, but when I went on Sam Harris's show,

01:47:19.820 I explained how psychologically people could arrive at choosing Donald Trump in a very

01:47:25.900 rational way.

01:47:26.660 And let me maybe propose it here.

01:47:28.300 So there is a decision rule called the lexicographic rule.

01:47:31.940 The lexicographic rule basically says when you're choosing between two alternatives, look

01:47:36.300 at your most important attribute.

01:47:37.880 For example, if you're choosing between two cars and if gas efficiency is your most important

01:47:41.300 attribute, you look at your most important attribute and the car that scores the best

01:47:45.620 on that attribute, you choose.

01:47:47.500 So let's apply now the lexicographic rule to Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton.

01:47:51.820 Let's suppose I'm going to use the lexicographic rule and immigration is my most important attribute.

01:47:57.260 Rightly or wrongly, if I think that Trump performs better on immigration than Hillary Clinton,

01:48:02.640 and I use the lexicographic rule, I would very rationally choose Donald Trump over Hillary

01:48:07.040 Clinton.

01:48:07.820 So here I have offered you a road by which millions of people could have chosen Donald Trump without

01:48:13.440 being redneck KKK members who sleep with their sisters.

01:48:17.220 Yet these guys all thought that 60 plus million people, all of them, could have only been rabid

01:48:24.080 racist and that again disappoints me because you should know better.

01:48:27.880 You should be smarter than that.

01:48:29.320 Yet they were parasitized by their disdain for Trump and it pisses me off.

01:48:32.520 I think there was a couple of things going on as well and I misread it because I thought

01:48:42.360 people were looking for something else.

01:48:44.520 They weren't.

01:48:44.980 They were so tired of the lies of people getting away with murder, of being called a racist for

01:48:54.880 anything that they had actual belief in.

01:48:58.060 And they saw this guy who all of a sudden they, they would, they might've gone ick, but

01:49:07.920 then they saw he's beating everyone.

01:49:11.780 He's, if this is working and everything we've tried doesn't work.

01:49:16.580 And I don't like that, but I think he might be able to, cause he'd just belly up to the

01:49:22.780 table and, you know, fart and then say, whoops, I farted.

01:49:26.600 Look, you're a clown.

01:49:28.120 You know what I mean?

01:49:29.400 Authenticity.

01:49:30.020 He's right.

01:49:30.500 He's at the same time, at the same time, for instance, come on, you know, sleeping with

01:49:40.140 a stripper.

01:49:42.120 That's a no brainer.

01:49:43.640 Okay.

01:49:44.040 For Donald Trump.

01:49:44.780 That's a no brainer.

01:49:45.600 Of course that happened.

01:49:46.720 And we, and we all have baked that in.

01:49:50.300 You see Donald Trump strippers affair with him?

01:49:54.080 Uh, probably, but you've baked it in.

01:49:57.280 Right.

01:49:57.420 And so they've taken and they've seen, okay, I don't like his lifestyle.

01:50:01.740 I don't like that, but I like the fact that he might be lying to me about these things,

01:50:09.120 but he's saying the truth that I believe to power.

01:50:15.240 Yes.

01:50:15.880 And that's more important.

01:50:17.340 And the fact that he, he was someone from outside of the establishment, right?

01:50:20.920 He, he had the potential to be the disruptor that the zeitgeist needed.

01:50:26.020 And so for all sorts of very rational reason, reasons, people chose Trump.

01:50:31.560 And yet none of my highfalutin academic friends were willing to concede to that.

01:50:36.580 Everybody who voted for Trump as a rabid Nazi.

01:50:39.940 It's ridiculous.

01:50:41.380 Um, the, uh, the media way they have, the media is collapsing.

01:50:47.780 Okay.

01:50:48.340 Collapsing in trust.

01:50:49.040 There's just a trust implosion.

01:50:50.720 Media is collapsing.

01:50:51.800 The old 1950s system of government just doesn't work anymore.

01:50:57.320 I mean, the constitution would work because it would say, go back home, you know, but the,

01:51:02.360 but the system, the old bloated 1950s style of committees and all of this crap, it just

01:51:08.700 doesn't work in today's world.

01:51:10.140 So that's collapsing.

01:51:12.320 Media is collapsing.

01:51:13.540 Meanwhile, new media, or, or I should say, Google and, uh, YouTube and Facebook, that's

01:51:22.900 growing, but it's also starting to get a bad name because it's got all your information.

01:51:30.200 So when an economy goes bad, these two are gone.

01:51:35.940 If this rises up, but if this rises up and the people are like, I can't trust you at all.

01:51:40.860 These people need these people to protect their golden goose.

01:51:46.360 Right.

01:51:47.260 So they'll, they'll prop these people up in, in DC.

01:51:51.940 These people will create the laws to keep them, you know, uh, isolated.

01:51:56.600 And these people will also join.

01:51:59.300 So I fear a joining of a, a, a, a big government, big, uh, media and big tech.

01:52:11.180 Well, isn't that one, isn't that one of the reasons why, uh, big, all the social media

01:52:15.900 companies haven't received their due regulatory, you know, oversights precisely because they

01:52:22.000 seem to be in bed with, with big government.

