The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - My Chat with David Baddiel, Author of ”Jews Don’t Count” and ”The God Desire” (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad

00:00:00.000 go. Hey guys, this is God Sad for the Sad Truth. One of the beautiful things about my public

00:00:05.980 engagement is that my world intersects once in a while with folks that otherwise I might not have

00:00:12.040 met. Today, I've got David Baddiel, who is a British comedian, presenter, screenwriter, and

00:00:18.480 author. I first became aware of David when I read an article, I can't remember in which platform

00:00:23.980 where he was talking about how one can be an atheist and Jewish, which resonated with me,

00:00:29.180 and that sent us off on several exchanges, and here you are. Welcome, David.

00:00:34.780 Hi, Gad. How are you doing?

00:00:36.260 I'm doing well. Maybe you want to tell people why you might be.

00:00:39.960 I'm doing well too, but in a slightly weird way. So I had a medical procedure this morning,

00:00:44.560 not a serious one. I basically had a stomach ache and I needed someone to put a camera down my

00:00:51.000 stomach to find out what's going on. Nothing bad is going on. But to do that, because I'm essentially

00:00:55.700 not very male. I got the option of just having the tube down my stomach or with sedation. I said,

00:01:02.780 give me the sedation. So I am shocker with fentanyl at the moment. And I don't want to

00:01:08.660 promote fentanyl, especially not in North America, but it's the moment I'm quite enjoying it.

00:01:13.960 Okay. Well, for the British, well, I'm glad that it's nothing serious. That's wonderful.

00:01:19.540 We're, by the way, we're roughly the same age when I went and did a, well, a deep dive. It's not much

00:01:25.080 of a deep dive, but I went on to your Wikipedia page. You're about five months older than me.

00:01:30.300 You're born in May 1964, and I'm born in October 1964. And so in Arabic, you say

00:01:37.420 meaning, may we reach a hundred together. May we do that. That would be great. Yeah. When you look

00:01:45.240 at me, do you think we're the same age? Do you think we look the same age? Because I have a notion,

00:01:51.100 which is actually in my book, The God Desire, that at heart, everyone feels about 12. That adulthood,

00:01:58.960 we're all winging adulthood. It's essentially a sham. And when we see ourselves looking old,

00:02:03.260 we think, who's that? So you are younger than me, but I'm having to process that,

00:02:09.760 even though I know I look old too. That's what I'm saying.

00:02:12.720 You are right that we always feel younger than we really are. I remember a very poignant story

00:02:17.360 where my dad, this is probably 25 years ago. So he's now 93. So he would have been, you know,

00:02:24.620 sorry, he's still alive. Thank God he's still alive as is my mother. And so he, we were sitting

00:02:31.940 watching TV and a guy comes on television who looked, let's say 25 years younger than he was

00:02:40.400 at that point. And he looks at the guy on TV and he goes, do I look this old dad? I said, dad,

00:02:47.280 you look about 30 years older. And that shocked his world. He's like, really? I look older than that

00:02:52.640 guy. I said, the guy is like, I mean, literally three decades younger than you. And so I think you're

00:02:57.820 right. We've got this false perception of how old we are. Yeah, we do. I actually have,

00:03:02.660 I don't know if it'll work on a Canadian, but because maybe this is just a British thing,

00:03:07.060 but I know how you can tell what your soul, the age of your soul, by the way, obviously,

00:03:10.420 I don't believe in a soul, but that's aside what your soul is. And there used to be a show

00:03:14.640 in Britain that every year it would change its name. It was a film review show. And when I was growing

00:03:19.360 up, it was film, I'm going to say it like 82, right? So if you take when I was born, 1964,

00:03:28.000 to then, that's clearly what I feel inside. Because if you say film to me, and I choose

00:03:33.180 a year for what that show should be, it's kind of 82, right? Which makes me, I can't do the

00:03:39.520 maths quickly, but actually that makes me about 16, right? In my soul. So if you had to choose

00:03:45.200 a TV show called film, what would be the year? Oh, that's a good question. Probably Cheers.

00:03:53.420 Do you remember the comedy show Cheers? Of course. Yeah. And so that's how you feel that should be

00:03:59.540 on TV when you turn on the TV. Well, you know why? Because it really captured my formative years.

00:04:06.160 I think it started in 82 when I was just finishing high school and then it went off air.

00:04:15.200 By the time I was well into my PhD. And so, so, you know, this is a show that took me from my high

00:04:23.620 school days all through my education. And I remember I had a real, a really sad kind of nostalgic state

00:04:30.200 that this was not over. You know, you, you become attached to these characters. So that's probably

00:04:34.740 the most iconic show that I can think of. Okay. So that does put you in the, in a coming of age

00:04:41.400 time in, in, in, you know, if we, if what you think of first off instinctively, when you watch,

00:04:47.160 when you think of TV, that is what I'm saying is what the age, the age you are really in, in your

00:04:52.180 heart. Got you. Speaking of television series and so on, my wife and I, this is our second crack at

00:04:59.680 doing it. And boy, I'm glad that we went back to it about a few years ago. We started watching

00:05:04.640 Mad Men. Have you, have you watched that series? I watched about half of the first series and I

00:05:10.180 didn't not like it. I actually really liked it. But something took me away from it. I think it was

00:05:15.500 just before the idea of really long form TV was something I'd accepted. Because like when I grew

00:05:22.040 up and in Britain, particularly a TV series is like six episodes. And then maybe there's another

00:05:27.420 one a year later, that's six episodes. The idea of committing three months, a year of your life to

00:05:33.020 watching TV, that took me a while to get my head around. Now I'm really into it. And I watched

00:05:36.900 Breaking Bad recently and thought it was like the greatest thing ever made. So I need to go back

00:05:41.800 to watch Mad Men, which is- I really highly recommend it. So Breaking Bad is also one of my

00:05:46.400 favorite. And I came to it late, but a few years ago. So Mad Men appeals to me. I mean, sort of to our

00:05:52.580 earlier discussion about how old you are. The cinema, well, first of all, I, I study psychology of

00:05:57.760 decision-making and evolutionary psychology and consumer psychology. So all the psychology of

00:06:02.760 advertising that is the, you know, the central running theme through the show, Mad Men, of course,

00:06:07.780 is Madison Avenue, guys who work on Madison Avenue. But the cinematography, the icons, the set,

00:06:16.740 so appeals to me because it takes me back to when I was a kid growing up in, in Lebanon. So I was born

00:06:23.100 in Lebanon, grew up there till the age of 11. We left in 1975, the first year of the Civil War. And I keep

00:06:28.820 my fingers crossed that I will see a Pan Am logo because somehow those Pan Am logos are so attractive

00:06:36.920 to me. Do you have such a brand that no longer exists that is very evocative of your childhood?

00:06:42.580 Yeah. I mean, many, I mean, loads of things. There, there was something in Britain. I think it still

00:06:49.400 exists, but I don't think of it as it is now, which was R. White's Lemonade. And it's partly because

00:06:55.760 there was an advert that went with R. White's Lemonade, which for no reason at all was a guy

00:07:01.760 because you don't have to hide drinking lemonade, but he used to tiptoe down the stairs, like at

00:07:07.520 night. And he used to sing a song about being a secret lemonade drinker. And there was an urban

00:07:11.800 myth that that was Elvis Costello's dad. I remember that in Britain. And whenever I think of R. White's

00:07:18.200 Lemonade, I think of that guy. And I think of me very young. Can I ask you a question about

00:07:22.160 Mad Men and consumer psychology? I mean, we, we have to get on to talking about Jewish atheism

00:07:26.440 and stuff, but I got to ask you a question, which is there's one scene in the first episode,

00:07:32.100 I think of Mad Men that I've always thought is immensely evocative of something, which is

00:07:36.540 a shift in understanding to do with how consumer, how advertising work, but also how mass psychology

00:07:42.740 works, which is that scene where, is it Lucky Strike, where the cigarette company are going

00:07:47.640 to Dan Draper. And they're saying, we can't basically say cigarettes are good. We can't

00:07:52.120 do that anymore. We've been told legally. And, and he's just talking to them and asking about

00:07:56.860 the cigarettes. And they say, how do you make them? And you make them like this, you do that

00:07:59.860 and you toast them and blah, blah, blah. And he says, what? And he says, well, you do this

00:08:03.380 and you toast them. And then he just writes down, Lucky Strike, it's toasted.

00:08:07.120 That's right.

00:08:07.580 And that becomes the slogan. And I remember watching the thing that is so clever, because the idea

00:08:12.580 of lateral thinking to advertise something feels to me like a very modern concept.

00:08:18.420 And sometimes you see that on a historical drama, you see modernity happening. And that's

00:08:22.820 what I remember thinking about that.

00:08:24.660 Yeah, no, that, that it's funny because I just, so we restarted watching it again. And yesterday

00:08:29.260 we watched exactly the episode that you just mentioned. And as I was watching it, I turned

00:08:33.340 to my wife, I said, you know what? I don't think I need to lecture anymore. I'm just going

00:08:36.820 to play those, those, those episodes and then just interject once in a while. Uh, I don't

00:08:42.540 know if you remember the other scene where they talked about, you know, this, uh, a doctor,

00:08:46.340 I'm guessing a PhD comes in and she shares a report with him about, you know, some of the

00:08:51.820 positioning that they must do. And he takes the report and he throws it in the garbage.

