The Name of the Rose (2019)TV series

About Dave Rubin: http://rubinreport.com- It is in every nook and cranny of academia. A lot of people said exactly what you were saying, well this is just some esoteric nonsense that a few bozos in the humanities and the social sciences are doing, absolutely not. Right now most of the granting agencies that fund you know, research in the natural sciences. In physics and chemistry and biology and the neurosciences will require the grant applicants to submit a, what I call a DIE religion statement. DIE stands for diversity, inclusion and equity where you literally have to state right up front, irrespective of what you're studying, what is it that you've done to you know, promote DIE principles and what are you going to do if you were to win the grant in promoting DIE principles. (calm music) - I'm Dave Rubin and this is The Rubin Report. Quick reminder everyone to subscribe to our YouTube channel and then resubscribe when the subscribe gremlins unsubscribe you. And joining us today is an evolutionary behavioral scientist, a Professor of Marketing at Concordia University and author of the new book, "The Parasitic Mind: "How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense". Gad Saad, welcome back to The Rubin Report. - Oh my God, it's so good to see you again. I wish were being done in person in California but second best. - I wish we were doing this in person. I know that you have a love of Southern California and the sun that is almost unrivaled by other human beings. One time we had you in here after you had been in SoCal for a few weeks, your glow, the color that you can achieve, the bronze. It almost blew out our whole system, but you have a very nice tan right now. - Well thank you, thank you. Not bad for up in Canada. So before we do anything, I had to count beforehand and we were trying to figure it out. This is either your seventh or eighth appearance on The Rubin Report. You are now the most returning guest of The Rubin Report. Would you say basically in terms of, you've got a pretty impressive CV. Your resume is looking pretty good but, where does that fall in the scheme of things? - I think, if I only put that on my CV I've already made it, so. You're top. - All right, so look. I wanna obviously dive into the book and you know, you guys sent us the book a couple weeks ago and when I was reading it, I kept thinking that what you're explaining in this book is what about 20 of us have been yelling about for the last five years and a whole bunch of mainstream media people kept saying oh this is just a college campus thing, this ain't real. You're all overstating it, you're overblowing it and now it's everywhere. And some of these people have actually had mea culpas. We're seeing some people who used to mock us kind of go, oh maybe, maybe they were kind of right about some of this stuff. So let's try it this way for the first question. Oh and I can see you're putting your glasses on so you're ready to be a learned professor. When did the ideas, when did you first notice that these bad ideas were creeping into society and then we'll sort of talk about what the ideas are. - Sure. So I called them of course in the book, idea pathogens and drawing a corollary to how animals could be parasitized by actual brain worms. I argue that human beings can be parasitized by another class of pathogens, idea pathogens. So and hence this is why it's called The Parasitic Mind. So I first noticed it when I was a doctoral student at Cornell. I was taking a, a course with my eventual doctoral supervisor J. Edward Russo who is a mathematical and cognitive psychologist. And in the course he assigned to his students some postmodernist reading. That was absolutely insane. Now this was published in the top, the most prestigious journal in the field, Journal of Consumer Research. You know very high impact factor amongst the social sciences and it was complete insanity. It was basically what is often referred to as a you know, auto, you know the guy was talking about his consumatory experience when he gets a warm erection thinking about his wife. And I'm thinking this is science? Well of course it's science be according to these guys, postmodernism is my truth. So if I share it with you, my truth in a dear diary sense it is just as valid as quote, the scientific method. And so when I was first exposed to this postmodernism I thought it was absolute insanity. Once I became a professor I got my PhD in 1994, became a professor, I started seeing this postmodernist thinking throughout the halls of academia and it was usually coupled with a rejection of biology. So biology is great in explaining the behavior of every single species except human beings. So this was the first instance about 28, 30 years ago when I first faced the insanity. - So one of the things I find interesting and why I think you're such a good communicator about this stuff is a lot of people think, oh these, these bad ideas and identity politics and all of this stuff, well this, it only is on the arts and it's only in you know, the sort of superfluous you know, classes and things like that. But because you come from a science background, you've