The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - June 30, 2026


Chat with Piers Morgan - On Gabor Mate, Elon Musk, Migration & Grooming Gangs (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1012)


Episode Stats


Length

33 minutes

Words per minute

164.8

Word count

5,599

Sentence count

273

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

38

sentences flagged

Hate speech

81

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of Uncensored, I'm joined by evolutionary psychologist and scholar Dr. Gad Satt to discuss his new book, "Suicidal Empathy," and to debate whether or not Muslims should be allowed into the West.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I think we discussed it last time, the per capita issue.
00:00:03.200 It is incontestable.
00:00:04.400 No, no, I understand the per capita, yeah.
00:00:05.980 Why don't you like doing debates?
00:00:07.320 There is nothing that I could ever share with Dr. Mate
00:00:10.940 that would ever alter his opinions,
00:00:13.520 and therefore it's a futile exercise.
00:00:15.520 I mean, just full disclosure,
00:00:17.240 Gabor Mate is listening to this debate.
00:00:19.980 Gabor Mate is a Holocaust survivor
00:00:22.360 in that when he was six months old,
00:00:24.480 he was passed on to another family to be protected.
00:00:28.440 I, too, am a Holocaust survivor 0.87
00:00:30.460 because I was a spermatozoa in my dad's testicles in the 1940s. 0.68
00:00:35.960 He's never read my work. He doesn't understand it.
00:00:38.340 So if he says, I got no authority, I got no support, I have no credibility,
00:00:42.540 he just doesn't know what he's talking about.
00:00:43.960 This is a good reason he doesn't want to debate with me
00:00:45.620 because he couldn't. He keeps doing this.
00:00:47.820 He talked about, he gave a talk in Tel Aviv where he mentioned me.
00:00:50.920 He gave a talk in Montreal recently when he mentioned me.
00:00:53.800 He's got some kind of a fixation.
00:00:55.020 Suicidal empathy is a concept which has been amplified by many notable and opinionated public
00:01:01.760 figures, including Elon Musk, Mark Anderson and Bill Ackman. Loosely speaking, it's the idea that
00:01:07.460 misdirected compassion and moral virtue leads to irrational judgment on matters like mass migration.
00:01:12.960 The suicide part, they argue, applies to nothing less than Western civilization.
00:01:17.120 The idea is many critics say it sounds a lot like an excuse for not having any compassion
00:01:20.960 when the issues don't align with your own politics.
00:01:24.000 Professor Gad Satt presumably disagrees with that.
00:01:26.820 He came up with the idea, and it's the title of his brand new book.
00:01:30.560 Well, joining me now is indeed an evolutionary behavioural scientist
00:01:34.600 and scholar at the University of Mississippi, Gad Satt.
00:01:37.320 Gad, welcome back to Uncensored.
00:01:39.760 Thank you so much for having me, Pierce.
00:01:43.340 Suicidal empathy, just in simple terms,
00:01:46.320 just lay out what you think the issue is here
00:01:50.020 and why it's such a big problem right so empathy is a wonderful virtue to possess we are a social
00:01:56.940 species so for you and i appears to have a meaningful conversation i need to put myself
00:02:01.320 in your mind and vice versa that's called cognitive empathy or theory of mind so certainly as an
00:02:06.880 evolutionary psychologist i'm not arguing that empathy is a bad thing but like aristotle explained
00:02:11.660 to us several thousand years ago via his golden mean too little of something is not good too much
00:02:18.000 of something is not good, and much of life is about finding that sweet spot. That exactly applies
00:02:22.900 to empathy. If I have no empathy, I'm likely to be a psychopath. If I have too much empathy,
00:02:28.760 if it hyperfires in the wrong situations toward the wrong targets, you end up with suicidal empathy.
00:02:36.880 So Elon Musk has endorsed your book. He said, Western civilization is doomed
00:02:41.200 unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken that are hard,
00:02:47.420 but necessary for survival gad sad articulates this well all gad's book including including this
00:02:54.320 one are great all your books include this one are great um so a big fan in elon musk many people at
00:03:00.320 the same time have viewed elon's feed on his own x platform in the last couple of years as being an
00:03:08.220 almost permanent rally cry against migration um and in particular you know promoting people like
