The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Discussing Suicidal Empathy at the Salem Center at UT-Austin (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1013)

00:00:00.000 Well, good evening. I'm honored to be able to introduce to you Gad Saad, Professor of Marketing

00:00:05.920 at Concordia University in Montreal, Advisory Fellow at the University's Center for Inquiry.

00:00:11.900 He's taught at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Northwood University, and the University

00:00:16.600 of California at Irvine. He's also a visiting scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center

00:00:21.460 for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. He's not your

00:00:26.180 average business school professor. He's an accomplished, energetic, and creative evolutionary

00:00:31.240 psychologist who pioneered the application of evolutionary psychology to marketing and

00:00:36.280 consumer behavior. His works have garnered more than 5,400 citations. Gad's research breaks new

00:00:44.700 theoretical ground. It's also remarkably useful. I recommend his paper, Gender Differences in

00:00:50.180 Information Search Strategies, for a Christmas gift for anyone who's wrestled with the question

00:00:55.060 of what to get that special someone.

00:00:57.420 He's also a passionate public intellectual,

00:01:00.180 someone who defends science, reason, and common sense

00:01:03.000 against the many forces,

00:01:05.480 academic, political, and psychological, that assail them.

00:01:09.000 His books include The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption,

00:01:12.760 The Consuming Instinct,

00:01:14.240 What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift-Giving

00:01:17.640 Reveal About Human Nature, 0.70

00:01:19.920 The Parasitic Mind,

00:01:21.140 How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense,

00:01:23.820 the sad truth about happiness eight secrets for leading the good life and finally now suicidal

00:01:31.980 empathy dying to be kind he's also a prolific blogger his podcast the sad truth has more than

00:01:39.220 363 000 subscribers and over 43 million views its motto the truth can hurt the truth can set you free

00:01:49.100 but you can't hide from the sad truth.

00:01:52.580 Can you handle the truth?

00:01:54.680 If so, please welcome Gad Saad.

00:02:01.280 Thank you all for coming.

00:02:07.720 We were in a bit of a pickle

00:02:09.540 because we didn't want to promote it too much

00:02:11.860 because there's often security concerns.

00:02:14.820 So notwithstanding,

00:02:16.100 Notwithstanding not much of a promotional campaign, it's lovely to see many of you taking

00:02:21.200 the time to be here.

00:02:22.960 So I wanted to maybe spend 10, 15 minutes giving you a broad overview of both the parasitic

00:02:30.080 mind and suicidal empathy, how they sort of cover a full narrative, and then we'll have

00:02:36.040 a fireside chat, and then hopefully we'll have a bit of time to open it up for a moderated

00:02:41.440 Q&A.

00:02:42.800 So my background is in psychology of decision-making.

00:02:47.460 You know, how do people make choices?

00:02:49.340 How much information do people look at before they commit to a choice?

00:02:53.340 And while training within that paradigm, I studied things like axiomatic rationality.

00:03:00.440 So many of you who know, for example, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, they talk about axiomatic rationality.

00:03:07.440 rationality. If I prefer car A to car B, and I prefer car B to car C, I should prefer car A to

00:03:14.200 car C. If I don't do that, I'm being axiomatically irrational. So there are very tight definitions

00:03:22.280 of rationality. But in my recent books, I'm talking about another form of irrationality.

00:03:29.560 This is the irrationality that causes us to now engage into a debate as to what constitutes

00:03:36.480 male or female, right? Until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people that had existed on Earth

00:03:44.680 seemed to have been able to adjudicate through this very difficult conundrum of what constitutes

00:03:49.760 male or female very easily. But 15 minutes ago, we were no longer able to do that. Well,

00:03:54.820 this is a type of irrationality that really begs to be explained. When people tell you that there

00:04:01.820 are no objective truths everything is shackled by our personal biases therefore the scientific

00:04:08.260 method is inherently suspect that's a form of epistemological irrationality and so in the

00:04:15.900 parasitic mind I was trying to understand how is it that people can hold such parasitic thoughts

00:04:23.780 because if I really want to hijack your ability to think I have to hijack two elements your 0.90

00:04:30.700 cognitive system your thinking processes and your affective system your emotional system

00:04:35.900 parasitic mind deals with your cognitive system suicidal empathy deals with your affective system

00:04:42.080 if i can hijack both of these systems then i own your ability to to think or or not think

00:04:49.020 to depart from thinking but let me explain very briefly what why i use the neuroparasitological

00:04:55.720 framework. And then I will get into a bit of what suicidal empathy is about, which, by the way, is

00:05:01.760 literally out tomorrow. So suicidal empathy is now a term and concept that has really seeped its way

00:05:09.680 into the, you know, the daily parlance, the daily lexicon in many languages. And some people are

00:05:17.180 surprised that it hasn't been out, which I guess speaks to the fact that it has really resonated

00:05:21.640 with people. So I'm incredibly excited that finally tomorrow it'll be out. So anyway, so

00:05:27.060 in the animal kingdom, we study parasite-host interactions, right? And so there are many,

00:05:35.860 many examples of these. So a tapeworm can parasitize your intestinal tract, okay? That

00:05:43.040 would be an example of a parasite. But a neuroparasite is a parasite that ultimately

00:05:49.460 needs to get to the host's brain, altering its neuronal circuitry, typically to suit its

00:05:57.280 reproductive interest. So for example, a wood cricket, many of you maybe have heard me mention

00:06:03.520 this example, a wood cricket abhors water. It wants nothing to do with water. But when it is

00:06:09.200 parasitized by a hair worm, the hair worm needs the wood cricket to merrily commit suicide,

00:06:16.340 and suicidal empathy jump into water commit suicide because the hair worm needs to complete

00:06:22.680 its reproductive cycle in water so once that hapless wood cricket has been zombified it

00:06:30.360 loses its ability to pursue its survival instinct right and so what i argue in in suicidal empathy

00:06:39.640 is very different from what already the hit pieces

00:06:45.240 that are coming out on the book,

00:06:46.720 even though people haven't read it,

00:06:47.940 because by definition, my publisher wouldn't have sent it

00:06:51.020 to some of the people who would hold animus against me.

00:06:55.240 And so they're writing these articles

00:06:57.240 without even having granted me the courtesy

00:06:59.840 of having read the book,

00:07:00.960 but that's the way it is in the public sphere.

00:07:04.600 And so the general timber of their attacks

00:07:07.300 is the following one.

00:07:08.780 so let me sort of address it off the bat.

00:07:12.100 They usually argue that I am, you know, a neocon.

00:07:17.260 You know, I'm connected with Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

00:07:20.880 I'm trying to usher a dark world where empathy is no longer, you know, a valued trait.

00:07:30.060 I'm doing no such thing.

00:07:32.400 Empathy is a perfectly laudable virtue.

00:07:36.580 As a social species, we are expected to have evolved empathy as a trait.

00:07:43.940 Why?

00:07:44.620 Because as a social species, for you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need

00:07:50.500 to put myself in your mind and vice versa.

00:07:53.440 This is called theory of mind, which is a feature of cognitive empathy, right?

00:07:58.140 Autistic children typically fail a theory of mind test, and that's how you diagnose

00:08:03.780 them as being autistic.

00:08:05.940 So there's nothing wrong with empathy per se.

00:08:08.880 It's wonderful.

00:08:09.740 We try to choose our closest friends if they are, hopefully they are empathetic.

00:08:14.960 We, both men and women, would love to be with spouses who are empathetic.

00:08:18.740 If we're choosing our physicians and therapists and vets, we want them to be empathetic.

00:08:24.580 So this is not an attack on empathy.

00:08:27.460 It's an attack on dysregulated empathy.

00:08:31.420 Now, what does that mean?

00:08:32.520 Before I explain what I mean by suicidal empathy, let me draw you an analogy from another psychiatric condition.

00:08:41.180 If I were to notice that one of you was sneezing frequently into their hands while you're listening to me lecture,

00:08:51.960 and then later you came up to shake my hand,

00:08:54.980 I would have probably coded the fact that you might be suffering from a cold or a flu that I prefer not to catch.

