Ep 24 | Dr. Gad Saad | The Glenn Beck Podcast

This is a fantastic podcast that you are going to.

It's our longest podcast.

It ran almost two hours, the interview.

You are going to love it.

I just made some notes here on just some of the things we touched on in his words.

Progressivism's kindergarten logic, the socialism of ants,

the wisdom of not knowing, the expressionist character of Islam, the courage of responsibility, the humanity of struggle.

This guy is amazing.

He is currently a professor of marketing.

That we talk about,

in a way, is that's not really what he studies,

and it's kind of

makes me uncomfortable, but I think it made him uncomfortable in the same way.

He has garnered a lot of attention online as the Gad Father, ushering in an audience of loyal followers he is a regular on Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin's podcasts it is a fascinating I mean it's just a

it's a roundhouse kick to the brain

in his article for psychology today titled Life Advice for Young Adults he advises he advises young people to pursue a career that you are passionate about.

Commit yourself to lifelong learning.

Never cower to group conformity and live your life with honesty and dignity.

This man lives that.

He guides his life in what he calls

apostolic humility.

He is funny.

He is charming.

He has an incredible life story.

On this episode, The Consuming Instinct and the Morality in a Chaotic World.

Get, I want to eventually get,

I want to go back in time to the beginning of your life, but I actually want to start at the book Homicide and how the book Homicide

influenced you.

First, tell me about the book and what you.

What a fantastic first question.

Great one.

So first first semester doctoral student at cornell university i take a course with a professor by the name of dennis regan uh it's an advanced social psychology course not an evolutionary psychology course about halfway through the semester he assigns the the class the book homicide which is written by two Canadians.

You can't avoid the damn Canadians.

Damn man, what's up with this?

Their husband-wife team, two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology,

Martin Daly and Margot Wilson.

The book Homicide looks at patterns of criminality via an evolutionary lens.

In other words, it argues that there are certain types of crimes, certain causes of crimes that happen irrespective of whether they happen in the Amazon or in Detroit or 500 years ago or 500 years from now.

So we can find a Jack the Ripper all over the world.

Or perhaps let me give you more specific examples.

What do you think is the number one greatest threat to a child growing up in terms of the likelihood of him or her succumbing to child abuse.

Do you have any

number one predictor?

For example, is it which zip code he lives in?

Is it if his dad was an alcoholic?

What's the best predictor of a child experiencing child abuse?

If one of the parents were abused themselves.

Good guess.

No, it's if there is a step-parent in the household.

Right?

The Cinderella story, the Cinderella story, it's a universal fable precisely because it plays plays on this universal evolutionary theme, which is that it is very difficult for people to be placed in a position where they don't differentiate between their biological children and their stepchildren.

Now, this doesn't mean that every step parent is a nasty, brutal child abuser, but once you have a step-parent in the home, it's a 100-time more likely

probability that there'll be abuse.

Well, that turns out to be the case in many animal species.

So, for example, lions, when the resident dominant males are kicked out by new incoming males, the first thing that the new males do is go around and kill every single cub that exists in that pride because they couldn't have been sired by them and they don't want to waste their evolutionary investments in children who are not theirs.

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

So that's one example.

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

Who would that person be?

Who do you think it is?

Is it a guy that's hiding in the bushes, a serial killer?

Who is the person who's most threatening?

I'm going to get it wrong.

I don't know.

Sorry, I don't mean to put you on the spot.

No, no, no.

I mean.

It's very easy.

It's the husband.

It's their husband.

The number one reason why husbands, whether they be in the Yanamomo tribe in the Amazon or whether it be in ancient Greece or it be 3,000 years from now, if he suspects infidelity or he knows that there's infidelity, he goes into a homicidal rage.

And the reason for that is very simple.

We are a biparental species.

Human males invest a lot in their children.

And so you and I are descendants of ancestors.

who cared whether they're women straight or not because we don't want to be investing in children who are not ours.

Now, oftentimes when you give these types of scientific explanations, people hate evolutionary psychology because they think that if you offer a scientific explanation, you're condoning it.

You're justifying it.

Or you're using your fancy science to explain why child abuse happens, why women are beaten and killed?

Of course you're not.

The argument that I always tell people is your logic when they attack me with this kind of nonsense is this is like saying that an oncologist who studies cancer is for cancer, is justifying cancer.

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

Exactly.

And everybody, and I remember because my grandfather was one of them saying, you know, these guys are just trying to excuse them and everything else.

And they were saying, no, we're trying to understand.

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

Exactly.

Okay.

So

you take this book on homicide and you realize

this is the direction for me in my life.

Exactly right.

So I had gone to Cornell to study decision-making and specifically consumer decision-making.

But thinking that I would do sort of a traditional stuff, I have a background in mathematics and computer computer science.

So I thought I would be a mathematical modeler of consumer choice.

Then I really got into behavioral sciences, psychology, and then through serendipity with this book, I then saw the light.

Hey, I will take this evolutionary principle, and in the same way that they applied it for criminality, I'll apply it for consumer behavior.

And I then developed, founded, and developed the field of evolutionary consumption, which is simply the application of these evolutionary principles to consumer behavior.

All right.

So

let's stay in the evolutionary evolutionary world of decision-making here for a second.

Tell me how that is relevant to us today.

Everything that we do, we do it not outside of biological imperatives.

Many social scientists, many professors in general, think that evolution stops at the neck, right?

It can explain everything below the neck.

It explains our opposable thumbs.

It explains our liver, our heart.

Because it's our thinking that makes us man.

Right.

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

This is called the human reticence effect.

Sure, explain the behavior of the mosquito, the zebra, and the salamander using evolutionary theory.

That's perfectly fine.

But don't you dare explain

human behavior via the same vulgar biology.

We are cultural animals.

Well, that's nonsense.

Of course we are cultural animals, but we're also biological animals.

We're both.

Regrettably, the social sciences have built these edifices of knowledge for the past hundred years whilst completely abdicating biology.

And that's just purely wrong.

This is funny that you say 100 years because it's been about 100 years of the real impact of progressivism.

Right.

And progressivism

denies the natural state of man.

It's why it doesn't work.

Exactly.

It takes away

your will to do better.

You know, it takes, it, it,

when it looks at consumerism, it tries to take away the free market,

which the free market just is.

It is what the culture is.

So every free market will be different.

A really moral culture will have a really moral free market.

A really horrible culture will have a really horrible free market, correct?

Yeah.

The great quote to support what you said originally about progressivism being sort of anti-human nature is a quote that I love to use from E.O.

Wilson, who's a Harvard biologist.

His specialty is he studies social ants.

In social ants, you know, everybody is equal and there's just one queen, right?

Otherwise, everybody's equal.

So he says, communism slash socialism, great system, wrong species.

That's it.

That's a mic drop right there.

That covers it all, right?

You're trying to impose a political and economic system on humans when humans are hierarchical.

Humans are not interchangeable drones.

We're not all equal and so on.

And so.

But we know that it's not about being equal.

It's about shifting the pyramid.

Right.

Those that are on the bottom are now on the top.

Those who are on the top are now at the bottom.

Right.

You know, it's a very vindictive

system.

Right.

Well, I think it also comes from the idea that if you've been successful, it must have been because you've exploited someone, right?

So there's this kind of faux victimology narrative.

You're rich, you've done well.

Who did you rape and pillage to get there?

And that's a grotesque view of life, right?

I mean, many of us work hard, very honestly, without exploiting anybody, and we simply work harder than the next guy, and that's why we succeed.

Do you believe this

started at a place of good?

Great question.

So I've actually argued that all of these nonsensical ideas, all of which start in universities, it takes intellectuals to come up with such idiotic ideas.

And so postmodernism basically says there are no universal truths other than the one universal truth that there are no universal truths, right?

Cultural relativism, all cultures are, you know, you can't judge someone else's culture.

Who are you to judge someone else's culture?

Again, comes from a noble place because you want to try to minimize the likelihood of being bigoted against the other.

So all of these ideas originally started from a noble place.

But the reality is in the pursuit of noble causes, you can't kill truth.

But they were willing to do that.

So they were consequentialists.

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

No, you can't

have justice without truth.

Exactly right.

And you can't have perfect justice because you don't know perfect truth.

Right.

Indeed.

So in your study of evolutionary psychology, you know Cass Sunstein?

I do.

Or know of him?

I know of him, yes.

So are you familiar with Edward Bernays?

I'm not.

Okay, he's the father of propaganda.

And then later after propaganda got a bad name from the Germans,

he changed that to father of advertising.

That's right.

So you, you, you,

yes.

I actually think one of my students at one point sent me a link to a documentary to this guy, which I've never watched, so maybe I should.

Oh, you should.

Yeah.

Fascinating.

You should read about him.

Yeah.

And what they really learned by combining science, you know, progressive science in the early 20th century, science

with

advertising was that you could move people a lot like Nudge, Cass Sunstein.

And

I want to separate,

for instance, I don't fear AI.

I don't fear machines.

I fear the goals because they will

be absolutely followed relentlessly by AI.

And what are we putting into that machine?

You know what I mean?

And so

I don't fear advertising.

I don't fear

evolutionary psychology at all.

And I think this is good.

But

it is so many times used in such a way to manipulate because so many people think I know better than him.

Right.

It's funny you say this because oftentimes people when they hear that I'm housed in a business school they think I'm basically a propagandist.

All I sit all day I'm in cahoots with Procter and Gamble to come up, which of course is not at all, I don't care about that.

I simply care about studying human nature and I choose to use the consumer realm to study human nature because the reality is, short of breathing, the thing that we probably do most is consume.

We consume not just Coca-Cola and Starbucks, we consume friendships, we consume religious narratives, we consume music.

So, everything is consumatory.

