The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - My Chat with Dr. Batya Ungar-Sargon, Deputy Opinion Editor at Newsweek (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_704)

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00:01:16.680 Hi guys, I am back from Southern California, the promised land. Israel is not the promised land. 0.99

00:01:22.580 Newport Beach is the promised land. Today, I've got a fantastic guest to kick off the new season.

00:01:30.720 Batya Unger-Sargon. Did I pronounce that right, Batya? 0.79

00:01:34.420 You sure did.

00:01:36.180 Is the deputy opinion editor at Newsweek. Newsweek also, we joked offline that maybe she doesn't want 1.00

00:01:45.020 me to mention this, but she has a PhD in English literature from UC Berkeley. We need to talk about

00:01:51.360 that. She is the author of two books. The earlier one was Bad News, How Woke Media is Undermining

00:01:57.600 Democracy Right Here. I got this at my alma mater at Cornell. And the recent book, the most recent one

00:02:03.600 that came out just recently, Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.

00:02:09.920 Welcome, Batya. How are you doing?

00:02:11.680 Thank you so much for having me. I feel like this is a long time coming. I've been admiring your work for

00:02:16.080 so long, especially your work on how women spend more money during different phases of their menstrual

00:02:22.280 cycle, which is so freaking true and no one will admit it. By the way, thank you for having me.

00:02:28.900 Thank you, Batya. Just to give you a, I mean, you would think that it's so obvious that human beings

00:02:36.140 are affected by hormones, that consumers are biological beings, that in the exact same way

00:02:42.780 that endless female mammals would be prone to these hormonal fluctuations depending on their 1.00

00:02:49.900 reproductive status. When I tried to apply this to the work that you just kindly cited, I was a Nazi. 0.63

00:02:57.080 How dare you argue that you? So that was actually my first exposure to all of these parasitic ideas

00:03:04.700 was in the pursuit of my scientific work, where apparently it was really controversial to argue

00:03:10.940 that humans in general and consumers in particular are biological beings.

00:03:17.160 Wow, that is amazing. Yeah, it's so interesting to me. I've been thinking about this a lot,

00:03:21.640 especially at the DNC, watching all of these women, someone like Hillary Clinton, for example, 1.00

00:03:28.740 right, who will never need an abortion, let's say, okay, who would not have needed an abortion for the 0.97

00:03:34.420 last 50 years, maybe less than that. But that is her number one issue. And there's this weird

00:03:41.140 projection thing that happens when you reach a certain level of economic security in a country

00:03:47.080 that has a big class divide, to where it becomes unbearable to you to admit that you are the

00:03:53.100 beneficiary of inequality, if you're a leftist or on the left. And so they create all of these

00:03:58.260 alternative, you know, kind of oppression envies, right, where you have, let's say, you know, white,

00:04:05.580 progressive, affluent women who get conned by Robin DiAngelo into believing that America is still a white 0.99

00:04:12.620 supremacy, right? Or who get conned into supporting trans women in women's sports, pummeling young 1.00

00:04:21.300 girls, right? Because, to me, I'm a real materialist, you know, like, to me, this is all about the kind of

00:04:29.440 economic security that the left has achieved, and how that has warped their minds, because they simply

00:04:35.940 will not admit that they are rich. So I'm sure that a lot of that was at stake in women saying, 0.98

00:04:41.580 he will not publish the truth about how women spend money when they are on their periods.

00:04:48.700 But, by the way, speaking of those, I love your term, did you call it professional envy? Is that

00:04:55.320 what you called it? I called it, I mean, it's oppression envy. Oh, oppression envy. So I just

00:05:06.980 responded to a tweet by Kamala Harris, where it was some syrupy, you know, girls can be anything they 1.00

00:05:15.760 want, and so on. As if, you know, she's, she's saying this from Waziristan, where the Taliban has

00:05:20.860 refused, you know, little girls to go to school. And so I said, I agreed. And I, you know, in my 1.00

00:05:25.940 usual sarcastic way, I said, you know, data from the US government shows that across every level of

00:05:32.600 educational attainment at the university level, so associates degree, bachelor's degree, master's

00:05:37.300 degree, and doctoral degree, across the five most, you know, major racial groups. So there's basically,

00:05:42.600 it's a four by five cell, it's, there are 20 different cells, where you can calculate the

00:05:48.320 ratio of men to women that have graduated in each of those cells. In 20 out of the 20 cells, Batya,

00:05:56.480 women outnumber men. But the way that Kamala is speaking, it's, you know, I mean, we need to allow 0.98

00:06:03.160 women to enter universities, because otherwise, I mean, we're not reaching our full potential. So it's 1.00

00:06:08.040 exactly what you said, it doesn't matter what the data shows, we're always going to, you know,

00:06:13.200 swim in an in an orgy of oppression. Yeah, it's really upsetting, because there is a real crisis

00:06:20.280 in this country, there's a crisis afflicting men, young men. And, and it's so interesting how

00:06:26.800 this kind of spiritual crisis has followed on the heels of the economic crisis. But precisely for the

00:06:35.440 reason you just pointed out, this is a crisis afflicting men, women are going to college and

00:06:41.520 in a country like America, where you have this enormous class divide based on whether you have

00:06:45.760 a college degree or not. Women are on the ascendant and jobs that require brawn or physicality, or 1.00

00:06:55.040 machismo are the kinds of jobs that have been totally degraded by democratic administration after

00:07:01.500 democratic administration after democratic administration. So you started with NAFTA,

00:07:05.300 which was Bill Clinton's baby, shipping a whole bunch of and I'm talking 5 million very good working

00:07:11.680 class jobs overseas to build up China and Mexico's middle class. So suddenly all of those men have no

00:07:17.600 jobs. And then you had the sort of opening of the border, and the welcoming in of millions and

00:07:23.440 millions of low skilled workers to compete against the service industry jobs that remained here. And then

00:07:30.380 you had President Obama who defunded vocational training, so that nobody now can become a plumber

00:07:36.620 or an electrician or a welder, which are all jobs that ensure upward mobility into the middle class

00:07:40.960 for working class men specifically, because they rely on brawn. And, and here's the kicker is, 0.99

00:07:47.460 it is not an accident that the discourse around toxic masculinity, to where being a man, a provider,

00:07:57.180 having machismo, all that stuff that, by the way, women really like, right? That, that we, we created 1.00

00:08:03.480 this discourse to criminalize what it means to be a man in the symbolic areas of academia and the media

00:08:12.400 and culture and every movie and every TV show at the same time that the other hand was degrading their

00:08:19.360 labor and making it impossible for them to support a family. Those things went hand in hand,

00:08:25.400 the discourse, the symbolic discourse around toxic masculinity was an alibi to justify the

00:08:31.560 dispossession of the American male. Yeah, beautiful. Well, to, to link what you just said about toxic 0.66

00:08:37.080 masculinity to your doctoral dissertation, which was, I mean, not the specifics of your doctoral

00:08:42.620 dissertation, but English literature. No, but I'm, I'm, I'm going to be serious for a second,

00:08:46.200 because I love how you, you preemptively start laughing before I even, I even, because you,

00:08:52.360 yeah. You're reminding me of my, the great sins of my youth. The great sins of your year. That's

00:08:56.960 right. Youthful indiscretion of getting a PhD in English lit at UC Berkeley. But so in, in, so I'm,