00:08:55.600 And I'm thinking, you don't remember that? And she talks about the death, which, uh, death

00:09:00.000 wish of Freud and so on. And so it's so up my alley. I mean, one of the things that I

00:09:03.760 love about advertising when I lecture to my students is that it really is part art, part

00:09:08.760 science. There are psychological principles that are predictable that we could apply.

00:09:14.280 When is it appropriate to use fear-based advertising? When should you use humor? How many times can

00:09:20.020 you show a humorous ad before people get tired of it? So there are absolutely clear scientific

00:09:25.400 principles that we could use in designing optimal advertising copy, but there's also an art

00:09:31.700 part. So that scene that you talked about where it just came to him, he wasn't even prepared to do

00:09:36.460 a pitch and yet he did. And then suddenly everybody's happy. Yeah. That didn't come from,

00:09:41.280 you know, science one-on-one. It just came organically from his brain. That's what I love

00:09:45.480 about advertising. Yeah, no, that is really interesting. It's really interesting as well,

00:09:49.080 because of course, all art at some level is also advertising because, uh, you know, except in very,

00:09:55.620 very kind of like Puritan, uh, ideas of art, the artist does want their art to be seen the art,

00:10:02.160 you know, to sell tickets. You know, uh, I went and saw a production of a Tom Stoppard play the other

00:10:07.720 day, uh, which would have been redone and it's a very difficult play, but they still want to sell

00:10:12.860 tickets. Uh, and they still, uh, have things in the play that are designed to just like get people to

00:10:18.600 come get bums on seats. Right. And at no point really, is there an artwork that isn't at some

00:10:25.200 level advertising? Well, I actually wrote an article. I think I can't remember exactly when,

00:10:30.400 maybe seven, eight years ago, I used to write often in a psychology today column, which I haven't

00:10:36.100 been doing most recently. And I titled the, the article, uh, life is marketing and marketing is life.

00:10:43.080 So to your point, I was arguing that everything is marketing, right? When we go to the mating market,

00:10:48.240 where in this case, I am the product and I'm advertising myself in the labor market,

00:10:52.800 I'm advertising myself within a group at a cocktail party. I'm advertising my belief system

00:10:58.820 so that hopefully other people will like me. So everything beyond just selling Coca-Cola and, uh,

00:11:04.640 Levi's jeans, everything is marketing. So when some people come at me and say, oh, but you know,

00:11:09.800 you're, you're, you're at a business school, you study consumer behavior. That's not serious.

00:11:13.320 I say, nothing could be more serious. I mean, short of breathing,

00:11:16.120 we are a consumatory animal. So your point is, well, that's correct. That's absolutely correct.

00:11:22.140 Shall I, just cause we started off talking about, but shall I talk a bit about the Jewish atheism

00:11:27.260 thing? Of course. So let me just put up this, uh, so this is the book where you develop that whole

00:11:32.820 thesis, the God desire, the other book that was sent to me, Jews don't count. And I also have access

00:11:38.400 to your documentary based on that book. Uh, I haven't read yet. I can't put it up because you sent it as a

00:11:44.260 PDF file, but so I can, I can, if it's any good, this is Jews don't count. Jews don't count. And the

00:11:52.160 God desire, you take it wherever you want to go. Well, Jews don't count. I can start with this

00:11:56.580 actually, because it relate, they relate to each other. Jews don't count is a bigger deal, uh,

00:12:02.220 certainly in terms of sales, uh, and, and in terms of its impact on the conversation around

00:12:06.940 antisemitism than the God desire, which is a more kind of philosophical work really, and doesn't have a

00:12:12.480 sort of social purpose in quite the same way. Uh, but, but they relate to each other because one

00:12:17.140 of the key ideas in Jews don't count, which is a book about how antisemitism, uh, has not received

00:12:23.380 the same attention, the same concern, the same level of like protectiveness, if you like, that

00:12:28.360 progressives would extend to other minorities and why that is, uh, and to do with the sort of deeply

00:12:34.120 embedded notions of Jews and power and how Jews don't really suffer from any kind of trauma or

00:12:39.200 whatever, is it all in Jews don't count. But part of that, a corner of it, which was actually very

00:12:43.480 important, turned out to be more important than I realised, is my point is that, uh, antisemitism

00:12:48.220 is racism. It's racism. It's not what people think it is. People tend to think it's religious

00:12:52.980 intolerance, particularly in America, I've noticed, where racism is very ring-fenced for people of colour,

00:12:58.440 less so in Britain. Uh, and my point about it, the way I prove antisemitism is racism, which I can do

00:13:02.980 very easily, is I am an atheist, uh, but that would get me no passes at all out of Auschwitz.

00:13:08.620 And indeed, my great uncle Arno, who was not a religious Jew, he was totally secular, died in the

00:13:14.660 Warsaw Ghetto. Many other, uh, of my family who were mainly non-observant Jews died in the Holocaust

00:13:19.780 and in America now, uh, white supremacists marching and chanting the Jews will not replace us.

00:13:26.760 They won't, they wouldn't ask me if I keep kosher before they set light to my house. And so religion

00:13:30.620 is kind of irrelevant, uh, to the, to the racists. And that's quite an important corner of that book,

00:13:35.960 uh, because I think people like to mark down antisemitism as basically it's just about

00:13:40.580 religion and religion is not as important as racism, right? So that led to, uh, me wanting to

00:13:47.420 sort of explain a bit more in this book, in The God Desire, what a Jewish atheist means. Uh, and part of

00:13:54.460 it was trying to express something quite complicated about how you can not believe in God as a

00:14:00.320 supernatural being, but particularly if you're from a minority with a long history of persecution,

00:14:04.900 I think that's sort of part of it is you are moved be, you know, in ways that are nothing to do with

00:14:10.440 that belief by tradition and defiance and survival. I actually in the book talk about, um, a friend of

00:14:18.540 mine who tragically lost his son at a very young age, who is also an atheist and who sings Kaddish,

00:14:23.880 uh, Yit Kadalvi Yit Kadash Shemayroba at his funeral. I'm being intensely moved by that. And I'm not moved

00:14:31.200 by the meaning of the words. I'm moved by the sonics of the word because the sonics of the Hebrew plug into

00:14:38.340 sort of centuries and centuries of what I think being a Jew means, which is actually very little, I think,

00:14:45.620 to do with an actual imagination, which I think Christians do have, uh, of a sort of person or

00:14:52.880 version of a person or a God-like being that they are in a relationship with. I'm not sure,

00:14:58.860 you know, being Jewish is about that. And so the book is, that's partly the book, uh, why the book

00:15:05.480 happened. It's also an extension from that of my own feeling that atheism, as I understand it, as I've read

00:15:14.120 many books about it, tends to be very, very dismissive of religion. And I'm not very dismissive

00:15:18.420 of religion. I completely stone cold don't believe in God. Uh, and, uh, I don't just don't believe in

00:15:24.300 God. I sort of absolutely know there is no God, but I think that, uh, as a Jew and as a Jew who

00:15:30.860 understands the storytelling of what it means to be a Jew and how that culture has sort of, you know,

00:15:36.100 absolutely at the bedrock of my being, I think that a lot of the sort of what I would call white

00:15:41.360 Christian men of the new atheists don't understand how religion teaches what us, what it means to be

00:15:48.180 human. And also in my particular case, my deep desire, which is where we get to the God desire

00:15:53.580 to believe in God. And this is a slightly depressive position, but I believe it to be the real one

00:15:58.680 informs me that there is no God because I believe that I believe that that exists in the deep

00:16:04.560 recesses of most humans or in a mass cultural way as well. There's a mass psychological wish

00:16:10.220 for there to be more meaning in life, for there to be life after death, for us to see our loved

00:16:16.140 ones again, all sorts of things that we would like and a hardwired need to worship. And all of that is

00:16:21.860 serviced by a God. So we have created that thing in many different forms in order to surface that deep

00:16:29.500 desire, sometimes mainly that we're not aware of. I mean, sometimes we are aware of it, but a lot of

00:16:33.600 time we're not aware of it. And my point is I am an atheist who absolutely acknowledges that desire

00:16:38.940 being himself. And that's what doesn't happen in the God Delusion or indeed in Bertrand Russell's

00:16:45.960 books. That's just dismissed as obviously nonsense. And why would that comes back to the childish

00:16:51.560 thing in a way is like you only a child, only a baby would be at all moved or interested in the

00:16:58.000 idea of this fairy tale. And I think I say at one point that to dismiss religion as fairy tales is to

00:17:04.680 not understand how you shouldn't dismiss fairy tales as fairy tales, because legends of how we live and how we

00:17:11.200 create ourselves are key to understanding what it means to be human. Sorry, that was a very long answer.

00:17:16.520 Well, but your thesis resonates very much with me, because you may or may not know. I mean, I'm very wedded to my

00:17:24.460 Jewish identity. We're Lebanese Jews.

00:17:26.300 But on the other hand, I too, I'm not much of a believer in that, you know, I don't worry that we

00:17:32.920 need to set the candles, because Chabad said, said it should be at 421. And if I do it at 422, I'm a bad

00:17:40.060 Jew. And so but yet, just like you, I understand that we have a shared history, we're part of a people.

00:17:46.540 I understand that. And I mean, if you think that the way that you guys pray in Hebrew, you know,

00:17:52.580 might resonate with you, try to do it when you're Arabic speakers. I mean, it's taken me back to,

00:17:58.380 you know, thousands of years ago. So the type of cadence of how we pray, no disrespect to my

00:18:05.460 Ashkenazi brothers, but you really have to sit in a Syrian, or a Lebanese, or an Egyptian, or an Iraqi,

00:18:11.600 or a Yemeni, to maybe even get more of that, you know, sense of awe of shared history.