00:09:04.300 And so after I shake your hand, I will hopefully discreetly go off to the bathroom, wash my hands so that I have avoided this germ contamination.

00:09:14.420 So I did scan the environment for potential threats, and I acted accordingly.

00:09:20.680 So to scan the environment for potential threats is a perfectly rational evolutionary mechanism.

00:09:27.720 What isn't rational, hence it becomes dysregulated, is if I say suffered from germ contamination fears, as would be the case with OCD,

00:09:38.220 I would be stuck in the bathroom for eight hours, and it's stuck in an infinite loop,

00:09:44.900 washing my hands until my skin was falling off due to the scaldingly hot water.

00:09:51.620 So what was adaptive in the case of me tending to you sneezing in your hands

00:09:56.820 becomes maladaptive once it hyperfires, right?

00:10:01.620 Healthy cells multiply, cancer cells multiply, but cancer cells don't have a stopping policy

00:10:13.840 whereby they stop multiplying at a particular point, right?

00:10:18.720 So there are many, many maladies that are really the maladaptive instantiation of an

00:10:27.280 otherwise adaptive process.

00:10:28.940 That's what suicidal empathy is.

00:10:31.620 And now let me link it back to an ancient philosopher.

00:10:38.100 Many of you undoubtedly are familiar with Aristotle.

00:10:42.080 In his Nicomachean ethics, Aristotle spoke about the golden mean,

00:10:48.980 or I would call it the inverted U.

00:10:51.340 Too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good,

00:10:55.120 and much of life is about finding that middle sweet spot.

00:10:59.260 In the case of Aristotle, he was talking about, for example, a soldier.

00:11:04.980 If the soldier doesn't exhibit enough courage, he's cowardly.

00:11:09.140 That's probably not a good trait for a soldier to have.

00:11:12.380 If he exhibits an abundance of dysregulated courage, then he's probably going to die very

00:11:18.660 quickly and be a reckless martyr.

00:11:20.820 Somewhere in the middle is the optimal level of courage for the soldier to exhibit.

00:11:27.280 Same applies to empathy.

00:11:28.820 If I have little to no empathy, I'm called a psychopath.

00:11:34.020 And if I have too much empathy, as is the case in what I'm talking about in the book,

00:11:39.300 so it hyperactivates, it hyperfires, in the wrong situations towards the wrong targets,

00:11:47.900 then you get suicidal empathy.

00:11:49.780 And so let me give you an example of what would constitute targeting your empathy towards the wrong target.

00:11:56.800 let's suppose you have the trolley problem you all have maybe heard of the trolley problem a classic

00:12:03.760 you know experiment where you tell people there's a trolley that's barreling down and it's either

00:12:12.260 going to hit three of your biological children or you can pull a lever and then it could be

00:12:18.600 diverted and hit five random strangers well if the catalyst was simply how many people die in each 0.99

00:12:26.140 of the two options, you should always say, well, it'll be much better that it kills my 0.99

00:12:31.120 three children, because three is smaller than five. 0.94

00:12:34.580 But I bet that no one in this room would say, I would be willing to give up my three biological

00:12:40.620 children for five random people.

00:12:43.540 Now, I know it sounds like a sinister example, but it demonstrates that our emotional system

00:12:50.020 and our cognitive system has evolved to met out investments, resources, empathy, love in

00:13:00.020 strategically relevant ways as would be dictated by an evolutionary calculus. So for example, I've

00:13:06.280 done studies with some of my former doctoral students where we've looked at how do people

00:13:12.280 allocate their gift-giving budgets. And not surprisingly, people allocate their gift-giving

00:13:18.260 budgets in ways that are perfectly informed by an evolutionary calculus.

00:13:23.700 Few people give larger gifts to their second cousins than they do to their siblings.

00:13:31.080 Your siblings are on average, they share 50% of your genes with you.

00:13:36.180 Your second cousins share 6.25% of your genes.

00:13:41.860 And therefore, it makes sense that the way that I allocate my gift-giving budget would

00:13:46.940 would be consistent with some evolutionarily relevant metrics.

00:13:52.840 Suicidal empathy negates all that.

00:13:55.920 It basically says, when having to choose

00:13:59.940 between Guatemalan illegal migrants

00:14:04.720 or American vets who have fought for American liberties

00:14:08.860 and lost their limbs, 0.92

00:14:10.640 choose the Guatemalan illegal immigrants every time. 1.00

00:14:14.700 When deciding whether you should be empathetic towards rape victims or rapists of color, 1.00

00:14:23.300 well, then you've got to empathize with the rapist. 0.89

00:14:26.140 He's probably grown up in a white supremacist society, so we should probably be kind to him.

00:14:31.420 We should maybe give him a 187th chance at a second chance in life, right?

00:14:38.680 Suicidal empathy is saying that it is inherently evil

00:14:42.940 for there to be income that is not equal across all individuals.

00:14:49.300 Therefore, there should be some benevolent overlord

00:14:51.820 that redistributes your income

00:14:53.800 so that we live in a more equitable and empathetic society.

00:14:57.480 So communism, by the way, is very much justified

00:15:01.360 through an appeal to empathy, right?

00:15:04.600 Good people should not tolerate billionaires existing while other people are on food stamps.

00:15:11.380 Give up your money.

00:15:12.320 Be empathetic. 0.58

00:15:14.240 Empathy is what causes rape victims to empathize with their rapists.

00:15:22.720 I'm here to tell you as an evolutionary psychologist that our emotional system did not evolve to empathize with our rapists.

00:15:30.320 And I'll give you maybe one or two stories, but there are many, many of these that are documented in the book.

00:15:37.440 Early in the book, I talk about the example of a Norwegian man who was raped by a Somali migrant in Norway. 0.66

00:15:47.340 And after the Somali migrant was caught, because the Norwegians are on a higher plane of enlightenment,

00:15:54.740 and they don't believe in very severe, stiff punishments.

00:15:58.960 They're kind, they're empathetic, they're sweet, they're compassionate.

00:16:02.560 After he served a very short sentence,

00:16:05.280 then he was going to be deported back to Mogadishu.

00:16:08.600 Well, the rape victim felt great existential angst and great guilt

00:16:15.140 that this poor, hapless migrant was not going to be fully self-actualized

00:16:21.340 if he were to be sent back to Mogadishu.

00:16:23.500 That's probably not an optimal way for your emotional system to fire.

00:16:31.180 Suicidal empathy is when a woman is gang-raped in Germany

00:16:35.360 by some men who are speaking during the rape in Arabic and Farsi.

00:16:42.980 When the cops interview her,

00:16:45.800 she tells them that they were speaking in German.

00:16:48.520 She lies because if she were to say that they spoke in Arabic and Farsi, that might marginalize those communities. 0.75

00:16:58.880 And so best to lie to protect the identity of the rapists and their communities.

00:17:04.180 That's suicidal empathy.

00:17:05.920 There are many, many other examples which maybe we'll talk about during the fireside chat.

00:17:10.000 But what the book really shows is that many, most, all of the domestic and foreign policies that are really attacking the edifices of reason of the West stem from this dysregulated empathy.

00:17:28.900 So there you have it. Thank you very much.

00:17:30.760 And we'll now take it to the fireside chat.

00:17:33.220 should i sit here or where would you want here okay

00:17:42.700 hi yes before we start i want to direct your attention to this you'll have a chance or

00:17:50.580 a chance to submit your own questions um just look at the qr code or put that hideous thing

00:17:57.980 in your browser. Well, first of all, I want to start by having you say something about your

00:18:12.920 own background, partly to mobilize the empathy of the audience. I admit I'm being a little

00:18:17.660 manipulative. But, you know, in an oppression Olympics, you would have to be at least a

00:18:23.240 bronze medalist. So tell us about your own background. I think gold medal. That could

00:18:27.200 well be. So I'm, I was born in Lebanon. So Arabic is my mother tongue. We were part of the last

00:18:36.100 remaining group of Lebanese Jews that had remained in Lebanon. As you might imagine, the Jewish

00:18:43.620 communities throughout the Middle East became pretty much extinct, but there was still a very

00:18:49.320 small pocket, minuscule pocket of Jews that had stayed in Lebanon. Much of my extended family

00:18:55.640 had left Lebanon, you know, well before the start of the Civil War.

