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The Rubin Report
Exposing the Unexpected Science Behind Why Liberals Get Selfishness Wrong | Gad Saad
01:12:18
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- [00:00]
Dave Rubin
It's a crazy world Crazy world Somebody gotta have the same view.
- [00:12]
Gad Saad
It's a.
- [00:12]
Dave Rubin
Crazy world It's a crazy world Somebody gotta have the same news.
- [00:30]
Gad Saad
All right.
- [00:31]
Dave Rubin
Gad. Not only do you get no introduction, but you said to me right before we begin, what are we going to talk about? And I said, you'll find out once the cameras are rolling.
- [00:39]
Gad Saad
They're rolling.
- [00:40]
Dave Rubin
I've got stuff on this paper. But I guess before we do anything. How are you, my friend? Welcome once again to the free state of Florida. You have fled Canada.
- [00:48]
Gad Saad
I.
- [00:48]
Dave Rubin
Here you are.
- [00:49]
Gad Saad
Yes.
- [00:49]
Dave Rubin
How's life? How's life?
- [00:51]
Gad Saad
Life is good. I don't know if you know, but I'm. I mean, while I'm living in Canada, I'm officially affiliated with a school in Michigan for the next year, Northwood University. They've given me all the freedom that I can hope for in order to be able to create and produce work on my next book. So I couldn't be happier, other than to have the house right next to yours.
- [01:11]
Dave Rubin
How does it feel to be out of Canada? Because Canada is extremely weird right now.
- [01:15]
Unknown
I mean, every time I put you.
- [01:16]
Dave Rubin
On the show, something weird is happening in Canada. But it seems that the weirdness has sort of now overtaken the streets almost at an endless level, particularly Montreal, where you guys are, but also Toronto and a couple other places.
- [01:29]
Gad Saad
So many places, as you said, are very bad, but Montreal is certainly arguably the worst place, at least from a Jewish perspective. I just published an article in the New York Post on the unique dynamics of antisemitism in Montreal. It's something that, regrettably, I'd been warning about people for many, many years. The writing was on the wall, and it's really gotten now so bad that it really is a godsend that I don't have to walk in on campus. I'm not even sure how it would be possible to do it now, because.
- [01:59]
Dave Rubin
Your university, Concordia, is like kind of ground zero for this lunacy.
- [02:04]
Gad Saad
It really is. So for at least 20 years, maybe more, it's been colloquially referred to as Gaza University. So you may remember in 2002, Netanyahu was actually shut down. Maybe one of the early cases of cancel culture. At the time, I was at UC Irvine, so I wasn't there on campus, but this has been a brewing problem that the administration has chosen to ignore. As a matter of fact, as I was trying to decide whether to take a leave and so on, one of the senior administrators looked at me straight in the face and said, there's absolutely Zero Jew hatred at my university, at our university. A few days later, the president of the university was summoned to Parliament Hill to admit that there is Jew hatred. So it's the old ostrich parasitic syndrome. You bury your head in the sand and hopefully the problem will go away. It doesn't.
- [02:53]
Dave Rubin
Let me throw to a quick video of one of the protests in Canada.
- [03:13]
Gad Saad
I think if I heard what they said, they said, God. Say God. So it's a religious cry. And usually many of these religious cries end up downstream with bad things happening to Jews.
- [03:27]
Dave Rubin
Right? So you're saying this stuff with a smile on your face, and you usually have a smile on your face. And you wrote a book about happiness. But you've seen this before. I mean, with. We've obviously been on the show a million times, and people have heard your story about growing up in Lebanon and surviving the civil war and everything else. But what do you see as the future for Canada? America seems to be turning around right now. We seem like we got to the precipice, we looked into the abyss, and we're coming back. I don't see that moment for you guys to see.
- [03:55]
Gad Saad
Yeah, you're exactly right. You really needed a cataclysmic figure like Donald Trump to be able to turn things around. Now, anybody who comes in is going to be better than Justin Trudeau. So there is going to be an improvement of sorts, but it certainly will not be anything like what Donald Trump has been able to now invigorate and so on. So I'm cautiously optimistic that things will improve. But unfortunately, the demographic realities in Canada in general and in Quebec and Montreal in particular, are so astounding that I don't see how. I mean, it'll just be a slow walk into the abyss of infinite lunacy, really.
- [04:36]
Dave Rubin
That's gotta be tough to sit with as a Canadian. I mean, you lived through this once already.
- [04:41]
Gad Saad
Lebanon was a Christian country within our lifetime, Right. Lebanon was about 65% Christian. And now it's flipped the other way around. It's about 65% Muslim. And it didn't take 500 years. It took, you know, 40, 50 years. And so things can quickly change. And usually you can predict. There's a book by a gentleman by the name of. He's a missionary from Africa. His name is Peter Hammond. He wrote a book a few years ago where he looked at what happens to a society as a function of the percentage of people who are of the Islamic faith. You know, 0 to 2%, or they're just a exotic minority. 3 to 5%. They're a bit more politically, you know, motivated, but they're still pretty quiet. And you can just, you could predict it as quick, as easily as the trajectory of diabetes. Right. With more Islam comes more problems. And at one point you close your eyes, you open them and then the whole society is Islamic.
- [05:41]
Dave Rubin
What would you do if you were Prime Minister of Canada?
- [05:44]
Gad Saad
So certainly no one can stay in Canada who does not share the foundational deontological principles of Canada. Right. So there can't be a two tier system where we can criticize vigorously any religion except one, because that would be Islamophobic. There is a motion that was passed at the table called M103 that, you know, can make it very difficult to criticize Islam because you would be spreading hate and division and lack of community cohesion. And that was under Justin Trudeau. So I would certainly halt immigration from any society that does not share our values. Look, I'll give you an analogy from evolutionary psychology. And when you're choosing a mate, one of the best ways to ensure that you're going to have a successful marriage is what's called assortative mating, meaning birds of a feather flock together. If I share the same values as my mate, I'm much more likely to have. It's not difficult to understand, Right. Well, you could apply that exact same mechanism. I call it cultural homophily, cultural liking of similar others. Right. So you're much more likely to integrate people from Denmark or Sweden or Estonia, not because they may share your skin you or not, but because they're likely to share some of those foundational values that the west was built on. Regrettably, many other societies don't. And so I would certainly reduce that greatly. And I would very vigorously deport anyone who adheres to those kinds of antithetical principles.
- [07:14]
Dave Rubin
Do you think the average Canadian is just kind of sitting around like Trump save us at this point? I mean, Trudeau showed up to Mar a Lago just a couple days ago and basically kissed the ring. And now it sounds like even he's going to do something as it pertains to the border and everything else.
- [07:28]
Gad Saad
I hate to say this because I like to always be smiling and optimistic, but I also like, like to be truthful. I'm not very optimistic for the following reason. So I can walk in my neighborhood in Montreal, which is there are a lot of Jews, there are a lot of people who support my message, who come up to me, who are fans. Dear Dr. Saad, I love you for reasons X, Y, Z the next question I ask him. Do you mind if I ask who you vote for? Oh, I voted for the Liberal Party so that disconnect. I love you Dr. Saad, but I voted for the Liberal Party and I will continue to do so for the next 17 generations and there will never be any autocorrection in my political voting behavior. How could you resolve the problem if I can never get you to change your behavior?
- [08:13]
Unknown
When Rumble first started in 2013, they.
- [08:15]
Dave Rubin
Built the platform for the small creator.
- [08:17]
Unknown
They didn't censor or have biases. They were fair and treated all creators equally. No one thought platforms would censor political conversation or censor opinions around Covid. But they did. Facebook admitted they fell to pressure from the Biden and Harris administration. Of course, Rumble did not.