You have taken, I uh, I think, therefore, I am to I consume, therefore, I am, exactly.

Meaning, I mean, because that takes on such an ugly, yeah.

I mean, I think, therefore, I am

makes man

laudable,

Yeah, laudable.

I consume therefore I am is ugly.

Right.

It depends how you define consumption.

I mean yesterday I was having a chat with some of your employees, great guys by the way, and we were talking about spirituality.

And I said to them, you don't need a supernatural agent to feel spiritual.

The fact that I'm sitting with them there, having a wonderful intellectual conversation, for me, that is spiritual.

It's communion with a bunch of like-minded people.

We're getting to know each other.

There is spirituality in that moment.

So consumption and consumer behavior need not be considered a sinister thing.

Everything is consumatory.

Our evolving friendship is a consumatory experience.

I'll invite you to dinner.

You'll reciprocate.

That ritual is part of our reciprocal arrangement.

So you're not just talking about consumption of a product.

Exactly.

Life is consumatory.

And that's why oftentimes people think, again, that there is something sinister of me being in a business school.

I'm trying to influence people.

No, I'm simply trying to understand human nature using the vehicles of consumption as the.

But would you agree that Nudge

is a business book to get people to consume

what, right?

Yeah.

And how do you feel about that?

By the way, just for full disclosure, I think I mentioned this to you last night at dinner.

One of the two co-authors of Nudge was my former professor at Cornell.

Actually, the same semester as when I took the course on on homicide, it was with Dick Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize in 2017.

It depends how you use these principles, right?

I mean, if you use some nudge principle to help you lose weight because your physician has told you it's time to lose 40 pounds, then that mechanism has been used to good use.

So it really depends.

So,

how is it?

Let's talk about

the evolutionary process on

socialism.

Our founders did a lot of study of all different systems and they studied the good ones and the bad ones, why they failed, why they succeeded, and they came to the conclusion that

power always corrupts.

Of course.

And so you have to have limits on power and you have to empower the individual and restrain the government.

Progressives don't believe that.

And they believe that the government should be able to do all of these things for people and to people to create this utopia.

It never works.

But you know what they'll tell you as an answer to that?

It wasn't true socialism.

Correct.

Same thing with Islam, right?

So if I give you a million instances where the infusion of Islam in the society led to less freedom, more abuse, but bruh, it's because it wasn't true Islam.

So this is the

last sort of refuge that these guys go to.

There's no way to falsify their premise, right?

I could give you a million examples where socialism has been tried and failed, and the answer is always the same robotic answer.

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

Had they done that, it would have shown to be the best one.

But again, it takes all

human principles out.

And violates them, yeah.

It violates them.

So what is it about the evolutionary process that

I think has brought this?

Because it's been tried forever.

I mean our pilgrims tried socialism.

Jamestown was doing it until it ended up in cannibalism.

I mean, so what is it that, where does that come from?

I think it's, it's a very, I can't remember the guy's name.

There's a guy who a few years ago wrote a book where he argued that much of progressive thinking is akin to kindergarten logic.

And I think he's exactly spot on, right?

It sounds good to say, can't we all live in harmony equal to one another with fig leaves covering our genitalia while singing John Lennon, Imagine?

That sounds good.

Sign me up.

But they're stunted.

That's what a five-year-old thinks, right?

So I think it's almost as if they're parasitized by a form of utopic thinking, but it's a childlike understanding of the world.

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

But tell me, I'm not telling you what you think.

I'm being diplomatic here, by the way.

I'm being on my best behavior.

Wow, I'd like to know what you really think.

Okay.

Right now, we're going through a

shout your abortion phase.

Okay.

Where people are,

it's gone from rare and safe to, I'm proud of of it.

Sex out, meaning celebrate it.

Celebrate my abortion.

I had an abortion.

I actually heard a woman say to a crowd in Seattle, and she got cheered.

She said, I've had several abortions, and my favorite one was my first.

And it happened right here in Seattle.

Nothing like the first one.

Right.

And it was kind of like, I mean, if I had somebody that was putting down my dog and he was like, ooh.

That was my favorite one.

You'd run from

that guy.

And

if I understand evolutionary psychology, you know who Vent Velikovsky is?

No.

Manuel Velikovsky?

No.

Manuel Velikovsky is a guy who said,

hey, let's not reject

the stories in the Bible.

Let's not reject them.

We can reject them because we don't believe in magic or whatever.

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

Is there any physical things that might have been happening?

The sun

stands still.

We know that's not possible.

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

He said,

we should look for these patterns to see if there was anything that would scientifically explain the way they interpreted it.

There's a story in the Bible about

Baal, the god Baal, and he invites them into the grove, and they are a society that is encouraged to have promiscuous sex,

stop worrying about rules, to love each other, then to get pregnant.

And his price was,

bring me your baby.

when you're pregnant, and we will kill your baby, and we will celebrate.

And

you can interpret this as, you know,

it's in the Bible, so it's nothing.

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

We just don't have the trappings of a God,

but we're repeating this.

Right.

Is that evolutionary psychology?

I wouldn't necessarily link it to evolutionary psychology.

I mean, the only way I would link it to evolutionary psychology is the following.

There is a field called literary Darwinism.

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

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

We have the exact same evolutionary heritage in terms of our human minds.

And that's what allows us to understand the plight that he was facing 2,500 years ago.

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

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

No, no, no, but that was my point.

Right, okay.

Was take away all the God stuff and the bail and the, you know,

to make it rain.

Just this happened.

Forget about all the God stuff.

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

Now we've got a group of people who are celebrating the exact same thing, but they're wrapping it in

their religion.

Exactly.

Okay.

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

Indeed.

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

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

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

That

they're sacred, right?

They're sacramental.

You cannot argue against them.

No amount of science or reason or logic could ever penetrate them.

Having immigration policies is racist.

That's it.

That's the truth.

So if you argue to people, but how could that be?

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

Don't you have a password code on your bank account?

Isn't there a concept of territoriality?

It's actually part of our evolutionary imperative to have territorial defenses.

So the idea that there should be,

it is racist to have the notion of borders is insane, but that's an absolute truth.

So many of my academic colleagues think that any

antipathy towards anything short of open border policy makes you a Nazi.

And these are sophisticated thinkers, right?

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

So as a guy who understands nudge,

how do you

nudge them?

How do you get that to stop either in yourself with

whatever it is that you're living?

I mean,

a phrase that

really changed my life was Thomas Jefferson.

He was talking about how to educate yourself and he got to religion and he said, above all things, when it comes to religion, fix reason firmly in her seat and question with boldness even the very existence of God.

For if there be a God, he must

rather prefer honest questioning over blindfolded fear.

And that changed my life on everything.

And it's true, but most people don't want to question themselves,

their existence, their life, their belief, because it's either too hard,

too scary, or they're afraid there isn't anything there.

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

So there is a concept in evolution psychology called nomological networks of cumulative evidence.

This is the idea that if you're trying to demonstrate that some phenomenon is due to evolution, you try to come up with as much evidence cross-culturally, cross-temporally,

across disciplines, all of which point to that phenomenon being of the form that you're saying.

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

Let me give you a specific example.

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

There is a reason why men prefer women to have that hourglass figure.

How would I go about demonstrating to you that this is an evolutionary mechanism?

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

Women who have that hourglass figure are more likely to be healthy, younger.

Okay, so that's one box in that network.

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

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

So they couldn't have been socialized through L Magazine and through Oprah and through Hollywood Images.

You're ruling out that possibility.

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

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

it's tedious and it's slow paced because I've got to build that network slowly and And the person that I'm trying to convince has to have the humility to be willing to concede that his position was wrong if my evidence proves that he's wrong.

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

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

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

So how can you?

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

All I can do is do that.

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

You're irredeemable because you are outside the purview of the framework of the scientific method.

So, how can I talk to you?

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

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

Back in the early 90s, I

I was in my 30s and

I was an income poop.

And, you you know, I

finished high school, never went to college.

I was working when I was 13 years old.

I was working in my dad's bakery when I was eight.

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

And when I sobered up, I realized I didn't know anything, anything.

And so I started to,

you know, do my

homework and try to figure things out.

And it's a terrifying process.

Yeah.

And it's really, it takes years to know what you actually believe.

Right.

You know, and then to take them out and say, this doesn't match this.

And I believe both of those are true.

So one of them is wrong.

And start over again.

Yeah.

Years.

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

It's, it's to know what you know and what you don't know.

And usually there's a correlation between epistemic humility and intellectual sophistication.

If you are a true intellectual, you're actually quite humble about all the things you don't know because you realize that however much you know, you realize how little you know.

The ones who upset me the most are the ones that I call, and I'll explain the term, walking Dunning-Kruger effects.

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

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

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

That really angers me.

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

You're funny.

Thank you.

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

When they, for example, come to you, some guy who

is in his basement, in his mom's basement playing video games all day, who knows nothing about evolutionary psychology, proceeds to write to me to tell me that evolutionary psychology is a pseudoscience.

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

angers me because it demonstrates that it's it's going to be very hard to reach that guy because he is parasitized by his the stupidity of his self uh by the self-assuredness of his stupidity

Again, I go back to your evolutionary psychology then.

Where does that come from?

I understand

what's happening right now is we're in tribes.

I understand the need for tribes evolutionary.

Coalitional thinking, yeah.

I understand, you know, stone the one who's not with the tribe and cast them out.

I get it.

When you're under attack,

that's our animal instinct, right?

And I understand the

need for the animal to shut down thinking when it's under attack.

But

I don't understand how

people can adopt such the Nazis.

How can they go to sleep at night and they're not under attack and do something so diametrically opposed to what they believed in when they were raised and maybe even two three four five years ago and they're fine with it

when they're even in power there's a lot to unpack there just regarding the nazis one of the reasons why people hate evolutionary psychology one of many wrong reasons is they somehow associate evolutionary thinking with a wide range of Cretans who have misused evolutionary theory to advance their political agenda.