00:19:00.860 Unfortunately for us, we were caught up in the Civil War,

00:19:04.500 which started in 75.

00:19:06.880 It wasn't an easy existence.

00:19:12.060 Things that I saw during that first year of the Civil War

00:19:15.400 are things that you might see on TV in that region.

00:19:20.280 That was my childhood. 1.00

00:19:22.000 We ended up, luckily, thank God, being able to leave Lebanon. 1.00

00:19:27.240 And then on one of my parents' return trips to Lebanon, 0.99

00:19:31.240 because they still had business interests in Lebanon,

00:19:35.240 this was in 1980, they were kidnapped by Abu Nidal's group, Fatah.

00:19:42.280 And some really bad things happened to them in captivity,

00:19:45.660 but luckily they were able to be freed.

00:19:48.900 And so since 1980, no one from my family has gone back,

00:19:53.260 but that's sort of the background that I come from.

00:19:55.920 Oh, thank you.

00:19:57.040 I want to ask initially about something you say in the parasitic mind.

00:20:02.480 I highly recommend it, by the way.

00:20:05.540 On page 129, you're talking about these parasitic pathogens of the mind,

00:20:10.720 and you briefly there mention suicidal empathy.

00:20:13.840 It's the only mention, I think, in that book.

00:20:15.400 Very good.

00:20:16.460 And here's the quote.

00:20:17.540 reciprocal altruism is an evolved mechanism. Suicidal empathy is not. So could you start by

00:20:25.040 telling us why you decided to write an entire book on this particular pathogen of the mind?

00:20:31.140 Right. So because, as I mentioned briefly in my remarks, we are a thinking and a feeling animal.

00:20:40.280 So let me, one of the things that I, you know, lecture on is, for example, psychology of

00:20:45.780 advertising. And so if you are an advertiser and you're trying to sell a product or advertise a

00:20:53.020 product, there are really two routes of persuasion that you could take. You could try to invoke the

00:20:58.980 cognitive system of the consumer or their emotional system. So for example, if I'm trying to sell you

00:21:06.520 a mutual fund, then this is a cognitive product. It's a utilitarian product. So I'm going to say,

00:21:13.620 here are the seven reasons why you should buy my mutual fund. I am engaging your thought

00:21:18.840 processes, your cognitive system. On the other hand, if I were selling you perfume, usually you

00:21:24.420 don't have perfume ads that show a Harvard physiologist explaining to you the science of

00:21:32.220 olfaction. What do you usually have when you're selling a hedonic product like perfume? A beautiful

00:21:38.280 woman with luxuriant hair flowing on a horse and then there's the like a French sounding name for

00:21:46.020 the perfume, Mystère, right? So I'm trying to engage in one case your emotional system, in the

00:21:53.320 other case your cognitive system. So for me to be able to fully parasitize, hijack your capacity to

00:22:00.940 think, I need to do two things. I need to hijack your cognitive processes, hence the parasitic 0.84

00:22:07.300 mind, and then your affective processes, your emotional system, and suicidal empathy. So that's 0.97

00:22:13.240 the one-two punch. That's really helpful, and actually it makes me think of Aristotle, but in

00:22:19.160 a different way. In the rhetoric, he talks about these three sources of persuasion, and two of them

00:22:25.460 you've already talked about, logos and also pathos, but there's also ethos, and it's a question of,

00:22:31.640 as it were, the credibility of the source, having somebody recognized, even if it's somebody

00:22:37.720 irrelevant. So the pop star appears and recommends a political candidate or a particular product.

00:22:43.540 And in that case, what's happening is partly an emotional appeal, but partly just this appeal to

00:22:49.700 authority almost. And I'm wondering about the connection between that and things you talk

00:22:55.620 about in the book. The rather extensive attempt to silence dissenting voices, to put out frankly

00:23:03.740 obvious falsehoods as propaganda from a lot of people in positions of authority, that's been a

00:23:09.140 pervasive feature of our life for the past say 20 years. And is that the matter of this third

00:23:16.280 element being mobilized? And how does it interact with the other two? So I have a chapter in

00:23:22.480 suicidal empathy on what I call epistemological empathy. Epistemology, for those of you who

00:23:29.780 don't know, it's philosophy of knowledge, right? Now, if you're a scientist who adheres to the

00:23:34.440 scientific method, your epistemology is the epistemology of truth. You have to find the

00:23:40.620 means by which you could best approximate the truth out there. But then there's now a competing

00:23:46.320 type of epistemology that is called epistemology of care, meaning that the way that you should

00:23:53.320 adjudicate whether you study something or don't study something, whether you share certain

00:23:58.520 findings or you don't share them, is not whether they are veridical or not. It's what are the

00:24:03.900 consequences of that information getting out? Is it going to hurt someone's feelings? So therefore

00:24:10.000 you have what's called, for example, forbidden knowledge. Don't do research that shows that one

00:24:16.060 racial group is more likely to commit murder than another group. That doesn't adhere to the

00:24:22.020 epistemology of care. It might be perfectly true that that difference exists, but it's hurtful,

00:24:28.280 it's mean. Don't show that a group of immigrants might be less likely to assimilate than another

00:24:34.440 group of immigrants that don't share the same foundational values. That hurts someone's

00:24:39.240 feelings. So to your point about the third pillar on Aristotle's, you then get purveyors of what

00:24:46.860 is appropriate as truth. You get top-down approaches of what constitutes settled science,

00:24:54.700 something that we heard during the COVID, you know, debacle, right? This is what led 1,281,

00:25:04.480 I think if I remember my numbers, public health officials to say, you can't go to your dying

00:25:12.440 grandmother's old home place where she's dying because it's too dangerous because of COVID

00:25:21.240 transmission. But when 100,000 progressive people with hashtag BLM signs are banded together on top

00:25:29.740 of each other, the same virus that couldn't have you go see your grandmother and had all

00:25:36.660 of our children locked up for years during an important developmental stage of their

00:25:41.620 lives, it didn't transmit the virus as long as you carried hashtag BLM signs.

00:25:48.700 That literally epidemiologically protects you against, that's just settled science.

00:25:54.980 And so science is never settled.

00:25:58.520 I have a whole section in the book where I talk about some of the biggest scientists,

00:26:05.600 all of whom share one commonality, that they were going against the settled science of the day.

00:26:13.080 Let me just mention one or two.

00:26:15.020 A recent Nobel laureate, I think 2005, in physiology or medicine,

00:26:21.440 had argued that what causes ulcers is an actual bacterium.

00:26:27.840 Every single physician and researcher in the area said, this is insane heresy. 0.99

00:26:34.820 You're a quack. 0.97

00:26:36.060 It's caused by increased stress.

00:26:39.700 It's caused by the culinary choices you make, for example, spicy food.

00:26:44.360 And that's settled science.

00:26:45.920 The way that he was able to break through is he actually did a self-experimentation.

00:26:52.000 He ingested that bacterium and then demonstrated that he was right, and oops, I guess he was right.

00:26:59.480 Here is your Nobel Prize.

00:27:01.580 Sir Harold Ridley, Sir Harold Ridley, is the pioneer who developed the number one most successful surgery around the world.

00:27:12.860 Does anybody know what it is?

00:27:15.320 Sorry?

00:27:17.780 Can you speak up?

00:27:20.540 No?

00:27:22.000 No. Cataract surgeries. Okay. When he first proposed the mechanism for the cataract surgeries,

00:27:31.440 the entire ophthalmological community said this is some of the biggest quackery ever.

00:27:39.220 Let me just do one more. Semmelweis. Does anybody know who Semmelweis is?