seen these things infect virtually every level of academia right? - It is in every nook and cranny of academia. A lot of people said exactly what you were saying. Well this is just some esoteric nonsense that a few bozos in the humanities and the social sciences are doing, absolutely not. Right now most of the granting agencies that fund you know, research in the natural sciences. In physics and chemistry and biology and the neurosciences will require the grant applicants to submit a, what I call a DIE religion statement. DIE stands for diversity, inclusion and equity where you literally have to state right up front, irrespective of what you're studying what is it that you've done to you know, promote DIE principles and what are you going to do if you were to win the grant in promoting DIE principles. Now a colleague of mine at a fellow university here, a sister university in Montreal, a very prestigious university. One of my alma maters, is a physical chemist. His grant application, he's a very, very accomplished physical chemist. His grant application was stopped at the DIE statement because they felt that it wasn't sufficiently adhering to the DIE tenets. So those who think that is just some esoteric anomalous thing are absolutely wrong. - Can you go further with that 'cause I think a lot of people hear that and they're like oh but the statement means well and if that helps more black or trans or whatever people get into these fields, that is somehow good. But can you explain why that is actually antithetical to the type of research. - Sure. - That people like you are trying to do. - Look the scientific method liberates us from the shackles of our identity. That's what makes it so wonderful right? Listening to transcendental experience because I don't listen to Barry White thinking that I have a certain quota of black singers that I need to listen to. He transcends whether he's black or white. He gives me goosebumps because he's very white. So art, literature, music, the scientific method are the laudable endeavors that they are precisely because they remove those shackles of identity. I come from a world of identity politics as we've discussed on the show before when I escaped Lebanon. So the fundamental principle on which classical liberalism as you well know and many of your viewers know is a commitment to individual dignity. When you now say no, your individual dignity must be tied to some tribal identity, I don't care how accomplished you are as a physicist. Are you a transgender person of color and if yes we give you the grant or no? What could be a greater cancer to individual dignity? It's grotesque. - Have you seen how it sort of works its way up in institutions in terms of actually destroying the work? So it's not, okay so you hire you know, some of these people not based purely on skill. So you know, people can understand that. Okay so now you have a less qualified group of people at the bottom but have you seen it sort of really go up the chain of command until it's really just wiped out everything? - Absolutely, so in the book I talk about one effort right now in Canadian universities which refers to what's called indigenization of the university. So the indigenization of the university has many levels. So on one level you have to hire more indigenous people. So that's kind of what we've been talking about. But this indigenization reflex goes much, much further. There is a professor at the University of British Columbia who was denied tenure because she hadn't published a sufficient number of papers to get tenure. She filed a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of British Columbia arguing that she is an indigenous woman. That in her culture, the oral tradition supersedes the written word. Therefore by forcing me to have to publish things in tenure, that is violating my you know, my culture. So that's, so imagine how insane that is. But there's even a more pernicious effect of this indigenization. This is, this goes to the root of epistemology, philosophy of knowledge. The scientific method is the only game in town when we're trying to adjudicate whether a hypothesis is correct or not. There is no indigenous way of knowing. There is no Lebanese Jewish way of knowing. There is no gay way of knowing. There is the scientific method. So once we start, we start saying well, if we wanna study the environment, we can't only rely on the scientific method. We need to go to this tribe and learn from their ancestral boogabooga, you are violating essential tenet of the scientific method and it is grotesque. - So, okay so that gets us to why I love the title of the book because the word parasite. That this in effect this awful thing has attached itself to all of us. No matter how clear thinking you are on this. This is effecting your life in a negative way as much as it's effecting someone who believes in it, in what I assume they think is a positive way. Why the title, why the word parasite? - So as an evolutionary psychologist I often look to other animals to draw comparisons when I'm making some statement about human cognition. That field is called comparative psychology. Comparative in the sense that you are