00:03:16.680 Tommy Robinson, who I know you know and have talked to, the people that many people think
00:03:21.580 are genuinely Islamophobic, who hate Muslims and Islam and are directing all their fury
00:03:31.000 at the two billion or so Muslims on the planet, which is, of course, one in four of the entire 0.96
00:03:35.840 global population. What do you say to that? Look, I'm an immigrant. Elon is an immigrant.
00:03:43.920 The fact that we are both immigrants doesn't mean that we are equally likely to assimilate
00:03:48.820 within the Western ethos, irrespective of where we come from, right?
00:03:53.720 Fido the cat, the house cat, is a feline.
00:03:57.280 The wild lion is a feline.
00:03:59.900 They're both called feline.
00:04:01.480 That doesn't mean that I will equally cuddle with both of them, despite the fact that they
00:04:05.380 hold the same title of being a feline.
00:04:08.300 So people from Islamic countries come in all varieties.
00:04:12.400 Some are perfectly lovely and peaceful. Others, not so much so. But as we've discussed, you and 1.00
00:04:18.640 I previously, Pierce, Islam contains a set of codified ideas that are either congruent or 0.99
00:04:25.800 incongruent with the West. And so in answering that question, we may want to decide how many 1.00
00:04:31.680 Muslims to allow into the West. Which is perfectly reasonable to have controlled 1.00
00:04:38.020 immigration policies. I think one of the problems you've seen in the UK, for example, and indeed
00:04:43.760 throughout Europe, has been a failure by governments, Western governments, to control
00:04:50.140 immigration. And that has been pretty disastrous, actually. So I don't, for a moment, dispute that.
00:04:55.760 It's just my issue with people like Tommy Robinson, for example, is that his concern is singular 0.90
00:05:02.200 to Muslims. It's all he talks about. I mean, you talk about a lot of Muslims are perfectly good,
00:05:08.020 law-abiding, peaceful people, which is obviously true.
00:05:10.760 But you could take the same argument with white Christians, right? 0.84
00:05:14.780 There are, the UK is a majority white country. 0.99
00:05:18.020 Therefore, the majority of crime is committed by white people. 0.88
00:05:21.280 But if you read Tommy Robinson's ex-feed, he never mentions any crime by white people. 0.97
00:05:25.980 It's like it doesn't exist. 0.93
00:05:27.560 It's like this is a singular issue, that this kind of stuff only happens with Muslims. 0.59
00:05:33.780 And that gets amplified by Elon to hundreds of millions of people.
00:05:38.760 And that, I think, is problematic.
00:05:42.560 Look, in evolutionary psychology, there's a principle called assortative mating, which basically argues that if you wish to have a long, successful, happy marriage, you should marry someone with whom you share some of the most foundational values that define your life.
00:05:59.760 So, for example, if I were an acerbic atheist and I marry someone who is very religious, I am putting the statistical odds against me of having a happy marriage.
00:06:09.900 Love does not conquer all. 0.96
00:06:12.060 By this exact same logic, there are a set of values that typically come from Islamic societies that are perfectly antithetical to Western values. 1.00
00:06:23.060 So, on average, someone coming from Denmark and Sweden and trying to settle in Iceland is more likely to assimilate than the same number of people coming from Waziristan and Afghanistan. 0.99
00:06:36.640 And that statement should be obvious to the average three-day-old pigeon. 1.00
00:06:42.260 But what do we do with people who are not Muslim but commit similar crimes? 1.00
00:06:49.820 We punish them like we would anybody else, right? 1.00
00:06:53.060 There are Jewish pedophiles that should be punished. 1.00
00:06:57.120 No one is contesting that. 1.00
00:06:58.760 I'm Jewish. 1.00
00:06:59.620 I think they should deserve the exact same punishment as anybody else.
00:07:03.140 That doesn't take away from the fact that when we're looking at the British grooming gangs for the past 30 years,
00:07:10.300 most of them are not named Mordechai Richter.
00:07:13.820 They're named Mohammed Akbar Hussain.
00:07:17.540 That is true, that the grooming gangs in places like Rotherham and Telford in the north of England
00:07:22.940 were predominantly British Pakistani Muslim men, 0.99
00:07:26.720 and they were committing their crimes, horrendous crimes, 1.00
00:07:29.600 against many thousands of young white English girls, predominantly.