00:27:44.080 Semmelweis was a physician practicing in Central Europe who noticed that there were many women who

00:27:55.100 had just given birth who would die of purpural fever and he noticed that some women in this ward

00:28:04.620 would not die and some women in this ward were dying at an alarming rate and the only thing

00:28:11.700 that could explain that it was sort of a natural experiment that had been set up you know

00:28:16.240 inadvertently it was because the physicians would be working on autopsies and then would go on to

00:28:25.820 deliver the babies without washing their hands so then he said hey if you and the other one

00:28:33.160 for for various reasons that wasn't happening so then he proposed the idea that there was

00:28:39.440 germ transfer from the autopsies to the obstetrics and all the physicians were terribly offended

00:28:49.020 you think us with our god complex are the ones who are killing the women how dare you now he

00:28:55.980 ended up dying a terrible death in a insane asylum and then later they now have statues of him

00:29:04.280 everywhere. And it's became known as the Semmelweis reflex. And that is when, irrespective of

00:29:12.260 how much evidence I show you that your position is incorrect, you go, la, la, la, I don't want

00:29:19.000 to hear it. We have a term for it from psychology named after this guy. So, suicidal empathy

00:29:25.920 manifests itself in endless ways. But what is always true to all of those cases is it's the

00:29:32.040 dysregulation of your empathy virtue. I was thinking about several vices. You were talking

00:29:38.240 about this, as a matter of fact. I want to talk about a couple of criticisms that I've seen

00:29:44.180 on X from people who, of course, haven't read the book since it's just come out. But nevertheless,

00:29:51.560 yes, some of them are just always saying that empathy is bad, which is clearly wrong. But

00:29:56.860 others say you're using the wrong word i mean it's really more compassion or sympathy that

00:30:03.160 you're talking about now in the book you say i'm going to use these interchangeably

00:30:07.160 but it does raise this issue of the the cognitive versus the affective aspects of things because i

00:30:14.240 think at least the way i hear those terms um sympathy and compassion seem more affective

00:30:20.440 than cognitive. Empathy seems sort of equally both. So could you say a little bit more about

00:30:26.580 the thinking-feeling issue and the difference between the books and whether it's primarily

00:30:31.220 a thinking problem here or a feeling problem? I mean, it's more of a feeling problem because

00:30:37.640 this book is about how your affective system is parasitized. And I'm glad that you pointed

00:30:43.940 the fact that I mentioned that I'm going to be using these terms. There are unbelievably

00:30:48.620 fine parsing definitions in the academic literature as to which elements of compassion,

00:30:57.260 empathy, and sympathy overlap, and which don't.

00:31:00.660 They're unbelievably arcane and really pedantic.

00:31:04.300 For most people, when I say the words empathy as is used colloquially, everybody understands

00:31:10.920 it, that one difference would be to sympathize would be, you know, what do you say when someone

00:31:17.280 passes away?

00:31:18.620 You have my deepest sympathies, right?

00:31:21.560 But empathize, if you'd like, is more active.

00:31:25.500 I could either, I understand your feelings,

00:31:29.500 or I feel your feelings, right?

00:31:31.880 And therefore, I will intervene in a way that is more active.

00:31:35.420 So there are very fine parsing definitions,

00:31:38.620 but for all intents and purposes,

00:31:40.620 everybody understands what I mean.

00:31:42.360 Right.

00:31:43.280 Here's another one that is, I think, maybe,

00:31:46.500 calls into the question larger issues.

00:31:50.980 So you put it this way.

00:31:53.000 You're assuming that people make

00:31:55.020 not only personal decisions,

00:31:56.780 but some key political and social decisions

00:31:59.580 based on suicidal empathy.

00:32:02.300 And this person might say,

00:32:04.280 look, I agree that lots of people in the public

00:32:06.480 are shaped by this,

00:32:08.040 but actually I don't think the political leaders are doing that.

00:32:10.740 I think they're cynical,

00:32:12.620 and they've either got a highly ideological worldview

00:32:16.440 or maybe they're even being paid off by foreign powers.

00:32:20.300 But in any case, they're really betraying their own citizens whom they hate.

00:32:25.600 So the right analysis of this is really Julian Benda,

00:32:29.160 Treason of the Intellectuals, 1927.

00:32:32.600 And yeah, a lot of their followers are deluded,

00:32:36.080 but that's not what's really driving events.

00:32:38.860 How would you respond?

00:32:40.100 There is a bit of that, it's true.

00:32:41.700 But I don't think that suicidal empathy was engineered and designed at a World Economic Forum meeting at Davos, right?

00:32:55.000 It's not top-down.

00:32:57.220 I think – now, that doesn't mean, though, that there might not be political leaders that are willfully diabolical in going along with those policies.

00:33:06.520 In general, I think what's happened is, so the parasitic mind goes through all of these parasitic ideas that have really wreaked havoc on our edifices of reason.

00:33:19.500 So what are examples of parasitic ideas?

00:33:22.840 Post-modernism, right?

00:33:25.220 There are no objective truths. 0.55

00:33:27.120 Up is down, left is right, men are women, freedom is slavery.

00:33:31.720 You can't tell what is true. 0.98

00:33:33.940 Cultural relativism would be another parasitic idea.

00:33:37.840 Who are you to judge the cultural practices

00:33:40.720 and beliefs of another culture? 1.00

00:33:42.840 If they have honor killings, shut up, racist. 1.00

00:33:45.800 If they have child rights, shut up, racist. 1.00

00:33:48.480 If they have female genital mutilation 1.00

00:33:50.340 of five-year-old girls, shut up, racist. 1.00

00:33:52.760 Don't impose your cultural belief system 1.00

00:33:55.480 on the noble others,

00:33:57.340 especially if the noble others have darker melanin,

00:34:00.540 then God forbid you should make a comment.

00:34:02.380 So, the way that suicidal empathy then finds fertile ground, it's a one-two punch.

00:34:10.480 You first have to have the proliferation of all of these dreadful ideas, and that then

00:34:15.860 creates the right environment for the dysregulation of empathy.

00:34:20.440 Let me give you an example.

00:34:22.280 If you internalize the parasitic idea of cultural relativism, which is you don't have the right

00:34:28.940 to judge the cultural practices of another society,

00:34:32.220 then that renders you impotent in making judgments

00:34:36.260 as to the differential value of prospective immigrants

00:34:41.200 into your nation, right?

00:34:43.400 So if you, for example, have an open border policy

00:34:46.680 that is perfectly consistent with suicidal empathy

00:34:49.440 because it says it's wrong, it's icky to argue

00:34:53.260 that one group of immigrants might be less likely

00:34:56.780 to internalize the foundational values

00:34:59.700 of, say, the United States.

00:35:01.400 And what led to you being

00:35:03.000 suicidally empathetic in that way

00:35:04.620 is that you've internalized

00:35:06.120 cultural relativism,

00:35:07.460 which says you have no right

00:35:09.280 to judge a society

00:35:10.740 if they think that gays

00:35:13.120 should go through a very effective

00:35:15.040 gravity-based conversion therapy program.

00:35:18.380 We find the biggest building,

00:35:20.240 we throw you off the building, 1.00

00:35:21.860 your brain splatters, 1.00

00:35:23.580 and you've been cleared 0.99

00:35:25.180 of your queerness.

00:35:26.440 You don't have a right to judge their values.

00:35:28.940 So if you let in millions of people that have internalized those values, so be it.

00:35:34.860 We're all going to get along beautifully and nicely and justly so.

00:35:39.640 So it really is a one-two punch.

00:35:41.620 I first have to soften you with all these parasitic ideas,

00:35:45.240 and then you could merrily swim in the infinity pool of suicidal empathy.

00:35:50.940 I want to ask you about the ecology of the pathogens in a way,

00:35:55.460 these parasites, because it does seem to me that suicidal empathy interacts with a lot of the

00:36:01.280 things you talked about in the parasitic mind in kind of interesting ways. So here is one of these 0.98

00:36:06.880 examples. Runaway selection, the peacock's tail. This very dangerous, in evolutionary terms,

00:36:15.980 signal, but nevertheless it works as a signal and confers evolutionary advantages precisely

00:36:21.640 because it is costly. And I was thinking about the fact that people who inhabit ideologically

00:36:28.300 uniform environments, like, oh, universities, or the media, or a variety of other things in culture,

00:36:37.260 tend to become more extreme, and partly as a way of distinguishing themselves from the rest.