00:09:04.060 I'm an evolutionary behavioral scientist. So I, I apply the evolutionary lens to all sorts of

00:09:10.200 areas of human import. And there is a field called Darwinian literary criticism, and I'll link it in

00:09:16.640 a second to toxic masculinity. There is a field called Darwinian literary criticism, where rather

00:09:22.720 than analyzing literary texts using a feminist lens or a postmodernist lens or a Marxist lens,

00:09:30.020 you actually use the evolutionary lens. The idea being that there are certain underlying universal

00:09:37.020 themes that move us in literature, whether it's a Japanese novel or an ancient Greek poem or a

00:09:43.200 Victorian novel, it doesn't matter. And those underlying universal themes are evolutionary-based

00:09:49.020 themes. It's paternity uncertainty, it's sibling rivalry, it's parent-child, apparent offspring

00:09:54.640 conflicts, it's sexual longing and so on and so forth. Now, when it comes to toxic masculinity,

00:10:00.660 the best place that you, if you want to study what women fantasize about regarding their archetype 0.83

00:10:08.160 of the ideal man, you, you should do a content analysis of romance novels, because romance novels

00:10:14.560 are largely consumed by women, uh, precisely. And, and as someone who studies consumer psychology,

00:10:21.080 right? I mean, marketers understand human nature, whether they call themselves evolutionary psychologists

00:10:26.400 or not, and therefore they're not going to create products that are going to fail in the marketplace.

00:10:30.540 And if you do a content analysis of every single romance novel that's ever been written anywhere,

00:10:36.420 it's the exact same male, right? He's a neurosurgeon, he's also a prince, he is tall, he is, uh, reckless

00:10:44.620 and bold and brash, and he could only be tamed by the love of one good woman. He's got a six-pack,

00:10:50.920 which he wrestles alligators on. I just described every single, uh, romance novel archetype of a

00:10:58.020 male hero. And boy, is he oozing of toxic masculinity. So take it away, Batya, what do you think of that

00:11:04.080 analysis? Well, as a great consumer of romance novels, um, I, oh yes, yes, yes. Listen, listen,

00:11:11.460 Shabbat in the summer is really long. Okay. You need something to get you through that afternoon

00:11:16.920 because you can't watch any TV. You can't check Twitter. You know, you could, there's so much

00:11:22.060 eating and drinking you can do with your friends and then it's romance novel time, you know? And

00:11:27.000 yes, I read a lot of romance novels. I love them. And, um, it's very, very true. In fact, I wrote an

00:11:31.860 article about this once that the romance industry elites were not happy with, because of course it's,

00:11:37.980 uh, as an industry, I have to say it is an incredibly feminist industry because it is 1.00

00:11:42.760 totally organized around the concept of female desire. And you're totally right because it is 0.99

00:11:48.440 part of a capitalistic marketplace. It is all about, um, worshiping female desire, honoring it,

00:11:56.860 respecting it, giving women what they want. And it turns out what they want is a strong man. And the

00:12:04.440 truth is though, it has evolved a little bit. Like I'll read romance novels from the seventies and,

00:12:09.320 and part of the romance structure of the fantasy structure of the female imagination at the time

00:12:14.480 was just full on non-consensual rape. That was like a total staple of romance novels in the seventies. 1.00

00:12:21.280 But, you know, by now that would never, ever occur. Even it's called dub con, which means dubious

00:12:26.560 consent. If you have a romance novel, there are a lot of them that have that women still totally get 0.99

00:12:31.160 off on that, but, um, they often have like a warning in the beginning, right. Where there's this

00:12:35.360 very playful relationship between the author and her readers and the readers know which books to go

00:12:40.640 to and which ones to, uh, you know, but, but you're totally right. Oozing toxic masculinity. Um, 0.65

00:12:46.320 and of course the flip side is she is the only one who can bring out this sort of softer nature within

00:12:51.860 him. But can I tell you that what you're saying about how there are, um, narratives that we are

00:12:58.380 programmed. I don't know if I would say biologically, but certainly culturally, um, to, to as, as, as

00:13:05.260 humanity to, to really, uh, be attracted to and love. Uh, I was thinking about that so much, um, around

00:13:13.180 the rescue of Noah Argamani, who was, um, an Israeli hostage held by Hamas, who was rescued in this

00:13:22.300 incredibly daring mission by a bunch of absolute heroes in the IDF. And I'll tell you why I was

00:13:28.920 thinking about this. I was watching this footage of these men who were risking their lives because

00:13:36.400 a beautiful, vulnerable, uh, innocent woman, young woman had been abducted by pure evil. And they were

00:13:49.360 standing up and saying, this is our job as men is to, uh, to, to, to, to risk our lives, uh, to save

00:13:56.780 this woman. I mean, you could not have, you, if you had written a movie about this, it would not have

00:14:02.720 been good as the real life footage. You saw these men, these macho men, the most macho men on the

00:14:07.780 planet walking in. And when the guy saw her and he's saying in his walkie talkie, Noah be a Danu, 0.68

00:14:15.000 Noah be a Danu, which means Noah's in our hands. We have her. His voice cracks. He's this 0.91

00:14:19.340 macho man starts. He can't keep it together that they have her. And you hear them in their,

00:14:24.720 in their, um, walkie talkies. And you hear them talking to her as they're carrying her to, to take

00:14:30.960 her, to rescue her. Are you okay, Noah? They get to the helicopter. They put her on. They says,

00:14:34.900 are you okay, Noah? Noah says, I'm afraid. And he says to her, Noah, we're so happy to have you.

00:14:40.800 We're so proud of you. I mean, it just gives you chills. Like you could, and, and, and to me,

00:14:46.360 so this is what, what, this is what antisemitism is. It's you look at this footage and you are able

00:14:54.240 to overcome the programming that we as humans in 2024, that all humans in 2024, more or less have

00:15:01.360 gotten that this, we know who the hero in this movie is. We know who the villain is in this movie.

00:15:07.940 And what does it mean to be an antisemite in 2024? You are able to overcome all of that programming.

00:15:14.540 So you can flip the switch and say, no, the ones who went to rescue her are the bad guys. And the

00:15:21.020 ones who were protecting her, who were, who had, who had kidnapped her, they are the victims, right?

00:15:26.520 It was such an amazing moment. I think this is what you're describing about those narratives that,

00:15:31.100 that we are, we are bred on and how those can get perverted by perverse ideologies.