comparing across species. So that's one of the tools that evolutionary scientists use when they are studying the evolution of the human mind. So as someone who has looked at other animals, I noticed that there was this incredible field called neuroparasitology whereby these parasitologists study how parasites can enter the host's body but instead of going for example to your intestine, the tapeworm goes to your intestine. Neuroparasites seek to infect and alter the circuitry of a host's actual brain. So the classic example would be toxoplasma gondii. This is the one that many of your viewers might know. It can effect humans by, the classic example is with mice. So a mouse that is infected with toxoplasma gondii loses its innate fear of cats and it actually becomes sexually attracted to the cat's urine. Not a very good sexual attraction to have if you're a mouse because that helps the parasite to complete its reproductive cycle. There's another type of parasite that attacks the brains of ungulates. Moose, elk, deer and when they are infected with this parasite they start engaging in circling behavior. They start going around in circle unable to extricate themselves from this motor pattern. So even if the predators are coming, they won't flee and so I took these ideas and I said well you know, in a sense that's what's happening to many people who are parasitized by these bad ideas. Instead of going around in circle like the helpless, the hapless moose. It leads us to the abyss of infinite lunacy. I'll just give you one other quick example. There is something called the spider wasp. The spider wasp will parasitize spiders by stinging them. It then takes this much larger spider into its burrow. It lays an egg and then as the egg hatches, it eats the spider in vivo. Basically the spider is alive but zombified. Well I argue that, I argue that political correctness is exactly kind to the spider wasp's sting. It keeps us lulled and it leads us to the abyss of lunacy. - So in a weird way do you admire it? Do you admire the genius behind it at a certain level, not the ideas specifically obviously but it sort of, when you were talking about that what was ringing in my head was the movie Alien and there is this scene where one you know, and you can think of the alien as the parasite right? But you know the, one of the scientists, they really admire the beauty of it, the ingeniousness of it. How it gets into the body to then reproduce, all of these things. Do you sort of admire, whoever sort of really put these ideas together to send them out into the universe, there's a certain beauty as horrific as it is right? - Well I'm glad you mentioned Aliens because it literally is a manifestation of invaders of the body snatchers. In this case, of the mind snatchers. - Yeah. - Right, that's exactly what it is doing. And if you read the neuroparasitology literature, it really reads like science fiction because there's this incredible evolutionary dance between the host and the parasite where the parasite is trying to always find ever clever ways as you said, admirable ways to dupe the host into its own reproductive pursuits. So in that nefarious diabolic sense, yes I admire these incredible mind viruses. - So do you think that the host in this case, just the average social justice warrior walking down the street or the average person who gets infected, you know, through fake news, bad news, whatever it might be. The part that they're getting from this is somehow like, is it an ego stroking that they're getting or is it a I understand the way the world really is and nobody else. Like what, what is it that the host is actually getting? Like is it a, it seems to be a replacement for religion or belief or something like that. - I mean I think it's a combination of those factors. One of the things that I talk about in the book is that all of these various idea pathogens share a couple of things in common. One is they are ways by which we can free ourselves from the shackles of reality. I mean literally soar right? So militant feminism frees us from the shackles of biology. Postmodernism frees us from the shackles of universal truths. Trans activism, you put trans on anything as a prefix and it frees you from your genitalia, it frees you from your race. I just need to put trans and that's it right? So for example I trans-self identify that yesterday I fasted on Yom Kippur. I didn't but I self identified as having done so. Therefore I was a trans Yom Kippur faster, you get it? So all of these different idea pathogens liberate us from the shackles of reality but they also do something else. They all start from a noble place and I mean noble not in the satirical way I often use on social media. I literally mean it, they start off with a good intention. So for example if you look at all of the social constructivists. Social constructivists are those that reject biology as being relevant in explaining human affairs. Everything is due to a social construction. Well that penchant began as a noble desire to free the human condition from biology because all sorts of really nefarious evil folks had misused Darwinian theory right? The Nazis said hey, it's a natural