- [08:32]
Gad Saad
They held the line.
- [08:33]
Unknown
They're attacked daily for giving us a voice to talk to you. They're attacked in corporate media. They're attacked by governments like France. They're attacked by brand advertisers who refuse to work with them. Corporate America is fighting to remove free speech while Rumble is fighting to keep it. Rumble won't survive with brand advertisers alone, they don't get much of it. So watching our show is the number one way we can ask for support from you. But if you really believe in this fight and you have the means, one major way you can help Rumble survive is by joining Rumble Premium. Join the community that believes in the First Amendment and believes in our human right to free speech. Rumble is offering $10 off with promo code Rubin when you purchase an annual subscription. Go to rumble.com premium rubin and use code rubin. Like I said, if you have the means and believe in the cause, now is the time to join Rumble Premium. If you don't have the means, we're just happy if you watch us right here on Rumble.
- [09:25]
Dave Rubin
So do you see any way, I mean, not just with Canada, but with say, Germany and France and Denmark and some of these other countries going through this? Do you see any solution that ultimate is not violent to this? Because it seems to me that the people who either have suicidal empathy or ostrich parasitic syndrome, that it's almost too late. It might have not been too late 10 years ago to have dealt with this appropriately, but now, as you've mentioned, it's a numbers game that I don't see a real way to get out of.
- [09:54]
Gad Saad
I don't either. And when I, you know, you and I have known each other now for probably about a decade and certainly a decade before that. If not, if not More. I've been saying that if we continue on this trajectory, we're going to have a repeat of the Beirut that I escaped. And people would say, that's such an exaggeration. That's so hyperbolic. That's so silly. I understand you had, you know, this childhood trauma. You know, don't project it onto the West. It'll never happen. Well, you have to have the imagination to be able to extrapolate these patterns. Right. It won't happen next year, it won't happen in 10 years. But give it enough time, and it has to happen. There's no alt. Right. So we won't amputate your legs the first day you get diabetes, but let it rage far enough and it will lead to the amputation of your limbs. That's what's going to happen.
- [10:39]
Dave Rubin
So what do you make about what happened here in America? Because, again, I think we really looked at the abyss and decided not to do it. I think that's really what this election was.
- [10:47]
Gad Saad
So I'm very optimistic that, of course, I'm elated that Trump won. But I keep. Right away, I started warning people, don't be complacent, because that could just be a little bleep. But then the woks are come back even stronger than ever before. So it took about 50 to 100 years for many of these cultural values to lead us to where we were. Hopefully it won't take 50 to 100 hundred years to reverse them, but it won't begin and end with Trump.
- [11:14]
Dave Rubin
So, evolutionarily, what do you do if you're, if you're on the winning side right now, which, let's say we are, people watching this are on the winning side of this thing. We want to widen the tent as much as possible, but we don't want to dilute it with, say, the people that have been pushing all these bad ideas for so long. How do you decide where to put the markers on that? Because I've been seeing a lot of this lately. Suddenly the progressives that had everything to do with all of this are pretending they had nothing to do with it and they're trying to make amends. I'm all about making amends. That's fine, but I just don't know that we're there yet in the game.
- [11:45]
Gad Saad
Well, occasional cortex removed her pronouns, right?
- [11:48]
Dave Rubin
Yeah.
- [11:48]
Gad Saad
So. So, by the way, I'm AOC for.
- [11:50]
Dave Rubin
Those who are not playing along with your humor. But literally, I mean, right after the election, she removes her pronouns. It's like, so what was this? You're all going to pretend you had nothing to do?
- [11:58]
Gad Saad
Well, it's exactly. I mean, I think we've both used the term performative. Right? Yeah. That demonstrates to you that it's right. I didn't in the darkness of the night when no one was looking, remove tweets where I defended freedom of speech. I defended them yesterday, I defend them today, and I'll defend them tomorrow.
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Dave Rubin
Right.
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Gad Saad
If you truly have intern internalize those principles, you never take them off your bio. They're part of your foundational principles. So the fact that she removed them exactly when she realized that the winds were changing demonstrates that it's complete nonsense. But to your point, and you're gracious to admit that, I think we have to have a door for redemption for people. Right. If you say, nah, nah, nah, you lost, now get lost, that's probably not a good idea. So hopefully we can strike the right balance between the righteous indignation that we felt, but also being welcoming to those who want to join the tent.
- [12:48]
Dave Rubin
Right. And that's never easy when you've had people calling you a Nazi for 10 years and then suddenly be like, okay, okay. Because it's weird. Because right now what seems to be happening is it's the people who lost who are asking for unity. And you'd think it would be the other way around. And yet there's a strange backwardness to all of this.
- [13:04]
Gad Saad
And I love speaking of sort of being gracious, although I think it was a bit Machiavellian, the amount of, you know, glee by proxy that I felt when Mika and the Morning Joe went down to Margo to kiss the ring while he's kind of caressing their hair, going, good boy, good girl. I thought, oh, man, I was. I was happy all day long.
- [13:26]
Dave Rubin
Right. And all it does is buy it buys them maybe a couple more months of having the job until the network gets sold or.
- [13:31]
Gad Saad
But during those couple of months, they make more money than I make 10 years as a professor. So something is off in the cosmic justice therein.
- [13:38]
Dave Rubin
Lies thereof. That's the. Why didn't you become a cable news host?
- [13:41]
Gad Saad
You had to. I'm hoping that our mutual friend Elon buys MSNBC and I get the 9 o'clock slot.
- [13:48]
Dave Rubin
What do you think is going on with Elon? That's actually where I wanted to go next. I mean, he's been a big supporter of yours and he's sharing your stuff all the time and he's telling people to buy your books and all of those things. This is a guy who was Largely apolitical two years ago. What do you make of sort of the psychological makeup of someone who goes all in to the extent that he has?
- [14:05]
Gad Saad
So Elon is a visionary. Right. He can put patterns together. He can see where things are going. And for various reasons, some of which are personal reasons, that happened within his own family's dynamic, which I think at first he shared it privately with some of us, but I think now he's come out and shared it. His son became his daughter and disavowed him and so on. He suddenly was kind of awakened out of the stupor that many people had been in. Right. Where, you know, you. You're busy with your daily life, and few people are as busy as Elon and that. But. But when he saw the problem, when he recognized what it is, when he recognized some of the people who are offering solutions, including yours truly, I think he went all in. And that's what Elon.
- [14:47]
Dave Rubin
But what do you think that is? What do you think it is about him as a person? Because a lot of people see the problems and they bury their head in the sand. What do you think it is about the type of person. I've been very interested in that lately because I'm seeing a lot of people suddenly wake up to the things that we've been talking about for years. And by the way, people were talking about them well before I was or you or anything else. But the type of person who's just like, I see something, I'm going to.
- [15:09]
Gad Saad
Do it, so I'm going to. I recently did a clip on my show where I said, what do Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Donald Trump have in common? Now, the premise of that show was authenticity, that they're all authentic. But to your question, I think they're also all honey badgers. Right. And as we know colloquially, honey badgers don't give a f. Right. So Elon sees it to your point, just like others see it. But the others will modulate their behavior, but not does. I mean, Elon not only has FU money. I mean, he's got. Got cosmic FU money. And so he doesn't need to modulate or temper his speech or his behavior.
- [15:50]
Dave Rubin
Sure. But plenty of people do. And they, you know, I know several other billionaires, and they're very quiet about all of this stuff because they suddenly feel like they have more to lose than anyone else.
- [15:59]
Gad Saad
You don't want to mention any names, right?
- [16:00]
Dave Rubin
No names.