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

We won, the Jews lost.

So what if we kill them?

Hey, that's Darwinian.

It's got nothing to do with Darwin.

But somehow they usurped it because it gives it a veneer of scientific credibility.

Kind of what I was saying about nudge is you can do this, and then it's taken and twisted and used.

It's a nefarious...

It doesn't make what you...

believe and study wrong.

It makes the people who take it and use it.

Exactly right.

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

They're cognitive misers.

They don't want to spend time studying something.

And so they learned in some sociology course that all evolutionists are Nazis.

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

Because I'm Jewish and I'm an evolution psychologist.

But it's easy to

simplify the world by coming up with these little sound bits.

But earlier you said...

But at the same time, the Nazis used it.

I'm, and a lot of people will claim I'm a Nazi, but

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

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

I wouldn't be here.

No, but in all seriousness, I think it is an indelible part of human nature to always create demarcations, to always create, it's just part of who we are.

Some of us can transcend that, but for most people, it's very easy.

I've seen it in my own family, where

they exhibit a clear coalitional thinking.

I mean, not let's go kill someone else, but there's Jews, there's the others.

And I've always hated that.

Even as a young child, I detested that.

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

who once told me,

I so regret, my biggest regret with you, God, is I never sent you to Jewish school, to which I responded, that's the main thing that I have to thank you for.

Because to me, the fact that I grew up in an environment where I was

exposed to a plurality of people created a richness in my personal history.

He thought that that was bad.

Too bad I didn't grow up in a more insular Jewish environment.

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

By the way, that's why Abrahamic faiths are so successful, because at their root, all of them create a clear demarcation between us and them there's the believer and there's the kufar in islam there is the everybody who's with jesus and the rest of us who are going to hell there is the jews and the gentiles and so they all play on this tribal mindset that we already have

but everything does that it does everything is becoming a religion right i mean nietzsche was right you know good luck with that you've just killed god i'm fine with that right what are you going to replace him with right because we do we'll replace

the Jew and the Gentile with Republican, Democrat.

It doesn't matter.

We always will do that.

And

it's whether that

basic ideology is to try to get people to look up and reach higher

or lower.

And

historically speaking, everything has its problem, but when you

the archetype has been Moses or Jesus.

Somebody's been listening to Jordan Peterson.

I heard the word archetype.

No, I

know, but it's true.

When you look at who are we striving to be for?

Right.

Who are we striving to be?

Who do we say that is the person?

We have no heroes anymore.

We have no religious figures anymore.

The only religious figure that's off bounds and so can grow is Mohammed, and that's not necessarily a

we can get into that if you'd like.

Yeah, we're going to.

Because I don't get enough death threats.

I need to increase them.

I know, I know.

But to me, I revere

ideas.

There's a quote, I can't remember, I actually use it in my book.

You know, you could tell someone's social class by if they're lower class, they gossip about people.

If they're slightly higher class, they gossip about whatever things.

And then if they're upper class, they discuss ideas.

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

We're not talking about Joe, let's gossip about him.

We're not talking about the Christian or Muslim guy.

We're elevating the conversation.

So I pray at the altar of science, of cerebral pursuits, of ideas.

And that's what gives me purpose and meaning in life.

And

if everyone did that, it would be a richer, safer world.

I think, and

I know you're going to disagree,

but if there be a God,

he would have to be a scientist.

He would have to be a scientist.

And I don't think there is,

there are things we don't understand.

This argument on evolution, that's not God, how God creates.

Really?

Because I don't know how God creates.

I have no idea.

I know what I know.

I know what I know.

And I know what I think.

And I think

he is above us and started, as my father used to call it, first cause.

He's not God.

He's first cause.

What is first cause?

I don't know until we get to the other side.

Now, I've got some things that help me get to the, you know, to the eternities, if there is one.

But it's got to be based in science.

Right.

It has to be.

So there is one way, and you've probably heard of it, to reconcile evolution with sort of a divine narrative, and that is simply to argue, and not that I agree with it, but oftentimes I'll get students who come to me who come to my class religious, then they get into the whole evolution psychology and you see that there's sort of a fracture in themselves because how do they reconcile both?

And usually I want them to not walk away thinking that it's an either-or proposition.

So I give them, although I disagree with it, I give them a accommodationist way out.

And the argument works as follows.

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

You understand what I'm saying?

So, and that's it.

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

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

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

Forgive me here, I say false narrative and explaining science.

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

So

my atheist friends and I have this conversation a lot.

Just as I can't prove there is a God.

To say that it's a false narrative, to say

intelligent design.

Yes.

Wow, look at this how did this just all come together we don't know we have guesses i could say it's god you could say whatever we have guesses but we don't know wouldn't that make you an an agnostic uh

can i be direct yeah to me

to be agnostic is to be an intellectual coward i respect more believers than I respect the agnostic because the agnostic is a fence sitter.

I don't know if he exists.

I don't know if he doesn't exist.

And so I sit on the fence equivocating.

But wait, wait, wait.

You told me last night at dinner

that you are a seeker of truth.

You don't care what it is.

It's the truth.

If you don't know the truth, if you're saying, I think that's why I think you're not, yeah.

For instance, you could be an atheist.

Are you, and I don't know what it would be.

Yes.

But if something happened

and you were like,

Wow.

Then I would revise my beliefs.

Right.

But I'm going to be waiting for a long time for that to happen.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But you have to be open to that, just like I have to be open to.

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

Right.

Or, for example, touch therapy.

There's a paper that was published.

I think it still is a record.

A little girl, maybe 10 years old, Emily Rosa.

I mean, she's not much older, but she holds the record for being the youngest person to publish a paper in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, a very prestigious journal.

She published a paper there based on her grade four or grade five science project, where she wanted to test scientifically, using the scientific method, the validity of touch therapy.

For your viewers who don't know what touch therapy is, it's the idea that you could cure things like cancer simply by

you know, hovering your hand over the afflicted area because there's some cosmic energy and so on.

And so to test that idea, she basically constructed a very simple experiment.

She asked these touch therapy healers to guess.

She would put either her right hand or her left hand out.

They couldn't see.

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

So that's a very easy.

If you're able through your energy fields to cure pancreatic cancer, you should certainly be able through the energy field to tell if it's right hand or left hand.

Well, they

at lower than chance level.

In other words, if you had flipped a coin, you would have done better than these charlatans and scammers.

Guess what their rebuttal?

So now I have proven to you.

So I was open to the possibility of touch therapy.

I used the scientific method.

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

It didn't.

Guess what?

The touched healers argued.

Can you guess?

No.

Putting us through that process interferes with the energy bullshit.

Right?

So how can I falsify your position?

This is why it is in the domain of the non-scientific.

Because a fundamental principle in science, this is Karl Popper's falsification principle.

The way you establish the veracity of a scientific theory is you put up the theory and then you put all your weapons up against the theory trying to shoot it down, trying to falsify it.

If at the end of the day, it's still standing, then it is provisionally true until something else comes along.

So, as a scientist, I'm perfectly humble to the possibility that God might exist, but I'm still waiting for Him to show up.

Okay,

and I think that's

reasonable.

And I let's get into your childhood.

Sure.

Can I drink some water while we're doing this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course you can.

No, you may not.

I am

a puzzlement to many Christians because I like to go to different services.

I like to see how people are worshiping, and I just love it.

You should come to our synagogue.

I would love it.

Arabic Jews.

I would.

That's tribal.

That's, yeah.

That precedes Jesus by a few thousand years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So,

and I love it.

I've been all over the world.

I've, you know, been in Buddhist temples.

I've been in

the great synagogue and went on

Shabbat.

So love it.

Where I have a problem, and I think

you probably have the same problem, except in reverse, is

how.

Let me say it this way.

I think if we would just stop saying, No, I have the full picture.

I have the full picture.

Your picture is wrong.

And if we would all just shut up and sit our pictures down on the table, they might snap into a puzzle and we'd see the whole picture.

You know what I mean?

But we can't do that.

For me to be right, you must be wrong.

It's a zero-sum game, absolutely.

And the people I respect, and I mean,

you are the

father, the grandfather of the intellectual dark web web uh and or dark uh intellectual yeah dark web

um and

what i like about that is

you don't have to agree on everything right you just have to be cool with other people

thinking differently and as a matter of fact i think most of the people who are who are part of that group actually disagree on quite a few very serious i mean uh sam harris and i are in perfect disagreement when it comes to donald trump he thinks he's ushering nuclear holocaust.

I don't.

So there are many, but what we do all share is a commitment to intellectual conversations, a disdain for intrusions against freedom of speech, a disdain for political correctness.

So that's sort of the bedrock on which all else can be built.

And I want to get into your story because you're not like this, I don't think.

Bill Maher, Sam Harris,

they

talk about religious people like they are,

you know,

the scourge of the world.

And, you know,

I happen to agree.

I happen to agree with Gandhi.

You know, I love this Jesus of yours.

I just, I'm not such a big fan of his followers.

Right.

You know, they're good people and bad people in all of it.

There are good things that come out of it, bad things that come out of it.

I actually know a few good Muslims.

Now, they're the first to be killed by radical Islam,

but, you know, they say they're Muslim.

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

Right.

And they're great.

And they tolerate me and I tolerate them.

There are others, Christians, Jews, atheists, all of them, that just...

demonize and that's the thing that sets I think sets you apart at least in our interaction yeah Absolutely.

With others.

Look,

I absolutely don't mind that people are very religious because I truly appreciate the functional utility of the religious mind.

I get that there are endless benefits that can come from being a believer.

What bothers me is when religion becomes intrusive.

You understand what I mean?