00:18:18.340 I'm really, I'm really interested in that. Because I feel it. I feel, I think I say in the

00:18:24.900 book, when I'm listening to that, that I feel the echo of centuries of tradition and suffering and

00:18:30.080 defiance. And I do. I think I quote also, Simon Sharma, the historian, talks about when Jews were

00:18:36.700 exiled from Spain, what would you hear, as they were leaving the ports of Spain, the Shema. And if you

00:18:43.640 hear the Shema, you're going to be moved by the Shema, or the idea of it, whether or not,

00:18:48.320 you believe that a God is listening. And I think as an Ashkenazi, I think you're right. I think I'm

00:18:55.320 sure the music would be somehow more emotive, if I was able to tune in to what it would be like for

00:19:02.940 a Lebanese Jew or a Syrian Jew or whatever. But I would like to think that there's a meeting place

00:19:08.940 anyway. Sure, of course. We're all Jews. We've all heard that music at some point in our, you know,

00:19:15.400 in our inner souls. I'm using all these words that only religion can give you that I actually

00:19:20.640 don't believe in these things. But you know what I mean?

00:19:23.400 Yeah, absolutely. But so I'm going to build on your argument that there is a functional value to

00:19:30.380 being religious. And I'm going to come at it from the perspective of how an evolutionist would argue.

00:19:37.920 So you, this may, I think, maybe interest you, because you probably haven't attacked it from that

00:19:43.820 angle. Evolutionists actually offer evolutionary-based arguments for why religion exists. So there's what's

00:19:52.820 called the adaptation argument. So this is where you have to argue that there is a unique, in this

00:20:00.340 case, survival advantage to religiosity. And so, for example, David Sloan Wilson, who is a evolutionary

00:20:06.980 biologist, and I think he recently retired at State University of New York at Binghamton, who's,

00:20:12.660 we know each other well. He wrote a book now maybe 20 years ago called Darwin's Cathedral,

00:20:18.680 where he uses a group selectionist argument to argue that if you take two groups, one of which

00:20:25.760 scores high on religiosity, the other one which doesn't, well, the group that is religious is going

00:20:32.820 to have a survival advantage because there are very earthly mechanisms that are conferred to the

00:20:38.860 group that's religious. Greater communality, greater cohesion, greater demarcation between in-group and

00:20:45.240 out-group members, greater reciprocity relationships within in-group members. So there are real earthly

00:20:51.460 benefits that are reaped by those who are religious. So that's the adaptation argument. Then there is an

00:20:57.340 opposing argument that argues that religion, from an evolutionary perspective, is an exaptation. An

00:21:03.480 exaptation is when you're piggybacking on an evolutionary mechanism. So for example, our skeletal

00:21:09.900 system is white, but that color is not itself adaptive. It is just the path-dependent thing that came up

00:21:17.280 because other things have happened. And so from that perspective, religion is piggybacking on cognitive

00:21:24.480 systems that evolve for other purposes. So for example, our ability to see the world as blue team,

00:21:31.080 red team, us versus them, coalitional thinking, while certainly the Abrahamic religions are very good

00:21:37.180 at using that neuronal system, right? There are the Jews and the Goys. There are the believers and the

00:21:43.480 Kuffar in Islam. There is those who are going to Jesus for eternity and the rest of us who are going to be

00:21:49.520 damned in hell. And so there are very clear science-based, evolutionary-based arguments that

00:21:56.280 support your claim that really the default value is to believe.

00:22:00.760 Yeah. So I don't, in the book, really go into those evolutionary arguments. I'm not, I am aware of

00:22:07.400 them, although not in the way that you are. The way I tend to write these books, because I come from

00:22:11.520 stand-up, is just essentially out of my head, with not a lot of sort of data and proper academic

00:22:18.480 research, and thus they are short and anecdotal. And that seems to be one of the reasons that they

00:22:23.560 do okay. But I talk about identity. That's, it's not a word you use, but I think it's important in

00:22:30.420 what you're talking about, in that religion confers a whole host of advantages. Some of them are

00:22:36.560 obvious social advantages, which would have a Darwinian, if you want to look at it in those

00:22:41.460 terms, advantage. Obviously, because it will create a tribal cohesion to share the same identity. And

00:22:48.300 religion gives you a host of things of which you could basket them as identity. So I would say sort

00:22:55.400 of meaning is one of those. And another one, which is very, very live now because of social media,

00:23:02.020 is a way in which you can project your identity to those around you. Religion is able to do that

00:23:10.600 because religion has meetings in it, it has colours, it has things you can wear, it has prayers you can

00:23:16.080 say that only your people say. But what that allows you to do is say, I am a important and supportive

00:23:25.100 member of the tribe. Now, what is very interesting, and you touched on it just then, is that humans seem to be unable to

00:23:32.020 to project an identity without it being in opposition. It seems to the strengthening of identity, which is

00:23:39.220 very important to human beings, they should feel I am this, I am a Catholic, or whether it be, you know, I am

00:23:45.520 an anti-vaxxer now, or whether it be whatever it is, I am woke, whatever it is. Now, it seems impossible to do

00:23:55.280 that in and of itself, the way you have to build it, and social media has created an incredibly dysfunctional

00:24:01.040 ability to do that, is by hating on the ones who are not you, by creating a fan, an idea of the ones who

00:24:08.160 are not you, and being angry with them. And then hopefully, again, social media allows for this, but

00:24:14.040 it's a very religious idea, bringing the people with you, who are part of the tribe, in order to, you know,

00:24:20.420 mob hate on them, and then get mob hate back. And this just reinforces your identity. And it feels to me that

00:24:26.340 the performative nature of all that is all there in religion, because religion has always had Catholics

00:24:31.980 hating Protestants, or Jews and Philistines, or whatever it might be. It seems that the binary nature of identity

00:24:38.940 always involves, who is my opposite? How can I build, or how can the tribe, if you want to be more Darwinian

00:24:46.560 about it, how can the tribe reinforce its identity by having this negative version of itself?

00:24:51.660 Right. Well, and religion does another incredible thing, I mean, to your point. So take, for example,

00:24:57.060 Islam. In Islam, the Islamic nation is called the Ummah, right? Well, what that does is now removes

00:25:03.600 otherwise immutable characteristics that would otherwise put us in different tribes. It no longer

00:25:09.560 matters whether I'm black or white, or whether I am from Morocco or Malaysia. What matters now is we

00:25:18.360 are united in the fact that we are part of the Ummah. So it becomes a supramechanism by which we can erase

00:25:24.600 all those other characteristics. And therefore, we belong to the same group. It's a brilliant

00:25:29.900 memaplex to use Daniel Dennett's term.

00:25:34.160 Memaplex is not a word I know.

00:25:36.160 So memaplex is basically a collection of memes. So memes is a term, of course, that you probably know

00:25:41.840 from Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene. So Daniel Dennett, I think he's the originator of

00:25:47.560 the term, argued that something like religion is a memaplex. I think the term comes, so for example,

00:25:54.580 when you talk about a cineplex, it's a multiplicity of movie theaters in one place. So a memaplex

00:26:02.400 is a coherent narrative made up of distinct memes making up a memaplex.

00:26:08.120 Okay, because I think as far as I remember, in The God Delusion, what Dawkins actually does is use the

00:26:14.560 word meme to draw a parallel, which I don't completely agree with, with genes. So in the,

00:26:20.880 because he's such a Darwinist, he can't understand the spread of religion, because it doesn't have a

00:26:26.120 biological basis, and it seems to have no obvious evolutionary basis. And so he talks about the

00:26:31.160 spreading of memes exactly as if they were genes. And I don't think it works entirely like that.

00:26:35.480 And actually, one thing that I think speaks to that is what you've just said about the Umar

00:26:40.560 is also true of the way that Christianity spreads, because Christianity is an evangelical religion.

00:26:46.620 And as an evangelical religion, obviously, it was able to colonize a lot of the world.

00:26:51.520 Judaism is odd, because Judaism is not a proselytizing religion. It's really fucking hard to become a Jew.

00:26:58.420 From a marketing perspective, Judaism sucks.

00:27:01.160 It completely sucks. And actually, I talk about this in the book. I got quite a bad review from the Jewish Chronicle.

00:27:08.380 A newspaper that I sometimes write for, but hey, one is, you know, prophet is not without honor, saving his own country.

00:27:13.840 Because the reviewer felt that I was someone who liked Christianity more. And that was a misunderstanding of the book,

00:27:20.360 because I don't like or dislike any religion particularly, but I was saying Christianity is much more successful,

00:27:25.900 which it obviously is in terms of size. And that's not just to do with the fact that it's an evangelical religion.

00:27:31.300 That's to do with the fact that I think that I actually use the example of Hollywood screenwriting,

00:27:36.080 that if you read a book called Save the Cat, which is a book on how if you wanted to do a formulaic Hollywood story,

00:27:42.700 you might notice that your hero should be empathetic. So that's number one, where Christianity has done better than Jews,

00:27:50.380 because they've created a God who is a man, right, rather than a formless being.

00:27:54.180 So empathy is there straight away. Then it might tell you have that character, your hero, be of lowly stock,

00:28:00.920 because you want to feel that he is an underdog and he's got a lot of obstacles to overcome.