01:52:24.180 Right.

01:52:24.340 I often see on Tucker Carlson, he's got this, uh, uh, section or segment on, uh, tech insanity

01:52:31.820 or something where he brings people to ask them, you know, how come these companies are

01:52:36.580 not regulated anymore?

01:52:37.920 What's your view on that?

01:52:38.900 Do you think that it is time for the government to step in and make sure that these guys, I

01:52:42.100 really hate, I hate government regulation.

01:52:45.520 It's always bad.

01:52:46.980 Right.

01:52:47.080 Um, I don't think here's, here's what's bad government getting involved.

01:52:56.300 The free market will allow it to, uh, burn itself out.

01:53:04.120 You know what I mean?

01:53:05.520 There should be no real protection from government, no collusion with government.

01:53:10.220 Once, I mean, the, um, the, um, what was the save the internet nonsense, uh, that went

01:53:17.680 on?

01:53:17.900 That was, that was written by Google.

01:53:19.800 Right.

01:53:20.500 That was written by Google.

01:53:21.520 What do you think, who do you think that's going to protect?

01:53:24.000 Right.

01:53:24.520 You know, during the FDR administration, they put great cars out of business car companies.

01:53:31.060 Auburn was a great car gone.

01:53:34.200 Why?

01:53:35.120 Because the government protected GM Ford and Chrysler.

01:53:38.240 You know, we have the Goodyear blimp because they put other tires that were cheaper and

01:53:43.580 better out of business because they couldn't live to the standards that Goodyear wrote for

01:53:50.040 the government.

01:53:50.760 But for example, for things like, uh, the intrusions that these social media companies do when they

01:53:56.260 remove the voice of someone because they said something that was offensive to the progressive

01:54:00.540 church, do you think that if these social media companies were to become akin to utilities

01:54:05.100 that might.

01:54:06.560 No, I think that would be bad.

01:54:07.640 Here's what I think.

01:54:09.280 They're having it both ways.

01:54:10.880 These media companies are claiming to be both platforms, uh, and, uh, uh, and, um,

01:54:19.480 news sources.

01:54:20.560 Okay.

01:54:21.260 You can't, you can't be both.

01:54:23.440 You're not an, you're not an editor and a platform.

01:54:27.160 You can't be and have government protection.

01:54:29.600 If you're a platform, which they claimed, you can't sue me.

01:54:33.880 We're just a platform.

01:54:35.060 Everything.

01:54:35.740 We're not responsible for what people are putting on.

01:54:38.780 Now I'm an editor.

01:54:40.920 Well, wait a minute.

01:54:42.340 Then you're not a platform.

01:54:43.400 Right.

01:54:43.640 Because now you can be held responsible somehow or another, um, through lots of money, they

01:54:51.580 became both.

01:54:52.780 Right.

01:54:53.080 They, they have to choose one or one or the other.

01:54:57.080 And the free market system will work itself out right now.

01:55:00.900 They're getting protection.

01:55:02.820 I'm, I'm convinced that the people like Peter Thiel or others will find and create a new

01:55:09.700 platform.

01:55:10.120 Even if it's in the form of a pirate radio ship, uh, voices won't be snuffed out forever.

01:55:18.200 Right.

01:55:18.640 You're going to go through a period where they're just snuffing them out, snuff them out until

01:55:21.680 somebody else comes up and says, really?

01:55:25.100 Cause here's this free thing.

01:55:26.820 Well, I already see it now.

01:55:27.940 I don't know if you, do you know what Patreon is?

01:55:29.760 Yeah.

01:55:30.240 Yeah.

01:55:30.440 Right.

01:55:30.720 So do you remember the recent stuff that happened and all these big players left Patreon and

01:55:35.080 now probably 10 times a week, I will receive some email from a tech company seeking my

01:55:42.200 support because they're trying to build a absolute guaranteed freedom of speech alternative

01:55:47.080 to Patreon.

01:55:48.160 Correct.

01:55:48.360 So I think your intuition about the free market resolving it hopefully is, is going to bear.

01:55:53.360 We are running out of time because I think they're growing at such an exponential rate that,

01:55:59.300 um, you know, when 5g hits, uh, you know, it'll change the world.

01:56:06.260 What about if I can ask you a personal question?

01:56:08.160 Are you, are you glad in your, in your case that you're on your own now that you have the

01:56:12.600 freedoms that you do that you're not associated with?

01:56:15.500 Yeah.

01:56:15.860 I'm sure you are.

01:56:16.840 Yeah.

01:56:17.040 Yeah.

01:56:17.560 Um, it's been hard.

01:56:20.260 I mean, look at me and look at a picture of me five years ago.

01:56:23.740 It's been hard.

01:56:24.880 Um, and, uh, I think it's only going to get harder for independence, but, um, not if we

01:56:34.140 can sit down with one another and talk people, I think people are sick of living like this.

01:56:41.200 They're sick of everything being political.

01:56:43.520 And I have to hate this person if I, you know, even if I really like them, I can't be friends

01:56:48.040 with them.