00:15:36.740 So how did you, of course, I agree with everything that you said, and I've known a few of those

00:15:43.040 Israeli guys. I mean, it seems like a good Jew is one that is quiet and meek. And that once the Jew 1.00

00:15:52.420 is able to fight back, then suddenly just by, by the sheer desire of wanting to survive,

00:15:59.840 he becomes the oppressor, right? So even though he engages in violence just to protect himself,

00:16:07.020 that, why, why are you being so smarmy Jew? Why don't you just die in a dignified, quiet way? And 1.00

00:16:14.480 by the way, I, I, you may or may not know the story from, from this book right here, The Parasitic

00:16:18.900 Mind. In chapter one of the book, I, I tell the story of, since we're talking about sort of macho

00:16:24.560 combatants, my, one of my older brothers was a Olympian judoka, judo champion, and he had won

00:16:34.140 several Lebanese championships in a row, at which the optics weren't nice because it's, it's, it's,

00:16:41.300 it's quite shameful for a Jew to be winning in Lebanon, all of these macho combatant sports. 1.00

00:16:47.320 And so he was visited by some men who explained to him that it was time for him to retire,

00:16:53.300 lest there might be an accident that happens to him, which ended, and he ended up leaving

00:16:57.500 Lebanon. This was prior to the start of the Lebanese civil war. He moved to, to France to

00:17:02.440 pursue his career. So this just the sheer idea. So, so the Jew is okay, as long he is, as he is 1.00

00:17:08.840 ghettoized. And yes, we tolerate you until of course we decide not to tolerate you, in which case you

00:17:15.260 better put on some really good sneakers and run fast. But for you to be macho, that doesn't go with

00:17:21.080 our archetype of the Jew. And therefore, by definition, the IDF soldier becomes the evil Nazi. 0.96

00:17:27.060 A hundred percent. And I'm going to say something controversial now. I think that a lot of the

00:17:34.360 discourse around Jews on campus is playing into that. Yeah. A lot of these Jewish students saying

00:17:41.480 that they feel unsafe, because a bunch of no nothing they thems are chanting things they don't

00:17:48.400 like. Right. I'm sorry, but man up like that is an insult to Jewish history. And I hate I just 1.00

00:17:55.280 hate it. And Jews hate when I say this, because I think that, well, a lot of Jews in America, 0.97

00:18:00.680 they go to university, they they're, they're very educated. It's a very educated group. I American 0.60

00:18:06.460 Jews, 60% of them have a college degree, which is, by the way, why so many of them are Democrats,

00:18:10.500 because universities are Democrat producing machines. But I just hate this discourse that

00:18:16.640 we're supposed to, the real victims of October 7, are, you know, Harvard students who happen to be

00:18:24.140 Zionist, you know, I just hate that. No, I refuse to accept that that is not it's 2024. And we are not 1.00

00:18:32.320 trembling Jews anymore. And we're not afraid of this. And we're not afraid of that. We're not afraid 0.98

00:18:36.400 of Hamas. And don't you dare be afraid of the they thems who are out there, you know, chanting and 0.99

00:18:42.360 doing absolutely nothing. I mean, getting nothing done except to make Americans more Zionist. 0.97

00:18:47.660 Right. Well, by the way, that Star of Davis that you as Star of David that you're wearing,

00:18:52.920 you should try to wear that at my university or in Montreal and see how that goes for you.

00:18:59.280 Can you I mean, can you know, I'm not afraid I've worn it in in in you know, in Ramallah and

00:19:04.060 Yes, and in Al-Halil and I've worn it in Nablus.

00:19:08.840 That's amazing. So I was I was definitely not overstating the case when I was earlier on on X in

00:19:16.520 the last couple days, I was posting who are some of the guests that I have coming up. All three

00:19:22.120 happen to be female honey badgers. And if you know anything about the honey badger, it's the most

00:19:27.800 fierce and ferocious animal. So I was definitely I didn't know that story about you wearing the Star

00:19:33.220 of David in Ramallah. So that's you're definitely a honey badger. So which leads me to my next 0.92

00:19:38.600 question. So and I'm not being facetious, I'm being very serious. So you had all of the trajectory

00:19:45.380 that one would expect to be one of the really annoying progressive Jews, right? I mean, you're 1.00

00:19:51.740 an American Jew, you have a PhD, you have a PhD in English literature, you have a PhD in English

00:19:57.900 literature from UC Berkeley. So were you one of the really annoying Jews? Oh, yeah. And then you you 1.00

00:20:04.180 got out or all along? You were anti woke, but you just played the game? No, I had a woke phase. Okay.

00:20:16.380 But I never, I never wanted to be insulated from the views of people I didn't agree with,

00:20:23.220 because I always thought that was unbelievably dangerous. And I'm an Orthodox Jew. And our

00:20:29.240 tradition is about debate. And, you know, I studied Talmud. And, you know, we believe in that we

00:20:35.840 believe that it is godless to insulate yourself from the people you don't agree with. In fact,

00:20:42.020 in the Talmud, there's a story of one of the great rabbis, and he had Havruta. And so in the Jewish

00:20:48.720 tradition, you study Talmud with a partner, right? And your partner is supposed to give you a hard

00:20:54.720 time. And this guy, this rabbi's partner died. And he said, Oh, Havruta, Omituta, he was literally

00:21:00.580 longing for death, because they would bring him new partners. And they just couldn't give him a hard

00:21:05.600 enough time, he would say something to them. And they would give him, you know, one one rebuttal,

00:21:09.680 and he would be like, Okay, but what about this? And then they'd be finished. And they just couldn't

00:21:13.720 the that intellectual rigor. So I never gave up on that. I was pretty woke. I really did

00:21:20.440 believe in this mythology, especially around race in America. I'm very glad, thank God that I got out

00:21:27.760 of that. But I think I was able to get out of it, because I never quite, you know, the pleasure of

00:21:35.140 encountering a piece of information that can destroy your whole worldview is, if you if you lose,

00:21:42.460 it's obviously also a horrible feeling. And if you're on the left, which I was,

00:21:46.400 and you encounter a piece of information like that, you know, you're going to lose all your

00:21:49.980 friends. So it's like a kind of horrifying experience. But it's sort of a sublime experience.

00:21:55.940 And I'll just give you another example that happened to me recently, when I was at the DNC.

00:22:01.780 It was the opposite of what I was expecting. And I was expecting to be incredibly hostile to Jews 1.00

00:22:08.460 and incredibly anti Israel. And they really went out of their way to snub the Palestinian faction.

00:22:15.080 I think they went too far with that. I felt sorry for them. I felt like it was undemocratic how they

00:22:19.720 silenced them. But then they really went out of their way to make American Jews, or rather, 0.97

00:22:25.040 to make the swing voters who care a lot about the well being of American Jews, feel that, you know,

00:22:31.580 things are not as bad as we would have expected. And the ability to see that to see past your

00:22:36.760 expectations and your confirmation bias, it really is, I think, a Jewish value to prefer death 0.99

00:22:42.640 to being so caught in your blinkered worldview that you cannot see counter evidence.

00:22:48.900 That's beautiful. Since you mentioned the Talmud, I would love whether it be you or anybody else that

00:22:55.580 you know, who is a Talmudic expert, there's always these really annoying sort of Jew haters that post 0.98

00:23:02.700 all of these out of context and, you know, idiotic Talmudic quotes to demonstrate that no, no, 0.99

00:23:09.700 the real nasty religious edicts are never Islamic. It's really, it's the Jews who started this whole 1.00

00:23:17.740 thing. So I did mention that I had gone to my alma mater recently to give two talks,

00:23:23.760 one about the parasitic mind, one of relevance to what we're talking about now on global Jew hatred. 0.66

00:23:31.960 And the, the Chabad rabbi, whom I had become very good friends with, this is at Cornell. I was,

00:23:40.020 I told him the exact same thing that I'm telling you now, which is that somebody should, you know,

00:23:44.160 actually go through the process of having a succinct rebuttal to all that nonsense. Are you familiar

00:23:50.860 with the sort of the memes that I'm talking about? Do you know them on, on X? I can imagine. I mean,

00:23:56.400 I've sort of encountered them peripherally, but you mean like the stuff where it's like, well, you can