struggle between the races, the Jews lost, we're the Aryans. Hey that's Darwinian, what's wrong with killing the Jews right? Eugenicists say the same thing. Hey if you are gay, we sterilize you so that you don't reproduce, we get your genes out of the pool. He it's Darwinian, well of course it's got nothing to do with Darwinian theory. But the ones who were promulgating these idea pathogens were coming from a noble place. If we create a new reality, hopefully we can forestall these bad things. So they start off with noble causes, freeing us from the shackles of reality but then of course, when you murder the truth there's always downstream consequences that are nefarious and that's what we're seeing today. - I can't do one show without saying the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That's what it always seems to boil down to one way or another. So do you think that for those of us that were on YouTube and podcasts and everything else and the whole you know, intellectual dark web phenomenon and that whole thing that largely has sort of disappeared. Oddly when we sort of need it most. Do you think in a way? I wanna word this correctly. Do you think we failed in a way that because we were talking about all of this stuff, a bunch of us were. Jordan Peterson obviously and Ben Shapiro and the Weinstein brothers and a whole slew of other people. It's not that we weren't discussing these things and Sam Harris of course. But it still all happened. It still all here we are. Do you think we missed something? Was there something else that we could've done that would've been a better defense against the pathogen? No because I think that to eradicate these pathogens it's a longterm game. It took 40, 50 years of brainwashing, of parasitic infestation in academia. I always say by the way, it takes intellectuals to come up with the truly dumbest ideas. This is why all these idea pathogens start within the university ecosystem. So it took 40, 50 years before we ended up with Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister who basically embodies all of the idea pathogens that I discuss in the book. So the fact that the IDW came up was certainly a good thing. Because you had some people with large platforms who were calling you know, alarm, you know ringing the alarm bell but it really does require the involvement of every single individual to truly win this battle. So when I tell people, you know I get millions of emails and so do you where someone says, well I don't have your platform, I'm not the fancy professor, I'm not Dave Rubin, I'm not Joe Rogan, what can I do? Well you can do a lot. When someone, when your professor says something in class that you find is objectionable, challenge them politely. If someone says something on Facebook that you disagree with, challenge them politely. In other words it's trench warfare. It's not just Rubin and Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad who are holding the mantle of you know, killing these idea pathogens. Everybody who has a stake in this battle which is everybody who wants to commitment to reason, logic, science and common sense should be engaged in the battle. The problem is most people, because of cowardice, because they diffuse responsibility on others don't get engaged and therefore the idea pathogens keep eating away at us. - Well that would sort of make you admire the pathogen in a double fashion wouldn't it? Because it's using their own fear against them at the, it's using their, their nobility, they think they're doing something good at some level when you know, and then it's also using fear to keep them quiet once they wake up to it, pretty clever. - Exactly, no it's beautiful right? I mean that's why propagandists are so desired because they know how to construct the machinery of the meme so that it can have maximal impact right? So they are virologists of the human mind. One of my endorsers by the way in the book is Paul Offit. The reason why I chose him, I mean first he's a great guy. He's a virologist, he's a pediatrician who's developed some vaccines for child you know, viruses. The reason why I wanted him to. Because in the same way that he combats actual viruses that go around your body, I'm combating viruses of the human mind. So we're both parasitologists, just dealing with different organs and different types of pathogens. - Yeah, do you think there's a limit? We got into this a little bit when, when you interviewed me on your show about my book. Do you think there's a limit to how the human mind can fight this? So one of the things that I've sort of come around to is that the people that rely purely on the enlightenment, that just logic and reason in and of itself are enough to coordinate a society that can fight all these horrible ideas, I just don't believe it anymore. I think that's why we've seen these ideas just infect everything. Do you think that logic and reason in and of itself are enough? Because I think we've sort of watched a lot of, a lot of our crew let's say, sort of become irrelevant in this fight because relying on logic and reason sometimes isn't enough. - Yeah so in chapter two of my book, it's, the book is about thinking