It could be intrusive in that you better be...

There's a difference between Islam and an Islamist.

Right.

Although, although, just to be clear,

there is no codified way by which Islam is different from an Islamist.

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

There is no book of Islamism that is distinct from Islam.

Correct.

It's a lack of a reformation to codify.

Exactly right.

Yeah.

But there are those who are not Islamists.

In that they don't take seriously all the content of the book.

It's not that they're praying to a different book called Gentle, Sweet Islam.

So from my perspective,

and it doesn't have to be as intrusive as when Islam comes in to try to kill everybody else.

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

Stay in your lane.

Don't have the lack of epistemic humility to try to explain why that rock looks like it is 4 billion years old, but it's really young earth creationism.

Now you're being intrusive against the truth.

That pisses me off.

So I'm perfectly willing to tolerate

everyone, including the most religious, as long as you don't intrude on other people's rights.

But the way I define intrusion, wait, wait, wait, yeah.

Intrude on other people's rights,

including truth.

Right.

The example that you used

and you said, stay in your lane.

If,

for instance, the guy who invented radar, I can't remember his name, but he was a weatherman.

Okay.

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

No, yeah, yeah.

No, you're a weatherman.

You're a weatherman.

No, I'm telling you, this idea will work.

Right.

He created it.

He proved that it worked.

And then the government stepped in and said, okay, we're going to have real people work on this now.

Oh, okay, I get it.

I get your analogy.

there is i don't mean stay in your lane in that uh i'm an elitist only an intellectual should say this and not a common person to the contrary i i'm a professor of the people as i always say not at all what i'm saying is the epistemology of religion does not provide a workable framework for understanding natural laws.

That's not its domain.

Therefore, it shouldn't pretend that it could contribute to scientific truths.

Maybe it can help you understand how to behave or not.

We We can debate that and that's fine.

Maybe it has a place to play in terms of moral codes and we can disagree or not with that.

But it doesn't,

there is no way to study natural mechanisms either through the epistemology of religion or the epistemology of science.

Science is the only game in town when it comes to studying natural phenomena.

You're not having a

I think I agree with you.

The Bible is not a science book.

But it does does make science claims.

It does make very clear scientific claims that are

disproven.

Anyone,

I think any thinking human being will look at the scriptures and say,

what were they trying to explain in their language?

What were they saying?

And you can look at the arc of the story and go, okay,

the arc of the story, I get.

Did God create in seven days?

That's ridiculous.

It's ridiculous.

Now you could say his days are different than my days.

Fine.

That's where the Olympic mental gymnastics start.

If you want to say that a book that is written 5,000 years ago, those guys had an idea of, you know what I mean?

But Olympic gymnastics are not, you can look and say, okay, well, his days aren't the same as mine,

but science will tell me

how old this planet is and

the Big Bang.

I don't have a problem with the Big Bang.

Don't know if that's the way it happened.

Looks like it, but okay.

What I'm concerned about is what caused the Big Bang?

What happened?

a millisecond before the Big Bang.

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

You've heard of the God of the Gaps argument.

The God of the Gaps argument is basically whenever there is an explanatory gap in our scientific knowledge, that's where God goes to hide, right?

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

Then thunder was God.

Then he can't hide there.

That's a scientist.

There is nothing.

There is nothing.

I don't believe.

I don't believe.

Boy, this is going to get me in so much trouble.

I don't believe that the waters parted.

Okay.

I do believe the Jewish oral tradition that the winds might have swept and swept the water to leave a path, but not like this.

Right.

Velikovsky theorized that maybe the

asteroid belt was from a, and he was wrong on all this, but maybe there was an maybe a moon spun off, caused some gravitational pull, something came, made the water stand up.

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

You know, faith,

people say, well, that wasn't a miracle.

Well,

I don't know.

I think a CAT scan is.

I think that's a cat.

I think that's a miracle.

In any other time, that would have been called a miracle.

Now, we're just learning how to do things.

And what brought about the cat scan?

Science.

Yeah.

I have no problem.

Science,

But by the way,

if God comes and he says,

no,

two plus two equals five, he's not God.

That's called postmodernism, by the way.

Yeah, I know it is.

I know it is.

You said earlier, God is a scientist.

I actually wrote an article where I argued that God is a Darwinist.

And let me make the argument here for you.

So there's a great paper written by a Darwinian historian.

So this is a historian who studies historical patterns using the evolutionary lens.

And she did a content analysis of the Old Testament.

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

And here's what she did.

So there is a lot of research that shows that with higher status, men have more access to women, right?

So the reason why men fight to other men for status is because the downstream consequences is I get more women, right?

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

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

So, for example, he's a prophet, he's a king, he's a general, he's a slave, he's a farmer, and then counted the number of women, mates, that are associated to him.

And it was the exact prediction that you would expect from evolutionary theory.

With greater status of men in the Bible comes greater reproductive benefits.

And so, therefore, I call that God is a Darwinist.

So, again, the Bible does contain certain universal truths, certain evolutionary truths, but those truths can exist, from my viewpoint, simply because they are a manifestation of human beings having written those things, not of a supernatural agent.

Last question on this.

Then I want to get to your history, but last thing.

Can we agree on

maybe two out of the four?

Ben Franklin was asked, what is the American religion?

And they were trying to trap him.

And he said,

well, the American religion is that there is a God.

He's going to judge us.

So we should serve him.

And the best way to serve him is by serving our fellow man.

If that's what religion did,

is it good?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is it good?

Yeah.

The only thing, though, is I would say, my God, is it more impressive for me to serve you?

without it being an exhortation from God.

Exactly.

In other words, if I am good to Glenn Beck simply because I am innately virtuous and I think it's the right thing to do without worrying whether a sky daddy is judging me or not, that's I'm more pure for that.

And it's more pure, it's when you,

you know,

people try to go baptize people.

I got to get you baptized in the faith.

Oh, would you stop?

So you're not baptized?

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

I believe in this, etc., etc.

I believe what I do.

However,

how about I just love somebody

with no ulterior motive?

I just want to love you because anything else is crass.

Anything else does not come from what?

That's more impure because it has an ulterior motive.

And that's what we were talking about.

God's not like up there going, you know, if we befriend this guy, then this guy will do that.

It's not going to, it doesn't work that way.

If there is a God, he's not doing that right he's like hey can can you guys he is come to me like a child he is very childlike guys

just get along right love each other right

Personal history.

I want to talk to you about

because how much of your feeling on religion comes from your childhood?

It was frightening, I would imagine.

Yes.

Want to talk about that?

Yeah.

So I was born in Lebanon in the 60s.

I was part.

Those were trouble-free for Jews in Lebanon?

Yeah, of course.

Well, as the Middle East goes,

we were...

tolerated.

In other words, it wasn't as though every single day you had to fear for your life, but you always understood that you to know your place.

Be pretty and be quiet and don't flaunt your religion.

Don't push it in some way, right?

So where's your, where's the, where's the heritage, your genealogy?

Where did your people go?

So I think three of my four grandparents are originally Syrian Jews.

So my parents and all my siblings are all Lebanese Jews.

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

As the antipathy between Israel and the Arab countries grew starting from 1948, it became less tenable to be Jewish in Arabic lands.

And so there would be these sort of waves of exodus out of Lebanon.

How did your family feel about the creation of Israel?

Supported it.

I mean, we didn't really talk.

I mean, although, frankly, although we have a lot of family in Israel,

my father comes from a family of 11 children.

My mother comes from a family of seven children.

And almost all of them, many of them went to Israel.

So we certainly had a

connection with Israel, but we're Lebanese.

I mean, we're Arabic.

Our mother tongue is Arabic.

Our culture, our ethnicity is all Arabic.

That's what people don't understand.

They think, somehow, no, we're diabolically Israeli.

No, we're Lebanese.

Now, we ended up being part of the last group of Jews that remained in Lebanon when the writing on the wall was that you should probably get the hell out of there.

And then in 1975, when the civil war broke out

between everybody, I mean, everybody was killing everyone,

the one that almost all groups agreed in terms of their animus towards were the Jews, right?

Now, in Lebanon,

you carried an internal ID, not unlike a passport.

So if the cops stop you, they say, show me your ID, that ID has your religion written on it.

Because

in Lebanon or in the Middle East, everything is viewed through the prism of your religious, you know, tribal identity.

Now, the reason i'm mentioning this is because when the civil war broke out uh different militia groups would set up these roadblocks throughout lebanon and if you were stopped and you were of the wrong religion then you would be taken to the side and executed and then they would do this to each other now there weren't many roadblocks that jews were going to clear

Some Christians would let you through,

but almost all of them we would have been shot.

So we were...

Christians would have shot you too?

No, I've said

that would have been probably the only now there now incidentally though although we escaped execution from islam it was all actually also muslim militia who helped to get us out of lebanon

uh some plo militia i remember very clearly on the day that we were leaving lebanon plo militia came to our house fully dressed in the way you see the isis guys today that's the world that i grew up in uh took us in their car because there's no way for you to get to the Beirut International Airport at the time without having the clearance of the Palestinian militia because all of their camps surrounded the airport.

And so there was no way for you to get through that unless they were protecting you.

The reality is when they picked us up, we didn't know if they were going to take us to a field somewhere and put a bullet through our head.

Or to the airfield.

So the same Muslim faith that was trying to kill us, also it was Muslim guys who saved us.

And so this is, and this is how I explain to people that I never demonize an individual Muslim.

They are phenomenally beautiful Muslim people and they are nasty, just like they are phenomenally beautiful Jews.

Exactly.

But Islam itself

always ends up, the trajectory is always that at some point, those who are not Muslim are going to be persecuted.

Sometimes it might take five minutes, sometimes it might take 500 years, but the trajectory is always the same.