00:24:00.900 get engaged to a three-year-old girl, but you can get engaged to a three-year-old girl. Yeah. The goys are 1.00

00:24:06.840 really animals. It's okay to spit on the Christian, whatever, you know, and you know, I'm, I'm probably 1.00

00:24:14.440 more versed in the Talmud than, than many people, but not versed enough to be able to take each of those

00:24:20.460 quotes and say, it is, it is a vertical quote or not. It's, it is taken out of context or not, but it would

00:24:26.680 be great if someone who, who already comes equipped with all that knowledge to spend an hour or two, pick

00:24:32.100 the top 10 or 20, and just kind of demolish them to your point about sort of rebuttals, because so many

00:24:38.880 people keep hitting me with that stuff and I just ignore it. I mean, I know it's nonsense, but I don't

00:24:44.140 necessarily have the Talmudic expertise to be able to rebut it. I wonder if that might be, do you think

00:24:50.540 that might be a worthwhile endeavor for someone to do? You know, one of the things that makes me feel

00:24:57.180 like perhaps there was a real divine intervention in the writing of the original Torah, the Old

00:25:03.180 Testament, the five books of Moses is the fact that it is so unflattering to the Jews and so 1.00

00:25:07.980 unflattering to God. I think it's really the only sort of nation building, you know, God establishing

00:25:14.900 text that is so unflattering to the people who are the chosen people allegedly, and their God, right?

00:25:22.180 God does not come off as, you know, some benevolent, he has benevolent aspects, but he comes off as,

00:25:28.900 you know, a rageaholic who is petty, you know, who is extremely narcissistic, extremely jealous,

00:25:37.100 right? All of these things I personally relate to very much, and I would not have it any other way,

00:25:42.460 but, you know, as Jews, that's who we are. We are not here to impress anybody else. Our texts are not

00:25:48.580 here to impress others with how liberal we are, right? Happens to be we invented equality before

00:25:54.980 the law. That is mentioned in the Old Testament multiple times that you may not give preference to

00:26:00.700 a rich person or a poor person, right? For the woke mind, right? We did invent equality before the

00:26:07.060 law, but I don't feel that I am here to impress other people with how, you know, how 21st century

00:26:14.280 impressing the Talmud is. The Talmud is an enormous compendium of a series of intellectual debates and

00:26:21.180 stories that were ongoing, that was cobbled together over the course of five centuries. It is the most

00:26:26.800 magnificent text after the Bible itself, and it does not represent the actual law. In fact, Orthodox Jews 1.00

00:26:33.480 know you don't open the Talmud to find out how to keep the law, because since the Talmud, there have been

00:26:38.560 another thousand, two thousand years of law written since then. So if you pull over any Orthodox Jew, any 1.00

00:26:44.740 guy with the yarmulke and black hat, whatever, and ask them about those lines, they'll say, yeah, those lines

00:26:49.440 are there. Is that what we do? No. Is that what they were doing then? No. They were engaged in an extremely

00:26:54.360 intellectual debate. You know what else they were debating? They were debating how heavy a little bird had

00:26:59.600 to be in order to qualify as a sacrifice before God. They were writing that in the 7th century AD,

00:27:07.220 when you remember that the temple had been destroyed in 70 AD, right? So they were not actually

00:27:13.340 doing that either. They were engaged in a magnificent body of work, creating a body of work to sustain the

00:27:22.620 Jews in exile, to keep them engaged intellectually and spiritually and psychologically and emotionally

00:27:28.860 in the texts so that they could understand the gap between the written word and the oral tradition.

00:27:35.560 And, you know, those anti-Semites to me, they just don't exist to me. They do not exist. The idea that I should

00:27:43.480 have to explain to them my tradition, I mean, come on. I got nothing to say to you. I don't expect anything

00:27:50.960 from them, and I don't feel that I owe them anything. Do you feel that since October 7th,

00:27:57.200 you've been exposed to more Jew hatred, if only through, let's say, social media? Because before you

00:28:03.840 answer, I mean, I've seen it all in terms of Jew hatred. I'm from Lebanon. We escaped Lebanon because 0.96

00:28:11.040 of Jew hatred. So, you know, few people are going to outrank me in actual lived experience of Jew

00:28:17.040 hatred by definition. But then, you know, I spent the next 35 plus years being pretty free of Jew 1.00

00:28:24.840 hatred. I mean, you'd have the isolated incident where someone speaks to me not knowing that I'm

00:28:29.900 Jewish, you know, before I would have been recognizable, and they might say something that

00:28:33.880 seems like, wow, that was some pretty Jew-hating stuff. But, you know, I pretty much lived a Jew-hating 0.78

00:28:40.300 free life. And then after October 7th, I can't turn in any direction where if it's not the academic

00:28:48.380 progressive left hitting me with stuff, if it's not the Islamic Jew haters, if it's not the you 0.59

00:28:53.640 won't replace us neo-Nazi types, I mean, it's coming at me everywhere. So as someone who is in 0.90

00:28:59.120 the public eye, have you yourself experienced that? So first of all, I've experienced more love

00:29:05.240 for being a Jew than ever in my life before. Although in America, there's a lot of that.

00:29:10.560 I was, yeah, that for sure. I hear that a lot. People stop me all the time and point to my necklace

00:29:17.600 and say, you know, God bless you. And here's what happened. I think that the corners of the universe

00:29:27.740 that were anti-Semitic are now more boldly anti-Semitic. So that includes exactly like you 0.98

00:29:33.960 said academia. So progressive, the progressive left was always on a collision course with

00:29:39.780 anti-Semitism, whether they knew it or not. The Islamic, you know, anti-Semitic movement,

00:29:45.240 the neo-Nazi right, and Canada, apparently. I think that was the most surprising to me. Like I,

00:29:51.020 you know, God, thank God in America, the American working class, the average normie American is deeply 0.60

00:29:59.600 philo-Semitic. This is America's the first country in the history of humanity to organize

00:30:05.760 its religion around the protection of Jews rather than attacking Jews and oppressing Jews. And that

00:30:12.640 culture runs very deep. I mean, for a long time, it was just Protestant Americans. But then after 0.88

00:30:17.580 1967, Catholic Americans as well sort of jumped on this train. And there was very much this view that

00:30:23.920 Jews must be protected at all costs. And so America is very, very unique in that sense. 80% of Americans

00:30:30.500 back Israel. So when people say it's spreading in America, I think that's absolute nonsense. Like 0.98

00:30:35.500 anybody who tells you that anti-Semitism is spreading in America is trying to raise money off of

00:30:39.400 you. It's just not true at all, I don't think. What has happened is that the universities have become

00:30:46.380 much more explicit and comfortable in turning the idea of Zionism into a slur. Now, that is

00:30:53.540 anti-Semitic and bad, but that was always there sort of in potencia, right? That was always sort of

00:30:58.860 a latent aspect of the university culture. I was very shocked to see Canada just totally,

00:31:06.280 the Canadian unions, I mean, just absolutely disgusting. People whose job it is to protect 0.92

00:31:12.600 the wages of working class people suddenly staging walkouts over pro-Palestinian nonsense. I mean,

00:31:18.720 so that was very shocking to me. I wasn't shocked to see it erupt in Europe. But I think what we're

00:31:24.180 seeing online is a global audience showing up in the comments of YouTube videos, and then

00:31:36.380 steering the audience captured hosts of those channels into a more anti-Israel, anti-Semitic