00:28:05.900 Then you might say, make him do good things early on in the film, make him do various good things,

00:28:12.160 small good things that are slowly building to more and more good things.

00:28:15.080 And then at the end of the movie, what you really want is a big sacrifice.

00:28:18.340 This is all in Save the Cat. In Act Three, you want a huge sacrifice that this person does

00:28:23.860 so that you really feel that this person has, you know, gone on the journey towards your love, right?

00:28:29.540 Your love as a character and engagement. And it turns out the New Testament had all those beats down,

00:28:34.240 you know, 2,000 years early. And that, I think, is why you see the spread of that religion.

00:28:40.320 But it's interesting that Jews, who somehow or other have survived, I do think,

00:28:45.720 I actually wrote a piece very recently about this, about Jews' incredible ability to survive,

00:28:49.300 because it makes no sense, right? Jews are a very small religion.

00:28:52.660 They've been mainly genocided over many, many centuries, or ghettoized or exiled or whatever.

00:28:58.900 They don't encourage people who were not born Jewish to join them.

00:29:04.700 And yet some or other, a small amount, 15 million of us, still exist.

00:29:09.540 And so, given that I'm an atheist and don't think this is because we are Hashem's chosen people,

00:29:15.280 I'm somewhat mystified as to why we've managed to do that.

00:29:19.840 But, yeah, but some religions are memiplex, did you call it?

00:29:24.680 A very memiplex. Judaism is not.

00:29:29.120 Right, no, that's a good point.

00:29:30.620 It doesn't spread itself in that way.

00:29:32.880 Well, you were just, you know, talking about the structure, the narrative of Christianity,

00:29:38.060 which kind of leads me to another point that's not necessarily religious,

00:29:43.160 but that I think will resonate with you.

00:29:44.940 So, you're obviously a writer, you also write fiction, you're a screenwriter.

00:29:49.280 So, there is a, and I know that you pursued a PhD, but never finished it.

00:29:52.940 Maybe we want to talk about that you should go back and finish that PhD.

00:29:57.040 My grandmother, who is long dead, that was all she wanted.

00:30:01.240 My grandmother, Otty Fabian, who was a refugee from Nazism, on my mother's side, they were refugees.

00:30:07.540 My mum was actually born in Nazi Germany.

00:30:09.100 When I was 21, I didn't have enough money to be a comedian.

00:30:16.480 And at that time, which is now an amazing idea, the government in Britain would give you money to be a student and even to be a PhD student.

00:30:25.740 You could get a grant really easily.

00:30:27.400 And so, I got a grant, and I was at London University doing a PhD in Victorian sexuality and literature, is what it was.

00:30:37.280 And she, although I don't think she particularly knew what I was doing, but she just loved the idea of me being Dr. Baddiel at the end of it.

00:30:44.540 And then she was just pissed off.

00:30:45.860 It didn't really matter that I was on TV.

00:30:48.240 I'm going to speak on behalf of your grandmother.

00:30:50.480 You ready?

00:30:50.920 Please do.

00:30:51.320 Okay, so two stories that I mentioned, forgive plugging my own book, in this book right here, The Bad Truth About Happiness, I talk about towards the end of the book about the psychology of regret and how oftentimes the things that we regret, we could actually still affect change.

00:31:09.060 It's too late for me to be a basketball player.

00:31:12.600 I'm too old, too short, and not good enough to be a basketball player.

00:31:15.500 But, so here are two stories that are going to resonate with you regarding your incompleted PhD.

00:31:23.060 Story one, I think his name is Dagobert Brault.

00:31:26.120 He was a guy who left just as the Nazis were coming into power, a Jewish guy, moved to Montreal, became a businessman, never pursued his lifelong dream of going to university.

00:31:38.860 Then when he finished his career, he retired, he was in his 60s.

00:31:42.700 He said, well, you know what, now I've got some time, why don't I go back and do my undergraduate?

00:31:48.180 In his 60s, he completes his undergrad.

00:31:51.320 He says, well, you know, I'm young, I'm still healthy.

00:31:53.760 In his 70s, he begins his master's.

00:31:56.240 Fast forward, at the age of 92, this is at my university where I'm a professor, and it used to be called the Thursday Report, which was the weekly newspaper of the university.

00:32:08.100 I think the title on the front page was, Finally, a doctor at 92.

00:32:13.200 And so he obtained his PhD at 92.

00:32:15.220 Story two, Memfred Steiner, who is a gentleman who came on my show about a year and a half ago, got his MD degree in 1955, David, and then picked up a PhD in biochemistry in 1967 as part of his training in hematology.

00:32:30.200 But his main love had always been physics.

00:32:33.540 But his parents had said, what is this physics stuff?

00:32:35.920 This is not serious stuff.

00:32:37.520 Have a serious profession.

00:32:39.220 Do something practical.

00:32:40.480 Become a physician.

00:32:41.700 So after he retired from medicine, after a long, illustrious career as a hematologist, he went back, pursued physics, and at the age of 89, a year and a half ago, I think, got his PhD and came on my show.

00:32:55.380 So based on those two stories, you're still a spring chicken, so there's no reason for you not to go back and do your PhD.

00:33:03.040 Okay, so you're right.

00:33:05.440 I actually wrote like 90% of it, which is kind of weird, considering that you would think just finish it, David, because I could do.

00:33:14.640 I could just finish it and just submit it.

00:33:17.440 And I might, and I'll take your advice.

00:33:19.600 But there is a couple of reasons why not.

00:33:21.140 Number one, when I've read it now, and I wrote a lot of it in the 80s, it's academically massively out of date in terms of the way that literary theory and stuff.

00:33:29.180 It's very, you know, infected by sort of Foucault and ideas about literary theory that were very prominent in the 80s.

00:33:36.180 It's kind of post-structurist.

00:33:37.520 And I'm not bothered about all that stuff anymore.

00:33:40.140 Although it's mainly historicist.

00:33:42.880 It's mainly looks at the Victorian in terms of like how the history of Victorian thought is there in all the literature.

00:33:50.540 But the other thing is physics, which is, so my dad was a working class guy and not a refugee, although a few generations back, they were fleeing from Russian pogroms.

00:34:04.240 And obviously, in fact, there's a story, which I don't know if it's true or not, but that my great, great grandfather smuggled himself on a wood, on a timber ship from Latvia from running away from Russians.

00:34:16.020 He was on his way to New York and because he didn't speak any English, he just got off at the first stop, which was Swansea in Wales, which is where my dad's from.

00:34:24.360 I actually wondered why your dad was from Swansea.

00:34:28.080 I couldn't.

00:34:28.580 So now I got the story.

00:34:29.980 Yeah.

00:34:30.100 So presumably my great, great grandfather, 10 years down the line, spoke enough English or Welsh to say, where is the Statue of Liberty?

00:34:36.960 And they said, no, it's a long way over there.

00:34:38.640 You got off the boat too early.

00:34:40.500 But my dad got out of poverty by studying chemistry and became a, you know, he ended up actually taught in New York for a bit in upstate New York in Rossellaire Polytechnic Institute, which is in Troy, upstate New.

00:34:55.020 That's where I was born.

00:34:56.520 But then he came back to Britain and he had a job in science for quite a long time before he was made redundant.

00:35:00.840 And when I was a kid, I realised that was not in my gift to do those subjects.

00:35:06.340 I was good at words and English.

00:35:07.880 But my dad, in a way that he's not good parenting, like now this is like definitely not good parenting.

00:35:13.360 When I eventually told him I don't want to do science subjects, he said, well, that's a waste of a brain.

00:35:18.180 Right.

00:35:18.380 So, as I say, not what you would tell kids now.

00:35:20.960 But the interesting thing about it is he's dead now and I spend all my time reading popular, I can't do the maths to do it properly, but I read popular physics books all the time.

00:35:31.980 And I wrote a play called God's Dice, which is a play trying to match up religion and physics.

00:35:38.700 It's actually a play about a woman who appears in a lecturer's room one day, a young woman, and she's a Christian and she uses probability to suggest I can provide you equations to show you the probability of water turning into wine or the Red Sea parting or all the miracles.

00:36:00.200 Because she's a kind of genius and she's able to come up with physics equations to show you, because in an infinite universe, right, in an infinite universe, if anything that can happen will happen, it is sort of possible for water to turn into wine in an infinite universe.

00:36:17.000 A tiny, tiny, tiny possibility, but it's possible.

00:36:21.000 And therefore you can work out the possibility, right?

00:36:23.340 So that I wrote that play.

00:36:24.680 And it's a good play, but it's also an example of the return of the repressed.

00:36:28.640 Because I think my dad, you know, wanted me to be a scientist and I couldn't do that, but I sort of repressed it in me.

00:36:35.700 And then it's coming out now in my fascination with science.

00:36:38.940 And also, can I ask you a question, actually?

00:36:40.400 Please.

00:36:40.780 Another thing, which is, I think it's a bit different for you because you're in, what would you, what is your area of study?

00:36:47.260 What would you call it?

00:36:48.740 So evolutionary consumer psychology.

00:36:51.560 Okay.

00:36:51.760 So that seems to be like a proper subject, right?

00:36:53.820 I studied English and I'm a writer and I love my subject, but a tiny part of me, and I think all people who work in the arts think this, thinks proper cerebral work is being done elsewhere.

00:37:07.640 Proper cerebral work is being done essentially in the sciences, right?

00:37:11.180 And so I think that my dad saying it's a waste of a brain is a bad thing to say.