01:56:48.300 I can't, they're sick of it.

01:56:50.360 Yeah.

01:56:50.880 And they just want reasonable people just to have a reasonable conversation.

01:56:54.620 And what amazes me, and I think I discussed this a bit with some of your colleagues yesterday,

01:56:59.140 the, the hunger that people have for these long format, intimate conversations is bewildering,

01:57:06.580 is bewildering because I receive so many emails from people who they'll say things.

01:57:12.900 I mean, it's really humbling.

01:57:14.080 I stopped watching TV.

01:57:15.860 All I do now is watch your conversations on your show.

01:57:18.160 You're like, God damn, really?

01:57:19.240 I have that much, but that's the kind of, and that, that hungry, they're starving.

01:57:23.620 They're starving.

01:57:24.600 And not the little five minute tidbits.

01:57:27.080 These long, deep conversations where they're sort of flies on the wall listening into these

01:57:32.720 meaningful conversations.

01:57:33.800 So I think that I was evidence.

01:57:36.260 I think I was first evidence of that, um, uh, lie in the media.

01:57:42.240 When I first started, they said, you can't have the same background.

01:57:46.740 This is on CNN.

01:57:47.520 You cannot have the same background for more than seven seconds because people will not,

01:57:53.960 they'll lose interest.

01:57:54.800 So we have to change something on the screen every seven seconds.

01:57:58.720 I said, they're not morons or cats.

01:58:02.400 Or pigeons.

01:58:03.460 Yeah.

01:58:03.680 Or pigeons.

01:58:04.140 And they said, uh, uh, I said, we're not going to do that.

01:58:07.920 Um, and then I started arguing.

01:58:11.380 They said, you can't talk about the same topic for more than three minutes.

01:58:17.240 Wow.

01:58:17.600 And I said, that's insanity.

01:58:19.120 You can't get into anything in less than three.

01:58:22.240 I went over to Fox.

01:58:24.120 They told me that I could only talk about something for seven minutes, but I had control of my own

01:58:29.180 show.

01:58:30.440 Um, I ended up in the last year and a half of my show doing 44 minute monologues.

01:58:38.580 Okay.

01:58:39.360 Nobody's ever done that.

01:58:41.400 If you're, if you know that you have to make it interesting and you have something that is

01:58:49.520 different and you're making sense, people will watch it.

01:58:53.440 They will watch it.

01:58:54.280 Well, listen, I have to deliver lectures in front of a class three hours at a time.

01:58:59.200 Right.

01:58:59.820 And they could be sitting on their phone and so on.

01:59:01.760 If I can get a whole bunch of students to just pay attention, then I'm doing that.

01:59:06.260 Right.

01:59:06.580 I mean, professors would be out of a job if our only possibility would be to hold attention

01:59:10.660 for three minutes as per CNN.

01:59:12.300 I have to hold them for three hours.

01:59:14.040 Right.

01:59:14.500 It doesn't make sense.

01:59:16.060 It doesn't make sense.

01:59:17.780 So what a pleasure.

01:59:19.700 Oh, likewise.

01:59:20.680 It's finished already.

01:59:21.760 Wow.

01:59:22.080 It's finished.

01:59:22.960 Two hours.

01:59:23.760 Wow.

01:59:24.420 Well, thank you.

01:59:25.020 It's been a pleasure.

01:59:25.760 Thank you.

01:59:25.920 I look forward to seeing you again.

01:59:26.980 Cheers.

01:59:32.980 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend

01:59:38.540 so it can be discovered by other people.

01:59:40.160 Bye.

01:59:41.160 Bye.

01:59:42.160 Bye.

01:59:43.160 Bye.

01:59:44.160 Bye.

01:59:45.160 Bye.

01:59:46.160 Bye.

01:59:47.160 Bye.

01:59:48.160 Bye.

01:59:49.160 Bye.

01:59:50.160 Bye.

01:59:51.160 Bye.

01:59:52.160 Bye.

01:59:53.160 Bye.

01:59:53.760 Bye.

01:59:54.160 Bye.

01:59:54.780 Bye.

01:59:55.420 Bye.

01:59:57.420 Bye.

01:59:57.920 Bye.

02:00:00.560 Bye.

02:00:10.580 Bye.

02:00:10.700 Bye.

02:00:11.680 Bye.

02:00:12.020 Bye.

02:00:12.660 Bye.

02:00:13.700 Bye.

02:00:14.380 Bye.

02:00:14.980 Bye.

02:00:15.680 Bye.

02:00:16.160 Bye.

02:00:16.700 Bye.

02:00:17.680 Bye.

02:00:17.820 Bye.

02:00:18.240 Bye.

02:00:18.380 Bye.

02:00:18.960 Bye.

02:00:19.940 Bye.

02:00:21.760 Bye.

02:00:22.060 Bye.

The Glenn Beck Program - February 16, 2019

Ep 24 ｜ Dr. Gad Saad ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

Episode Stats

Length

Words per Minute

Word Count

Sentence Count

Misogynist Sentences

Hate Speech Sentences

Summary

Transcript