- [16:01]
Gad Saad
Okay. Although many of the.
- [16:03]
Dave Rubin
I'm not talking about Teal, though, because everyone always thinks I'M talking about Teal.
- [16:05]
Gad Saad
I'm trying to think who you mean.
- [16:07]
Dave Rubin
He's on the Elon side.
- [16:08]
Gad Saad
But a lot of the. This is not my term. I heard it first from Ayaan Hirsi Ali and maybe it's not her term, but a lot of the tech bros have come around. Right.
- [16:15]
Dave Rubin
Ye.
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Gad Saad
David Sachs and.
- [16:17]
Dave Rubin
Well, it's easier now. Sax, I think was one of the leaders of it too.
- [16:20]
Gad Saad
Yeah.
- [16:20]
Dave Rubin
But it's. But it's a hell of a lot easier. But.
- [16:22]
Gad Saad
But from your view, without mentioning any names, there are others that you would love to see them throw their name into the. Their hat, into the arena. But they're not doing it. Sure.
- [16:30]
Dave Rubin
Well. Or that. That are doing it now when it's safe. And again, I want to be welcoming to all of that, but I think there's. I'm just curious about the psychological makeup. You know, if you have two people who have the exact same bank statements and roughly the same lives, yet one is willing to walk right into the fire and the other one's always waiting for the guy to walk into the fire. I just think there's something just Honey badger.
- [16:51]
Gad Saad
They're absolute honey badgers. Right. Joe Rogan does not. And the lead, and we both know him personally, he doesn't give a damn. He won't modulate a single syllable to please or placate anybody. Certainly Donald Trump doesn't. First reaction of Donald Trump when he shot in the head is fight, fight, fight. So I think they all have those qualities. And I always say, by the way, the trajectory of history, whether it be for the good or the bad, is always led by people who are not fence sitters. Right. It's not the equivocators and the. Let's see things on both sides. It's the guys who see something for better or worse and say, I'm taking that road. And so Elon epitomizes that more than most people.
- [17:34]
Unknown
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- [18:56]
Dave Rubin
What do you think all the craziness that we've seen over the last couple of years means as it relates to truth in general? It seems to me that this had to have happened that Trump losing or us all feeling like the west is done and all freedom of speech is over and all these things, it would have been so out of whack with truth that it couldn't have worked. In a way, I mean that in sort of like an existence.
- [19:18]
Gad Saad
Yeah, but it amazes me that we even got that far right. For some of your viewers who may not know of some of my previous interventions in 2017, both Jordan and I appeared in front of the Canadian Senate separately on separate days where we had to use all of our professorial expertise to provide the imprimatur that. No, no, there really is something called male and female in my case. I use the the framework of evolutionary psychology.
- [19:50]
Dave Rubin
And you had a bow tie on, if I'm not mistaken.
- [19:51]
Gad Saad
I did have a bow tie.
- [19:52]
Dave Rubin
So you looked very professional indeed.
- [19:54]
Gad Saad
Thank you for remembering. And by the way, well, I shouldn't mention this because I don't usually release any images of my wife, but you could see her in a few. But people don't know that it's my wife.
- [20:05]
Dave Rubin
Well, you do realize we put this on the Internet.
- [20:07]
Gad Saad
Oh, now I'm screwed. Okay, well, it's okay. But anyways, they're probably going to see her tomorrow at Margo. So there we go. Maybe the cat will be out of the back. So the fact that in 2017 we had to appear in front of. I don't know if you actually watch my testimony.
- [20:22]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, I know I did. We played clips of it.
- [20:24]
Gad Saad
Okay. But when they were asking me questions after I gave my. The smugness, the obnoxiousness, it's difficult to, you know, if you told me that that was in the 16th century when we were going to be throwing, you know, prospective witches into the pool to see if they swim, I would think it would be ridiculous. And so to your point, it shows you the fallibility of the human mind that Even in the 21st century, once those parasitic ideas get in, even the smartest of people can become.
- [20:55]
Dave Rubin
So what does that tell you then about suicidal empathy and sort of where or how it relates to group think in general? That these people with a lot, you know, they tell you how great they are while they're also trying to get you fired and all of these things, they seemingly only surround themselves with people who are exactly the same and then also are always trying to take out the rather mild mannered professor who's just saying there's differences between boys and girls.
- [21:18]
Gad Saad
Exactly. So I'll give you example. That just happened a few days ago. I put out a tweet, a post. Now we can't say tweet anymore. A post where I said, dear Donald Trump, could you please invade Canada? It won't require more than 10 to 15 men to do so. Yeah, right. There was a whole movement that was started, undoubtedly, including some of my, my colleagues, seeking to have me fired from Concordia because I'm a Canadian citizen who's arguing for the overthrow of the Canadian government.
- [21:53]
Dave Rubin
Right. When you have, I'm calling for it, but I'm not a Canadian.
- [21:56]
Gad Saad
There you go. So to imagine that someone could be so unhinged, so humorless, I mean, if it wasn't already clear that me saying to Donald Trump, please invade Canada was a joke.
- [22:06]
Dave Rubin
Right.
- [22:07]
Gad Saad
If I then add, it won't take more than 10 to 15 soldiers to do so. In what world should a professor not realize that I'm being facetious? But you can go and see many, many taggings of my university where they're saying, how can you tolerate such a guy who is seeking the overthrow of the government?
- [22:26]
Dave Rubin
So the people that are going for you on this, do you think they mean it or do you think they.
- [22:32]
Gad Saad
Believe what they are saying?
- [22:34]
Dave Rubin
Right.
- [22:34]
Gad Saad
So I'm of two minds and here let me introduce an evolutionary twist to it. Robert Trivers. Has his name ever come up?
- [22:43]
Dave Rubin
I don't think so.
- [22:43]
Gad Saad
Robert Tr. I think he's still alive. He's arguably one of the greatest evolutionary biologists since Darwin. That's saying a lot. One of the theories that he came up with was to explain why self deception has evolved. Why is it that human beings. So to your question, do I really believe my lies or not? And he proposed an unbelievably elegant explanation for self deception. So you and I are caught up in an evolutionary arms race. I'm trying to manipulate you to serve my best interest, and you're trying to read my cues to see if I am trying to manipulate you or not. Usually when we engage in deception, there are micro cues that we emit that allows my interlocutor to know that I am BSing. Now imagine if I could shut off those cues of deception so that you can no longer read them in me. Well, the best way for me to shut those off off is to believe the lie first. Right? Or as we both are fans of.
- [23:41]
Dave Rubin
It'S not a lie if you believe it.
- [23:43]
Gad Saad
It's in my first book, by the way, the Evolutionary Basis of Consumption.
- [23:46]
Dave Rubin
And you're wearing velvet, and I'm wearing. To be ensconced in velvet.
- [23:50]
Gad Saad
I'm kind of.
- [23:51]
Dave Rubin
You're basically the George Costanza of our culture.
- [23:54]
Gad Saad
Thinner and taller and much better looking and with more hair.
- [24:00]
Dave Rubin
That's what he would have said.
- [24:02]
Gad Saad
But. No, but seriously. So to your original question, I think that consciously they will tell you that they believe it. And the deep recesses of their minds, when they put their head on the pillow late at night, they know they're full of bs.
- [24:21]
Unknown
So what does that tell you about.
- [24:22]
Dave Rubin
The type of people that will literally, in the name of tolerance, import the people that will kill them? I mean, what's the.
- [24:28]
Gad Saad
They're diabolical. They're evil. They're pigs, they're buffoons, they're imbeciles, they're the Democrat Party. They're Justin Trudeau. I mean, that's. That's history, right? There's always two camps. Truth and light and debauchery and degeneracy. But at least Biden has pardon. So. So we have that at least.