00:36:44.360 And so how much, basically, what does that have to do with suicidal empathy, and how is it

00:36:50.240 leading to more and more of this.

00:36:53.040 So let me explain what you said about runaway selection and so on.

00:36:57.920 So there are two mechanisms in evolution that explains the selection of particular traits.

00:37:07.480 There is natural selection, which is the mechanism that results in the selection of traits that confer a survival advantage.

00:37:15.800 And then there is sexual selection, which is the mechanism that results in the selection of traits that confer a reproductive advantage.

00:37:25.060 So if we take the peacock's tail, the peacock's tail could not have evolved because of its increased survival advantage,

00:37:34.400 because if anything, it does the opposite.

00:37:36.380 Why?

00:37:36.620 Because having a very big tail that's conspicuous, that has iridescent coloring, makes you more visible to potential predators.

00:37:46.880 Having a big burdensome tail makes you less likely to avoid predators and take flight.

00:37:53.560 And so why would that tail have evolved?

00:37:57.480 Well, it has to be because it is conferring a reproductive advantage.

00:38:02.860 Now, what is the reproductive advantage?

00:38:04.400 there's a bunch of males that are going to be saying pick me pick me I'm the top male but in

00:38:11.740 order for the signal to be an honest signal it has to be costly meaning it has to be handicapping

00:38:21.220 so what the peacock's tail is effectively saying is despite the fact that I've got this very

00:38:27.640 burdensome tail that reduces my survivability here I stand before you isn't that an honest

00:38:34.320 signal of my phenotypic quality, so choose me as a mate. So then there is this runaway form of

00:38:40.340 selection that results in ever more outlandish traits. And so excessive purity tests, excessive

00:38:49.920 virtue signaling becomes a form of peacocking. Oh, you think that this particularly insane idea

00:38:57.540 from the university ecosystem is wild? Well, I'm going to outwild this one. And so you get

00:39:02.980 a never-ending cycle of complete departure from rationality, from logic, from common sense, from

00:39:10.320 your eyes, right, and by the way, I noticed this very early, and so I've been a professor now for

00:39:15.420 32 years, okay, since 1994, and my, as you briefly hinted at, my work is really to apply evolutionary

00:39:25.840 biology and evolutionary psychology to study human behavior in general and consumer behavior in

00:39:31.380 particular. Now, to me, it seemed quite obvious that humans in general and consumers in particular

00:39:38.660 don't exist outside of their biological reality. But to most of my social science colleagues,

00:39:45.560 that was complete heretical. To them, what made us human is that we transcended our biology.

00:39:54.160 Biology matters for the dog.

00:39:56.860 Biology matters for the zebra, to the mosquito.

00:40:00.180 But surely, Professor Saad, you don't think biology matters to human beings.

00:40:04.100 And surely, Professor Saad, if you're going to use evolution to study human beings, use it for things like why we've evolved opposable thumbs.

00:40:13.320 but God forbid you should use evolution to explain things above the neck, like the most

00:40:19.880 important organ that defines your personhood called your brain. So they're perfectly happy

00:40:26.940 to apply evolutionary theory to explain the evolution of every single species on earth

00:40:32.780 except one called Homo sapiens. So that was originally when I said, I think we have a problem

00:40:39.080 here. These professors who are supposed to be educated and smart, who have a lot of titles

00:40:44.340 before and after their names, are some of the biggest walking morons that I've ever interacted 1.00

00:40:49.200 with. How could that be? How could a trained social scientist not understand that humans are 1.00

00:40:59.320 not operating outside of their biology? And that's what led to the parasitic mind. So it really is 0.95

00:41:05.740 a broad narrative, these two books.

00:41:08.480 It really explains how we all

00:41:09.920 have the potential of becoming wood crickets.

00:41:13.200 There is a bizarre

00:41:14.340 thing you've noticed, not only about

00:41:16.340 wood crickets, but about

00:41:17.620 the same people

00:41:20.140 who mock creationists

00:41:22.080 for rejecting science

00:41:23.760 are social constructionists.

00:41:25.880 Yes. And reject biology

00:41:27.940 as soon as it involves anything mental or anything

00:41:30.060 social, which is an astounding

00:41:32.180 division. And if I may add to this, forgive me for

00:41:33.840 Yes. People have often asked me, well, why do you largely attack the left? And that's not because

00:41:41.460 I'm taking a political position. It's because all of these ideas that result in the parasitic mind 0.94

00:41:48.040 and in suicidal empathy stem from ideas that were spawned on university campuses. Now, university

00:41:55.980 campuses are almost exclusively populated by leftist professors. Now, we're not talking about

00:42:02.460 just a statistically significant odds ratio, let me, for those of you who may not know what that

00:42:08.420 means, let's suppose I'm trying to measure the efficacy of a drug. And I have a placebo group,

00:42:15.720 and I have the actual experimental manipulation. If the efficacy of the experimental manipulation

00:42:21.680 is 1.2 to 1, that means it's 20% more effective. Now, it's 1 to 1.2. Now, in academia, the ratios

00:42:32.320 are 1 to 140.

00:42:36.380 You get it?

00:42:37.620 So you would be very excited in publishing a paper

00:42:40.780 if you got an odds ratio of 1 to 1.2.

00:42:43.880 This is, if you go into communication studies

00:42:47.100 and ethnic studies and sociology and anthropology 0.99

00:42:50.180 and the rest of the bullshit stuff, 0.98

00:42:52.380 what you end up with, 0.99

00:42:54.240 you end up with literally more likelihood

00:42:57.100 of running into a unicorn

00:42:59.220 than having a conservative professor in those disciplines.

00:43:03.380 So this is why I attack those leftist ideas.

00:43:07.560 It's just because I'm a product of the ecosystem that I inhabit.

00:43:11.240 But that doesn't mean, to your point,

00:43:13.780 that people on the right can't also be parasitized.

00:43:17.840 It's just that it's different parasitic ideas that they are prone to.

00:43:21.860 So to your point, when it comes to believing in evolution,

00:43:27.220 people on the right are more likely to exhibit animus towards evolution but when it comes to

00:43:34.600 the application of evolution to the study of the human mind which is a sub-branch of evolution

00:43:41.880 it's people on the left that exhibit greater animus precisely because of social constructivism

00:43:48.800 social constructivism basically is another parasitic idea that argues we are all born

00:43:54.720 tabula rasa with zero biological imperatives that are endowed within our instincts. And then it's

00:44:02.860 only socialization that makes us who we are. This is, by the way, what leads to the suicidally 0.78

00:44:08.420 empathetic idea, what I call blank slate felons. Blank slate felons is a term that I use because

00:44:15.100 the blank slate is exactly what tabula rasa is. We're born with empty minds. So the criminal

00:44:21.260 doesn't have personal agency. The criminal became a criminal because he's a product of a really

00:44:28.920 unfair white supremacist American society. So what would be the point in you penalizing him

00:44:35.080 by putting him in prison? Don't you think he deserves 187th chance? And by the way,

00:44:40.260 now the book is already out, but the cases of suicidal empathy are never ending so that,

00:44:47.020 you know i could write volumes two three four and become very rich for many more years just adding

00:44:54.060 up the latest additions to suicide empathy two such examples that i'd love to share with you

00:44:58.720 that are not in the book you've all heard of the case in new york city that just happened

00:45:03.160 where there is a habitual offender who happened to be an offender of color so untouchable who

00:45:10.360 had been arrested just recently the woman didn't want to press charges against him because she 0.67

00:45:18.200 didn't want another black man in prison what did this lovely blank slate felon do a couple of days

00:45:24.080 ago he took a 77 year old former teacher retired teacher and for absolutely no reason other than 0.64

00:45:32.080 the fact that there's no there's no longer any coupling between actions and consequences

00:45:37.620 pushed him down killed him and now people are upset you know you're why are you punishing this

00:45:43.960 poor blank slate felon second example as you know Donald Trump there's been assassination attempts

00:45:51.640 on him not once not twice but three times the third time when they arrested the guy did anybody

00:45:57.440 see the incredible crying and sobbing of the judge recently I am so so sorry that we've put you 0.94

00:46:05.580 in this cell with no windows i mean holy crap what kind of unbelievably harsh society would put a

00:46:13.640 alleged assassination guy of the president of the united states not in the four seasons hotel 0.97

00:46:21.140 here in austin this is unusual and cruel punishment so the fact that this degenerate judge

00:46:27.520 actually had the reflex to apologize publicly to the guy who would assassinate the president

00:46:34.060 in the United States is probably an example of suicidal empathy.