00:31:47.060 direction. So if you are an independent news outlet who makes your revenue off of YouTube,

00:31:55.020 or off of any social media outlet, there's a lot of sort of reading of the comments involved in that

00:32:01.060 and trying to please your audience. And people get very audience captured. And the thing that people

00:32:05.600 forget is, even if the host is American and in America, there are a billion Muslims on this planet

00:32:12.660 who don't live in America, who would be very happy to see Israel wiped off the map, and they watch 0.93

00:32:18.460 YouTube shows, and they comment on them. And I think with someone like Candace Owens, you can really

00:32:22.600 see this. You go into the comments section, and it's not Americans anymore. So she's doing really well in

00:32:29.400 terms of the ranking. But who is listening? Americans have no appetite for that. I mean, zero appetite for

00:32:36.040 that. So I think that's really what we're seeing. So maybe I want to actually mention Candace Owens in

00:32:41.960 a second, but to your sort of optimistic position regarding the non-increase in Jew hatred, I think

00:32:49.880 you might be right when it comes to the general American culture may have not shifted to becoming

00:32:56.780 innately more, inherently more anti-Semitic. But I think, as the old maxim says, demography is destiny. 0.88

00:33:04.500 So if only because you have more immigrants coming into Canada and the United States and 0.69

00:33:11.580 the West in general, who hail from Islamic countries, where anti-Semitism is baked into the

00:33:19.680 identity of those folks, right? Where you do Pew survey research that shows that in most of those

00:33:26.040 countries, you have 96, 97, 99% of surveyed people exhibiting very nasty anti-Semitic views of the Jew,

00:33:34.500 then just by sheer numbers, by reality, if you increase the number of people that are, right?

00:33:41.720 So today you have Dearborn and Minneapolis, but tomorrow you'll have a lot more of those pockets.

00:33:47.720 So don't you think that by the sheer fact of the current demographic realities,

00:33:52.120 you have to have an increase in Jew hatred? How could it be otherwise?

00:33:55.520 I think the answer is no, but again, this could be very Pollyannish. So I mean, you lived it in a way

00:34:03.000 that I really never have. And so I take this with a grain of salt, but I live in a neighborhood that's

00:34:08.800 50% Russian Jewish immigrants and 50% Turkish immigrants. The idea of there being anything but 1.00

00:34:16.680 sort of love between our communities is so far. I wear this big Jewish star. I'll go to the Turkish 1.00

00:34:21.740 cafes all the time. They could not be more lovely to me. Now, granted, if you're a Turkish person and

00:34:27.160 you move to America, you probably hate Erdogan. You probably hate the Muslim Brotherhood. You're 0.96

00:34:30.500 probably more inclined to like Israel. That's totally fair. But again, going back to my experience at the 0.91

00:34:35.780 DNC, so there was this big uncommitted contingent, right? This group of people who said, we're not

00:34:41.520 committing to the democratic nominee. We're democratic delegates. We're not committing until we hear that

00:34:46.760 they're going to do a ceasefire immediately in Gaza. Again, totally their right. This is a 0.75

00:34:51.780 democracy. It is their job to use whatever pressure they can to get the policy that they want.

00:34:56.880 I interacted with a lot of those people. I wanted to sort of speak to them, especially as they were

00:35:00.960 making news and it became clear that they were not going to be given a sort of a spot at the DNC stage.

00:35:07.180 One of them, I think the one of the leaders maybe was anti-Semitic. Every time he saw me,

00:35:11.940 he was incredibly rude to me and I saw him being much nicer to other media people. But I spoke to

00:35:18.480 a number of those people. I interviewed them and they could not have been nicer. I don't see the

00:35:23.040 Middle East the way that they do. They want a ceasefire now. I don't. But I just have people in my 1.00

00:35:30.060 life. I met these people, but also I have people in my life that I'm close to who want that and are

00:35:35.680 not anti-Semitic. And so I think it's really important for us who care about civil rights,

00:35:42.220 who care about the Middle East, who care about the survival of the Jewish people, but who are 0.93

00:35:45.460 American, like me, who care deeply about this country. For me, it is deeply important that I

00:35:51.800 can exist in a we, a collective, with people I disagree with about the Middle East. That supersedes

00:36:02.380 that disagreement. As an American, this is incredibly, incredibly important to me for

00:36:07.020 the survival of this country. And of course, Israel, I think, you know, will be in a much worse

00:36:10.620 position if America's democracy doesn't exist. And now I will not be in a we with someone who's

00:36:15.860 anti-Semitic. I find that to be degrading and undignified. And I refuse with my personal family

00:36:22.440 history of anti-Semitism. And just as a Jew, I refuse to bend the knee to that. But I think that in 0.66

00:36:28.220 this situation, we have to have the most capacious understanding and really sympathy for the widest

00:36:38.100 birth of possible opinions that are not my opinion on the Middle East, but are also not

00:36:42.740 anti-Semitic. And to me, it's very easy to do. I mean, a lot of Jews really feel like if you're an

00:36:47.480 anti-Zionist, you're an anti-Semite. If you want to ceasefire now, you're an anti-Semite. You know, 0.59

00:36:51.540 if you are talking, if you're taking Hamas's number that 40,000 people died, you're an anti-Semite. 0.72

00:36:56.560 To me, it's like, no, if you hate Jews and want bad things to happen to Jews and are obsessed with 0.96

00:37:02.400 Jews and think that Jews are our calamity, you are an anti-Semite. I know people want to ceasefire 0.97

00:37:07.360 who are not anti-Semitic. I know people who take Hamas's word for it who are not anti-Semites.

00:37:11.440 They're wrong about all these things. Down the road, I think if they got their way, Jews would be in 1.00

00:37:18.140 trouble and I'm going to fight them and make sure that they don't get their way. But while I'm fighting 0.95

00:37:22.960 them, I'm going to do my best to convince them. That's my job as an American, especially for the

00:37:27.960 people in my life who I love and really don't agree with on this issue, but have yet, I have failed to

00:37:33.780 convince them. And that's on me. I accept that responsibility as an American.

00:37:38.620 Do you, within your close circle of whether it be your family, your nuclear family or extended family

00:37:44.520 or close circle of Jewish friends, are most, you know, I mean, do they have the same affinity as,

00:37:52.700 I mean, same political positions as you do, or are most going to be the liberal progressive Jew 0.71

00:37:59.400 that's going to be voting for the cackler in chief?

00:38:03.160 The minute you step out of the like little MSNBC opinion box, you're going to shed 90% of your

00:38:16.780 liberal friends. They just can't. And if you say anything nice about Trump, you'll have like a,

00:38:23.760 you know, I emerged from that with, you know, maybe 10 very close friends who were progressive. I lost

00:38:30.720 many, many, many. Now it's probably down to like three or four and not because I don't want to

00:38:36.180 still be friends with them. They, they really cannot abide. It's so crazy how Trump brings this

00:38:43.640 out in people. Like if you, and, and as an Orthodox Jew, we never had this because the Orthodox Jewish 0.96

00:38:49.440 community was always divided on Trump from the beginning. So that means that on Shabbat at Shabbat

00:38:55.100 meals, you're as likely to end up at a Shabbat table with people who like him as with people who hate

00:38:59.680 him. That's less true. Now, I think after the Abraham accords, that was a really big deal for

00:39:03.800 our community. Um, but you know, that, that we never had that where you say a nice thing about

00:39:09.200 Trump and it's, you're dead to them. They, they like, they draw a line through your name. So at

00:39:13.420 that point, I not through any desire of mine, but I did lose. And, and they, they're not content to

00:39:18.100 just not return your calls. They have to denounce you on Twitter publicly to let everybody else know

00:39:22.560 that they're not, you know, no longer proximate with you, you know? Um, so there's a lot of that.

