The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - April 15, 2026


Discussing My Forthcoming Book Suicidal Empathy： Dying to Be Kind (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_985)


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

184.88373

Word count

636

Sentence count

46

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Saad Chaudhuri is a Canadian neuroscientist and author who specialises in understanding the link between mental illness and empathy. In this episode, Saad talks about his new book, Dying to be Kind, and how we can all learn to be kinder to others.

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 .
00:00:00.280 Dr. Saad, it's great to be with you here in Montreal.
00:00:03.280 I am so excited to be with you. Thank you.
00:00:05.120 Your home territory.
00:00:06.140 And last time we spoke was actually on Zoom.
00:00:08.500 It was actually the day Trump came back into office.
00:00:12.260 Is it?
00:00:12.940 It was, yeah, yeah.
00:00:13.640 So there were two great things to rejoice over, talking to you and Trump's victory.
00:00:19.540 Exactly.
00:00:20.280 And I think we also talked about what would happen after Trudeau.
00:00:23.080 And you said anything would be better, even a lobotomized turtle.
00:00:28.400 That sounds like me.
00:00:29.720 Is this better?
00:00:31.540 I mean, only in the sense that he just irks me less, Carney.
00:00:36.680 But in terms of his policies, it's probably not that much better.
00:00:40.700 Yeah.
00:00:40.960 So here's hoping for the lobotomized turtle next time.
00:00:44.420 Now, the book.
00:00:45.440 You've got the new book, which we all know the title of so well because it's become kind of part of everyday speech in our circles.
00:00:53.640 But that's due out now in a few weeks, right?
00:00:56.380 It's out in exactly a month on May 12th.
00:00:59.580 So go out and pre-order it.
00:01:01.180 Suicidal empathy. 0.79
00:01:01.920 Suicidal empathy.
00:01:03.000 And then the subtitle, Dying to be Kind.
00:01:05.360 And it's literally what is happening, right?
00:01:06.940 That's exactly what's happening.
00:01:08.320 So just to kind of give you a 30,000 view, in the parasitic mind, which is one of my
00:01:14.560 earlier books, I talk about what happens to human beings when their cognitive system is
00:01:20.040 precipised.
00:01:21.160 Cognitive system is a fancy way of saying their thought processes.
00:01:23.840 But for me to completely hijack your ability to reason, I have to precipice both your cognitive and your affective system, your emotional system.
00:01:32.060 So this book completes the story by showing us what happens when I can take hold of your empathy module and completely hijack it in a way that you start caring more about Guatemalan gang members more than you do about American vets, that you care more about homeless people than about the children who should be playing in parks, that you care more about the 183 times bellend than you care about their victims.
00:01:56.920 And so empathy is beautiful. It's an evolved trait. We expect a social species to have empathy. But like most other psychiatric conditions, if it misfires, it's either hypoactive or in this case, hyperactive, and it targets the wrong people, it becomes suicidal.
00:02:15.880 And it's really also about empathy for others more than for our own.
00:02:20.520 Exactly.
00:02:21.200 And that's such a weird feature of today's thinking, isn't it? 0.93
00:02:24.140 Well, I am so progressive, I am so enlightened that I will side with those who, at their first attempt, would love to behead me. 0.99
00:02:33.440 Hashtag queers for Palestine. 1.00
00:02:34.540 Queers for Palestine. 0.91
00:02:35.500 Hashtag Jews for Hamas. 1.00
00:02:36.940 Trans for Hamas, all of them. 0.99
00:02:38.300 And so on.
00:02:38.920 And so that's why, by the way, the front cover of the book is a...
00:02:42.660 The lamb.
00:02:43.220 The lamb.
00:02:44.000 It's a sheep and it's free the wolves.
00:02:47.140 well um and and i mean we're about to sit down for a longer chat which uh people will be able
00:02:53.300 to see in a few months about islam and anti-semitism for part of a project that i'm working
00:02:59.460 on so we're really grateful that you're speaking to us for that um and in the meantime those who
00:03:05.000 are keen followers of your work will be able to get the new book suicidal empathy a phrase like
00:03:09.600 i said that has become kind of part of everyday speech uh coined by uh you and i hope that the
00:03:15.840 book will be you know as well received as it should be i'm sure it will i'm sure we'll rush
00:03:20.240 up to the best sellers and thanks for talking with me now just before we start the the main
00:03:24.320 wonderful thank you everyone great cheers