00:46:38.800 I want to ask you about the relationship

00:46:41.220 between two of these pathogens

00:46:43.180 that I've noticed accompanying each other very frequently,

00:46:46.460 but I don't really grasp the connection between them.

00:46:49.640 In The Parasitic Mind,

00:46:51.180 you talk about the ostrich parasitic syndrome,

00:46:54.200 a kind of unwillingness to believe

00:46:56.960 even very clear data and obvious truths.

00:47:00.200 and it does seem as if there is an empathy problem in many of these cases but also just

00:47:07.780 an understanding the world problem so think about the things that all we've all been told like for

00:47:12.900 example if you get the covid vaccine you will not get sick period it would be the first completely

00:47:18.240 adequate vaccine in history or i mean you list a bunch of them i'll just mention a few all cultures

00:47:24.960 are equally valuable. The mind's a blank slate. Everything's a social construct. Immigrants

00:47:30.080 commit fewer crimes than natives. Diversity is our strength. All of these are absurd. And yet,

00:47:36.840 people insist on them and refuse to look at data. So how does that interact with the problem of

00:47:42.040 suicidal empathy? Well, reality has a way to autocorrect your otherwise reflex for suicidal

00:47:50.760 empathy but if you reject your lying eyes then that creates the fertile environment for you

00:47:56.820 holding on to the beliefs that lead to suicidal empathy i was asked recently well not too recent

00:48:02.820 now maybe two years ago by a i was invited on a show of a british psychiatrist and he's the only

00:48:11.460 one to have ever asked me this question which i think is surprising but also you know quite clever

00:48:17.000 on his part. The last question he asked me, he said, in all the years that you've been a professor

00:48:23.180 and a behavioral scientist, what is the singular phenomenon that has most surprised you about the

00:48:30.460 human condition? And so I had to sort of pause for a second because, you know, I've studied many

00:48:35.540 things. I said, the inability for people to change their minds once it is deeply anchored in a

00:48:42.920 position, which in a sense is quite a pessimistic view because there would be no point for me to

00:48:50.440 write these books if I thought that there was no chance to ever flip somebody from the anchored

00:48:57.860 positions that they hold. So what I've become very adept at, not perfectly so, but certainly much

00:49:03.900 better than earlier in my career, is if I'm interacting with you in good faith and I realize 1.00

00:49:09.940 that you're likely one of those ostriches, 1.00

00:49:12.260 I cut my losses and don't waste any more time on you 0.99

00:49:15.120 because I know that no matter what other information

00:49:18.140 I could ever show you,

00:49:19.680 I will never move you a single millimeter

00:49:22.080 from your position.

00:49:23.680 By the way, this is the exact reason

00:49:25.400 why I often refuse to have certain types of debates.

00:49:30.160 So I get invited, I'll mention his name,

00:49:32.980 I hope he doesn't mind,

00:49:34.660 Pierce Morgan, every 15 seconds his producers call me 1.00

00:49:38.040 to go on his show to debate this idiot and this degenerate and this imbecile the reason i don't 0.99

00:49:44.320 is not because i'm too haughty to speak because i actually will debate random eggs on x like 0.98

00:49:51.520 literally where i don't even know that so it's not that i modulate whether i speak to you if

00:49:56.040 you're important or not but it's whether it's in good faith that there is we're both coming into

00:50:01.480 the discussion there is a hope that if you say something that is convincing i might change my

00:50:07.200 opinion and vice versa. And if I think that there is no way that that could happen, then it looks

00:50:13.000 much better on your CV to have this conversation than it will look on mine. And so I refuse to then

00:50:17.960 do it. And so, for example, I won't debate a rabbi or a young earth creationist about the 0.84

00:50:26.860 validity of evolutionary theory versus whatever religious dogma that they adhere to, because no 0.79

00:50:33.520 amount of evolutionary evidence that I could ever show them or present to them would move them away

00:50:39.800 from their religious revealed truths. And so that's usually what makes me decide whether to

00:50:45.420 have a dialogue with someone or not. This brings me naturally to the next question I have, which is

00:50:51.060 about what you call epistemological dichotomization, this idea of seeing everything in terms of us

00:50:57.040 versus them, drawing a sharp binary distinction. And we see that in a lot of cases, it's an

00:51:03.620 oppressor versus oppressed, or bourgeoisie versus proletariat, or what have you. And it concerns me

00:51:11.320 that that, A, leads to a kind of dehumanization, something that you talk about a little bit in

00:51:18.000 the book. But it's also, as far as I can see, largely arbitrary. And so if I look for cognitive

00:51:25.540 types of explanations, for example, of how Jews end up being oppressors while Muslims are oppressed,

00:51:32.980 I start thinking, I don't understand this. I don't understand how you get to be part of one group 0.95

00:51:37.840 as opposed to another group. I'm luckily from the Balkans, where I think Americans don't have 0.98

00:51:44.300 any clear sense of who's the good guy and bad guy. We're just all crazy. But still, it seems to me 0.98

00:51:50.900 there is something odd and a lot of people end up as a result of this dichotomization

00:51:55.780 being in your words zombified by ideological rapture so um here's the thing you mentioned

00:52:04.800 wood crickets being zombified and so is that what's going on people adopt an ideology that

00:52:12.560 doesn't just keep them from seeing certain obvious truths but really does in a sense

00:52:16.940 zombify them in such a way that they become

00:52:19.420 self-destructive? Right, great

00:52:21.340 question. So there are

00:52:23.300 these two French psychologists

00:52:25.120 Hugo Mercier

00:52:27.700 and Dan Sperber

00:52:29.440 they wrote a book called

00:52:31.500 The Enigma of Reason

00:52:33.640 and they're

00:52:35.360 evolutionary minded psychologists

00:52:37.020 and they said that our

00:52:39.160 faculty of reasoning

00:52:40.600 did not evolve to seek

00:52:43.480 some objective truth

00:52:44.860 but it evolved to win arguments in other words most people don't say i want to be a honest

00:52:54.480 purveyor of information and based on where the information takes me i will then decide

00:52:59.740 accordingly where i fall but rather it's blue team red team la la la i don't want to hear what

00:53:06.760 the blue team has to say this leads by the way oftentimes when people ask me we we don't quite

00:53:11.800 know, I mean, are you a classical liberal or are you a conservative? And they think I'm being coy

00:53:17.980 and not giving them a definitive label, but that's because I truly am either one or the other,

00:53:25.340 depending on the specific issue. I have no allegiance to one group. When it comes to death

00:53:30.800 penalty, I would be extremely conservative. If we find your DNA on the bodies of four dead children,

00:53:36.860 I don't think that you're likely to be innocent. Let's execute you quickly. That would make me a 1.00

00:53:43.160 very harsh conservative. I'm not crying for the rights of the pedophile, right? On the other hand,

00:53:48.940 when it comes to whether you wish to live your life transgender this or that, I don't care. I'm 0.99

00:53:55.100 very socially liberal. But that doesn't mean that in my support of your right to have whatever

00:54:01.560 gender identity you want, that I should go along the ride with you, celebrate your personhood, 0.81

00:54:07.820 and murder truth in the service of your personhood. I could walk and chew gum at the same time. I 0.94

00:54:14.080 could support your right to be transgender, whatever you want, and I agree that you shouldn't

00:54:19.440 be discriminated against. That doesn't mean that I should now go back to my classes and change what

00:54:25.520 i teach about the effects of the ovulatory cycle on women's behaviors and to now change it to men 0.96

00:54:32.300 too can menstruate f off with this bullshit right so i can be fully socially liberal but yet adhere 0.94

00:54:40.000 to the truth i think in most cases the people who suffer from epistemological dichotomania 0.98

00:54:44.760 is that once i'm in this camp everything of this camp has to be false and the world is not

00:54:52.680 structured that way? This is a question that occurred to me as I was reading the book.