00:07:34.260 So that was an appalling scandal.
00:07:36.880 It wasn't exposed by Tommy Robinson, as he likes to claim.
00:07:40.600 It was exposed by a journalist at the Times newspaper
00:07:43.320 in a big front-page exposé that started it.
00:07:45.900 I don't dispute and ever have done that Robinson hasn't banged the drum
00:07:50.160 about this quite properly, because he's right. It was a scandal that was then covered up. And it
00:07:55.560 was covered up because people didn't want to confront the reality of who was perpetrating
00:08:00.600 these crimes and against whom they were doing it. And the whole thing, frankly, was a complete
00:08:05.460 disgrace. Now, having said that, it's also true that the vast majority of sexual crime in the UK
00:08:12.600 is committed by white men, right? 0.98
00:08:14.900 And again, I simply say, 1.00
00:08:16.240 if everyone's focus is only on sex crimes by Muslim men 0.99
00:08:21.840 and therefore used as a stick to beat Islam with generally, 0.99
00:08:26.660 even though the vast majority of 2 billion Muslims in the world 0.98
00:08:29.500 do not commit sex crimes,
00:08:31.300 then there's a problem right there, isn't there?
00:08:35.220 Right.
00:08:36.020 Again, I think we discussed it last time,
00:08:38.880 the per capita issue.
00:08:40.840 It is incontestable.
00:08:41.240 contest. No, I understand the per capita. Yeah, I understand that. So then that addresses the
00:08:46.180 question. Go ahead. Go ahead. Well, not really, not really, because per capita means, yes, if you
00:08:51.640 have more white people, you are more likely, you know, and you have a disproportionate number of
00:08:56.600 a certain ethnicity committing crimes, then you can say there's a per capita thing. The problem 0.62
00:09:02.240 with that grooming gang scandal, the problem with sex crimes in the UK generally, particularly
00:09:07.240 involving young people, is there is not really a proper breakdown to assess. So when people keep
00:09:13.080 bringing up this per capita thing, I understand the meaning of it, obviously, but there's not the
00:09:19.720 information available to make that assessment in most of the cases. And that, again, I think is a
00:09:26.200 problem. Right. But to link it back to suicidal empathy, look, the most fundamental instinct that
00:09:34.100 human beings have other than to survive is to protect their children. So imagine that British 0.93
00:09:41.240 authorities, whether they be the politicians or the police authorities, said, here are a bunch 0.83
00:09:46.960 of children that are being systematically tortured and raped by a particular group of people. And
00:09:53.340 when we're looking at the competing calculus of either protecting our children or demonstrating
00:09:58.960 who is the culprit in those particular cases,
00:10:02.340 let us say, hey, girls, take one for the team 1.00
00:10:05.880 because we don't want to create Islamophobia. 1.00
00:10:09.080 That's the suicidal empathy,
00:10:10.860 notwithstanding the fact of what you said, 0.99
00:10:13.440 which is, of course, white men also commit rapes. 1.00
00:10:17.140 Of course, Jewish men also commit rapes. 0.99
00:10:19.080 It doesn't take away from the singular tragedy 0.99
00:10:22.720 of the grooming gangs that comes from suicidal empathy.
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00:11:34.900 Yeah, well, I think it's more that there was, certainly in the UK,
00:11:40.560 a fear running through authority that if they were specific
00:11:45.000 about who had been perpetrating these hideous crimes
00:11:48.180 as part of these grooming rape gangs,
00:11:50.060 then it would cause enormous unrest, when of course it's caused a lot more unrest by trying
00:11:56.600 to cover it up. And this happened at all stages of British establishment and authority. And I think
00:12:03.700 honestly, it was disgraceful. On that, I completely agree with Robinson. But I don't like the leap
00:12:09.920 many take, including Robinson, that the whole problem is purely Muslim, purely Islam. It's a 1.00
00:12:17.540 religion issue? Because I just don't think that is true. Look, Jeffrey Epstein was Jewish. Harvey
00:12:26.460 Weinstein is Jewish. But they didn't commit those crimes invoking specific tenets of Judaism 0.76
00:12:34.940 to justify their debauchery. Many of the Pakistani Muslim men who were grooming and raping those 0.99
00:12:41.920 little girls, used the pretext of their religion to then argue, look, those girls are nejes, 1.00