versus feeling right? Truth versus hurt feelings and the reason why I set up that dichotomy is precisely to address in a sense, some of your points which is, it's not so much that these two systems should be pitted against each other. It's not that we are a thinking animal or a feeling animal. It's that depending on the condition, we should trigger the right system. So when I'm walking down an alley to take a shortcut to get home and I see four young men loitering around, my heart will start pounding, I'll start getting nervous. I'm getting a evolved fear-based response that makes perfect sense. In this case, my affective system has kicked in and it makes sense that it would do so. On the other hand, my affective system will not help me get an A plus on my calculus exam. I need to trigger in this case, my cognitive system right? My higher order cognition and so you're exactly right. You can't always, when you're trying to change hearts and minds only use reason and logic although in chapter seven of the book I do talk about how we can construct normalogical networks to try to convince people of our position which we can talk about. But I also use satire, I use sarcasm as you know. That's really getting to your emotional basis there right? So really you have to be someone who's got a whole toolbox of persuasion strategies and you pull out the right tool depending on the context. So it's not reason or emotions, use the right one in the right context. - Right so with that in mind though, does it surprise you that your allies these days would line up more on the right even though I know you consider yourself an old school liberal and that was sort of, your home. You know I know a little something about that. Like are you surprised or do you think that this was just the natural extension of where this was all gonna go? - Well it's, it more than surprises me, it makes me indignant. Because the word liberal has been usurped. The word progressive has been usurped. It's again it's a propagandist's game right? So by the way, most people are such cognitive misers that if you ask them why are you voting for the Liberal Party, let's say Justin Trudeau. They, it will literally end at the fact well I'm liberal, that's the Liberal Party, I'm not conservative. I mean it's literally that, it's fast and frugal right? - Yeah. - I'm, you know the Democrats seem progressive, the conservatives seem like mean and old fashioned. That's the level of cognition that people attribute to these types of decisions. So in that sense, I'm not surprised that I'm now tied to the conservative values because they're, that's really where the home of true freedom lies today. So I don't care to be in, I'm in the tribe of truth, I don't have a home. - Yeah but do you see a moment. I mean I guess this is what I'm, 'cause I'm still trying to parse this out for myself. Do you see a moment or a weakness in liberalism. So I think what you're saying is you see the weakness as too much of a reliance on only one piece of the toolkit right? Like you're saying it's just too much based in logic and reason and that their toolkit, whether it's about belief or satire or something else. They needed some other tool, something like that? - Sure I mean I think you probably have seen this that when they talk about you know who does, which of the two parties is better at creating memes, viral memes. I mean in a, right? Who is better at comedy right? I have a section in the book where I talk about all sorts of professors. Incredibly you know, prominent professors who were all canceled because of a misplaced joke. I mean having a Nobel Prize does not protect you from the ire of the angry humorless ones. Right, then I referred to a book, well originally a book but then a movie. The Name of the Rose, if you remember The Name of the, did you see it Dave by the way? - I didn't see it, no. - Well it's an amazing movie that takes place I think in the 11th or 12th Century. Staring Sean Connery and a young Christian Slater where a whole bunch of monks are dying and it turns out that they're dying. I don't wanna give it away in case anybody wants to see it, because one monk is trying to stop them from reading a book that has satire and comedy. So satire and comedy is exactly forbidden, whenever a dictator comes to town because it is so incredibly powerful to try to show the holes in a particular, in a particular ideology. That's why I use it. By the way some of our common friends who are highfalutin and so highbrow in the ivory towers, they're actually fraudulent because by not using all of the tools that are at your disposal to try to shape hearts and minds, you're losing an opportunity. So I never consider myself above the use of all sorts of tools. So for example you've seen me use the, I don't know if you've seen my hiding under the table routine. Where. - Yeah, yeah yeah. - What am I doing there? I am mocking the, now this hysteria by the way is not something that I'm making up. You could go to my personal page where these incredibly accomplished female professors are literally saying to one another, that they are now going to be afraid to go to campus because this new justice might come into you