00:55:00.100 And so I can't blame this on random people on X. It's my worry. And that is, if you look at this

00:55:06.560 from one point of view, you can say, yes, these people seem to have too much empathy, or really,

00:55:11.700 I think, better as you put it, misdirected empathy. And that seems to me quite plausible.

00:55:18.380 But when I look at certain phenomena, I end up thinking, it's the lack of empathy that worries me.

00:55:25.200 Here's what I have in mind.

00:55:27.020 You mentioned briefly October 7th.

00:55:30.540 People in New York and other cities here in the United States put up posters of hostages to remind people it wasn't just the atrocities that occurred that day.

00:55:40.120 There were still many, many people being held hostage.

00:55:44.220 And leftists, mostly women, went through and defaced those. 0.54

00:55:47.740 Jewish women. Yes, and tore them down. Now, in that case, it's not really an excess or misdirected 0.95

00:55:53.720 empathy toward Gazans or something. It was really a lack of empathy for the people who were being

00:55:59.260 held hostage and for those who had been victimized. Or think of the murals that were put up for

00:56:04.720 Raina Zorutska, the woman who was murdered in Charlotte. People are insisting on repainting

00:56:11.860 them taking them down and so on that's a lack of empathy for a ukrainian immigrant um rather than

00:56:17.960 maybe too much empathy for someone else or i think about the celebrations of the murderer of

00:56:22.760 brian thompson or charlie kirk yeah um and in all of these cases i think how can you

00:56:29.000 lack empathy for the victims i get it if you want to say but think about i mean i don't really get

00:56:35.200 it but i sort of get it intellectually i have but see it from the other person's point of view

00:56:40.300 okay, I can try to do that and try to be aware of that.

00:56:43.340 But really, it's the utter lack of empathy for the victim that shocks me.

00:56:47.500 And I look at that and I think, I don't really,

00:56:50.860 even given what you've said, fully understand that.

00:56:53.740 And the result of it all seems to me monstrous.

00:56:57.080 So how do you think about that sort of phenomenon?

00:56:59.860 Well, what's basically happening is the evolutionary-based calculus of empathy

00:57:05.800 has been rewired by the hairworm

00:57:08.480 so that the rapist is more deserving of empathy

00:57:13.200 than the victim of the rape.

00:57:16.020 So to you, it seems so incomprehensible

00:57:18.460 because you're a Darwinian being

00:57:20.460 that is bound to these evolutionary-based rules. 0.94

00:57:23.800 Well, that's what makes it parasitic mind and suicidal empathy.

00:57:27.480 You are literally rewiring this evolved calculus, right?

00:57:32.180 I mean, I'll give you...

00:57:34.460 I could give you many other examples from the book,

00:57:36.560 but let me give you another one. 0.78

00:57:37.380 A woman goes to Haiti, a white woman who's incredibly liberal, incredibly progressive.

00:57:43.380 She's a much kinder woman than all of you people here.

00:57:47.000 And so she goes to Haiti to demonstrate that this idea that black men could ever commit violence

00:57:55.680 is simply a narrative that has been promulgated by the white supremacist society of the United States.

00:58:02.580 I mean, there really is absolutely no evidence that any black man has ever engaged in any violence anywhere.

00:58:10.580 So because she was incredibly empathetic, she decided to go to Haiti to be able to promulgate an alternative and correct narrative

00:58:20.360 that black men in their natural state are just lovely, all of them. 0.98

00:58:27.860 Well, there's this thing called reality that gave her a big slap as one of those Haitian black men 1.00

00:58:35.600 took her to a rooftop and violently raped her all night. 1.00

00:58:39.760 If you read her testimony, you're not going to be able to understand it 0.82

00:58:45.280 because it defies the human experience.

00:58:48.660 I don't have the exact quote, so I'm going to sort of paraphrase it.

00:58:51.420 She looked at her rapist and said, do you not realize that I, too, am an admirer of Malcolm X?

00:59:00.580 I mean, shouldn't that have stopped that Haitian man from raping her once she shared with him that she, too, is a Malcolm X scholar?

00:59:09.840 So a person that navigates the world with that kind of distorted thinking is probably someone who is a walking wood cricket. 0.85

00:59:18.380 At the end of her statement, she said, I now realize that it was, you ready, white supremacy that forced you to commit this act on me.

00:59:36.680 So let's go back and analyze that. 0.90

00:59:39.320 But when a Haitian man rapes a white woman on a rooftop in Port-au-Prince, that is a manifestation of white supremacy.

00:59:54.340 And she said at the end, and so finally, I am thankful for that experience.

01:00:02.440 You can go read it in the book.

01:00:04.340 So when you read that, it takes your breath away because that woman is literally, I mean, in a metaphorical side, that's an analogy, but she is the wood cricket that's jumping into the water to commit suicide. 0.58

01:00:18.720 Her emotional system has been so distorted that she feels zero animus to the one who violently raped her, but feels great animus to this amorphous thing called white supremacy in Haiti.

01:00:34.340 wow yeah i don't understand i would if before you go on i would suggest that as you read this book

01:00:44.860 maybe you take one or two volumes because uh i suspect that your blood pressures and cortisol

01:00:51.480 level is gonna go up because you're gonna read this and say this is not possible there is the

01:00:57.280 example of the woman who not long ago in germany was raped by a migrant and the migrant was allowed

01:01:03.680 to even though he was found guilty was given a sentence that involved no jail time whatever

01:01:08.820 but she posted something nasty about the experience and about him on social media

01:01:13.560 and she was sentenced to jail if i can correct that slightly oh yes please i if if if it's the

01:01:19.700 same story that i'm thinking you're talking about it's not the woman that was raped that posted it

01:01:25.980 it's another woman that ran across those guys and recognized their faces and called them 0.97

01:01:33.360 you pig rapist and that was considered hate speech in germany so the rapist served no jail time 0.99

01:01:43.760 the independent woman who had not been raped but who was defending a fellow woman from the pig rapist 1.00

01:01:51.080 was was punished for using these inflammatory words yeah i'm agape okay that yeah i think that's 0.96

01:02:02.660 even worse than what I had thought the story was.

01:02:05.860 Okay, there is something I've noticed for a while,

01:02:09.200 and it seems to me suicidal empathy plays right into this,

01:02:13.660 and you note this near the end of the book.

01:02:16.280 It seems to me that certain people have a pervasive inability

01:02:20.740 to think about risk, to think about higher-order consequences,

01:02:25.260 to think about incentives.

01:02:27.900 And so you see people, for example,

01:02:29.940 interested in imposing a wealth tax.

01:02:33.000 In some cases, not understanding

01:02:35.240 that the wealthy people will simply leave.

01:02:37.600 And if somebody points it out, they'll say,

01:02:39.440 well, good riddance.

01:02:41.660 As Katie Wilson said, bye.

01:02:43.820 Bye, exactly.

01:02:45.340 And so this is one manifestation of this

01:02:47.580 not thinking through the consequences of consequences

01:02:51.900 or the potential for risk.

01:02:53.720 And as you pointed out,

01:02:55.560 that seems to be an intimate part

01:02:58.080 of at least the cognitive side of suicidal empathy.

01:03:01.380 So how do you get people to be aware of this?

01:03:05.360 You give a number of good bits of advice

01:03:07.380 that I want to get to near the end,

01:03:09.220 and one of them is don't just fall into the trap

01:03:12.840 of the myopia of first-order effects,

01:03:15.380 but how do you get somebody who seems just incapable

01:03:18.980 of thinking about risk or higher-order effects

01:03:22.900 in reasonable ways to start doing that?

01:03:25.860 I mean, there's no other way other than to first point to the fact that they're committing that cognitive error

01:03:31.580 and then walk them through the consequences of that error.

01:03:35.180 So, for example, I had some knee issues recently, and I went to see a physical therapist.

01:03:44.520 Incredibly kind, suicidally empathetic, Montreal woman. 0.92

01:03:49.240 She cries when she puts the gas into her car because she's raping Mother Earth, the whole thing.