- [24:48]
Dave Rubin
Well, that's a good. That's a good philosophical question for you. So, you know, when I was covering it on the show, there were sort of two pieces to this. One is that his son has done. Done terrible things. I mean, you know, beyond the firearm verification, that that was clearly illegal, you know, forging something. And then obviously there's all the stuff with Beesman, the smoking crack on camera, and there's definitely some stuff with prostitutes. Probably overstate. There's a slew of Things that the sun did.
- [25:13]
Gad Saad
Right.
- [25:13]
Dave Rubin
And many of them are probably connected to shady things that Joe Biden did. And he also pretends he doesn't know anything and all that stuff, but it seemed that there were two pieces to it. One piece was all the bad things that he did. And, but, but what I saw most people focusing on was that, that Joe lied about it. I thought that was interesting. You guys are still upset about this man lying. I mean, everything about these people is a lie.
- [25:35]
Gad Saad
It's amazing.
- [25:36]
Dave Rubin
So what, what do you do with that? That, that we are surrounded. I mean, maybe we're at the end of it now, but we have been surrounded by just like an endless clown car of liars.
- [25:44]
Gad Saad
Not just liars. I mean, I truly, I, earlier today I retweeted something about Biden and I said they really, they're a family of degenerates. Right. I mean, they exude. Right. I mean, you look at, and, and again, look, I'm Canadian. I, I don to keep reminding people that. So I don't vote here. I don't have a direct dog in the fight. But if you're coming with universalist principles, you look at Trump's kids and you look at Biden's kids, right? You look at, you know who in Arabic you say Shaksi. Like you have dignity and personhood. Which family exudes that more? And yet you've got all of my colleagues who are supposed to have the progressive lisp and put the finger out when they sip. And yet they will tell you that the Bidens represent American ideals, whereas Trump is this contagious buffoon. It's grotesque. It's unbelievable.
- [26:34]
Dave Rubin
Well, I had Laura Trump sitting in that chair just a couple days ago. So I know his children fairly well and his children in law. And it's like, these are good people. Well, maybe that's an interesting thing to discuss. That you have somebody who's gruff on the outside was the only person that could have done the thing that we needed to be done.
- [26:54]
Gad Saad
Yeah, I think we probably discussed this in the past, this distinction between, between affective processing and cognitive processing. Right. Most of the people that have this aversion to Trump, it's because of the affective based processing, right. They expect a leader to speak with a certain cadence, with a certain affectation, with a certain, you know, eloquence. And Trump is not necessarily the sort of the most sophisticated speaker. And so. But on the other hand, Barack Obama, I'm speaking now as them, he's tall, he has a radiant smile, he speaks with the cadence of a Southern Baptist minister. He has a mellifluous voice. That's enough for me. I'm already intoxicated with the Obama wine spirits. Right. On the other hand, Trump is grotesque. That's where it ends with most of these people. And actually, and I don't think they'll mind me saying this, I was speaking to Trump's team before he got elected and he was going to possibly come on my show. And I completely understood that after he went on Joe Rogan, there's no need to come on my little tiny show. But one of the things that one of his aides had told me, well, what would you talk about? And so what I had pitched was exactly that point, which is I think if people get to know him in the way that at the time, the Rogan thing had not happened yet. But like how when he went on Gutfeld, where he wasn't sucking all of the air in the room, where you just saw him as a actually pretty cool guy, really nice and personable with a very good sense of humor. If you can get people over that original aversion, people might actually like him. And I think part of the reason he won, maybe not hardly all of it. Imagine how many people saw him on Joe Rogan and said, wait a minute, I've been sold a complete bill of goods here, that he's Hitler, he's disgusting, he's actually a really cool guy. And so I think people are coming around. But boy, we came close to losing it.
- [28:50]
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Dave Rubin
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Dave Rubin
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- [29:41]
Dave Rubin
How worried are you that things are just going to get even wackier for the next 50 some odd days.
- [29:46]
Gad Saad
Oh, here, yeah.
- [29:47]
Dave Rubin
Meaning before he takes office. It seems like there's a lot of reordering of the world. I mentioned Canada's already doing things differently and Trudeau is coming to kiss the ring. They're due. He put out a great post about getting the hostages back. I don't know if you saw that. That was today, from when we're airing this. Like, it seems like good things are happening. But are you worried that the system always has some tricks? I mean, behavioral psychologist, it's like evolutionary biology. The system doesn't just give up. Right?
- [30:13]
Gad Saad
Yeah. As we know, the old maxim, the wounded animal is most dangerous just at the end. So I suspect there'll be some kind of response. 1. Actually, we were listening to a podcast coming down here from Palm beach, and they were talking about Doge and how likely will they be able, Vivek and Elon, to implement some of this stuff? And I thought that they raised some good points in that. Well, maybe I'll turn it to you. Do you think that they will be able to institute the kinds of changes that are needed? You think so?
- [30:48]
Dave Rubin
Yes, I think they can do it, and I think they can do it.
- [30:51]
Gad Saad
Argentina level.
- [30:52]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, I think they have a limited window of time that they can do it in, but I think if they are ready and there's just no reason to think that Elon will not be ready to do it, and Vivek. That they will just go in and within weeks, you fire thousands of people. You send.
- [31:06]
Gad Saad
I heard.
- [31:06]
Dave Rubin
Was it Vivek that was talking about it the other day? You basically take 7,000 FBI agents and that are all in D.C. for no reason and send them back. They're police officers for the most part. Send them back to the states that need them. I think things can happen, happen very, very quickly. And they. And they have an absolute mandate to do it.
- [31:24]
Unknown
I mean, it's either now or never.
- [31:25]
Dave Rubin
I guess I put it that way.
- [31:26]
Gad Saad
And I think they're supposed to disband the whole thing on the anniversary, the 250th anniversary. So it's like, right. So they basically 18 months clock, right.
- [31:34]
Dave Rubin
So they want, you know, 450 days to do it on July 4th, the 250th anniversary of the United States. I mean, it's pretty beautiful.
- [31:41]
Gad Saad
See, I think 26. It was Sachs who said it on the podcast. I was watching that it won't be as big, big as the Argentina fixings, and it won't be as big as what Milton Friedman would have hoped for. But it will be a lot better than what it is now. And I think that's a conservative but reasonable prediction to make.
- [32:02]
Dave Rubin
Well, it's interesting that we never fix any of these things. Right. So at least we have a chance to fix some of these things. That's pretty good.
- [32:09]
Gad Saad
And as you know, by the way, I mean, Canada is probably the worst when it comes to a lot of these inefficiencies. We're a socialist country, social welfare country. So every single thing that I could compare, how it was 40, 50 years ago when I first moved to Canada to now healthcare, how quickly we remove the snow when it snows in Montreal, every single social service has gotten exponentially worse over the past four or five decades. Why? Because we know exactly what happens to the social welfare state. Eventually you do run out of other people's money. So I'd like to think that there's going to be an autocorrection and also these nations, but we'll have to wait and see.
- [32:49]
Dave Rubin
So we talked about the sort of misguided motives, let's say, of some of these people, but then someone like Trudeau, if he. If he was hearing you say that right then and there, do you think in his heart of hearts he would disagree with that and say, no, no, we. Things are actually better and we don't have Hamas members running on the streets, and we do get the snow out pretty quickly and blah, blah, blah.
- [33:08]
Gad Saad
Yeah, I actually truly think he is beyond repair parasitized. I don't think he. And this is completely speculative, so I don't know him personally, so I'm just specul. I don't think he's an innately evil, diabolical guy. Many of the people that we both know who despise Trudeau will actually disagree with me. They think he's a, you know, evil dictator who's trying.