Once the demographic changes tip in a society in a certain way, it becomes very precarious for you to be non-Muslim.

And I see you wearing a noon thing

for Christians in the Middle East and so on.

That's what's happening with them.

So we had to leave Lebanon because it was simply impossible for us to remain there as Jewish people.

Then my parents, when we moved to Montreal, kept returning to Lebanon because they still had business there.

And so in 1980, they ended up being kidnapped by Fatah and they disappeared.

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

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

And again, those who rescued them, many of them, were Muslim folks, okay?

But the ones who were torturing them were also Muslim folks.

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

So that's my personal history with the Middle East.

So how has that shaped you with religion?

religion?

That's a great question because I could see how you might think that that would definitely send me on the trajectory of animus towards religion.

But I also think that my unique,

the unique combination of genes that constitute God Sad

also

yielded an animus to religion because I'm someone who from a very young age exhibited intellectual love.

And so when I would ask my father when we were at the synagogue and it's in Beirut, it's called Wadi Abujmi.

It's where the main Jewish synagogue is.

And apparently, they're trying to revive it now, but it's been many years they're trying to do that.

Well, when we would be at that synagogue, and I'm a little boy, and now we stand up for the prayer, now we sit down for the makarena, now we stand up, now we go left, now we go right.

And I would ask him, Why are we doing this?

Why are we doing that?

And his answer was always a very dismissive one: just shut up, just follow, do.

And I remember right then, I felt an antipathy.

I hated the fact, maybe, and then look at me now, 50 years later,

the irreverence I have towards groupthink, towards herd mentality, whether it be in science, whether it be in public discourse.

So religion to me felt wrong because it felt as though there were no intellectual answers that could satisfy my intellectual curiosity.

Even as a very young child, so I got turned off by it.

It struck me as one big sort of tribal scam.

So I think it's part, it's just my personhood and part my personal history that have resulted in me not being religious.

Your thoughts on Islam?

You have how much time we have for another four hours?

You can talk about it or not.

I mean, I know you're Canadian and also you're

already in trouble with everybody.

So look,

Islam is ultimately an expansionist religion.

It is not.

the tolerant religion that people are are are sold in the West.

You just have to crack a book and study the 1400-year history of Islam.

I mean, again, using nomological networks of cumulative evidence, is there any evidence that I could provide you that suggests that Islam is peaceful or not?

And the answer would be quite unequivocally clear.

Now, usually, I'm actually the nightmare for a lot of the Islam apologists because usually, if you're speaking to them, they'll say, oh, but Glenn Beck, you're some white guy from America.

You don't speak Arabic, so you don't know.

They can't say that to me.

Arabic is my mother tongue.

So no.

And you heard it.

And I heard it every day in every,

you know, taking the taxi on the bus, the politician in the sitcom, in the mosque.

It's everywhere.

It's the definitional DNA of the society to have endemic Jew hatred.

Now, again, this doesn't mean that they go around all day killing all Jews, because if that were the case, we couldn't have survived for the years that we did.

But the reality is that it is part of the narrative of Islam to view the other as in Arabic, the word is najas, impure.

It's like you're like urine, you're like sperm, you're like spoiled blood, right?

That's not something I make up.

You just do a Google search, right?

So if I show someone 20,000 Imams coming from 50 different countries,

each of which is preaching stuff that is astonishing, then they'll usually answer, oh, no, but he's no true Muslim.

So who's the true true Muslim?

Saudi Arabia is not the true Muslim.

Iran is not the true Muslim.

Osama bin Laden is not the true Muslim.

The head of ISIS is not the true Muslim.

But your friend Ahmed, who eats proshuto and drinks alcohol and is a fornicator, to use the religious term, he's the true embodiment of Islam.

So the reality is that Islam is an expansionist religion.

Most Muslims don't adhere to most of it.

And that's why they're perfectly lovely and peaceful people.

But they're perfectly lovely and peaceful people not because of islam they are that despite of islam so what do i think of islam uh if it is if there's a way for it to be practiced peacefully then do what you want the problem is that history suggests that there isn't a way to practice it what's the world look like in 10 years what's a europe look like what's canada look like not good because as relating to islam

uh look i always here's the analogy i always give if

on any given day whatever path I took that day in terms of the food that I've ingested, three things can happen that day.

I've either put on weight, my weight hasn't changed, or I've lost weight.

There's no other possible state of the world, right?

When it comes to Islam, when it comes to a society, only one of three things can happen.

More freedoms can ensue, no changes, or less freedoms.

Now, do we have enough data to answer that question?

And the answer is a outlandishly phenomenal, incontrovertible, yes, we have the answer.

More Islam is less freedom.

So how do we navigate through that?

I'm not sure.

Now, I had a conversation with Andy McCarthy, who's a federal prosecutor, who used to...

Right.

He's a lovely guy.

He worked on the first 9-11 case.

I asked him as a lawyer,

could you consider a case where maybe ever Islam could be considered seditious?

And, you know, he kind of...

did an answer, but I think that might end up have that's what will happen.

You will have to have officially Imams repudiating through some new magical theological process the endless passages of violence and intolerance.

And until that happens, and I'm not holding my breath, then we're going to always have problems.

You are creating that which I escaped in Lebanon 40, 50 years ago.

You're going to have it in every street corner in the West.

It might take 10 years, it might take 100 years, but it's coming.

Oh, that's not happy.

That's not happy at all.

Let me me take you back to, again,

evolutionary psychology, but I want to talk about tech and evolutionary psychology.

I saw you speak in front of

Google.

Right.

And I was in the vipers then of Social Justice Warriors.

I know you were.

And it was funny because everything you said

is basically what James Damor said.

Is it not?

It's so funny you say this because the rumor was when Damore had his memo thing that he was in the audience listening to my lecture and that's what kind of gave him the courage to send it.

And so right after the memo went out, him and I started communicating and I asked him the question.

He said, actually, no, I was away.

I wasn't, I'm a fan of your work, but I wasn't at the talk.

He was traveling somewhere.

But you're exactly right.

He said nothing in that memo that wasn't exactly what I would have covered in my talk.

So how did you get away with it and him not?

It's funny.

It's funny you say this.

And I hope the guys who, if they end up watching this, won't be upset at me.

The internal guys at Google who were supporters of mine, who invited me, warned me that if I were to have him on my show before the talk went up, that talk would never see the light of day.

And so if you go to my YouTube channel, you'll see that I only ended up talking to James DeMore several months after the memo had come out, but that was on purpose because we had to make sure that the algorithm, well, and the talk would be uploaded on their

platform because otherwise they were going to kill it.

And so I waited till they posted it.

And only when they posted it, I invited him on the show.

So it was a strategic move on our part.

But it's amazing that we even have to engage in such strategizing in the 21st century in the United States.

So I saw you just had

Jack

Dorsey on

from Twitter.

Yeah.

You're in this, and you're also, you're actually in it.

You're in Google.

Your work is

in Google.

You are also on the outside receiving end of the things that Google or Twitter are doing.

The testes are massive, Glenn.

They really are.

So

what have you learned that we should know?

Don't diffuse the responsibility to speak out onto others.

Every single person has a valuable voice in the battle of ideas.

Some of us have bigger platforms.

Not everybody's Glenn Beck.

Not everybody can reach 10 million people.

But even if you could only reach...

Your fellow students in the classroom.

When your professor says something that sounds like BS to you, politely challenge them.

When a Facebook friend says something idiotic, challenge them.

Don't leave it to Gat Sad to combat you on Twitter.

So, what I try to always do is tell people, I implore them, I beg them to get engaged.

But it's very easy for people to diffuse responsibility onto others.

You know, I have my job to worry about.

It's my daughter's high school graduation.

Let Glenn Beck worry about it.

Let Dave Rubin worry about it.

Maybe Peterson will get involved.

They're holding down the fort.

No,

if every one of the silent majority were to speak up, all that stupidity would get squashed.

The tsunami of clear-thinking people would squash these idiots.

The problem is that most people are apathetic, most people are cowardly, and therefore they diffuse the responsibility for a few of us to bear the burden for everybody.

And so, the way that I would tell them is: please get engaged.

So, they are taking

the same kind of

thinking that, you is in nudge, and they're nudging the other direction.

Right.

And they think they have a moral responsibility to do it, which is, you know, again,

progressives see themselves as ranchers and everyone else as cattle.

Exactly.

And so the rancher knows what's best for the cows, and so he's going to herd those cows.

We have this happening everywhere.

Let me take it

one step beyond, and you tell me where you think the reality is here.

I've heard talk about, you know, we've found the anger gene.

We've found the reason people are progressive or people are conservative.

I mean, we're entering an age now where we just have better equipment than Mengele did.

And we can gene splice, we think we know what's causing everything, and we can just turn these things off.

Is that reality at all, do you think, as a scientist?

No, not nearly as much as what you're saying.

It's very, very difficult to have a one-to-one mapping between a specific manifestation of a gene.

So a gene can take one of several forms.

It's called a polymorphism, right?

Sometimes you could say if you have the longer version of that gene, you're more likely to be a risk-taker.

If you have the shorter version, you're less likely to be a risk-taker.

So at this point, we can do these types of mappings between how a gene manifests itself and a particular behavior.

But for something as complex and multifactorial as your political ideology, whether you conserve it, to link it to a set of genes is a bit of.

So,

how about then just risk-taking?

If society felt that risk-taking was bad, should we be able

to

do that?

Isn't there something?

I mean, I know God doesn't play dice.

Isn't there something, though, into the dice

that we all are different?

Tell me again what you're at.

Should we be intervening to alter the risk taking?

Let me take

you brought up, you know, taking more of a risk.

If society thought that that was bad, let me take a real real-life thing.

Iceland says that they have eradicated in Helsinki

all

the time.

No, what's the one in Iceland?