00:12:50.240 they're impure. If we have at it with them, that is perfectly reasonable within our religion. 1.00
00:12:57.040 So a back-rober...
00:12:58.240 But as you know, but hang on again, as you know, I mean, I think that's irrelevant. I'll tell you
00:13:03.180 why. Because as you know, the vast majority of Muslims do not interpret the Quran to mean 1.00
00:13:09.080 that kind of stuff. And so I would say there's no difference. If you're a victim of Harvey 0.95
00:13:14.280 Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein or these appalling grooming gangs in the north of England, you're a
00:13:20.000 victim. And it doesn't matter to me if they've used or invoked their interpretation of religious
00:13:27.140 tracts, which many people of their own religion think the complete opposite. So I just don't like
00:13:33.520 the all-encompassing Islam is the problem, because we've got 5 million Muslims living in the UK, 1.00
00:13:40.460 about 5 to 6 percent of the population, and most of them live perfectly, peacefully, 1.00
00:13:46.520 in a law-abiding way, and they're fine. Why demonize the entire religion? We don't do that
00:13:52.560 with other religions. Okay, there are about 10,000 recorded religions. Actually, that's a
00:13:58.120 conservative number there are even more than 10 000 out of those 10 000 religions there seems to
00:14:04.060 be only one where there seems to always be the misinterpretation of that noble faith in the
00:14:11.220 exact same direction we never hear about jane jainist grooming gangs we never hear about shintoist
00:14:18.980 grooming gangs we never hear about you know what you know what is you know what you know the answer
00:14:24.720 per capita. Gad, I'm surprised you haven't worked that one out, because there are 2 billion Muslims.
00:14:29.980 It's per capita, my friend. It's your argument. Let me now throw it back at you. It's simply
00:14:35.340 because there are more Muslims. So therefore, per capita, they're going to be committing more 1.00
00:14:41.320 of these crimes. Do you agree with that? No, because Hindus also make up roughly,
00:14:48.520 maybe not a quarter of the world's population, but certainly a sizable amount. And I don't 1.00
00:14:54.580 have the numbers in front of me, but if we look at per capita, we would find that there's only one 0.85
00:15:00.960 group that misinterprets their religious edicts into committing terror attacks, into raping women 0.84
00:15:08.720 and so on. There's something unique about how we read Islamic texts that always makes us 0.96
00:15:15.940 mistranslate, misinterpret, misunderstand the beautiful noble texts in exactly the same
00:15:22.660 direction for the past 1400 years it's a real mystery well I think there are extremists 1.00
00:15:30.380 Muslims as there are any religion and extremism of any kind should be condemned and they should 0.97
00:15:37.340 be susceptible to the same law as everybody else and I've always felt that let me just 0.99
00:15:43.260 mention something you wrote in your book about Gabor Marte now the full disclosure we wanted
00:15:49.820 you to debate with him you don't like to do debates out of interest why don't you like doing
00:15:55.820 debates that's that's a great question uh i'm always happy to debate someone if a priori i feel
00:16:03.700 that both interlock both parties could potentially have some means of being swayed away from their
00:16:12.020 anchored position if the appropriate evidence were presented to them right so for example
00:16:17.260 I don't, as an evolutionist, I don't debate young earth creationists, not because I'm an elitist lofty guy who can't be bothered debating, but I know for a fact that there is no amount of evolutionary information that I could offer them to make them say, oh, you know what, Professor Saad, in light of what you just said, I've now changed my opinion.
00:16:36.880 So there is nothing that I could ever share with Dr. Mate that would ever alter his opinions, and therefore it's a futile exercise. That's why I love speaking to you one-on-one, because you're such a charismatic guy.
00:16:49.940 well thank you um for your false flattery but i i i mean just full disclosure gabor mate is
00:16:57.800 listening to this debate and the reason for that is that you dedicate two pages in your new book
00:17:04.600 to him um and so we thought we talked to him after you i mean i'd have preferred to have you
00:17:10.660 chat to each other because you do whack him in the book you say this gabor mate is a canadian