- [33:31]
Dave Rubin
Boosom strikes me as more than that. Trudeau. I agree as more of like an. Like an utter buffoon. He's a buffoon who has been taken to evil or something.
- [33:38]
Gad Saad
Exactly. Right. So his brain is literally made of Jello. Right. And so because it's Jello, I can parasitize it with ease. He comes from. From a milieu in Montreal that is very, very kind of uppity progressive. So all of the parasitic ideas that I would have enumerated in the parasitic mind are exactly what he has been inculcated with. He has swam in that educational ecosystem. And so what do you expect him to come out as? He's going to be a product of his Education. So I think. But at this point, he is so brainwashed in that stuff. Stuff that there is nothing. There's no amount of evidence that I could ever show him that suggests that he would make an autocorrection. I'll give you an example. A few years ago, they had caught some ISIS guys, or I can't remember what it was. And his response as Prime Minister was, well, clearly this is someone that we have failed in being able.
- [34:39]
Dave Rubin
Oh, I remember this.
- [34:40]
Gad Saad
Remember that one years ago. So how could that be, right? I mean, how much evidence would you need?
- [34:45]
Dave Rubin
Meaning it was a Canadian that went to. Wasn't it a Canadian that went to Afghanistan.
- [34:49]
Gad Saad
Went to Afghanistan, joined isis and the blame, suicidal empathy lay with us, right? It wasn't. We could look at him and say, what a pig. We gave you all the opportunities in the world and you did this. It's. What is it that we did wrong, that we failed him? Which, by the way, it's that exact same reflex that applies for soft on crime, criminal thing, right? Let's not punish the criminal because he's already a victim of society. Now you're going to incarcerate him for having just raped seven or eight women. That would be so grossly unfair. Just give him a 74th chance and maybe this time around he'll turn his life around.
- [35:23]
Dave Rubin
You think if we were doing like a Greek mythology version of this, that the gods would be looking at us like, what a bunch of idiots?
- [35:28]
Gad Saad
Exactly.
- [35:29]
Dave Rubin
Like it would be something like that.
- [35:31]
Gad Saad
They would say, you deserve all of the calamity and the pestilence and the locusts that can befall you.
- [35:39]
Dave Rubin
So how do we restore, let's say, un suicidal empathy if a huge amount of the world, even though clearly people are waking up to it, and maybe some tides are turning, but in the countries that it hasn't turned just yet, or even, as we said, the United States is still in a precarious position here. How do you wake people up about it?
- [35:59]
Unknown
And then what do you do?
- [36:00]
Dave Rubin
What do you actually do to right the ship?
- [36:03]
Gad Saad
So I'll give you first kind of the academic answer. It's not that empathy is an inherently bad emotion to have. Right? We've evolved the reflex of empathy because we're a social species, right? It's a good idea for me to be able to put myself in your shoes, to be able to empathize and sympathize with your plight. It builds bonds and so on. So that makes perfect sense.
- [36:27]
Dave Rubin
But it shouldn't be the most important thing in your life. Is that what you're telling?
- [36:30]
Gad Saad
Well, number one. And it shouldn't be directed to the wrong targets, right? So yes, it would be great if Guatemalan immigrants had the same opportunities as people in the US But I don't give them higher, you know, on the pecking order than American vets who went and lost limbs fighting wars to keep the United States free. Right. I would love for all children to be safe and happy, but I'm much more likely to jump in front of a truck to save my own biological children than random children. That doesn't make me a callous person. It makes makes me an evolutionary animal that has evolved the strategic ability to met out my investments in ways that advance my genetic interests. That doesn't make me evil or diabolical, Right? It's called evolution. So I think that once we're ape. So now I gave the evolutionary answer, but the simple answer is look, follow common sense, right? What's the point of having national borders if national borders are meant to be open and no human is illegal? Those two statements don't make sense. You can't be both averse virgin and be pregnant. Once you've become pregnant, you've lost the title of virgin, right? So you can't have a country that allows 10, 15, 20 million people to come in, most of whom are lovely and want to work and so on. But no, you're violating a deontological principle in the sanctity of. So I think people realize that deep down they just need folks like us to give them the courage to speak, speak out.
- [38:05]
Dave Rubin
And then, okay, so we get a bunch of them to speak out, they start waking up. What do you want to happen to the institutions? Do you want the institutions to be reformed or do you want them to burn?
- [38:13]
Gad Saad
At this point, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that we're going to burn down all the institutions. I think, as I said earlier when I said hopefully it won't take 50 to 100 years to reverse all the ideological trends, I think from within we could do a lot of good, right? So, I mean, because look, think about it, even at my university, which is supremely woke, I don't mean northward where I'm at now, I mean Concordia, it's supremely woke, it's incredibly progressive, it's very socialist.
- [38:40]
Dave Rubin
We'll play some B roll of some of the things that are going on at Concordia while you're talking.
- [38:43]
Gad Saad
Right now, it's very, very driven by Islamists and anti Judaism, Jewish stuff and so on, but yet 95% of the students that go there just want to study neuroscience and business and classics and they just want. Right, but it's a small minority that keeps the rest of us hostage. Right. So I, I think you can pretty quickly change the ecosystem to reinvigorate reason and logic and science into the institutions. I don't think you have to burn them all down and start from zero, although there are some institutions that are starting from zero. University of Austin. Right. So I think you can follow both paths equally well.
- [39:23]
Dave Rubin
Are you afraid that we'll start doing some things right here in America? Say deporting some of the people who are radically anti American and don't have, you know, aren't even supposed to be here in the first place? And so we start cleaning some things. But that be. The optics of it will just not be good. There will be bad optics. That's just part of reality. They're going to grab some of the wrong people. There will be some situation with a mother and a young child separated. There will be issues, whatever they might be. And that because still so many of us put empathy in such a high spot on that hierarchy, it'll derail the.
- [39:55]
Gad Saad
I very much worry about that. Yeah, exactly. Because I think even someone who is as much of a catalyst for change as Trump, and he is a once in a multiple generation kind of figure, I think even someone like him might lose his resolve once you start getting the crying children and so on. In an ideal world, if I am emperor of the universe for a year, I would shut off my empathy mod module and I would make sure to get it done whether he's able to or not. I don't know. I'm cautiously optimistic.
- [40:26]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, it seems to me that that's going to be the tricky part that they're going to start doing. Doing it. Most people will be for it. That's why he won. There's a mandate. Then there's going to be some weird story and we. And the mainstream media has lost cred. So that's good. Yes, but they'll start getting people to freak out.
- [40:42]
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- [41:40]
Dave Rubin
What else do you make of just sort of like the general sex war that seems to be happening right now? That, that it's largely women who were supporting Kamala and the Democrats and it was largely men, obviously. Obviously not totally. That we're more willing to shift towards Trump. That there seems to be like a some play there, maybe because of years of wokeness and everyone's got confused genitals and everything.
- [42:04]
Gad Saad
Well, I mean, yeah, this is something that has been, I've been fighting this kind of stuff not just in the political arena but in academia where. So you're talking specifically just about the gender gap, political voting difference or.
- [42:17]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, that men and women, you can present them with the exact same current events and they're just, just in many ways looking at them completely differently.
- [42:25]
Gad Saad
So I think part of that stemmed from the kind of second and third wave feminism of we need to have a woman break the glass ceiling. So a lot of my academic colleagues who are women and even some of the male feminist sneaky effort colleagues, they were very excited about the prospect of, you know, creating history by having a woman. I think that that could be easily defeated. I think. Which one was greater gender difference? Was it more women voted for Kamala than men voted for Trump or was it roughly the same gender difference?