00:37:19.580 A part of me believes it.

00:37:20.800 A part of me believes I should be doing physics.

00:37:24.560 So I just spoke first on behalf of your late grandmother.

00:37:28.900 Now I'm going to address your late father.

00:37:32.780 You ready?

00:37:33.100 And I'm going to cater to his point about it, you know, only science could be proper, which I disagree.

00:37:40.180 If you're going to address him, he was a doctor, a doctor, because he's got a doctor.

00:37:43.120 Okay.

00:37:43.340 Well, there you go.

00:37:43.980 Dr. Bidil.

00:37:44.400 PhD in biochemistry, Dr. Colin Bryan-Bidil.

00:37:47.820 So get ready.

00:37:49.100 So earlier you were mentioning that in your outdated manuscript for your dissertation, you were using a post-structuralist and Michel Foucault.

00:37:57.300 And I go on and on.

00:37:59.020 So in the parasitic mind in my 2020 book, I talk about parasitic ideas and idea pathogens, of which the biggest one is post-modernism.

00:38:06.880 That's the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas.

00:38:09.100 I agree.

00:38:09.400 I agree with that.

00:38:10.400 But here's a way where we can still have you finish your dissertation and it being properly scientific.

00:38:19.260 You ready?

00:38:19.600 And by the way, you owe me a major, major game at either Arsenal or Chelsea or Manchester City when I come next to England.

00:38:27.960 And also a massive credit in the book that gets published as a result of this.

00:38:31.420 There you go.

00:38:32.260 So I think if you've never heard of this, I hope that this serves as an epiphany because I think it truly is an exciting field.

00:38:38.600 So there is a field, David, called Darwinian literary criticism.

00:38:42.860 Have you heard of that?

00:38:43.880 No.

00:38:44.100 So basically what you're doing there is you're arguing.

00:38:48.260 So rather than doing a literary critical endeavor using a Marxist lens or a post-modernist lens or a feminist lens, you use actually the proper scientific lens, which is that literature moves us.

00:39:03.960 And the fact that we're able to, you know, link and understand some ancient Greek poem in exactly the way, if it were being said today, is because there are a few underlying universal themes in literature that are exactly catering to our shared biological heritage.

00:39:24.520 So I can study Victorian sexuality.

00:39:28.600 As a matter of fact, there's a book called Madame Bovary's Ovaries, where they literally look at all of these classic literary themes using a Darwinian lens.

00:39:42.320 So here comes soon to be Dr. Baddiel, the young one, the David one, where he applies a very formal evolutionary biological and evolutionary psychological approach to studying whichever literary genre he wants.

00:39:59.240 Now your dad is happy because you are, quote, applying science.

00:40:02.740 What do you think about science?

00:40:03.840 That's brilliant.

00:40:05.200 Well, thank you, Gad.

00:40:06.000 That's like sorted out an enormous amount of psychological issues for me in one go.

00:40:09.980 So I'll tell you one.

00:40:12.020 What's very interesting about it, really interesting about it, is I mentioned in passing that the way that I looked at literature was historicist primarily.

00:40:20.360 And to get over the fact that you're right, it's got far too much postmodernism in it because it was written in the 80s and I was young.

00:40:26.880 But there's something I still believe in.

00:40:29.180 But with a twist now, depending on what you've said, which is that history does contextualize art.

00:40:35.800 And I remember when I first came upon this idea, I was very excited by it, partly because I think because of my dad, again, a part of me doesn't want to be totally free floating intellectually about art.

00:40:46.040 I want to feel that there's something concrete.

00:40:48.180 And I remember I had a teacher, a really brilliant teacher who was basically a historian called Lisa Jardine.

00:40:52.180 And I went to see Lisa lecture and she was lecturing about the fairy queen, which is by Spencer.

00:40:58.940 And it was a massive poem written at the start of Elizabeth's first reign.

00:41:02.200 And she said, why is virginity so important in this poem?

00:41:06.660 And her point was, up to that point, people writing courtly poetry would have premised valour and heroism as their main objective for their heroes, because that's what their monarchs were doing.

00:41:20.260 They were going off to fight wars and crusades.

00:41:22.660 And then suddenly they had a female monarch.

00:41:25.360 What's her version of heroism at that point in time in 1550?

00:41:29.860 Interesting.

00:41:30.420 It's chastity.

00:41:31.820 That's a heroic thing for a female monarch to do.

00:41:35.480 And I remember sitting there thinking, suddenly literature has a reality.

00:41:40.520 It's not just people saying, oh, I like this poem or I don't like this poem.

00:41:43.560 It's that that felt to me like intellectually concrete.

00:41:46.240 So I became very historicist in the way that I looked at literature.

00:41:50.040 And I think I wrote some quite interesting things, actually, from that point of view.

00:41:53.800 But I would have changed now a bit to almost entirely what you have just said, except I don't know that I would put a Darwinian lens on it,

00:42:02.100 which is I do believe now more in the eternality of human experience.

00:42:07.140 Right.

00:42:07.540 So as I've moved away politically, to some extent, I used to be very left wing.

00:42:11.840 I now think of myself as purely free floating politically.

00:42:15.080 Like I don't have a political home at all.

00:42:18.420 I think, in fact, having a political home in your head as a brand, it just squashes original independent thought.

00:42:25.240 And as part of that, I think that assuming that everything is entirely dependent on your immediate historical context has that slightly Marxist element to it,

00:42:38.360 which I no longer completely I think history is incredibly important, but not in that way that there is nothing that can exist without the confines of your immediate historical circumstance.

00:42:47.500 That's a very kind of Marxist idea.

00:42:50.380 Now I think, no, you're right.

00:42:53.460 There's something that in eternal humanity that means that when you read Shakespeare or when you read Sophocles,

00:42:58.980 there is history and there is also something that binds us to that art.

00:43:04.000 And so in several of my early books in evolutionary psychology, I have chapters which I titled cultural products as fossils of the human mind.

00:43:16.080 And so my argument there is that if you're a paleontologist and you want to study the phylogenetic history of a species,

00:43:23.360 then your currency are the fossil remains and the skeletal remains.

00:43:27.740 And I can say very precise things about the mating behavior of an animal that has now been extinct for 65 plus million years based on those fossil remains.

00:43:39.220 On the other hand, when it comes to the human mind, it doesn't fossilize, it's organic.

00:43:43.940 But what I argue is the cultural products that human minds leave behind are fossils.

00:43:49.720 And so I could study the ancient Greek poem.

00:43:51.980 I could study the song lyric or I could study the troubadour.

00:43:55.840 I could study movie themes, screenplays or plays in general.

00:44:01.180 And I can study all of those things informed by the evolutionary lens because it will say some profound things about our shared biological heritage.

00:44:11.180 So I think, I mean, there are now a growing number of literary critics that are using Darwinian theory, but it is still a very small field.

00:44:19.020 So again, not to, again, channel your grandmother.

00:44:23.180 There are ways by which you can so easily write something innovative about a particular set of, you know, literary period, be it Victorian or other, where you incorporate the Darwinian lens.

00:44:34.620 And boy, would you take off the originality element because so few literary critics do use that lens.

00:44:40.440 Right. I mean, this is to move it slightly away from, like, helping me rewrite my PhD.

00:44:47.240 But what occurred to me when you were speaking is music.

00:44:50.500 Yes.

00:44:51.420 Because, of course, you know, people say all art aspires to the condition of music.

00:44:55.200 But one reason for that is that music is timeless.

00:44:57.780 You know, Shakespeare, I think, is also timeless, but he's also not timeless.

00:45:05.000 Like, a lot of what Shakespeare's writing is to do with what's going on in Tudor times, in Renaissance times.

00:45:11.460 Right.

00:45:12.300 Whereas we, the abstract way in which we can be moved by music from almost any period.

00:45:18.360 I mean, as it happens, I like music from the 1970s, which is probably why, because I was growing up then.

00:45:23.740 Give me some groups quickly.

00:45:26.180 Well, actually, I've come back round to really liking prog rock.

00:45:30.220 So I, having thought, well, that's not cool for ages, I now thought, what am I talking about?

00:45:33.980 Who cares what's cool?

00:45:35.020 So I like Genesis and Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd.

00:45:39.500 But I also like singer-songwriters, including Canadian singer-songwriters, particularly Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.

00:45:44.260 Okay.

00:45:44.820 So I'm very big fans of them.

00:45:47.700 So, but, you know, sometimes I sit down and listen to, you know, Tchaikovsky or Bach, Bach particularly.

00:45:55.280 And find myself incredibly moved by it in a way that clearly you cannot historicize.

00:46:01.460 Because it doesn't have an obvious meaning that you can do that to.

00:46:05.360 That thing I said about the Fairy Queen, which I like intellectually, but you can't do that with Bach.

00:46:10.620 You can't say exactly why the history has created this particular sound and why it moves you now, 400 years later.

00:46:19.100 Yeah, beautiful.

00:46:19.780 By the way, there is a field called evolutionary musicology.

00:46:24.340 Of course there is.

00:46:25.360 Of course there is.

00:46:26.520 By the way, one of the ideas that I'm thinking for my next book, I'm not sure if I've sold myself on the idea,

00:46:32.680 is to write a book demonstrating that the amount of new insights that could be gleaned from applying the evolutionary lens in fields that you wouldn't typically expect it to be present in.

00:46:46.340 So, what does evolutionary architecture look like, or evolutionary musicology, or evolutionary literary criticism?