00:17:15.460 physician who has built a self-help empire on the back of his supposed empathetic and
00:17:20.540 compassionate handling of patients who suffer from addiction. He argues that the root of
00:17:25.120 addiction is childhood trauma, but he goes much further by purporting that countless
00:17:29.840 diseases are rooted in this singular explanation. This reminds me of Freudian psychoanalytical
00:17:35.020 quackery, wherein all psychological disorders have their ultimate genesis in sexual repression,
00:17:40.580 or the hysteria of the repressed memories movement.
00:17:45.120 And you also go on to say that Dr. Mate,
00:17:48.480 who was raised Jewish in Nazi-occupied Hungary,
00:17:52.400 was a former Zionist who's since become a prominent critic of Israeli policy.
00:17:55.640 You say this, Mate's infinite well of intergenerational empathy 0.60
00:17:59.940 does not apply to Jews, though.
00:18:01.900 He knows as a Holocaust survivor,
00:18:04.480 and you put the word survivor in quotation marks,
00:18:07.740 what true trauma is,
00:18:08.980 and he never fails to remind the world that the Palestinians are suffering a genocide at the hands 0.83
00:18:13.600 of a Nazi-like Israelis. There is nothing noble about the Marte duo. Aaron, his son, is also a 0.73
00:18:19.380 regular guest on Uncensored. They are uninformed fools engaging in malignant narcissism, masquerading 1.00
00:18:26.240 as infinite compassion. Now, you may not want to debate with him, but that's pretty full-on 1.00
00:18:32.420 attack against this guy. He's listening to this. I mean, do you stand by the rhetoric you've used
00:18:39.760 there? Yes, I was actually trying to be charitable and nice in that quote that you kindly read.
00:18:47.020 Look, Gabor Mate, yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. I don't use words flippantly, right? So if my words are
00:18:55.240 going to be immortalized in my book, I say what I mean and I mean what I say. Gabor Mate is a
00:19:01.340 Holocaust survivor in that when he was six months old, he was passed on to another family to be
00:19:07.640 protected. But to say that you're a survivor when you're a six-month infant is like arguing that I
00:19:14.780 too am a Holocaust survivor because I was a spermatozoa in my dad's testicles in the 1940s.
00:19:21.980 A six-month-old infant is not cognizant of the reality around them. So there's no meaningful way
00:19:29.360 by which he can then argue that because I'm a Holocaust survivor that suffered at the hands of
00:19:35.100 the Nazis, I could tell you that the IDF is infinitely worse than the, it's a rhetorical
00:19:42.340 device that is being used to justify his position. So it's in that sense. 0.87
00:19:48.240 What age? Okay, but what age would he need to be then for you to accept that he's a
00:19:53.760 Holocaust survivor? It will be at the age at which your cognitive development would entitle
00:20:00.300 your memory to have traces. Well, give me an age. Well, it varies across people, but typically most
00:20:07.140 people, their earliest memory will go typically at around age three or four. So a six-month-old
00:20:13.680 infant has no knowledge of what happened to him during the Holocaust. And there can be no impact
00:20:20.760 of what happened on somebody of that age.
00:20:24.240 Because I would absolutely dispute that.
00:20:26.740 I mean, terrible things happen to people
00:20:29.020 when they're incredibly young babies or one or two or whatever.
00:20:33.360 And of course, it can have a massive material effect on them.
00:20:36.600 Of course, he will have discovered what happened with his family,
00:20:40.260 with the Holocaust, the realities and so on. 0.65
00:20:42.200 You know, so I just don't understand what the upside is for you
00:20:46.480 in diminishing his claim to be a Holocaust survivor,
00:20:50.160 albeit he was extremely young.
00:20:52.300 I mean, why shouldn't he be able to have had massive impact from that?
00:21:00.320 I'm not questioning the fact that he could look back at his family's history
00:21:06.140 and feel pain at what happened to him.
00:21:08.540 My concern is in using that narrative for nefarious reasons
00:21:13.940 to then justify why you have the authority and imprimatur
00:21:17.680 to say that as a Holocaust survivor, I can tell you that the IDF are no different than the Nazis.
00:21:25.080 It's in the intent of using that narrative. Pierce, as you know, I went through horrors as an 11-year-old
00:21:32.880 child in Lebanon that, you know, I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies. I do remember all of those