- [43:00]
Dave Rubin
Off the top of my head, I don't know. But it's got to be more women.
- [43:03]
Gad Saad
Voted, more women than that. Yeah. I think it's also driven by a lot of the emotional based processing. Right. She was the. Even though she was hardly joyful, but she was the party of joy and it was going to be fun and exciting. And maybe here I'm playing into stereotypes, maybe it's a bit easier for women to get channeled into emotional based processing. But if you're asking me to predict whether in the future these patterns will remain the same, I suspect that probably women will continue to be more likely to vote Democrat than Republican for the foreseeable future.
- [43:37]
Dave Rubin
And you think that that's directly connected? Is that directly connected to empathy, like misguided empathy, or is it directly connected to. Is there some hunter gatherer portion of that?
- [43:46]
Gad Saad
I don't know about hunter gatherer. So there are several ways I can go with this. So, for example, socialism, right? When you hear the idea that when you. I don't know who first said it, you know, if in your 20s, you're not a socialist, you don't have.
- [44:01]
Dave Rubin
In your 20s, if you're not a liberal, you have no heart and you're in your 30s. If you're not a conservative, you have no heart.
- [44:04]
Gad Saad
Exactly. Because a lot of the principles that appeal to people in terms of socialism, you know, if I'm 17 and I see there's a lot of inequity in the world, and imagine if, if there was a benevolent, magnanimous leader who would create lesser inequity. Wow, that sounds nice. But then if you play the second and third order effects of what happens under such a system, which typically you may not be familiar with when you're 17, then you realize at 30 that that was probably not a good idea. So I think for many people, irrespective of whether they're male or female, intuitively, when I'm very young, those principles appeal to me, but then I grow out of them because I actually, my prefrontal cortex develop, develops, and then I become mature and I real, you know. Do you remember, Is it Evan Syed? He's going to be happy that I, that I mentioned him. Do you know that guy?
- [44:53]
Dave Rubin
The name comes across. He's a comedian. Yeah.
- [44:56]
Gad Saad
Who? Oh, yeah, Evan Sayet.
- [44:58]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, he's S A Y E T, I think.
- [45:01]
Gad Saad
S A Y E T. Yeah, he wrote a book maybe 12, 13 years ago about sort of kindergarten logic. And he had, he had, he had even done a, A lecture, I think it was at the Heritage Institute foundation foundation, where he talked about exactly what we're saying now, which is, you know, a lot of these principles really are part of the utopia when you're in kindergarten. Caring is sharing. And that sounds good. Socialism, Right. But as you know, and I've probably mentioned this on the show before, E.O. wilson, the Harvard biologist. You know where I'm going with this?
- [45:35]
Dave Rubin
Please take me.
- [45:36]
Gad Saad
Yeah. So he studied social ants. Social ants have a unique social structure. You have a reproductive queen, then you have indistinguishable worker ants and soldier ants. Right. So when he was asked to comment on socialism slash communism, he said, great idea, wrong species. Meaning that you can't impose a social structure on a species. If the evolutionary trajectory of that species does not expect that social form. Right. So communism is wonderful for ants. It's not wonderful for human beings because human beings have heterogeneity of talents, of aggression of.
- [46:17]
Dave Rubin
You mean, we might like different things and we might work differently.
- [46:20]
Gad Saad
We might like differently to get them. Exactly. Well, but when I'm 12, I like the idea of all of us ending up at the same place, as Kamala Harris told us. Right. It's not fair we have to end up at the same place. And so, I don't know.
- [46:34]
Dave Rubin
It's incredible how thin it is, isn't it?
- [46:36]
Gad Saad
It's unbelievably thin.
- [46:37]
Dave Rubin
The fact that she put that video up, that we'll all end up in the same place video the day before the election that Biden got elected to be president. So now that's four plus years ago, she puts up this cartoon. It says, and we'll all end up in the same place. I mean, that's Marxism 101. It may. It also just. It stands up to no screw.
- [46:53]
Unknown
What do you mean?
- [46:54]
Dave Rubin
We're all in. So we're all gonna be millionaires, we're all gonna be baseball players.
- [46:57]
Gad Saad
We're all going to be.
- [46:58]
Dave Rubin
We're all gonna be vice presidents. Well, that's really what it means. But you would just think that we've evolved to the point where you couldn't get away with such mindless drivel. And yet here we are.
- [47:09]
Gad Saad
But what bothers me is that no amount. Now, look, I'm in the business of trying to change people's opinions, right? I mean, I studied psychology, decision making, and even in my public interventions, that's what I do. And yet, I hate to say this, I fear that the architecture of the human mind is not necessarily amenable to getting you to change your opinion. And let me. So in chapter seven of the Parasitic Mind, I lead off with a quote, long quote from Leon Festinger. Leon Festinger was the pioneering psychologist who developed the theory of cognitive dissonance, right? So cognitive dissonance is that, you know, there's tension in my head. How do I hold two opposing polar ideas? Right? Well, usually what I'll do is I'll implement a whole bunch of cognitive processes to try to soften that cognitive dissonance, right? I bought the Mazda, but not the. So now how can I try to reduce the dissonance of not having bought the other car, Right? And so I go through all kinds of machinations. Well, the human mind does not regrettably alter its positions, despite the fact that I show you a tsunami of evidence that suggests that you should be changing your mind. And so on the one hand, from this side of my mouth, I spend all day trying to get you to change your opinions. But then from this side of my mouth, I know that it's going to be a Herculean effort to be able to do so.
- [48:29]
Dave Rubin
So do you think that one day they'll be able to actually diagnose Trump Derangement Syndrome as a psychological order? I mean, I'm not even fully kidding about that.
- [48:36]
Gad Saad
It's called the Sam Harris complex.
- [48:38]
Dave Rubin
That's psychiatrically what it's called the Malibu Meditator.
- [48:41]
Gad Saad
The Malibu Meditator.
- [48:42]
Dave Rubin
Well, what do you make of somebody like that? I mean, we've talked about it a little bit over the years, but, you know, so I was on Jordan's, Jordan Peterson's 500th podcast a couple weeks ago and we were saying how it was eight years to the week of when we first met and boy, the world has so significantly changed in so many ways since then. And we were discussing basically, who could we all have done something a little bit different? Those of us who were out here on the, let's say, frontier of the Internet thing, could we have done things differently so that we wouldn't have gotten close to this precipice? And I think we both think it's an open ended question. Maybe we could, maybe we couldn't have.
- [49:14]
Gad Saad
Right?
- [49:14]
Dave Rubin
My guess is we couldn't have. I don't know what else we could.
- [49:16]
Gad Saad
Have done, but I think we did quite a lot to try to get people to change. But you know, people think that I, it's idiotic, or I have Sam Harris Derangement Syndrome. Nothing could be further from the truth. I wish Sam and all these other guys, nothing but the best. What I'm attacking the exemplar that they represent.
- [49:38]
Dave Rubin
Right.
- [49:38]
Gad Saad
So when Sam Harris takes the positions, for example, you know, I'm going to write a book literally called Lying, where he extols the virtues of not lying and how important it is to live an honest life and so on. Yes, okay, great, sign me up for that. But then fast forward, he's on trigonometry, or I can't remember which show he is, where he says, no, it was perfectly fine to have hidden and suppressed the information on Hunter Biden because consequentialist ethics, which, I mean, he didn't use those words.
- [50:11]
Dave Rubin
Right.
- [50:12]
Gad Saad
But in essence.
- [50:13]
Dave Rubin
Well, in essence it got. Well, the end is justified. The means.