00:39:27.580 So I, I would say now probably more people, but when I talk about how we have to have room in our

00:39:33.080 lives to hear from the Palestinian position, we have to have room in our lives to understand that

00:39:37.700 to ask Palestinians to be Zionists is like, I, that's the thing I really can't get past.

00:39:44.400 If you say all anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic, you're literally saying that for Palestinians, 0.96

00:39:50.600 say what you will about how, you know, their, their responsibilities for their situation,

00:39:55.480 which I think are, are large, um, to demand that they be Zionists to avoid being called 0.69

00:40:01.240 bigots. I just think that that's nonsensical. That's not fair. And I don't want to be on the

00:40:06.020 side that's doing not fair things. So when they hear me say that the people who agree with me,

00:40:09.840 my friends, my family, they're like, why do you have to say that? Just let it go. Just be the

00:40:13.900 pro-Israel voice. Right. But I have, that's not my job. My job is to tell the truth. So. 0.65

00:40:18.680 Yeah. Uh, speaking both of Kamala and Trump, uh, since you were mentioning the DNC and now you're

00:40:26.080 talking about Trump at Shabbat dinner. So in the parasitic mind, and, and I want to pick up on that

00:40:32.020 and I even suggested to you, I hope you don't mind me saying it online that I might, I'd be happy to

00:40:36.720 write an opinion piece for news week. Uh, so I'm going to propose the theory, which I originally

00:40:43.280 discussed in the parasitic mind. I want to see if you think it could be as simple as what I'm

00:40:47.880 suggesting as to why people become intoxicant, intoxicated with the, the joy and the positive

00:40:52.860 vibes and the, the goodness and the smile and, and, and the corollary is why they then end up

00:40:59.360 hating Trump so much. So there is a model in psychology of persuasion called the elaboration

00:41:05.640 likelihood model. And the elaboration likelihood model has been used to explain many persuasion

00:41:10.820 techniques. But for example, in advertising, you use it as follows. If I'm trying to sell a hedonic

00:41:16.380 product, let's say perfume, then I want to activate. So there are two routes of persuasion.

00:41:21.640 There's what's called the peripheral route of persuasion and the central route of persuasion.

00:41:25.280 The peripheral route of persuasion is cosmetic stuff, right? It's, it's, uh, when, when you,

00:41:31.440 when you're selling perfume, you're not going to say, here's what eight Harvard physiologists said

00:41:36.480 about this perfume. You want a sexy girl on a horse with her hair flowing. And you just say, 1.00

00:41:42.540 my stare, right? Because you are triggering my hedonic drive. And for that, the, the, the selling

00:41:50.020 point appeal has to be through the affective route, through the cosmetic route, the, the, the, the

00:41:55.440 peripheral route. On the other hand, if I'm trying to tell you, here are the eight reasons why you

00:42:00.060 should invest in my mutual fund, then putting a sexy girl on a horse with, it's not going to sell. 1.00

00:42:07.160 I have to show you, here are the returns, right? So I have to activate your cognitive system, right?

00:42:13.060 That's why in the parasitic mind in chapter two, I talk about thinking versus feeling. It's not that

00:42:17.740 we are one or the other, the challenge is to know when to activate which system, right? So we are an

00:42:24.280 affective animal. We do care about feelings, but when it comes to choosing a president, we should be

00:42:29.760 activating our cognitive system. So now this leads me to, so having given this whole big theoretical

00:42:35.300 framework, why people fall prey to the bullshit of Kamala or why they hate Trump. Thinking is too 0.98

00:42:43.260 hard, right? I call people cognitive misers, right? So they need to use some shortcut to be able to make

00:42:52.160 sense of the world, the word. And my emotional system is much quicker to deploy, right? It is a lot less

00:42:59.280 effortful to deploy my affective system than it is to activate my cognitive system. Therefore,

00:43:07.740 if you simply tell me happiness, joy, positive vibes, I'm in. I feel good momentarily. That's good

00:43:16.320 enough for me. So this is actually called the affect as information hypothesis. On the other hand,

00:43:21.240 Trump, if I only activate my affective system, is disgusting. He's grotesque. He speaks in a 1.00

00:43:28.580 cantankerous way. So notice that at no point when speaking of Kamala or speaking of Trump that I

00:43:34.700 engage my cognitive system. I didn't say I love Kamala because I respect her monetary policy. I

00:43:41.500 didn't say I hate Trump because I agree or disagree with his whatever immigration policy. And regrettably,

00:43:49.480 Batya, I think that a very, very large portion of the electorate only operates an affective world. 0.94

00:43:57.140 And therefore, that explains why so many people at your Shabbat dinner despise ogre Orange Himmler

00:44:04.320 and are infatuated and in love with positive vibe Kamala. What do you think of that whole analysis?

00:44:10.980 So first of all, you should definitely write this up. It's brilliant. It's funny. I think it has

00:44:17.440 really annoyed. I mean, just this morning, I was at the gym and this guy came over me who recognized me

00:44:21.540 from the televisions in the gym. He doesn't watch Fox News, but Fox is on one of the 15 TVs. He saw me

00:44:26.940 one morning and he comes over and starts railing against me. And I'm like, dude, I'm just trying

00:44:31.640 to like work out. But OK, so here's my question to you. Well, how do you persuade people then? How

00:44:38.520 can is persuasion just off the table in that model? It's yes, it's a great question. I mean, you

00:44:44.520 you certainly have. So this is going to sound obvious if you know that people are not going to

00:44:52.060 commit much cognitive effort in choosing, then at least don't give them the reason to despise you

00:44:59.760 for cosmetic reasons. So, you know, when we say that Trump is his worst enemy, yes, it's great that

00:45:05.480 he's a honey badger. And yes, a lot of his personality is what allowed him to break out of 0.56

00:45:11.080 the clutter and be able to be who he is. But if you can modulate that so that the people who are

00:45:17.320 in the independent zone, the undecided ones will not have their affective disgust response triggered,

00:45:24.040 then at least you're winning a point or two from those people. Right. So so even if we give up on

00:45:29.580 the idea that I can convince you through cognitive means, at least don't give people the disgust

00:45:36.620 elicitation. Because I know a lot of people who when I engage them, I'll say, just tell me why you hate

00:45:43.880 Trump. And these are supposedly intelligent people with titles after their names. They're called

00:45:48.200 professors. They're morons. They're imbeciles. Because I say, no, no, give me a specific reason. 1.00

00:45:53.320 He's disgusting. He's not presidential. He rubs me the wrong way. And then I keep pushing. No, 0.98

00:45:59.320 no, no, no. Give me monetary policy. Give me give me specific. I they can't. So why don't you at the

00:46:06.700 very least now, I think maybe tell me if you agree, it does seem as though Trump has reigned that

00:46:12.060 in a bit. Maybe he's gotten older. Do you feel that he's gotten better at not eliciting the disgust