00:21:39.400 incidents. I was 11 years old, but I don't use my victimology narrative, my true victimology
00:21:45.440 narrative to then espouse certain positions that are rooted in the fact, you have to believe me
00:21:51.520 because I'm a childhood war refugee. My position stands...
00:21:55.320 Well, hang on, hang on. In a way, you just have. I mean, in a way, you've just cited that for
00:22:01.500 viewers who may not have been aware of that. And therefore, that obviously forms the backdrop to
00:22:06.580 your opinions. I mean, I don't really see a lot of difference. I mean, you've just said that you
00:22:10.780 went through terrible things in Lebanon, of course that is going to inform your view of
00:22:16.820 issues in the Middle East. Of course it is, in the same way that what happened to Dr.
00:22:21.340 Marte is going to inform his views. The fact that your views, you know, don't concur with
00:22:27.760 each other, well, that's what happens in democratic society. You know, and I'm just surprised
00:22:33.020 that you would be so willing to dismiss his right
00:22:37.800 to lean on his background,
00:22:41.200 his experience from his family's perspective,
00:22:44.320 albeit he was very young,
00:22:45.440 just to dismiss it as almost fake.
00:22:47.980 I mean, when you put the word survivor in quotation marks,
00:22:50.500 you're kind of saying it's not real.
00:22:53.780 No, so again, I don't know if we need to debate
00:22:56.680 Gabor Mate for the whole show,
00:22:58.100 but if that's what you want to do, that's perfectly fine.
00:23:00.220 I'm not questioning his...
00:23:01.400 Do you want to talk to him directly?
00:23:03.020 I don't. You can talk to him after and he can discuss with you why I'm so wrong. But I don't believe that he doesn't have the right to say whatever he wants. As you said, in a free society, Holocaust deniers should be free to espouse their nonsense.
00:23:18.980 I mean, I'm genuinely a free speech absolutist. So I'm not questioning his right to espouse anything that he wants. All I'm questioning is the manipulative intent of saying that because I'm a Holocaust survivor, you should listen to me when I tell you that the IDF are indistinguishable from the Nazis.
00:23:38.960 That's the only thing that I'm criticizing here. I wish him well. I implored what happened to his family. So that's I mean, I don't have to justify how horrible the Holocaust is. Right. But what I'm saying is I have memory of the trauma I went through.
00:23:55.600 My parents were kidnapped by Fatah in 1980 when I was 15.
00:24:00.480 So I have the right, I have the memory to talk about my victimhood.
00:24:04.980 He doesn't cognitively.
00:24:06.840 He was a six-month-old infant.
00:24:09.000 That's all I'm saying.
00:24:10.920 Would you compare the people that did that to your parents,
00:24:15.100 would you compare them to Nazis?
00:24:18.720 I mean, no, in the sense that at the very least,
00:24:21.660 my parents were able to get out of their ordeal. 0.89
00:24:25.280 So in that sense, their kidnappers were a lot more charitable and ultimately kind and empathetic, more so than the Nazis, which would have undoubtedly put a bullet in the head.
00:24:36.160 By the way, the ones who kidnapped them were Muslim and they didn't kill them, right?
00:24:41.140 So again, they are very nice Muslims. 0.99
00:24:43.100 They are very mean Muslims.
00:24:44.620 They are very nice Jews. 0.99
00:24:45.900 They are very mean Jews. 1.00
00:24:46.940 What I criticize always, Spirits, as I think you know by now, is the specific tenets within Islam that may or may not be congruent with Western values. 1.00
00:24:57.700 Yeah, and my issue with that is it's how you interpret it. 0.93
00:25:01.500 You know, and that's my issue.
00:25:02.860 I have a lot of Muslim friends of mine who say the issue is extremist twists the language of the Quran to suit their nefarious intent. 0.99
00:25:10.860 And there's a long, illustrious history of people doing that with religious. 1.00
00:25:14.820 People do it with the Bible. 0.92
00:25:15.940 You know, we've had Christian extremists and nutcases using some of the very violent rhetoric of the Bible to justify what they do. 1.00
00:25:23.480 What's the difference? 0.79
00:25:25.100 Well, the difference is that Christianity went through the light of reformation. 0.95
00:25:32.120 Regrettably, Islamic doctrines have not.
00:25:35.300 There have been 1,400 years of attempts of Muslim scholars trying to incorporate interpretive reformation into Islam.
