Juno News - May 11, 2026


Gad Saad joins The Candice Malcolm Show to discuss his new book, Suicidal Empathy： Dying to Be Kind

Mentioned
Aristotle
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Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

150.53

Word count

299

Sentence count

18

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Empathy is a perfectly laudable virtue. But like Aristotle explained to us several millennia ago, everything in good moderation. Too little of something is not good. Too much of something, well, that s not good either. And that exactly applies to empathy. If I'm not the least bit empathetic, that's called being psychopath. And if I am too empathetically, that can lead to suicidal empathy.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Of course, if I need to hijack and parasitize your capacity to reason, I then have to make sure that I zombify both of these systems.
00:00:10.460 So the parasitic mind explained what happens when your cognitive system is parasitized, and now I complete the story by explaining what happens when your emotional system, in this case, as invoked by your empathy module, when it is hijacked.
00:00:28.260 and so maybe I could explain a bit what suicidal empathy is. Empathy is a perfectly laudable
00:00:36.300 virtue. We are a social species, and so in order for you and I to have a meaningful interaction,
00:00:42.740 I need to put myself in your mind and vice versa. One of the ways that we, the main way that we
00:00:48.460 detect and diagnose whether a child is autistic is we give them a theory of mind test, which they
00:00:54.620 invariably fail. So it is perfectly admirable if someone is empathetic. You want your veterinarian
00:01:02.880 to be empathetic. You want your physician or therapist to be empathetic. You want your spouse
00:01:07.220 and best friends to be empathetic. But like Aristotle explained to us several millennia ago,
00:01:14.320 everything in good moderation. Too little of something is not good. Too much of something is
00:01:19.680 not good. And much of life is spent finding that optimal sweet spot. And that exactly applies to
00:01:25.980 empathy. If I'm not in the least bit empathetic, that's called being psychopath. If I am too
00:01:31.620 empathetic, that can lead to suicidal empathy. So suicidal empathy is the misfiring of an otherwise
00:01:39.540 adaptive virtue, not only in that it becomes hyperactive, right, it overfires, and it targets
00:01:46.920 the wrong situations and the wrong targets so caring about the rapist is if he's a rapist 0.74
00:01:55.200 of color becomes more important than caring about the victim 0.92