know, might be nominated and confirmed and therefore it will be too dangerous for them. I mean do you genuinely believe that? I mean are you this idiotic? So it's frustrating. - Yeah. - That's why I'm often so indignant. - I think you probably saw a little bit of it but I know most of my audience has seen it. When I did a talk at University of New Hampshire and they're screaming at me and heckling me and the whole thing and pulling fire alarm and this woman or a girl, student starts screaming "We could be killed when we walk out of here." And I said to her, I was like, what are you talking about? I mean it's New Hampshire, we're in New Hampshire at 5 p.m.. As if people are just being mowed down on the streets but what I realized was the way she yelled it to me shows how the parasite, to bring it to this conversation had overridden all of her logic and reason and certainly humor was really off the table and what was left was just sort of this screaming lunacy. So that, does that also show you the emotional state? Like it's all tied into their emotional state too. - Exactly, the one who is most hysterical wins. Just like I have a section in the book where I talk about the one who has the highest victimology score wins. Now many people that have probably come on your show have talked about you know, the victimology currency and what I call victimology poker but I may or may not have discussed on a prior show when I came on your platform, I offer the actual psychiatric explanation for why this victimology currency has become the most important metric by which we adjudicate debates right? It's no longer about here is my argument, please give me yours and let's see who wins in the battle of ideas. It's who screams louder, who's more hysterical, who's the bigger victim? And I argue, so 10 years ago in 2010 I had written a scientific paper published in a medical journal where I was talking about Munchausen syndrome by proxy and Munchausen syndrome is where someone feigns a medical condition so that they can garner sympathy and empathy. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is when you take someone who's under your care, your biological child, your pet, your elderly parent, you harm them willfully so that you can then garner the empathy and sympathy by proxy. So I argued that the hysteria that we see today, the Jussie Smollett who is no longer satisfied with making a million dollars per episode, he needs to be the biggest victim. If he doesn't have a victimology narrative, he hasn't succeeded. Well the mechanism by which this initiates itself is through what I call collective Munchausen and collective Munchausen by proxy. - How do you think Trump possibly understood this? It seems very obvious to me that he understand, you know he may not understand every scientific principle you're laying out there or the research behind it or something but just that he intuitively understands and if, if he was watching this would say, oh yeah that's the stuff I'm fighting against. - I think it's, so one of the things that I teach my students, whether it be the undergraduate and BA, PhD and I'm trying to explain to them the biological roots of consumer behavior. I say look, ultimately a good marketer is one who understands human nature and exactly what you said. They may not have taken my courses or read my books to know the scientific mechanisms behind the principles but they know if this product X will work or not as a function of whether it is congruent with human nature or not. So what Trump has is a good understanding, he's an evolutionary psychologist. He may be a crass evolutionary psychologist, he may be a vulgar one, he may not use the right vernacular, he may not have a big lexicon but he certainly understands human nature and that allows him to win in these exchanges in ways that the other idiots don't. Do you think there is a, a way that they all sort of need him? One of the things I've been thinking about lately is how if you take the real never Trump conservatives, the people who he's doing the stuff that they always wanted done, the conservative stuff, he's doing it but yeah, they don't like his affect and all that. And then you take the you know, sort of the disaffected lefties who can't support him even if he's saving the Republic in some odd way because they you know, they wanna go to nice parties. That they both need Trump. Do you think that there is like actually, a reasoning behind that. Like they need to point to somebody else to sort of inflate their own value? - Well yes, I mean I think, I do remember on a previous show I talked about Trump representing an aesthetic injury right? - Yeah, yeah. - So I walk around the world, you know, highfalutin language and sipping and looking at those great unwashed people and therefore I expect those around me to speak with that you know, affectation. To speak with that vernacular and so on and then here comes this brash, is he from Queens, where's he from, Queens right? - Yeah, yeah yeah. - So he's from Queens, he's vulgar, he's brash, he's a guy, you know yes he's wealthy but he seems like he's got an eighth grade, eighth level you know vocabulary and he repudiates all the things tha