00:25:46.240 You really can't do it canonically because in Islam, it is the final, inerrant, unchangeable word of Allah.
00:25:55.000 So the likelihood of having the light of reformation come into Islamic doctrines is simply lesser than in Christianity. 0.98
00:26:02.520 let's just end with two um uh one one slight tangential uh subject one completely nothing
00:26:10.620 to do with it but the iran deal um which may or may not have been signed by the time we air this
00:26:17.500 uh this interview um but regardless it just seems to most observers that donald trump has got
00:26:26.680 himself into something that he just is desperate to get out of and that he was persuaded about the
00:26:32.500 merits of attacking Iran by Benjamin Netanyahu, who may have been working to a different agenda
00:26:38.480 as the Prime Minister of Israel. What is your view of that? And obviously, Israel's been killing
00:26:42.960 a lot of civilians in Lebanon, going after Hezbollah. You grew up in Beirut. You've talked
00:26:48.720 about some of the experiences your family had. What do you view about what Israel has been doing 0.98
00:26:54.160 and about where we are with the Iran war? Well, I don't know yet anything about the Iran deal,
00:27:00.740 the specifics, as you said, we don't know what those are. I think in a holistic sense, if we
00:27:07.200 were able, we meaning the West in general or America in particular, if we were able to get rid
00:27:13.280 of the existing regime in Iran, first it would free 90 million Iranians, most of whom are quite
00:27:20.860 modern, most of whom are quite secular, most of whom are quite educated, we'd be freeing them
00:27:25.880 from the shackles of 47 years of theocracy. So if one had empathy towards the Iranian people,
00:27:32.800 you would say, go, go, go, let's free this beautiful Persian culture. So that would be my
00:27:37.960 first statement. Regarding of what Israel is doing in attacking, are you saying now attacking
00:27:44.240 Hezbollah in Lebanon? Is that what you're asking? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I don't know the
00:27:51.080 specific numbers of how many civilians have died in those attacks. But the general idea of getting
00:27:57.680 rid of all of these proxies of Iran will only lead to greater stability in the Middle East. 0.99
00:28:04.320 And so, inshallah, hopefully when this regime falls, we will have a much brighter future in 0.98
00:28:09.680 the region. Of course, it could play out another way, which is, as we're already seeing evidentially
00:28:15.840 from American intelligence in Gaza 0.88
00:28:17.580 that for all the Hamas terrorists
00:28:19.640 have been killed,
00:28:20.960 five people have gravitated
00:28:22.580 to the ideology
00:28:23.560 because they're so appalled
00:28:25.500 by what's been done in Gaza.
00:28:27.860 If that was to extrapolate
00:28:29.460 across the region
00:28:30.440 with everywhere else
00:28:31.260 that Israel has gone after
00:28:33.360 these terror groups,
00:28:35.220 because as Donald Trump himself said,
00:28:37.260 you don't need to take down
00:28:38.180 an apartment block 0.99
00:28:38.960 to kill a Hezbollah terrorist. 1.00
00:28:41.080 And if you keep doing that, 1.00
00:28:42.160 you are going to create
00:28:43.080 more enemies potentially.
00:28:44.140 So your hope, your aspiration that all of this bombing is going to lead to Israel being safer and Israelis being safer, I'm not convinced by that at all.
00:28:55.740 I think part of the problem has been the massively disproportionate way that this Israeli government has gone about its business.
00:29:02.380 And I'm genuinely concerned about what that means for the security of Israel, of Israelis and of Jews worldwide.
00:29:10.680 I think we're already seeing the downside of this strategy.
00:29:14.620 So, look, you know, time will tell.
00:29:16.720 History will show us.
00:29:19.220 But do you think that, obviously, if Trump is going to pull out of this, can you see
00:29:24.340 a situation where Netanyahu goes it alone against Iran? 0.68
00:29:29.520 I mean, I suppose I could. 0.54
00:29:31.320 And I should also mention that I don't know if you hinted at that in your earlier question.
00:29:35.300 Many people think that, you know, Donald Trump, for all of his power and strong personhood, somehow loses all of his personal agency and becomes a helpless puppet of Netanyahu when Netanyahu tells him do A or do B.
00:29:54.260 or do be.
00:29:55.420 No, I don't think it was that.