Reykjavik.

Reykjavik.

Okay.

So Reykjavik

has eliminated all Down syndrome.

Yes.

Well, no, they didn't.

They just went in and either aborted, and now they're going to be gene

splicing.

And there is something

to be said

for the Down syndrome person.

And

so should we be intervening at the genetic level to alter realities?

Is that the question?

I guess, yeah.

I mean, where would you go?

The danger with that is that, remember, eugenics.

I don't know if you're very well.

And actually, of course, one of the reasons why people hate evolutionary theory earlier, I give the the example of the Nazis.

Another reason that is, I say, eugenics.

Oh, evolutionary psychologists are just the new instantiation of eugenicists.

Look, if there is a way to intervene genetically to maybe eradicate a reality that is truly problematic, perhaps.

But should you be

altering the distribution of how many risk-takers there are in a society or not, then you're entering into a dark science fiction.

Well, I mean, look, I struggle with this because my daughter has cerebral palsy.

And

had I been told

before she was born, what I was told right after she was born, she'll never walk, she'll never eat, she'll never think, she'll never understand, she'll never be able to speak.

She'll be in bed for the rest of her life.

Oh my gosh, if they would have told me that at 19 years old, I would have said, yeah, let's abort that site.

She's going to have a miserable life.

She works here.

She went to college.

You know,

she is differently abled, to use the politically correct term.

But she's not what they said.

And she changed me for the better.

She has changed many things, many people.

Can we be who we are really meant to be without any struggle in our life, right?

Well, if you, I don't know if you've asked her, and I don't know if you have asked her whether you want to share this.

Have you ever asked her whether,

despite all of the difficulties that she's faced, she's happy to be here?

She is happy to be here.

She

would love to have a cure.

And so would I.

You know, I don't know if there ever would be,

but

she is tired of being different.

But

she is happy she was born.

Right.

She's

glad she wasn't born in Germany.

Right.

You know, it's funny because one of the things that I struggle the most with in terms of what position I should hold, although I consider myself to be a

pro-choice person,

when I hear these stories, it does.

And I think Dave Rubin, whom we both know well, and he's a good friend of mine, I think he also very honestly admits that that's probably the issue.

Yeah, he's sort of.

he told you that.

And I think I also struggle with that because I truly can see

the value in both sets of arguments.

And so while I still am tilted towards the pro-choice side.

So you're a bit agnostic on this.

Yeah.

Yes.

You're a bit of a fence sitter.

Well, I am agnostic on issues that can be testable.

When it comes to God, my view is we could never test these things, and therefore I don't want to be a fence sitter.

But we can test it.

But But you're right.

I am a dance.

We can test that that is never going to grow into a test.

How long did you wait before you came back at me with something about the agnostic?

No, no, no.

It just got to happen.

The,

you know, we're arguing now

about insanity, I think.

We're now arguing whether we can kill a child shortly after birth, keep it comfortable until mom decides.

That's insane.

That's.

Did you see my satirical piece on my YouTube channel where I talked about fourth trimester abortions?

I actually said,

I found a way to eradicate murder around the world.

And it involves two steps.

Step one, so let's say I kill person B.

Well, person B is not my child, but I use

trans offspring by proxy.

Because if you use trance, it changes any reality.

So through trance offspring by proxy, he becomes my child, even though he's 37 and I don't know him.

Then,

since I aborted him in the fourth trimester, since murder is just fourth trimester abortion, through these two processes, you eradicate murder.

You're clean.

You're clean.

You're absolutely clean.

So, help people think this out because I think this is.

I am a guy who

I was broke choice.

I'm pro-life.

What made you change?

Is it because of the experiences with your daughter?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

The

but I

understand compassion.

If my daughter was raped,

I can't imagine going to my daughter and saying, you have to keep the job.

You have to keep the job.

And so I just can't bring myself, even though I believe it's life, so I'm stuck in this ugly place of, oh, crap.

But I just, I can't get there yet.

And Dave Rubin and I have talked about this.

You know, he's kind of stuck in that place.

Well, when it's viable.

And I asked him, well, viability keeps moving back.

So either truth is changing, or you know, that's not a baby now, but it will be soon.

What does it say about us that we are

that the vast majority of people

agree that, you know, in the first trimester, it's like 54% of Americans say,

you know what?

Okay.

Second trimester, it goes way down.

Third trimester,

it's like 5%.

Salad is okay.

It's like 5%.

And

it's a little crazy and almost zero when it comes to afterbirth.

What does it say that we are going this way and people are still trying to

look at it?

It certainly shows that there's a huge incongruity between the official ultra-left progressive positions and what most people think, right?

If the number that you gave is accurate, which there's no reason for me to expect that it isn't, if 5% of people are thinking that that's a viably appropriate

option, but that's the default value of the progressives right i mean most of the ultra progressives are celebrating as the

the woman is having contractions what was the what was the the guy the um the governor in virginia virginia right uh what do you think about what what he said

i think that

um do you know who baby naur is no

baby naur was the first victim of the holocaust a child born with no arms no legs blind and deaf, had no life.

Parents freaked out, didn't know what to do.

Hitler immediately came out and said,

compassion for the child.

And then said, but the mom and dad are really suffering, and so is this baby.

Maybe.

They say that, but maybe.

I'm going to send my personal doctor.

to see baby now and examine myself because we can't kill somebody who you know is is has potential is his life

and then he said

I got just got back my doctor just got back he informed me we got to kill the baby but it's

compassion well that set off the T4 program which required three signatures from a doctor okay

and when that happened and people started seeing their local doctor kill

newborn babies they stood up so here's what I take from it.

The people who voted for Adolf Hitler thought that was so bad.

They stood up and said, no.

Adolf Hitler said three signatures are required.

Virginia, New York, one.

It's one.

It was three.

It's three.

I mean,

that says something more about us.

So

what do you think drives that particular position?

is it just the celebration of the freedom of a woman to decide for herself at any point and so that her rights always supersede me what what what's driving in your viewpoint that position you mean of the people who are pushing for it who are pushing for it who are ultra progressive on that position the ones who are accepting it either don't want to look at it don't believe that that's what they really mean, they can't fathom it.

And, you know, the people I voted for, they'd never do that.

So that can't be right.

Okay.

The people who are pushing for it,

I'm not sure.

Perhaps they worship

the God of the environment.

But why would that result in

holding

more people?

Earth is unsustainable with a number of people.

We have to reduce our carbon footprint.

So it's an overcrowding argument?

Yeah, and the carbon footprint,

a lot of real die-hard global warming people are like, you should only have one child,

you know, all of that, possibly.

The reason why I asked that is because,

you know, it's one thing to critique someone's bad ideas, but it's a lot more satisfying to try to understand them.

Exactly.

So to use theory of mind to put yourself in the mind of the other, because then you're able to build better counter-arguments to try to persuade them to come on your side.

Don't you have any idea?

For that one, I think maybe it is feminism gone completely on steroid.

Where the remember, many feminists told women, you have the right and the obligation to be as sexually unrestrained in your behavior as men.

If men do it, you should do it too.

And then a lot of women took that culture, and then they realized they weren't satisfied with having unrestrained, meaningless sex.

They're different.

Exactly.

There are evolutionary pressures that would make men and women view sexuality differently.

And just to get fancy for a moment,

the costs of making a poor mate choice loom much larger for women than they do for men.

This is called parental investment theory.

Therefore, you expect women to be more judicious in their mate choice.

So it's basic evolutionary biology 101.

Yet feminism said, no, don't abide by this BS.

You have every right to be no different than men in your sexual behavior.

And so I think maybe this is simply the downstream effect of this empowering argument to feminism.

That's the only thing that I can think of.

Freedom of speech.

You've said some

powerfully,

I don't want to use the word crazy, but some people would say crazy things because you're being politically incorrect.

You're just being honest.

More and more in the United States,

millennials are saying, no, you don't have a right to

speech that makes me feel unsafe.

I think we have a real problem with the word unsafe.

I think they mean uncomfortable, and that's a gravely different word than unsafe.

Yes.

Where does this where how do you see this shaping up?

It's not good.

I mean, I'm an absolute free speech absolutist yeah i believe that anything short of a direct exhortation to violence libel and defamation everything goes and the way that i demonstrate my commitment to those principles is i pick the most grotesque possible instance which is Holocaust deniers to a Jewish person, right?

What could be more offensive than taking the historical event that is probably the most documented in history, where people were systematically, you

exterminated and allow someone to say, no, it never happened.

But if you are a free speech absolutist in a free society, then you have to tolerate the most grotesque.

So I tell people, I am a Jewish person and I support the right of Holocaust deniers to reject that the Holocaust ever happened.

So I walk the walk, talk the talk.

So your hurt feelings, frankly, I don't give a blank about.

Life is anti-fragile, to use the term of Nassim Talib, right?

You grow by being

that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, correct?

Therefore, postmodernists say that which doesn't,

how is this the turn of the phrase on this?

That which

I've never heard the postmodernist.

Okay, yeah,

they've twisted it and

turned it around.

So it really, I find it very frustrating because it is a perfect way to stifle discussions, right?

don't criticize islam because that's my religious faith that hurts me what do you mean in a free society you you can go on twitter and say what a bunch of crock judaism is if i'm strong in my beliefs i shouldn't worry about what glenn beck thinks isn't that the scientific method really shouldn't that be kind of the science

i should you you're a scientist You've said something.

I'm coming to you with facts.

That's the key.

I'm coming to you with facts and saying,

what are you?

Dumb as a box of rocks?

Exactly.

Here's how it works.

Show me where it's wrong.

And I'll tell you, I've become, for better or worse, the central repository for endless people in academia coming to me, reporting their horror stories within academia.

I'll just give you a very quick recent example.