00:46:54.140 I mean, I touched on this in some of my previous books, but I thought I would do an entire book where every chapter would be evolution and fill in the blank of a different discipline.

00:47:04.800 I think that might work well.

00:47:06.120 What are your first thoughts about such a project?

00:47:08.400 Well, yeah, I mean, I didn't realise you were quite so evolutionary.

00:47:14.340 And I think it is the case, as far as I can make out, that almost any field of study or endeavour can be examined in a Darwinian way.

00:47:22.740 That seems to be the case.

00:47:24.000 Because, as we said earlier on, everything is marketing.

00:47:26.460 Everything is marketing, and everything is marketing, can obviously have a reproductive basis.

00:47:32.200 Yes.

00:47:32.700 Or a social status increasing basis, which is, in terms of what you said earlier, a species drift, or whatever the word is.

00:47:39.580 I don't know if that's the right expression, but do you know what I mean?

00:47:41.560 Yeah, yeah.

00:47:41.840 What word do you use for something that was on an original basis and then becomes something else?

00:47:46.360 Oh, exaptation.

00:47:48.660 Exaptation.

00:47:49.520 Exaptation, instead of adaptation.

00:47:52.200 Yes, yes.

00:47:53.300 I've heard of that because this is going to receive a strange thing.

00:47:56.480 To mention, but the book I'm writing at the moment is based on a show I did about my parents.

00:48:02.740 And my mum, it's very much about my mother, who one of the things in her life that was the defining thing in her life was that she had an affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman and then turned our lives over to golf.

00:48:16.900 She became totally obsessed with golf and everything in our house was golf and golfing based.

00:48:21.980 And the comedy of it was that somehow my dad didn't notice that this meant she was having an affair.

00:48:26.180 With the golfing memorabilia salesman.

00:48:27.760 But I use and it's good that you've told me because I think I use species drift and I should use exaptation.

00:48:32.580 And I use the example of that in the middle of this book to say, I don't believe that my mother was really that interested in golf.

00:48:41.300 But what happened was her desire, which is the kind of evolutionary desire, I guess, to be with this guy was so strong that it moved her to a position whereby she was obsessed with golf, which doesn't really make sense.

00:48:53.980 Because from his point of view, she just became a rival in the market of memorabilia stuff.

00:48:59.540 Right. And as far as I know, he was always a bit annoyed about it, but she couldn't stop herself because something in her was being pushed to being to prove that your parents separate.

00:49:09.100 She did for a bit and then they got back together again.

00:49:11.940 OK, so she left the golf guy and went back.

00:49:14.100 She was just having an affair with the golf guy.

00:49:15.900 They were never actually together, but she was a part because my mother was the key thing.

00:49:21.200 And this is more how I think and not so Darwinian, maybe in terms I'm fascinated by human psychology and I don't always apply.

00:49:27.260 I mean, you might have a Darwinian version of this, but I think the reason my mom was like that is she was a refugee.

00:49:32.380 Her life in Germany, had Hitler never existed, would have been very glamorous.

00:49:37.700 She was from a very wealthy background.

00:49:39.880 They owned a brick factory in a place called Königsberg.

00:49:42.600 I've actually been there. It's called Kaliningrad now.

00:49:45.080 And they had servants and she would have had probably quite a glittering marriage.

00:49:48.920 All that went and she ended up with my working class Welsh dad, who was quite angry.

00:49:54.480 But I think at some level she always imagined this glamorous life that she would have had.

00:49:58.200 And the nearest thing she could find in suburban London in 1973 was this kind of golf guy.

00:50:05.000 And so your dad forgave her and then they lived out their life together.

00:50:09.280 No, my dad just never talked about it.

00:50:13.060 OK, well, but that itself is incredibly shocking.

00:50:16.140 So let me give you some stats that might either surprise you or not.

00:50:19.440 Let's see. When a man cheats on a woman, it doesn't at all mean that the relationship will end.

00:50:27.500 I think if I'm getting their number, I might get the numbers slightly off.

00:50:31.220 It's about a 30 percent chance that the marriage will dissolve when a man cheats on a woman.

00:50:37.040 When a woman cheats on a man, it almost and this is cross-cultural, it almost guarantees it.

00:50:43.240 It's it's it's roughly in the 90 percent range.

00:50:46.260 Right. So your dad and your mom fell in the 10 percent anomaly.

00:50:50.140 Now, the reason from an evolutionary perspective, they were quite anomalous in lots of ways.

00:50:53.800 There you go. So the reason why it is an unforgivable act is because of a basic Darwinian mechanism of paternity uncertainty.

00:51:02.560 So men have evolved the emotional, cognitive and behavioral systems to be very unforgiving of these kinds of dalliances because we're a bi-parental species.

00:51:12.000 And I don't want to go around raising the sexy gardener's son.

00:51:16.820 And therefore, you cheat on me. We're done.

00:51:19.220 And so it's quite incredible that your dad put up. That's interesting.

00:51:22.720 Well, as I say, he never really admitted it to himself.

00:51:24.940 Everyone else knew, including the children.

00:51:27.040 My dad, who was not an open man emotionally, never really admitted.

00:51:31.060 I think that my mom was doing that.

00:51:32.560 And the key element in my dad's life, to be honest, was that he was very lazy, man.

00:51:36.680 Like he hated any form of aggravation, any form of sort of emotional journeying.

00:51:41.220 And for him, it was just easier to stay with my mom.

00:51:44.820 I should say he was in no way a sort of beta male, however.

00:51:48.220 He was by far the largest figure in our house.

00:51:51.100 He was kind of a big, strong, quite angry man.

00:51:54.120 But he just couldn't be fucked, I think.

00:51:56.720 He did briefly, when they were separated, and I was a bit older, have a relationship with a woman.

00:52:03.980 By that time, he'd been made redundant.

00:52:05.640 He worked in an antiques market.

00:52:07.120 And I said, who is it?

00:52:08.600 And he went, oh, she's a Macedonian.

00:52:10.340 It's aggravation.

00:52:11.300 And that's all I knew about her.

00:52:13.780 And then he got back with my mom, because he couldn't be bothered, really.

00:52:16.420 So it was more of that.

00:52:17.220 But that is very interesting.

00:52:19.080 How much more time have we got?

00:52:20.000 Because there's something I wanted to ask you.

00:52:21.520 Oh, as long as you want.

00:52:23.220 Do you want to go for another 15 minutes?

00:52:24.900 Yeah, sort of 15 minutes.

00:52:25.980 Yeah, that would be cool.

00:52:27.240 I mean, just in terms of the Jews don't count thing.

00:52:29.820 So one of the key elements of Jews don't count, which you haven't read,

00:52:32.300 but I'd be really interested to see what you think when you do read it,

00:52:34.700 is that I talk about the ways in which the reasons why Jews are not in this kind of

00:52:39.900 what I call a sacred circle of minorities that are considered oppressed enough

00:52:43.980 for progressives to ally with them.

00:52:46.520 The Jewish allyship is not really a thing.

00:52:48.840 And this is to do with the fact that Jews are the only minority

00:52:51.820 that have got this weird dual status in the imagination,

00:52:55.200 in the racist imagination, which is that like all minorities,

00:52:58.480 they're seen as kind of low status, as thieving or lying or whatever.

00:53:03.120 But they also, Jews have this one other thing, which is we are high status.

00:53:06.460 We are powerful and rich and in control of the world.

00:53:08.920 And that excludes us from that.

00:53:10.620 The other thing that excludes us, and this is the question I want to ask you,

00:53:13.400 is that Jews are generally seen as white.

00:53:15.880 But this is a particularly big thing, I would say, in the modern binary,

00:53:19.560 where white is the apogee of everything bad.

00:53:22.340 Now, my position is that Jews are not straightforward.

00:53:25.240 Well, obviously, there are Jews of colour, which I want to come to you about anyway.

00:53:28.960 But also, no Jew is exactly white, because Jews are constantly being classed

00:53:34.860 as non-white by the Nazis or whoever it might be.

00:53:39.220 But then, of course, there's someone like you, who is a Lebanese Jew, right?

00:53:43.060 And I don't know what you consider yourself to be,

00:53:46.880 but I would say that the failure of progressives to think of you as,

00:53:51.880 you know, not just any other white bloke, right, is part of the problem.

00:53:56.820 I don't know how you feel.

00:53:57.760 Oh, no.

00:53:58.500 Listen, David, I have used that exact argument against all the wokesters,

00:54:04.140 because, so I always tell them that I outrank all of you in victimology poker, right?

00:54:10.840 So, for example, recently, I don't know if you heard the problems that are happening

00:54:15.020 with the president of Harvard, Claudine Gay.

00:54:16.840 Of course I did.

00:54:17.780 Right.

00:54:18.300 And so the president of the NAACP had come out saying,

00:54:22.960 oh, you know, these accusations against her are a form of white supremacy.

00:54:26.260 She's a brilliant academic and so on.

00:54:28.200 So I, you know, offered a rebuttal on Twitter, which went completely viral,

00:54:33.000 where I offered, you know, rebuttals to each of his points.

00:54:36.180 And at the end, to your point, I said, you know,

00:54:39.660 I would be very careful about accusing me of white supremacy

00:54:44.080 because I am a childhood war refugee of color, an Arabic-speaking Jew.

00:54:51.080 So I outrank you in victimology poker.

00:54:54.220 So be careful.

00:54:55.300 Well, guess what?

00:54:55.840 I do it in a kind of diabolical way, right?

00:54:59.000 Right.