00:29:56.400 I don't think Netanyahu told...
00:29:57.880 No, I don't think it's that.
00:29:58.660 It's just that everybody knows
00:30:00.120 from what Antony Blinken and Hillary Clinton
00:30:02.380 and others have now said
00:30:03.420 that Netanyahu tried to persuade
00:30:05.700 a series of American presidents to do this
00:30:07.940 and they all said no
00:30:09.280 and the only one who said yes was Trump
00:30:11.380 and the New York Times
00:30:13.220 had a big deep dive feature on all this,
00:30:15.860 very well saw some inside
00:30:17.120 the White House Situation Room
00:30:19.080 and what is clear is that Donald Trump
00:30:21.240 believed Netanyahu's prediction of what would happen.
00:30:26.540 And the tragedy of all this is it all turned out to be untrue.
00:30:30.460 Had it led to a very speedy overthrowing of a terrible regime
00:30:34.220 with the people uprising and seizing back control of their country
00:30:37.480 and the end of the IRGC and the Strait of Hormuz had been left alone,
00:30:41.660 as Netanyahu said would happen,
00:30:43.920 I think many more people would have been supportive.
00:30:46.880 But actually, the opposite has happened. 0.89
00:30:48.560 and ended up in a position where the Iranian regime now knows all it has to do
00:30:53.740 is shut up the Strait of Hormuz and fire a few missiles at the Gulf states
00:30:57.640 and they have the cards.
00:31:00.640 So if you were doing a forensic accounting of the net either success 0.50
00:31:05.800 or failure of this war, you would put it as that it's been an abject failure 0.61
00:31:10.880 more than a success?
00:31:13.380 Well, I'd certainly say a failure. 0.90
00:31:14.640 If the mission was to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, I don't see how anyone can say 0.89
00:31:20.840 with any confidence anything's changed from when Obama got the same wordy guarantees about that
00:31:26.040 issue as Trump is apparently getting in his deal. Plus, if it's true that the Iranian regime is
00:31:31.440 going to get $300 billion to rehabilitate and rebuild itself, well, why would we trust them 0.78
00:31:37.620 not to spend all that on all the missiles and weaponry that have been destroyed militarily?
00:31:41.740 So I just think I'm really struggling to see where the win is.
00:31:46.260 And in fact, when it comes to the failure, the failure to understand the importance of 0.97
00:31:51.220 the Strait of Hormuz and just how easy it would be for Iran to paralyze the global energy 0.99
00:31:57.440 economy market in the way that it has done, I think was an abject failure of intelligence 0.97
00:32:02.460 and strategic military planning.
00:32:05.080 And then when you add in the attacks on the Gulf states with just a few drones and the
00:32:09.220 mayhem that caused, then I think that that, again, has been a failure of predicting what may happen
00:32:16.180 and what the response would be if it did. So I'm afraid all I see is the same regime in place,
00:32:22.520 the Ayatollah replaced by his son, who's even more hardline and saw half his family killed,
00:32:26.940 so will hate everyone even more than his father did. The IRGC still in control,
00:32:31.880 no popular uprising whatsoever. And now the Iranian regime has the Strait of Hormuz as the 0.76
00:32:38.520 most effective weapon it could possibly imagine that it didn't know it had and may start charging 0.71
00:32:43.240 a toll to use it which it wasn't before if that is a victory uh gad sad my friend then i've got
00:32:50.040 a second-hand card to sell you i have a slightly different take but i will defer to your expertise
00:32:57.700 gad sad it's always good to talk to you although finally my final point the world cup apparently
00:33:04.540 You heard saying on X, I think in response to something I may have said, that Messi might be the proof that God exists.
00:33:14.160 Messi's turning me from an atheist to a believer.
00:33:19.460 Listen, Messi, when he scored his brilliant hat trick, and it was a brilliant hat trick, he should have been sent off before he scored any of them for a brutal assault on one of the defenders of the opposition.
00:33:31.680 So I don't know whether God got involved in that, but if he did, it might be time for a review of your beliefs.
00:33:41.900 One thing is for sure, Pierce, you're a loyal guy.
00:33:45.040 Your love for Ronaldo is only beaten by the love of my mother towards yours truly.
00:33:54.140 Gadsen, great to have you on our sensor. Thank you very much.
00:33:57.200 Thank you, sir. Take care. Bye.