Alessandro Strumia is a professor of physics at University of Pisa who also works at CERN, the nuclear center outside Geneva.

He had been invited to give a talk this fall about gender and physics.

The argument being that women are being discriminated against in physics, and that's why they're not advancing enough.

So he used bibliometric data.

Bibliometric data is scientific data that allows you to test these things.

For example, on average, when female physicists are hired versus male scientists, what's the average number of citations each of these two groups have?

So we don't have to engage in hyperbole.

We can test these ideas.

And what his data analysis showed is that, contrary to the narrative, women were not not being discriminated against.

As a matter of fact, women were getting jobs where they were much less qualified than the equivalent men.

He was suspended.

Now, he was completely confused because he thought, naively, as a scientist,

truth.

Data speaks.

If it supports your narrative, so be it.

If it doesn't support it, so be it.

Let the data speak for itself.

And then...

The hammer came down on him.

Well, the only one, as far as I know, that was willing to speak to him was yours truly.

As a matter of fact, there were 1,600 physicists who wrote an open letter, which they obnoxiously called it Particles for Justice.

Oh my God.

Where they were attacking him for being a Nazi, for denying the personhood of the transgender.

And he had said nothing about transgender.

He had said nothing about anything.

All he did was report objective, quantifiable data that didn't seem to support the politically correct narrative.

This is something that should be happening in North Korea and in Yemen, not in the West, but it happens on a daily basis.

In 1995, I read Immanuel Kant.

There are many things that I believe that I shall never say, but I shall never say the things that I do not believe.

I memorized that, not because I thought it was such a great quote, but because I pondered it for so long on what kind of world were you living in where you felt it necessary to say that?

I couldn't.

1995, I could not fathom that world.

We're in that world.

And

it's worsening by the minutes.

By the minute.

By the minute.

And hopefully these types of conversations will compel people to get engaged.

So

we're on page two.

Yeah, I know, and I've skipped a lot of stuff.

Let me go to the University of the Future.

Sure.

Everything is changing.

People who are looking at, you know, I've got to send my kids to college.

My wife and I have this argument quite often.

Kids have got to go to college.

No, they don't.

No, they don't.

If you want to be a doctor, you want to go and you want to open up a body.

Yeah, you're going to have to go to medical school.

But

you don't go to college to find yourself.

You go because you want to pursue an idea and you find the right college, university, you find the right people.

But a certificate means means nothing in the future.

Do you agree with that?

I do.

Jack Dorsey did not finish his undergrad at NYU.

Glenn Beck, I don't think, went.

Bill Gates didn't.

Steve Jobs didn't.

Zuckerberg didn't.

Now, I'm in a difficult position in that, on the one hand, as a professor and as someone

who's committed to knowledge, I say

lifelong pursuit of knowledge.

I went to college when I was 30.

Exactly.

As a a matter of fact, I have a great story.

There's a guy who had escaped Nazi Germany as a Jew, moved to Montreal, had a business career, retired in his 60s, had never gone to university, decided to start his undergrad in his 60s, did his masters in his 70s, finished his PhD.

I think he was in his late 80s or early 90s.

In our university newspaper, it was written, finally a doctor at 89 or 92 or whatever.

And within a year after that, he passes away.

That's a pure scholar because he did it for no other purpose than the sheer pursuit and joy of knowledge.

He wasn't doing it to become a professor.

He wasn't doing it for a career.

He was doing it just because.

And so I agree with you.

There are many ways to seek knowledge.

As a matter of fact, many people write to me, and I say this with all due modesty, they'll write to me and say, I watched your show for the past four weeks.

when you were speaking to XYZ, and I've probably learned more than my undergraduate degree.

So I think there are many ways by which people can now seek knowledge, and it doesn't have to be strictly through the confines of university.

You know who David Glertner is?

No.

Dr.

David Glertner, he's from Yale University and he asked me one time, he said,

hey,

who is the, do you know the name of the person that is the biggest

expert and scholar on D-Day?

And I said,

no, who?

And he said, exactly.

Nobody does.

Nobody does.

All the universities will say it's this person that person.

He said, but it might be a cab driver.

It might be a cab driver who has dedicated his whole life

to this.

Well, and especially today where you have such a democratization of knowledge, right?

I mean, you could now get on YouTube and all of the great minds that currently exist are all there for your pleasure.

And so I agree with you.

University should be where you go to get knowledge, which would have been otherwise very difficult for you to get on your own.

And short of that, but just commit to knowledge, whether it be through university or not, commit to knowledge.

I hate to bring up another reference,

but

come to me like a child.

To me, that phrase

in the Bible, to me, and probably to very few others, means...

You have children.

How many children do you have?

Two.

Two.

What were they?

What was their favorite word when they were little?

Mommy.

Why?

Why, why, why?

They said, oh, why?

That's true.

They said, why?

Why?

Why more than mom?

One face when they were...

And you know what makes you humble?

Is when you realize that half the questions they ask, you don't have an answer.

You don't have an answer for.

Yes.

Daddy, why is the cloud?

I'm like, I don't know.

My father, I knew he was going to die.

He always had a book in his pocket and always was learning.

And

he said to me at one point, I said, Dad, you've got to read this book he was like 81 or so got to read this book this this this idea is blah blah blah blah blah he would always say oh my gosh I'll go get it right away I'll read it

and he said

yeah that sounds good and I said

that sounds good you're not gonna read it and he said no

I'm kind of tired of learning new things.

And I knew that's, I knew that day.

That was the end.

That's the end.

Once you stop asking why,

you're done.

It's funny you say this because in evolutionary theory, do we still have a bit of time?

Yeah.

In evolutionary theory, there is a distinction between two types of scientific explanations.

There's what are called proximate explanations.

These are the explanations that explain the how and the what of a phenomenon.

How does diabetes work?

What are the factors that affect the severity of the symptoms of diabetes?

So much of science operates at the proximate level.

Ultimate explanations are what are the Darwinian whys.

Why would the mechanism have evolved to be of that form?

So to fully understand something, you need both levels of explanations.

You need to understand the mechanics of the phenomenon, but then you have to unfold the Darwinian why.

So when the two-year-old is asking why, why, why, in a sense, he is...

He is a Darwinist.

He is trying to seek that ultimate explanation for the phenomenon.

You are just pushing Darwinism.

every chance you get.

Hey, you want to have a soda?

You know, Darwin likes soda.

Let's do one piece of political stuff.

Do it.

What do I think of Trump?

Is that where you're going?

No.

Yeah, Trump.

And

what's happening in the media and with people because of Trump?

The hysteria, the collective Munchausen.

So

in 2010, I think mentioned this briefly on your radio show, in 2010, I wrote a paper in a medical journal where I talked about something called Munchausen syndrome.

Munchausen syndrome is where you've got to squirt on your face.

Why is it that?

I just love you.

I wish I was your neighbor.

I reciprocate

the warm feelings.

So Munchausen syndrome is where someone feigns.

a medical condition so they can garner empathy and sympathy.

Oh, poor me, look at me.

I'm sick.

Munchausen syndrome by proxy is where you take someone who's under your care, your biological child, your pet, your elderly parent, and you harm them so that you can get and garner the sympathy and empathy by proxy because they're damaged, right?

So this is called Bunchhausen syndrome by proxy.

And by the way, the ones who suffer most from that are usually women who harm their biological children to garner the sympathy.

So I had written a paper

talking about the psychiatric disorder.

And then when I started seeing the faux victimhood, the screaming, the fake hysteria associated with Trump, that's when I coined the term collective Bunchhausen.

Because it was a way for people to seek attention in grotesque ways, in truly, what seemed to me in false sounding ways, right?

I mean, I would see on my Facebook page.

people sort of testifying to their looming victimhood.

I am a woman of color.

I attend the University of Maine.

Will it still be safe for me to go to college now that Trump...

Well, what do you think?

There's going to be roadblocks and the Trump storm

patrols are going to be ushering you to gang rape centers.

I mean, what can justify this level of idiotic hysteria?

And so that's why I called it collective Munchausen because it truly was a confabulation of faux hysteria.

What upsets me is that it's one thing for this idiot on my Facebook page to write this stuff.

It's another thing when many of my supposedly sophisticated intellectual friends were succumbing to the same hysteria.

That's what upsets me.

So, I won't mention any names, but one of my good friends, whom you probably know, is one of the type who will say things like, you know, there's going to be food shortages now that Trump.

There's going to be to be a nuclear holocaust.

He's the worst thing since Hitler.

And this is a guy who otherwise you would have thought is a terribly sophisticated and dispassionate thinker.

And so it's a real mystery to me why they are.

What causes that?

What caused that in him?

I think I know who you're talking about.

Very smart guy, very reasoned.

very i mean he's sort of the the model of the very dispassionate right um so i i pitched an idea on the rubin report as to why i think this is happening i think that the intellectual class views trump as a what i call an aesthetic injury right he lived i mean you know how this this beautiful place that you're in i mean it's gorgeous aesthetics right you have it you have a nice aesthetic sense well academics and intellectual types have a sense of the types of aesthetics that they seek in their leader.

Barack Obama, exemplar, fit that.

He's tall.

He's got a beautiful smile.

He speaks with a certain cadence of a Southern Baptist preacher.

He seems noble and majestic.

So it doesn't matter what he says, that most of it is complete bullshit.

But he, my God, he sounds noble and intellectual.

Donald Trump is an ogre.

He speaks in an ugly way.

He's grotesque.

He's a brawler.

He's a New Yorker.

He's swearing.

He's grabbed this, right?

So, on every possible aesthetic metric, he offends my sense of aesthetics.

And so, I think they are disgusted by him.

They are repulsed.

It's visceral.

And that's why it is no longer within the realm of the rational, because they really are responding at the most visceral level.

He disgusts me.

