The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - April 13, 2026


All Roads Lead to Franz Kafka (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_984)


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

141.00134

Word count

843

Sentence count

40

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I draw a link between Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and the story of a woodcock and a woodcricket. And then I read a story about a man who wakes up one day and becomes an insect.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.240 Hi everybody, this is Gad Saad. In Suicidal Empathy, which yesterday was a month away
00:00:09.160 from its release, so please head off and pre-order your copy ASAP if you haven't done so already.
00:00:14.520 So in Suicidal Empathy, I draw a link between Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Some of you
00:00:23.700 may remember that story. You probably read it in high school. I certainly did, and then
00:00:29.340 sort of filed it in the back of my memory. And then as I was working on suicidal empathy,
00:00:34.320 some of you might remember that I often talk about human wood crickets, right? Because the
00:00:43.320 wood cricket, when it is parasitized by the hairworm, jumps into water committing suicide
00:00:50.880 because the hairworm needs that to happen in order for it to complete its reproductive cycle. 1.00
00:00:59.340 And so when I see some, you know, Jewish person being all rah-rah for Gaza and so on, then I called him a wood cricket Jew. 1.00
00:01:08.740 And so there I drew the link. 1.00
00:01:10.160 I said, well, you know, more than 100 years ago, Franz Kafka's famous story is of a man who wakes up one day and he's basically turned into this sort of vermin, this insect, hence the metamorphosis.
00:01:25.060 And I said, well, a hundred years later, we also have a metamorphosis from human beings
00:01:31.400 that should be endowed with reason who suddenly become wood crickets.
00:01:35.620 So that was the link that had sort of brought Kafka back into my mind.
00:01:42.720 And so I was reading this book.
00:01:45.760 Let me just bring it out here for you a second.
00:01:48.460 I was reading this book, which I just finished.
00:01:52.200 It's by the director of the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford.
00:01:58.360 And I actually reached out to him.
00:02:00.080 I haven't heard back from him.
00:02:00.920 I hope he accepts my invitation to come on the show.
00:02:03.040 This is basically a book about the history of all sorts of burning of books and libraries.
00:02:08.740 It could be, you know, when the Nazis were burning Jewish authors' books.
00:02:15.140 or it could be, you know, the burning of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria,
00:02:21.520 which is the one that most people think of as sort of the classic example of burning knowledge.
00:02:26.300 But there are many, many examples, and the book is really quite wonderful
00:02:30.720 in describing the cultural genocide of burning all of this accumulated knowledge.
00:02:37.160 Well, one of the stories in this book is when Franz Kafka asked his very good friend, Max Broad, to burn all of his material, all of the stuff.
00:02:54.880 If he were to die, just burn everything.
00:02:58.560 And then, supposedly, Max Broad told him, well, you know that I don't think I can do that. 0.79
00:03:07.160 so I'm not going to adhere to those wishes.
00:03:09.580 And here you have the tension of something that I've often talked about,
00:03:15.080 the distinction between deontological versus consequentialist ethics.
00:03:18.560 If you believe that the wishes of a dying man are absolutely sacrosanct,
00:03:28.380 that it's a deontological principle, then you have to abide by his wishes.
00:03:33.500 On the other hand, if you think that using a consequentialist ethic, that no, you shouldn't, you would be depriving the world of all of this great literature that would have never seen the light of day and would have been burnt in a heap of fire, raging fire, then you violate those wishes.
00:03:55.280 And that's exactly what Max Broad did.
00:03:58.900 And by the way, I recently had Harry Bert Tenshirt, the leading, the world leading rare books antiquarian dealer.
00:04:08.560 And you should go and watch our chat. It happened last week.
00:04:11.440 Incredible guy. He actually brought out two copies in German of The Trial, both the without a dust jacket and with a dust jacket.
00:04:21.900 And then he's also the one who purchased the handwritten copy of the trial back in 1988 for a million pounds.
00:04:30.880 All this to say, if you want to use Jungian synchronicity, it was all leading me to Franz Kafka.
00:04:38.200 So I head off to my favorite used bookstore here in Montreal.
00:04:44.140 And I asked the main guy that I usually speak to, do you have a Kafka biography?
00:04:48.880 he says well if it's not there in the biography section it's not there i look at there is nothing
00:04:54.160 there another employee overhears my request says oh i actually i there is a france kafka biography
00:05:02.900 here but it's it's in the online catalog so you can't see it it's sort of shelved way above eye
00:05:10.060 level and he was a six foot nine guy so he climbs and stuff comes out and comes out and the one that
00:05:15.540 i wanted was the biography of france kafka as written by max broad the one who ended up
00:05:24.240 not adhering to his wishes look what i got
00:05:27.480 can you believe it look at it you ready look at the year
00:05:35.220 this is absolutely unbelievable okay so franz kafka
00:05:45.560 get out there read read read truly incredible story and demonstrates the magic of life and how
00:05:55.720 things all come together have a great day everybody cheers