00:54:59.420 But guess what?

00:55:00.620 It works, David, because in their completely warped, parasitized minds,

00:55:05.660 you know, if I'm a greater victim, therefore my arguments are correct.

00:55:10.360 It's not the veracity of the argument that matters.

00:55:13.520 But if you say something against Islam, that's bad because, you know,

00:55:18.360 you're an Ashkenazi.

00:55:19.420 But if I say something against Islam, you know, my words are words of color.

00:55:24.740 Therefore, they simply carry more weight.

00:55:26.740 It's insane, but that's the world we live in.

00:55:29.020 Well, it's very interesting that.

00:55:30.120 So one of the things I try and explain to people,

00:55:32.360 I actually did a big interview with Haaretz just now,

00:55:35.320 which went very viral, and they slightly misquoted me

00:55:40.680 because the headline says Jews are a glitch in the matrix.

00:55:43.840 And I think this was a translation thing because what I actually said

00:55:46.580 was Jews are a glitch in the binary.

00:55:48.860 I might have said it's the matrix of the binary,

00:55:51.120 but what I mean is that that power relationship,

00:55:54.580 which is often about, you know, whiteness or non-whiteness,

00:55:58.380 is one of the many ways in which Jews fuck up the victimizer,

00:56:03.360 victimized binary that rules thinking in general.

00:56:07.080 And one of the ways in which we fuck it up is that it's impossible

00:56:10.380 a lot of the time to say exactly what the whiteness

00:56:13.320 or otherwise of Jews is.

00:56:14.480 You're a brilliant example of that.

00:56:16.100 Yeah, exactly.

00:56:16.860 You're very, very difficult to classify, right?

00:56:19.900 Exactly.

00:56:21.020 But you know what that does a lot of the time.

00:56:23.160 I mean, it may work for you, and that devilishness,

00:56:25.780 I absolutely understand it.

00:56:26.880 But also, I think it frustrates and annoys

00:56:29.880 those who just want the binary to be straightforward.

00:56:33.280 And it's another reason why anti-Semitism happens.

00:56:35.860 I mean, I'm not blaming you.

00:56:37.180 I think it's a good thing.

00:56:38.220 It's a very good thing to subvert those people.

00:56:40.140 But I think you'll find in my heart of hearts,

00:56:43.480 if you ask me, you know, what's happening now

00:56:45.980 and what this book is about, that it's a cry for complexity,

00:56:49.440 that Jews essentially represent complexity

00:56:53.280 in understanding the world.

00:56:54.880 And the fact that you've just listed about five categories

00:56:58.740 that are all dancing with each other,

00:57:01.440 like some kind of subatomic particle that you can't locate,

00:57:05.560 that frustrates people who want the world to be simple.

00:57:08.900 Indeed.

00:57:09.120 And by the way, your book, when did it come out,

00:57:11.940 Jews Don't Count?

00:57:13.000 It came out in 2021.

00:57:14.380 So, I mean, boy, is it even more relevant

00:57:17.980 after the reaction of October, post-October 7th, right?

00:57:22.440 Yeah.

00:57:22.660 No, obviously it is.

00:57:24.400 I mean, actually in the book, when you read it, you'll see

00:57:26.240 I have my position on Israel is fairly narrow.

00:57:30.240 So I have a very short chapter on Israel.

00:57:32.300 And the reason I have a short chapter on Israel,

00:57:34.200 which is going to be interesting for you as a Lebanese Jew,

00:57:36.920 is that I'm saying, right, what I tend to get

00:57:40.240 up to the point that I wrote the book and still afterwards,

00:57:42.780 when I talk about anti-Semitism is what about Israel?

00:57:45.000 What about Palestine?

00:57:46.040 And my answer to that is, you know,

00:57:47.180 I'm talking about a centuries-old racism here,

00:57:49.960 like something that's really complex and really old.

00:57:52.840 Do not reduce it to stuff that's happening in the Middle East

00:57:55.780 and has only been going on for a few years, really.

00:57:58.580 Oh, I completely agree with that.

00:58:00.480 And that's what progressives would do.

00:58:02.360 Like they think you can upend or subvert any conversation

00:58:05.900 about anti-Semitism just by saying, what about Palestine?

00:58:08.480 And my position is that's actually not what I'm talking about.

00:58:11.880 And it's reductive for you to do that.

00:58:14.080 And also no one, no progressive person would go up to a,

00:58:18.900 you know, a British Chinese person talking about, you know,

00:58:22.860 how they might be experiencing some racism in Britain and say,

00:58:25.500 well, firstly, I want you to talk about the Chinese state

00:58:27.540 and what they're doing to the Uyghurs

00:58:29.060 before I allow you into the conversation.

00:58:31.260 That just doesn't happen, right?

00:58:33.560 One of the things that frustrates me to no end

00:58:36.180 about the creation of modern day Israel in 1948

00:58:41.280 is that it has allowed a whole panoply of Jew haters

00:58:45.040 to change the justification of their, you know,

00:58:49.660 just visceral, diabolical Jew hatred and say,

00:58:53.140 oh no, all of my hatred is related to Zionism.

00:58:58.800 I love the damn Jews.

00:59:00.460 It's just the Zionists that I hate.

00:59:02.120 And I mean, again, demonstrably, that is such a god.

00:59:06.020 I mean, just look at what Hamas says.

00:59:08.060 I mean, and of course, as an Arabic speaker,

00:59:10.120 I can show you an endless litany of, you know,

00:59:14.020 speeches that they give to their people at the mosque

00:59:17.000 where they never utter a single time anything about land.

00:59:21.660 As a matter of fact, they often say,

00:59:22.920 it doesn't matter if we got back everything

00:59:25.200 from the river to the sea, Jews must be eradicated.

00:59:28.880 And so it really frustrates me when Westerners say,

00:59:31.820 oh no, everything that you're saying

00:59:33.160 in terms of global Jew hatred today stems from Israel.

00:59:36.640 Nothing could be further from the truth.

00:59:38.640 Well, no, yeah.

00:59:39.560 So before all this happened,

00:59:41.420 this copy of my book is actually the American copy

00:59:44.800 and I'd already added a bit more.

00:59:47.860 But put it up so people can see the whole thing.

00:59:50.280 Then I wanted to about Israel

00:59:52.280 because I wanted to take in that point specifically.

00:59:54.600 And I use an example, which is in 2019,

00:59:58.660 where there was an Israel-Gaza conflict.

01:00:00.740 Now forgotten about, but there was.

01:00:02.860 There were quite a lot of marches in London

01:00:04.520 and there was a march in Hyde Park

01:00:06.400 and there were two things about it that were notable.

01:00:09.340 Number one, there was a placard

01:00:12.360 that had a picture of Jesus on it.

01:00:15.580 And it had a picture of Jesus on it on the cross

01:00:17.520 and it said, don't let them do it again.

01:00:20.680 So if you want to separate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism,

01:00:23.180 there it is, because Israel, the state of Israel,

01:00:28.000 Benjamin Netanyahu was not around in AD 33,

01:00:31.820 you know, cheering for Team Barabbas.

01:00:33.720 That was not happening.

01:00:35.480 And as a result, it's clear that them means the eternal Jew.

01:00:39.420 And that's how you can actually set,

01:00:40.800 people say, oh, can't tell the difference

01:00:42.420 between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

01:00:43.840 Yes, you can, because the eternal trope

01:00:45.960 will only be applied to Jews.

01:00:48.260 And there's something else, which is that an activist,

01:00:51.800 a guy called Tarek Ali, at that thing.

01:00:54.500 He said something which is very common

01:00:55.700 and relates to what you just said,

01:00:56.860 and I get it all the time,

01:00:58.060 which is he just said, if the occupation ends,

01:01:00.540 you know, and the brutality ends,

01:01:02.540 anti-Semitism will fade away.

01:01:04.800 So I don't know if Tarek had forgotten,

01:01:07.240 but in 1948, when the state of Israel was set up,

01:01:10.520 there had been a fairly big global anti-Semitic event

01:01:14.040 like a few years before that,

01:01:15.880 which was not related to conflict in the Middle East.

01:01:20.100 So it really, really offends me,

01:01:22.120 the notion that anti-Semitism,

01:01:23.620 this unbelievably persistent form of persecution and racism,

01:01:28.260 it's just about what's happened in this.

01:01:31.320 Obviously, it is driven now in the way you're talking about,

01:01:35.620 but it is also very, very reductive

01:01:37.440 to imagine that that's all there is.

01:01:39.220 By the way, speaking of the event that happened

01:01:43.960 in the 30s and 40s,

01:01:46.460 the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem

01:01:48.640 was going on little love getaways with Adolf Hitler

01:01:53.960 where the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was saying,

01:01:59.260 you know, once we're done with the Jewish problem in Europe,

01:02:03.620 you know, don't worry,

01:02:04.220 I'll take care of the Jews in the Middle East.

01:02:06.760 And they were super simpatico

01:02:09.120 with this grand sort of final solution,

01:02:11.340 bringing the final solution to the Middle East.

01:02:13.460 This is well before the creation of modern day Israel.

01:02:17.080 So even historically, it just doesn't add up,

01:02:20.040 but yet it's almost impenetrable to reason.

01:02:23.860 I mean, I've tried to engage some of these folks.

01:02:27.140 I mean, one quick point,

01:02:29.400 and then I'll see the floor to you

01:02:30.360 and then we'll wrap it up soon,

01:02:31.800 maybe talk about some of your future projects coming up.