And so, I think that's- Well, there were

because I was against Barack Obama.

And for the same, many of the same reasons, I warned about Donald Trump.

It's don't get into a cult.

Don't get into a cult.

And

I was called a racist for saying, look at the way he views white people in his book.

Well, that's just the way white people will do you.

Well, you know, my grandmother was white, and she was the typical white people.

Well, the church that he used to go to, which was church.

Yeah, right.

Okay.

And to just take those out and say, you know,

what is it?

Does that mean anything?

Racist.

Right.

He's a socialist.

Racist.

And they saw race in everything, even though I think I had some pretty good logical reasons to point out that had nothing to do with race.

That's all they saw.

Is this...

How do they not see that they're doing exactly the same thing?

And

except they don't always have the best solid reasons.

You know, you look at Donald Trump and you can say

he's a mess.

You know,

he's bad for culture.

He's bad for this.

He's bad for that.

But

they are not doing that.

They just despise the man.

How do they walk that?

Well, I think is it just okay?

Well, I think cognitive inconsistency and moral hypocrisy is easy to support when you are so ideologically driven, right?

I mean, there's a thing in behavioral decision-making called axioms of rational choice, which Dick Thaler, by the way, the guy who wrote Nudge, is a big guy of.

So, for example, if I prefer car A to car B and I prefer car B to car C, I should prefer car A to car C.

This is called the transitivity axiom.

If you don't do that, you're being irrational.

So, a hallmark of good thinking is to be cognitively consistent.

And yet these buffoons are never cognitively consistent because they are so parasitized by their ideological disdain towards this man, right?

So for example, when I went on Sam Harris's show, and I'm not saying that the guy that I spoke of a few minutes ago was Sam Harris or not, but when I went on Sam Harris's show, I explained how psychologically people could arrive at choosing Donald Trump in a very rational way.

And let me maybe propose it here.

So there is a decision rule called the lexicographic rule.

The lexicographic rule basically says when you're choosing between two alternatives, look at your most important attribute.

For example, if you're choosing between two cars and if gas efficiency is your most important attribute,

you look at your most important attribute and the car that scores the best on that attribute, you choose.

So let's apply now the lexicographic rule to Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton.

Let's suppose I'm going to use the lexicographic rule and immigration is my most important attribute.

Rightly or wrongly, if I think that Trump performs better on immigration than Hillary Clinton and I use the lexicographic rule, I would very rationally choose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

So here I have offered you a road by which millions of people could have chosen Donald Trump without being redneck KKK members who sleep with their sisters.

Yet these guys all thought that 60 plus million people, all of them, could have only been rabid racists.

And that again disappoints me because you should know better.

You should be smarter than that.

Yet they were parasitized by their disdain for Trump.

And it pisses me off.

I think there was a couple of things going on as well.

And

I misread it

because I thought people were looking for something else.

They weren't.

They were so tired of the lies of people getting away with murder, of being...

called a racist for anything that they had actual belief in.

And they saw this guy who all of a sudden, they

they would, they might have gone ick,

but then they saw he's beating everyone.

He's, if this is working, and everything we've tried doesn't work.

And I don't like that,

but I think he might be able to, because he'll just belly up to the table and, you know, fart and then say, oops, I farted.

Look, you're a clown.

You know what I mean?

Authenticity.

He's authenticity right he's at the same time

at the same time for instance come on

you know sleeping with the stripper

that's a no-brainer okay for donald trump that's a no-brainer of course that happened and we and we all have baked that in you see donald trump strippers affair with him uh probably

but you've baked it in right and so they've taken and they've seen okay, I don't like his lifestyle.

I don't like that, but

I like the fact that he might be lying to me about these things,

but he's saying the truth that I believe to power.

Yes.

And that's more important.

And the fact that he was someone from outside of the establishment, right?

He had the potential to be the disruptor that the zeitgeist needed.

And so for all sorts of very rational

reasons, people chose Trump.

And yet none of my highfalutin academic friends were willing to concede to that.

Everybody who voted for Trump is a rabbit Nazi.

It's ridiculous.

The

media, the way they have...

The media is collapsing.

Collapsing in trust.

There's just a trust implosion.

Media is collapsing.

The old 1950s system of government just doesn't work anymore.

I mean, the Constitution would work because it would say, go back home,

you know, but the but the system, the old bloated 1950s style of committees and all of this crap, it just doesn't work in today's world.

So that's collapsing.

Media is collapsing.

Meanwhile,

new media, or I should say, Google and YouTube and Facebook, that's growing, but it's also starting to get a bad name because it's got all your information.

So,

when an economy goes bad,

these two are gone if this rises up.

But if this rises up and the people are like, I can't trust you at all, these people need these people to protect their golden goose, right?

So, they'll

prop these people up in DC.

These people will create the laws to keep them, you know, isolated, and these people will also join.

So,

I fear a joining of

a big government, big

media, and big tech.

Well,

isn't that one of the reasons why big, all the social media companies haven't received their due regulatory

oversights precisely because they seem to be in bed with big government, right?

Yes.

I often see on Tucker Carlson, he's got this

section or segment on tech insanity or something, where he brings people to ask them, you know, how come these companies are not regulated anymore?

What's your view on that?

Do you think that it is time for the government to step in and make sure that these guys

government regulation?

It's always bad.

I don't think

here's what's bad:

government getting involved.

The free market

will allow it to

burn itself out.

You know what I mean?

There should be no real protection from government, no collusion with government.

Once, I mean, the,

what was the save the internet nonsense that went on, that was written by Google.

Right.

That was written by Google.

What do you think?

Who do you think that's going to protect?

Right.

You know, during the FDR administration, they put great cars out of business, car companies.

Auburn was a great car.

Gone.

Why?

Because the government protected GM, Ford, and Chrysler.

You know, we have the Goodyear blimp because they put other tires that were cheaper and better out of business because they couldn't live to the standards that Goodyear wrote for the government.

But for example, for things like the intrusions that these social media companies do when they remove the voice of someone because they said something that was offensive to to the progressive church.

Do you think that if these social media companies were to become akin to utilities, that might

no, I think that would be bad.

Here's what I think.

They're having it both ways.

These media companies are claiming to be both platforms

and

news sources.

Okay.

You can't be both.

You're not an editor and a platform.

You can't be and have government protection.

If you're a platform, which they claimed, you can't sue me.

We're just a platform.

Everything, we're not responsible for what people are putting on.

Now I'm an editor.

Well, wait a minute.

Then you're not a platform.

Right.

Because now you can be held responsible.

Somehow or another,

through lots of money, they became both.

They have to choose one or the other.

And the free market system will work itself out.

Right now, they're getting protection.

I'm convinced that the people like Peter Thiel or others will find and create a new platform, even if it's in the form of a pirate radio ship.

Voices won't be snuffed out forever.

You're going to go through a period where they're just snuffing them out, snuffing them out until somebody else comes up and says, really?

Because here's this free thing.

Well, I already see it now.

I don't know if...

Do you know what Patreon is?

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

So do you remember the recent stuff that happened?

Yeah.

And all these big players left Patreon.

And now, probably 10 times a week, I will receive some email from a tech company seeking my support because they're trying to build an absolute guaranteed freedom of speech alternative to Patreon.

Correct.

So I think your intuition about the free market resolving it, hopefully, is going to bear.

We are running out of time because I think they're growing at such an exponential rate that,

you know when 5G hits

you know it'll change the world what about if I can ask you a personal question are you are you glad in your in your case that you're on your own now that you have the freedoms that you do that you're not associated with

yeah I'm sure you are yeah yeah

it's been hard I mean look at me and look a picture of me five years ago

it's been hard

and

I think it's only going to get harder for independence

but

not if we can sit down with one another and talk.

People, I think people are sick

of living like this.

They're sick of everything being political.

And I have to hate this person if I, you know, even if I really like him, I can't be friends with him.

I can't.

They're sick of it.

And they just want reasonable people just to have a reasonable conversation.

And what amazes me, and I think I discussed this a bit with some of your colleagues yesterday,

the hunger that people have for these long format intimate conversations is bewildering it's bewildering

because I receive so many emails from people who they'll say things I mean it's really humbling I stopped watching TV all I do now is watch your conversations on your screen like god damn really I have that much but that's the kind of and that that hungry they're starving they're starving and and not the little five minute tidbits these long deep conversations where they're sort of flies on the wall listening into these meaningful conversations i think that i was evidence i think i was first evidence of that um

uh lie in the media when i first started they said you can't have the same background this is on cnn you cannot have the same background for more than seven seconds Because people will

lose interest.

So we have to change something on the screen every seven seconds.

I said, they're not morons or cats.

Or pigeons.

Yeah, or pigeons.

And they said,

I said, we're not going to do that.

And

then I started arguing.

They said, you can't talk about the same topic for more than three minutes.

And I said, that's insanity.

You can't get into anything in less than three.

I went over to Fox.

They told me that I could only talk about something for seven minutes, but I had control of my own show.

I ended up, in the last year and a half of my show, doing 44-minute monologues.

Nobody's ever done that.

If you know that you have to make it interesting and you have something that is different and you're making sense, people will watch it.

They will watch it.

Well, listen, I have to deliver lectures in front of a class three hours at a time, right?

And they could be sitting on their phone and so on.

If I can get a whole bunch of students to just pay attention, then I'm doing that.

Right.

I mean, professors would be out of a job if our only possibility would be to hold attention for three minutes as per CNN.

You have to hold them for three hours.

Right.

It doesn't make sense.

It doesn't make sense.

So,

what a pleasure.

Oh, likewise.

Thank you.

It's finished already.

Wow.

It's finished.

Two hours.

Wow.

Well, thank you.

It's been a pleasure.

I look forward to seeing you again.

Cheers.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.