- [50:16]
Gad Saad
Exactly. The end justifies the means and therefore, wink, wink. Yeah. Don't buy it when I tell you, don't lie. Lie when it's expeditious for me to lie. Right. If it serves my purposes. Well, that gets my goat, right, Because I am authentic and truthful to a fault. And so I felt a bit of a. Maybe I'm getting too personal, but I felt a bit of a conundrum internally because on the one hand, having known him, we had dinner together, I've been on his show. I mean, we weren't best of friends, but I knew him personally. So there is the Middle Eastern code of conduct that says don't go after people you know personally.
- [50:53]
Dave Rubin
I felt that very strongly.
- [50:54]
Gad Saad
You felt the same way.
- [50:55]
Dave Rubin
Not to do it for a long time.
- [50:57]
Gad Saad
But then I started getting these kind of bouts of angst of, but I place authenticity and truth above all else. So am I being inauthentic and untruthful by biting my tongue when I hear him spouting pure nonsense all day long? And then finally that one won. Right? And so I came out. At first I came out in my usual jocular way. I was hiding under the table and doing all these kids. So what I'm trying to communicate to Sam that maybe you're being a bit obnoxious in some of the positions you're taking. But then he didn't respond well to that and therefore the gloves were off.
- [51:36]
Dave Rubin
So without making this about him specifically, of course, just to do something a little more broad, it seems to me that largely what happened to him is parallel to what happened to the atheist movement across, really across the world, I would say, because he was obviously deeply tied into that. And I think he had those debates with Jordan and I think. Well, I guess. I guess you can't say it objectively, but close to objectively, I think Jordan won. Or at least in terms of the public reaction to it, let's say. Where do you place the atheist movement these days? I mean, it seems like there's either been some sort of belief revival or it's happening right now, or, I mean, I don't know.
- [52:11]
Gad Saad
The epidemiology of lack of belief has, over the past 15, 20 years has really had gone up a lot. So I don't know if there's been a slight shift down maybe.
- [52:20]
Dave Rubin
I don't know that empirically there has been, but it does certainly seems like within the zeitgeist, suddenly people are talking about religion and belief again. I think post Covid, people started waking up to different things, stop believing the.
- [52:30]
Gad Saad
System and certainly Jordan has contributed a lot to that, to a lot of sort of young men who were kind of floundering aimlessly. And then he comes in with a somewhat clinical psychologist, somewhat spiritual, quasi religious. So certainly the new atheist movement is dead. Right. Rest in peace, for those of you who don't know. There was, I mean, of course, you know, well, about, I mean, well, Dennett recently passed away, so he, he's gone. Well, Dawkins is still kind of holding the candle. Right. He, he's had a few run ins with Jordan.
- [53:05]
Dave Rubin
He is, except he's made it very clear that he's very happy to live in a Christian country, to whatever extent you could call the UK still a Christian country. And that tells you. That tells you something.
- [53:14]
Gad Saad
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I actually watched a few of the interactions with Jordan and I almost felt a bit uncomfortable with Adam because it seemed as though they couldn't find a place where they could have a meaningful dialogue. Right. Because Jordan speaks in the sort of the biblical narrative metaphor. And whereas Dawkins is all about everything has to be scientifically vertical. And I felt as though they were speaking over each other. Is that a right perception?
- [53:43]
Dave Rubin
I mean, I couldn't say it better. Well, how do you feel about that? How do you try to integrate those parts of your great question? So I get one, One per show?
- [53:51]
Gad Saad
No, you've had many. There is an evolutionary explanation for religion, actually. So in a sense, and this is not a cop out answer that I don't want to answer you personally. I will also answer it personally.
- [54:03]
Dave Rubin
Sure.
- [54:03]
Gad Saad
So there are several ways to answer why religion exists from an evolutionary perspective. So let me break them down. There is what's called the adaptive art argument. Does it serve any adaptive function for us to be believers? So David Sloan Wilson, who is an evolutionary biologist, he's now retired, wrote a book called Darwin's Cathedral where he argued that groups that are more religious than groups that are less religious end up out surviving the less religious groups. Because inherently religion creates greater communality, greater cohesion, greater cooperation, greater delineation of in group, out group. So for very earthly reasons, being religious pays off in the evolutionary game of life.
- [54:51]
Dave Rubin
Yes.
- [54:51]
Gad Saad
Okay, so that's one argument. There is an exaptation argument. Exaptation means a byproduct of evolution. So for example, the fact that our skeletal system has the color that it does, there is no adaptive function to that. It's just an engineering pathway that lets. So it's a byproduct of other engineering decisions. Okay, so the exaptation argument for religion is that it piggybacks on evolutionary mechanisms that already exist in us. Evolution simply rides that wave example. We've already evolved the mechanism of coalitional thinking. We view the world as blue team, red team. Look at Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They all have an us versus them now with varying degrees of intolerance. But we all, there are the Jews and the gos. There is the believers who are, who accept Jesus in their hearts and the rest of you who are going to burn in hell, there is the believers and the kuffar in Islam, the dirty non believers. Right? And so what religion does is it takes this computational system that's already in our brain and it piggybacks on it, it uses it. So as an evolutionist, I think that it is the default value for human beings to be believers. It is an anomaly when you are an atheist as a, as a human being. Now here though, I side with Dawkins in the following sentence. The fact that religion offers us tons of functional benefits doesn't mean if I'm a purist, I should believe it for those functional reasons. Do you follow what I mean?
- [56:32]
Dave Rubin
Yeah. So.
- [56:33]
Gad Saad
So even though it may look if my child is 4 years old and gets God, God forbid, stricken with leukemia and dies, it makes a lot more sense for me to be a believer. You know, it's because God works in mysterious ways. It's because God calls his most pure angels to be with him. That gives me solace to imagine that shit happens and leukemia is just a random thing and too bad that Timmy's dead doesn't feel good.
- [56:59]
Dave Rubin
Right? So there are no atheists in a.
- [57:01]
Gad Saad
Foxhole or there's no atheist. So there are so many functional reasons to be a believer and so few to not be believer. So my view is religion is here to stay accepted. Now, do I necessarily buy into. So I'm very, very Jewish. I'm very much tied to my Jewish identity, yet I don't necessarily subscribe to many of the rituals of Judaism and I don't think I'm going to. As a matter of fact, I always joke with my, with rabbis that I know that I have paid a lot more to be Jewish than they will ever pay in 500 years of prayers.
- [57:35]
Dave Rubin
Prayers. How do they take that usually?
- [57:36]
Gad Saad
Well, they kind of sit back, right, Because I had to wear really good running shoes and run fast so that my head is not detached from the rest of my body because I'm Jewish. Whereas you just put on.
- [57:45]
Dave Rubin
Literally. You mean that? I mean literally, yeah.
- [57:47]
Gad Saad
Right now, by the Way I also put on tine. Did. Did you know this, by the way? I'm. I'm breaking new ground here. So at Cornell. So I. I did my PhD at Cornell. There was a Chad. Rabbi Lubovich. Rabbi. Became very good friends with him, Rabbi Elie Silberstein. Give him a shout out. We got to know each other very well. He would invite me over for Shabbat dinner. You know, hardcore stuff, Right? Lubovitch. Rabbi. And we'd have very philosophical conversations. As I was about to leave Cornell, he said, God. I said, oh, here comes the ask, right? You know, these guys are very sly. They're smiling assassins, as we say. So he said, can I ask you to do me a favor? I said, shoot, Rabbi. He said, how about you wear Tefillin for me? You have a pure Jewish soul, blah, blah, blah. He played on maybe my vanity. And for the next 10 or 11 years after I made that promise, Dave, I put on Tefillin every day. Now, I didn't put it on necessarily because every single element of that rich, but I did put it on as a overt signal know of my belonging to a shared group with a shared genetic heritage and historical heritage and persecution heritage. And by doing that for five, ten minutes in the morning, I was reaffirming that I belonged to that group. And so I think there are beautiful elements of religion that I could subscribe to without necessarily being tied down to the minutia of every word. Does that make sense? Yeah.