01:02:34.000 I, we escaped the Lebanese civil war.

01:02:39.620 I mean, under imminent threat of execution.

01:02:41.680 I could tell you a story.

01:02:42.680 That's to do with being Jewish, by the way.

01:02:44.280 Was your imminent threat of execution

01:02:45.840 to do with your Jewishness

01:02:46.920 or was it just political?

01:02:48.880 No, to be, being Jewish,

01:02:51.400 there was a family,

01:02:53.420 a couple of streets down,

01:02:55.180 I mean, a couple of houses down from us

01:02:56.540 that was rounded and killed, right?

01:02:57.800 Because what happens in Lebanon,

01:03:00.060 at least at the start of the civil war,

01:03:02.060 is there would be these random roadblock checks

01:03:06.100 manned by militia.

01:03:08.280 And then you would be asked to show your card.

01:03:10.620 In Arabic, you say Hawiyeh,

01:03:12.060 which is like an internal ID card,

01:03:14.320 which is the most prominent thing on that card

01:03:17.060 is your religion.

01:03:19.180 The Jews were referred to as Israeli,

01:03:21.680 which means Israelite.

01:03:22.940 It wasn't even Yahudi, which is Jew.

01:03:25.360 So you lost your Lebanese identity.

01:03:27.880 You were just an Israelite.

01:03:29.100 Now, there weren't going to be many roadblocks

01:03:32.220 if you were stopped

01:03:33.120 that you were going to get out of

01:03:34.740 without having a bullet in your head.

01:03:36.080 So there was an endless number of ways

01:03:38.100 that you were going to die

01:03:39.200 in the Lebanese civil war,

01:03:40.440 some of which had nothing to do with being Jewish,

01:03:42.760 but a lot of it with it being Jewish.

01:03:44.900 By the way, my parents were subsequently kidnapped

01:03:46.600 by Fatah, a Palestinian militia group,

01:03:49.240 and some really bad things happened there.

01:03:50.660 So no, it was absolutely,

01:03:51.620 I mean, there are no Jews left in Lebanon.

01:03:53.380 It's not because of magic, right?

01:03:55.440 And so it was completely related to being Jewish.

01:03:59.560 The anti-Semitism, even in progressive Lebanon,

01:04:01.800 was incredible.

01:04:02.840 But my point is that for all of the Jew hatred

01:04:06.260 that I experienced as a kid growing up in Lebanon,

01:04:10.760 it still left me shocked to see the level of Jew hatred

01:04:14.920 I have seen since October 7,

01:04:17.600 and coming from completely different sides.

01:04:20.740 So I have the progressive academic types, right,

01:04:23.680 who went to the Near East studies programs,

01:04:26.940 you know, Jews are the occupiers.

01:04:28.980 They're sending me hate mail.

01:04:30.640 I'm getting the, from the right side,

01:04:33.160 the Jews won't replace us guys sending me the hate mail.

01:04:36.800 And of course, I'm getting the usual Islamic guys.

01:04:39.320 So the Jew hatred now is coming from every direction,

01:04:42.160 whereas at least when I was in Lebanon,

01:04:43.820 it was just good old fashioned Islamic,

01:04:46.480 Middle East based Jew hatred.

01:04:48.120 But now I'm getting it from everywhere.

01:04:49.500 So it's unbelievable.

01:04:50.660 So do I, I guess.

01:04:51.640 It's, so do I, I mean, all the time.

01:04:53.980 I mean, you know, I can turn off social media.

01:04:57.740 So, which is where it resides in a big way.

01:05:01.400 But also, you know, it's there also in IRL.

01:05:05.340 It's there on the streets at the moment.

01:05:06.820 And it's there, you know, in all sorts of ways.

01:05:09.940 And it's really extreme at the moment.

01:05:13.420 And you're right, there is that sort of weird 360 degree nature of it.

01:05:18.440 There's no, but if, when you read Jews don't count, I, so,

01:05:22.760 so people like partly what I talk about in that is what I don't talk about it,

01:05:27.740 but this is what I'm sort of talking about, which is a sort of dynamic.

01:05:30.520 Because people say, oh, is it, you know,

01:05:32.180 you're trying to say it's worse from progressives than from the far right.

01:05:35.600 No, I'm saying the whole thing is in a dance, a very dysfunctional dance, right?

01:05:40.240 Because, you know, you're there, you progressive, supposedly operating this kind of protective

01:05:45.840 sanctuary space for minorities against the far right.

01:05:49.080 If you choose to neglect Jews within that and aggressively neglect Jews within that,

01:05:54.180 what does that do in terms of opening up the possibility of violence against them,

01:05:58.160 which, as you say, can also come from other directions as well.

01:06:00.500 And then the violence somehow is overlooked or considered understandable at this time.

01:06:05.040 And then you're in a very, very dysfunctional space, I think.

01:06:08.920 Let's add that on, hopefully, a slightly more positive, less dire note.

01:06:13.260 Are there any projects that you're currently working on that you'd like to use this opportunity to plug?

01:06:19.300 Yeah, I mean, I've got this memoir I'm writing, which is going to come out next year.

01:06:24.100 I'm recording, I'm still doing stand-up comedy, so I shall be recording.

01:06:27.500 I've done three shows in the last 10 years.

01:06:29.680 I'm recording them all for TV, for Sky Arts, and if any British people are listening to this,

01:06:34.500 I will be recording them at the Royal Court, which is a really great theatre in March,

01:06:39.260 and you can come and watch them being recorded.

01:06:42.220 But I think the thing that you will be most interested in as a Darwinian,

01:06:45.680 and I didn't really understand how a Darwinian you are,

01:06:47.940 is so these small books that I write, they're kind of polemical books.

01:06:51.820 Yeah, people want me to write another one about Jews,

01:06:55.920 but I don't think I'm going to do that, just because I want to write about something different.

01:06:58.500 So the one I'm going to write, I think, is about maleness,

01:07:01.160 because I've noticed through reading quite a lot of feminist books,

01:07:06.760 that there is no man really writing about male desire.

01:07:13.200 No sort of interesting man.

01:07:15.560 I don't mean kind of Andrew Tate or whatever.

01:07:16.960 I mean, no sort of interesting, like a friend of mine called Catelyn Moran,

01:07:21.580 who's a really great writer and she's a feminist in this country,

01:07:24.560 wrote a book called What About Men, which I'm actually in.

01:07:27.260 She interviewed me for it.

01:07:28.440 But when reading it, I thought this is really interesting,

01:07:30.660 but it's really weird that a book called What About Men is not being written by a man.

01:07:35.240 And so I want to write about something which I think will get me to a lot of trouble,

01:07:40.200 which is I am of the belief that you can talk about heterosexual male desire

01:07:47.400 without that necessarily being about reducing women.

01:07:51.600 This is my central thesis, is that the assumption, as I read most feminist texts,

01:07:57.580 is that the male gaze, which is what I may call this book,

01:08:00.820 is always objectifying, always dehumanising, whatever.

01:08:04.560 And I'm not saying it never is.

01:08:05.900 Indeed, I'm not saying it isn't.

01:08:07.260 But what I'm saying is that it's too simplistic to imagine that that's it.

01:08:11.440 That indeed, the way that sex works and the sexual gaze of men works is you can do that

01:08:19.640 and it can be dehumanising, but in the next minute it can be something else.

01:08:24.120 And so therefore, the sort of sociology of this, for want of a better word,

01:08:29.520 is I do not believe that there is a straightforward link between my desire for women,

01:08:36.680 which even at my age still exists, and imagining that women cannot be presidents

01:08:42.060 and judges and CEOs or whatever, and fully rounded human beings.

01:08:46.520 I think they obviously can be.

01:08:49.780 And if that is the case, then something glitchy is happening,

01:08:54.480 which again, I'm interested in, in the assumption about male desire

01:08:57.940 that I would like to speak about, and men generally are not allowed to do that.

01:09:00.760 But to finish on a joke of sorts, is one thing about Jews Don't Count,

01:09:06.520 which is also actually about a group imagined as powerful and too powerful,

01:09:12.700 and therefore speaking out is sort of problematic.

01:09:15.880 Jews in general, having read that book, and this is slightly self-aggrandising,

01:09:19.660 but it's true, are grateful for this book.

01:09:22.440 Jews come up to me or write to me all the time and say,

01:09:24.380 thank you for writing Jews Don't Count.

01:09:25.640 If I write a book that is very, very deeply honest about male desire,

01:09:30.180 men will not thank me for it.

01:09:32.860 I think men will say you shouldn't have written that,

01:09:35.180 and that hasn't helped at all.

01:09:36.920 But we'll have you back when you write that book.

01:09:40.700 Hopefully you'll make a return on the show.

01:09:42.960 I want to be mindful of your time.

01:09:44.860 Go get Jews Don't Count.

01:09:46.800 Go check him out in his next stand-up comedy tour.

01:09:50.140 Get The God Desire.

01:09:52.120 David, what a thrill it is to have met you.

01:09:54.320 Hopefully we can stay in touch.

01:09:55.640 We didn't get a chance to talk about soccer.

01:09:57.500 Maybe we'll do it next time around.

01:09:59.120 Stay on the line so we can say goodbye.

01:10:01.120 Thank you so much for being on.

01:10:02.500 Thank you.

01:10:03.380 Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - December 21, 2023

My Chat with David Baddiel, Author of ”Jews Don’t Count” and ”The God Desire” (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_633)

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