00:46:18.440 response? So I see it a little differently, which is. I think. That they are trying to hide from the

00:46:31.760 fact that. They are very wealthy, like the people who really, really hate him are also the people who,

00:46:40.260 like you say, have all the credentials after that. Like I spent a year interviewing working

00:46:45.380 class people from across the political spectrum for my second book, Second Class. And what I found

00:46:51.040 was like when you talk to democratic working class people, they don't hate him. I mean, they don't vote

00:46:58.100 for him. Most of the ones who don't vote for him, it's either because they're in a union. And this was

00:47:03.060 before, by the way, the teamster, the head of the teamsters union addressed the RNC. So we'll see what

00:47:06.980 happens now. But either they were in a union and they couldn't get a meeting with the local

00:47:10.920 Republican because they wouldn't give them at the time of day. And so they vote Democrats or they had

00:47:17.760 a health care issue. And the Democrats really are better on health care. Trump doesn't have a health

00:47:21.980 care plan yet. Although, of course, now with Bobby Kennedy, we'll see what happens there. But so but

00:47:26.180 they didn't hate him. They didn't have that. Where does that hatred come from? To me, again,

00:47:31.940 it's the sort of like how we have toxic masculinity hiding the dispossession of working class men.

00:47:37.880 To me, you know, the open border, let's take that right. Trump's signature achievement in his first

00:47:43.480 first four years was he shrank the wealth gap between the top 20% and the working class,

00:47:49.980 the first president to do so in 60 years. Wow. People don't know that because the left doesn't

00:47:55.260 want to give him credit and the free market right doesn't care about the working class. So there's like

00:47:58.940 no one left to talk about this except, you know, poor commies for Trump, you know, 0.67

00:48:03.160 Batya Unger Sargon, right? Like, you know, you know, camp of one, right? He shrank the wealth gap

00:48:09.900 between the elites and the working class. And he did that through trade policy that the free market

00:48:15.480 right hated and the left hated because their base is the highly educated elites who love cheap shit from 1.00

00:48:22.760 China, right? Right. And he did it by closing the border, which immediately raised the 1.00

00:48:28.720 wages of working class people because it's the most obvious law of supply and demand. The less you have 1.00

00:48:34.620 something, the more expensive it is, the less laborers you have, the more they can ask for,

00:48:39.620 right? So he shrank that wealth gap with very obvious policies. So what's the left supposed to

00:48:45.420 do with that? Well, they could just not give him credit, right? But the truth is, is that in shrinking

00:48:50.060 that wealth gap, what he reversed was the plunder of the working class by that top 20% by college 0.70

00:48:58.280 professors and journalists and professional managerial class denizens, people who had been

00:49:04.700 making bank in the knowledge industry while their working class neighbors were downwardly mobile. Now, 0.73

00:49:11.700 I don't think they realized this. I don't think they realized that the open border put money in their

00:49:17.640 pockets because they were able to hire illegals to do jobs and they didn't have to pay them as much as 0.96

00:49:24.520 they would have to pay an American. They don't consciously realize that. But I don't think they

00:49:29.780 could have been so wrong about something so obvious if it wasn't in their economic interests. And so to me,

00:49:38.340 the loathing of Trump, they're not sitting there consciously thinking, I hate him because he gave my

00:49:43.640 cleaning lady more money at the end of the month and it came out of my pocket. But they wouldn't be

00:49:48.600 able to be so wrong about him if they weren't sitting there like the mean, like counting their

00:49:54.000 bucks. You know what I mean? Like I keep saying like the Democratic Party is like a plane and their base,

00:49:59.880 the college educated elites are in first class and they are happy to pay for everybody to fly for free

00:50:07.360 and coach. But don't you dare try to use our bathroom, right? There's there's don't you dare

00:50:13.600 try to come into first class? No, they love paying higher taxes, these people, because they're so rich.

00:50:19.360 And I think at some level, they understand they have this guilty conscience and the higher taxes

00:50:24.140 is a kind of like Catholic indulgence. Yeah, exactly. Pay people off like like you can fly for free

00:50:31.200 and coach, but we decide where we're going, right? We have the nice chairs, right? That's kind of the

00:50:36.460 Democratic Party. And what Trump said was no, actually, it's not going to be like that. And

00:50:42.040 another point is very important to understand is the elites in the top 20 percent, their populism

00:50:49.220 amounts to sort of railing against billionaires, right? If you ask them, why are working class 1.00

00:50:53.680 people downwardly mobile? Why was the high watermark for working class wages 1971? It's been

00:50:58.680 downhill since then until Trump, but they won't admit it. You know, they'll say, well, well, there has

00:51:03.420 been an upward transfer wealth, but it's gone to the billionaires. And this is absolute nonsense.

00:51:07.580 If you look at the share of the GDP that's controlled by billionaires today, compare it to 1971. It really

00:51:15.460 has not changed very much. The only thing that's changed is that what used to be the largest share

00:51:21.560 of the GDP in the 70s, which was in the middle class, that has been squeezed up to the top 20 percent

00:51:29.120 who now control over 50 percent of the GDP. So they're really hoarding the American dream is

00:51:34.500 what they're doing. And I think Trump really exposed that he gave a voice back to the working

00:51:39.880 class. And I think that's why they really can't forgive him because he's basically a 90s era

00:51:44.700 Democrat. And so they and they cannot forgive him for that.

00:51:48.380 These are the types of analyses that you cover in your most recent book and second class, correct?

00:51:52.860 Right. Well, what maybe we could talk about just the writing process, because I often will get

00:51:58.320 people who write to me, you know, everybody's an aspiring author, right? And what's what's your

00:52:04.300 secret? What's your process? Do you have a particular process that you use when you're I mean, this is

00:52:10.260 you I mean, of course, you wrote your doctoral dissertation. But beyond that, you have two books

00:52:14.700 to walk us through any authoring tips that you can offer to some of the aspiring authors that might

00:52:21.700 be listening to this conversation. Wow, no one has ever asked me that before. That's why I'm

00:52:27.160 I'm a morning person. So and I have a day job. I'm the opinion editor of Newsweek. So when I'm

00:52:34.000 writing a book, when I was writing my first book, when I'm writing my second book, I would wake up at

00:52:39.100 5am and put in three hours. You know, I like to go to the gym in the morning also. So then I would go

00:52:45.520 to gym a little bit later. So I'd work, you know, work on the book from like five to eight or five to

00:52:49.120 nine, then go to the gym and then sit down 10am having put in that time and do my day job. And then if I'm

00:52:55.540 feeling it in the evening, put in a little bit more work. But if you have even two hours a day,

00:52:59.680 and you sit down every day, four or five days a week and put in those two hours, you'll write a

00:53:05.240 book very, very quickly. If you're a night person set aside two hours, maybe you're you go to bed at

00:53:10.120 11. Okay, do nine to 11, right? Like we're at whatever. For me, my brain, I wake up in my brain

00:53:15.420 is ready to go, you know, I have a cup of coffee. And then I'm I'm I'm so clear eyed. So I like to get

00:53:21.200 something done right in that zone. I would, you know, nowadays, I know some people they always

00:53:26.440 wake up at 5am, they have that 5am club, and I would join that except it means that I mean,

00:53:30.620 there are shows like Fox News shows that are like 11pm, right, they want to have me on and I want to

00:53:35.500 speak to that audience. And so I can't quite do it consistently. But if I was in the, you know,

00:53:40.740 six months where I'm like, you know, I've collected all my data, I'm sitting down to do the writing,

00:53:44.960 you know, just pick two hours a day, and sit in front of that computer, log off of the internet,

00:53:50.880 if you can, if you can't, you know, if you're too distracting. There's a lot of just downtime

00:53:56.000 staring at the screen, like that's productive time. My first book, when I wrote it, it was like

00:54:02.840 the beginning of the lockdowns, I put it up a notebook, this guy right here. Yes, bad news.