- [59:20]
Dave Rubin
So if we were splitting hairs there for the type of person that maybe needs belief in, like, the. You're basically saying there's like a utilitarian version of it, and. And then there's the sort of more mystical version of it.
- [59:32]
Gad Saad
Right.
- [59:33]
Dave Rubin
Do you think that the decision between that, whatever, to whatever extent people are making a decision on those two things, you think that's just built into them?
- [59:41]
Gad Saad
It is built into them. I think what bothers me, by the way, is when there is an overlapping of the influence of one into the other. Meaning I'm talking about science versus religion. So, for example, Stephen Jay Gould, who a famous paleontologist at Harvard, proposed something called noma. Noma is non overlapping magisteria, meaning that he was what's called an accommodationist. He didn't want to be hostile to religion the way Dawkins is. He said, look, religion serves a purpose here, science serves a purpose here. Let them not overlap and everybody can sing Kumbaya together. I'm not quite as accommodationist, because the problem is that you do get overlap. You don't get non overlapping magisteria because religion does make statements that should be only within the purview of science. No, I cannot tolerate that. A young earth creationist tells me that the earth is that age contravening what the geologist told me, because now you're demonstrating religious hubris that is frankly incorrect. Right. So I can see the value of religion, but please stay in your lane.
- [60:52]
Dave Rubin
Right. Well, also, in a world where everything's become political, I mean, how are you going to have a debate about abortion, let's say, without crossing up science and religion? But you've.
- [61:03]
Gad Saad
If I may, I don't know if we were, but I think you've become a bit more of a believer in the last few years. Yes.
- [61:09]
Dave Rubin
Yeah.
- [61:10]
Gad Saad
And what I mean, I know that of course you hung around with Jordan and so on, and that helped. Are there other things that caused you to become more of a believer?
- [61:20]
Dave Rubin
Well, I think there were a few things. I mean, I think spending the amount of time that I spent about with Jordan and then seeing the. And I guess this is the utilitarian argument for it, seeing the literal transformations that he was doing with people's lives. So I always say if people ask me about Jordan, like, you know, if I'm at the supermarket and someone says something about Jordan, like to me he's a prophet in the sense. I don't know if I mean that in the most literal biblical sense. But if we're to believe that some people. You described Elon as a visionary before. If some people have, through hard work and dedication and education and everything else, or some spark that existed before them, if they have some ability to communicate something that is so transcendent that it literally is changing the lives of thousands, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people all over the world, I'll grant, I'll jump on that train. I would say. I would also say being a father probably also altered some of that stuff because then you start seeing an unbreakable chain, and I think you probably don't want to be the one to break it. Actually, you'll appreciate this. One of my friends who is modern Orthodox Jewish, so he's fairly religious. I asked him about it and he's had a pretty lost his father very young. He's had some real difficult stuff in his life. And I asked him about why he's still so religious despite so much tragedy in his life. And he said that his grandfather survived the Holocaust and still was a believer till he died and he felt that he couldn't break that chain. So I think that that probably is a piece of it.
- [62:48]
Gad Saad
Yeah. I just before we came to, we were flying out of Montreal. I had some Lubovic guys come up to me and recognize me. So it's kind of fun. You think that they never check the Internet and they're stuck reading the.
- [63:03]
Dave Rubin
Don't they have their own Internet or something?
- [63:04]
Gad Saad
They don't have their. Exactly. And so. Oh, thank you so much for your work. And so even the ultra orthodox. Orthodox pay attention to some of our work.
- [63:13]
Dave Rubin
What else is on your mind these days?
- [63:15]
Gad Saad
What else?
- [63:16]
Dave Rubin
Before I make you two giant tomahawks.
- [63:18]
Gad Saad
Oh, my. By the way, people, should I look at this camera? Yeah, I saw the tomahawk. Do you remember what I told you? I will twerk for those tomahawks.
- [63:26]
Dave Rubin
You don't have to twerk. You don't. Well, we'll see. Let's.
- [63:30]
Gad Saad
Let's leave it open. Yeah. Maybe a couple of tequilas are going to twerk. I'm extreme. I'm. I'm. Can I say that I was on almost as excited about the Tomahawks as I was in holding this conversation?
- [63:41]
Dave Rubin
Well, we've done this. We've done this many, many times. You've never had the Dave Rubin Tomahawk.
- [63:46]
Gad Saad
I'm very, very excited. And what's keeping me? What?
- [63:48]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, well, what else is on your mind right now? I mean, you got a new book coming out. You're obviously happy with the new gig. There's a lot of wacky stuff going on in Canada. You're sometimes occasionally hiding under the desk. Still, there's a lot going on, but what else?
- [64:01]
Gad Saad
Just trying to be the best father and husband to my family. I always love when I travel with them because all of these experiences become that much more enriching when they can see it. And I know you're not going to show the camera, but my daughter and wife are sitting over there, and so it's nice to expose them to these new experiences. So hopefully I can be the best husband and the best father I can be, and the rest will take care of itself.
- [64:24]
Dave Rubin
And Your son, who's 13, is about to kick your butt. No, no, no, no, no, no. I want to be very clear about this. Dad said, and it's on video. I am not letting no 13 year old. Maybe that was a double negative, but no 13 year old would be biting me in baske.
- [64:38]
Gad Saad
Talking about.
- [64:38]
Dave Rubin
Although his handle is pretty good. I saw some stuff out there.
- [64:41]
Gad Saad
You said what's been on my mind. I'm not liking the fact that very, very soon he will be literally looking down on me, which is not a difficult thing to do because I'm not the tallest guy in the world. But it looks like he's going to be, well, taller than me. I guess that's a good thing.
- [65:02]
Dave Rubin
Is that the end? It's a strange ending to a fine.
- [65:05]
Gad Saad
He'll never have my green eyes. How about that? That's still not good.
- [65:09]
Dave Rubin
I think we can end a little stronger than that. Give me some deep piece of wisdom. We can't just end on the fact that your son might be taller than you. That doesn't seem like the proper ending to a show. Give me a behavior. Well, how about an evolutionary explanation for why your son might be taller than you, but you'll tolerate him despite that?
- [65:26]
Gad Saad
Or something like that? Well, okay, I'll tell you this. There is an expression. It's a Hebrew Arabic, maybe. That's probably not a good way, actually.
- [65:35]
Dave Rubin
Hebrew Arabic? Yeah.
- [65:36]
Gad Saad
No, like, not a Hebrew Arabic. It's like an Arabic spoken. Spoken by Jews. So they create their own little dialect. The term is called sin. Shin means the era. Shalut means the era of obnoxiousness. So you will see this when your boys become that age, when the kids hit teenage years, they become a bit. They could be, you know, they try different Personas and so on. He's hit that. But I'm proud to say that both of my children have hit the teenage years with a lot of poise and grace. And so my wife and I probably are doing something right.
- [66:12]
Dave Rubin
I'm going to beat your son in horse, and then I'm going to cook you a steak. Fair enough.
- [66:16]
Gad Saad
Let's do it. Thank you, sir. Cheers.
- [66:21]
Unknown
Thanks for tuning in to the Rubin Report. Don't forget to review, share and subscribe to this podcast. If you're looking for early and exclusive content, you can join me on locals@rubinreport.locals.com.