00:54:08.680 And I was sitting there with a pen and a pad. And I was trying to figure out like, I kind of had a

00:54:14.860 sense that I wanted to write about the class divide, I kind of had a sense that I wanted to write

00:54:18.540 about how Americans are more united than divided. But I tried to sell a book about that. And it

00:54:22.440 totally failed. I had a proposal together, I shopped it out, no one would touch it, I get got

00:54:27.760 told by editor after editor after editor, that basically, there's no market for a book about

00:54:32.060 how Americans are more united than divided. So I sat down, I said, Okay, well, what is there a

00:54:36.860 market? What what what is the story I'm trying to tell? What is another way I can tell it? And I just

00:54:41.540 took pages and pages and pages of notes, like whatever came to my mind. And after three weeks, I was

00:54:46.460 like, Okay, I have another idea of how to reshape this reformulate this. An editor had said to me,

00:54:52.060 you're telling me we're more united than divided, then why do I think we're so polarized? Maybe you

00:54:57.380 should write that book. And that's what bad that's the book, the bad news really is. And I sort of that

00:55:01.900 was sort of how I shifted things. But that's my best advice, I think is find two hours a day, even one

00:55:07.500 hour a day, where you're devoting it, if you're sitting there, you know, that's a lot of time,

00:55:11.740 two hours a day, 10 hours a week, you know, I mean, it doesn't take a long time to write a book.

00:55:16.760 It's just the commitment.

00:55:18.200 No, I love that answer. Because I, I've, I've also answered this question on several occasions. And

00:55:24.540 one of the prescriptions that I offer, although I don't use the temporal metric, I don't say,

00:55:31.300 you know, give three hours or two hours, I usually frame it in terms of word count for a given day.

00:55:37.660 So make sure to write 500 words a day, no matter what, I mean, I could be suffering from bronchitis,

00:55:44.340 I just taught two courses at the university, I'm exhausted, but I'm going to get now it in some days,

00:55:51.080 you don't hit it. But the average should be that because some days I'm spending six hours,

00:55:55.840 just reading the literature. And therefore, I don't actually produce 500 words. But I do start okay,

00:56:02.140 today, I'm at 12,700 words, let's see if I can at least put down 500 words. And then as you said,

00:56:10.140 very quickly, you blink your eyes. And oh, I've got 73,000 words, how did that come about? Which by

00:56:16.320 the way, that lesson, it seems so obvious, but it exactly applies to weight loss, right? So think of

00:56:22.520 it this way, this idea of persistent discipline, right? So on any given day, based on the decisions

00:56:31.160 that I make that day, in terms of calories ingested and exercise expended, only one of three

00:56:38.120 things can happen to my weight, my weight can go up, my weight can stay the same, or my weight can go

00:56:43.060 down. Now, if on every single day, I ensure that my weight goes down, even if it's point zero two of

00:56:50.520 an ounce, but it is always going down. And if I put together a sufficient number of days, where that

00:56:58.000 statement holds true, then I will get on the scale. And I will go, Oh, my God, I can't believe I'm 32

00:57:03.200 pounds down. But now it sounds easy. But the reality is just be consistent, persistent, have grit. Now,

00:57:11.360 of course, you have to have the talent, and you have to know how to write and so on. But you're so right,

00:57:15.740 it really is half the battle is the discipline. Yeah, I wish I wish I could say confidently the same

00:57:22.760 thing about weight loss. Well, I did lose, you may or may not know this. But when when COVID started,

00:57:28.320 I went on a way I had been historically very, very thin, I used to be a competitive soccer player.

00:57:34.360 Then over the next 20 years, I kept putting on weight, I got to a weight that was ridiculous.

00:57:39.960 And over COVID, I lost 86 pounds. And it's, it's literally Wow, that's amazing. Congratulations.

00:57:49.540 Thank you. But if you had, if you had chunked it as 80, no pun intended, as 86 pounds, then it would

00:57:57.260 seem insurmountable. But if you frame it, you slice it as I just have to win today. Right. And then

00:58:04.640 tomorrow, and then the next day, suddenly, I'm at the right weight, and I'm spelled. So,

00:58:09.100 so you're exactly right. Are there any projects that you're currently working on that you'd like to

00:58:15.240 use this opportunity to promote? Take it away? Well, I just started a show. I'm co hosting a show

00:58:24.200 with Michael Moynihan at the Free Press. Oh, Barry Weiss. Yes. Every Thursday night, we go live at

00:58:32.160 seven. And we would love to see you all there. It's funny, because the reason the Free Press really

00:58:38.280 appealed to me is because their viewers and readers are extremely diverse intellectually. Yes,

00:58:43.480 I can go on Fox, I can, I love doing it. But you can't really talk to people who disagree with you

00:58:49.480 there. And the liberal shows won't have me on the channels of like, I'm blacklisted, you know,

00:58:53.720 because I talk about class, you're not allowed to do that there. So, you know, I, so I, the, the,

00:58:59.100 the viewership is so diverse. It's so nice. So like, people will tell me, like, do you realize that

00:59:03.840 like, the comments on this are like, they hate you? And I'm like, yes, that's great. That's what I want.

00:59:09.920 But anyway, I would love to see any of your viewers there as well. We're having a really

00:59:14.180 good time. We were such a good time at the DNC spoke to a lot of people that we agree with that

00:59:19.160 we disagree with. It's really a space for just launched this. This was launched it. We've done,

00:59:26.280 I think, four or five episodes. At this point, we were live from DNC last week. And we did a couple

00:59:30.960 weeks before that as well. So but hopefully we'll be ramping up to more frequently during the throughout

00:59:35.720 the week. And yeah, that's, I'm really enjoying that. It's really exciting.

00:59:39.720 Fantastic. Actually, I haven't announced this publicly, but I will be appearing on Barry's

00:59:44.700 show. I think the first week of September, I don't know when she'll release it. So I'm really,

00:59:51.500 really excited for it. I mean, not only because, you know, I love I support her work, but because

00:59:57.100 precisely for the reason that you said, which is, I end up being invited a lot more on one side of the

01:00:03.220 political aisle, where in reality, I'd like to be speaking to the other side so that I could

01:00:08.380 inoculate their parasitized brains, but they won't have me on. And so, you know, the Bill Maher's and

01:00:13.880 the Barry Weiss's from a pragmatic, strategic perspective are indispensable. So that's great.

01:00:20.060 I look forward to catching that. What a pleasure to have you on. Stay on the line so we could say

01:00:25.960 goodbye offline. I'm really, really glad that we finally met and continued success to you. Thank you so

01:00:32.100 much about you. Thank you so much. God bless you, God. Thank you for having me. Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - August 28, 2024

My Chat with Dr. Batya Ungar-Sargon, Deputy Opinion Editor at Newsweek (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_704)

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