01:03:54.020 She's very kind.

01:03:55.540 And so at one point she had asked me,

01:03:57.300 what's your next book about?

01:03:58.560 So I said, well, it's called Suicide Empathy.

01:04:01.340 So give me an example of what would be Suicide Empathy. 1.00

01:04:04.260 Well, presuming that every single immigrant 0.99

01:04:07.320 anywhere in the world is allowed to enter 0.72

01:04:09.780 illegally to the United States

01:04:11.700 because they have a right to share in the American dream.

01:04:16.420 She was completely aghast by how mean-spirited

01:04:19.520 and callous I was.

01:04:21.340 She said, but while you're an immigrant, 1.00

01:04:24.740 You got the chance.

01:04:26.340 Why can't they get the chance?

01:04:28.300 So she's, I mean, she really speaks

01:04:30.300 at the level of a three-day-old squirrel, right?

01:04:33.920 So then I said, okay,

01:04:35.840 so let's play the boundary condition game.

01:04:39.440 Could you see that we live in a generous welfare state?

01:04:44.400 So the way that the Canadian government

01:04:46.860 is able to have all of this largesse

01:04:50.560 is through astoundingly high parasitic taxation.

01:04:54.740 I don't know if you have a sense of what the Canadian reality of taxes is, but anywhere in

01:05:00.520 the United States is child's play compared to Canada. So I said to her, let's say right now

01:05:05.840 you pay whatever taxes. Would you be willing to pay that much more so that more people could

01:05:13.600 come in illegally? She couldn't answer those questions because the only calculus was there

01:05:19.720 are people in need that want to come in, and the first order effect is by letting them in, I get

01:05:26.960 the dopamine-based hit of empathy. That's it. Reality doesn't unfold through multiple order

01:05:35.460 effects. It ends at order one. So did I get through her? I don't know, but there is no other

01:05:41.760 way than to administer the vaccine. That's why you should all go buy five or six copies of

01:05:46.160 suicidal empathy. Excellent. I suppose soon I should go to audience questions, but I do want

01:05:53.820 to ask you about existential guilt. You say suicidal empathy is driven by misplaced existential

01:06:00.960 guilt. And when I read that, I was reminded of these TV commercials I used to see as a child in

01:06:07.160 the 1960s, where someone would appear on the screen saying, I am black and I am beautiful.

01:06:13.400 and contrast that with the fact

01:06:16.960 that some posters appeared in 2020

01:06:19.560 saying it's okay to be white.

01:06:21.880 And this was considered outrageous white supremacy.

01:06:24.880 So why is it that people feel plagued

01:06:29.060 by this existential guilt?

01:06:30.520 It does seem to be behind a lot of this.

01:06:34.740 And I find it perplexing.

01:06:37.240 Hierocles in the ancient world had this idea,

01:06:40.700 almost a Kohlbergian idea of moral development.

01:06:43.400 we start being concerned for ourselves and then our immediate family and then a larger family

01:06:50.360 and then neighbors and so on and eventually the whole world and we recognize all of humanity

01:06:55.000 as akin to us and hierocles thought the idea was that we should care for all of them equally

01:07:01.220 but if you actually ask people and especially by political persuasion how they how much concern

01:07:08.300 they have for various people people on the right tend to have the most concern for those who are

01:07:13.140 closest to them and it gradually falls away nobody becomes utterly insignificant morally but

01:07:19.480 nevertheless it's a declining thing as you go further people on the left it's exactly the

01:07:23.920 opposite they care the least about the people closest to them and the most about the most

01:07:27.800 distant and i take that as a manifestation of this existential guilt as well i don't have

01:07:33.500 another explanation but help help me relate that to suicidal empathy right well so peter singer

01:07:40.460 the ethicist and animal activist used the argument of increasing the moral circle so that we can

01:07:49.600 exhibit kindness and empathy towards our animal cousins that we shouldn't only be caring about

01:07:56.600 the mistreatment of our fellow human beings but that these sentient beings called our animal

01:08:02.100 cousins and therefore increase it and of course there's there's value in say that i'm a huge

01:08:06.980 animal lover i the thing that i'm most afraid is when that spca commercial comes on uh you know

01:08:14.140 the one with the cruelty to dogs and so on you see me bolt out of that room as fast as i can

01:08:19.940 because i really can't bear to see those poor poor souls so there's nothing wrong in making people

01:08:25.920 aware that you may want to exhibit kindness and empathy towards beyond those in your nuclear

01:08:32.080 family but the inversion of the calculus has to be a form of suicidal empathy right so it it makes

01:08:39.920 none of us in this room have evolved the calculus that says if having to choose between protecting 0.54

01:08:49.020 to death my biological children or a random child in Rwanda sign me up for Rwanda that's not part 0.82

01:08:58.620 of your evolutionary calculus. Now, in a dream world, if all of us can save every child on Earth, 0.60

01:09:04.400 we would do it. But in a world of fixed resources, where there are trade-offs, right? Thomas Sowell

01:09:10.660 explained to us that life is about trade-offs. There is no optimal solution. There is just

01:09:17.440 the best of possible solution, right? That's what optimization theory is, right? That's what

01:09:22.980 operations research is. So what the suicidally empathetic do is they presume that the well

01:09:29.080 of empathy is infinite. So therefore, you never have to engage with what Philip Tetlock called

01:09:36.380 taboo trade-offs, right? So for example, if I were to tell you, in choosing between the rights

01:09:44.480 of a trans woman who has a penis and testicles but she's fully a woman or biological women 0.99

01:09:53.140 whose rights should supersede who well when it comes to the suicidally empathetic 1.00

01:09:59.840 that one trans woman supersedes all of the biological women so you can destroy the dreams

01:10:08.160 of all the women that have been fighting hard to get at the podium so that leah thomas thomas 1.00

01:10:13.820 who yesterday used to be joe blow but today has found out that she's a girl she is deserving of

01:10:21.820 all our empathy i mean imagine that we are having now discussions with the olympic committee where

01:10:28.040 the olympic committee is deciding yeah you know in retrospect biological males should not compete

01:10:35.480 with women i went in front of the canadian senate in 2017 and not to sound prophetic i warned the

01:10:43.280 canadian senate of exactly what would happen if we were to go down that path it wasn't because i was

01:10:50.400 a prophet it's because i can take from the lunacy where we were and extrapolate to the boundary

01:10:57.440 condition of where this would lead us and so yes this inversion results from suicide all right

01:11:05.320 one last thing that i wanted to say um in the last chapter here you talk about let me call them

01:11:12.500 inoculation imperatives, bits of advice for making yourself safe from suicidal empathy,

01:11:18.340 and some of them are just to resist immediate payoffs from empathy, avoid myopia, first-order

01:11:26.560 effects, statistical regularities matter, data is not defeated by anecdotes, don't assume equality

01:11:35.240 when it's not really there, don't be a fence-sitter, demand reciprocity, choose targets of empathy

01:11:41.780 wisely, and suicidal empathy is fatal. But there's one thing from the parasitic mind I would

01:11:49.220 add to that. In that book, you say, your voice matters, use it. And it reminded me of the words

01:11:58.140 of Rabbi Hillel, which are translated variously, but in one translation, it's when someone is

01:12:03.980 needed, endeavor to be that someone, which seems to be very, very important advice. There's another

01:12:10.360 translation that takes the gender or the pronouns more seriously where there are no men strive to

01:12:15.540 be a man and it seemed to me that exhortation to courage to stand up for what we believe and state

01:12:22.480 plain truths is vital right thank you for that so in in the parasitic mind in the last chapter

01:12:29.280 probably the call to arms that is now most that i'm most known for is when i implore people to

01:12:37.160 activate their inner honey badger. That speaks to that, right? And the reason why I use that

01:12:42.560 terminology is because the honey badger, for those of you who may not know, has been classified and

01:12:48.580 ranked as the fiercest and most ferocious animal of all animals in the animal kingdom. Now, that's

01:12:55.480 a big title because there are a lot of many fierce animals. It's the size of a small to medium-sized

01:13:02.560 dog, yet when lions in the African savanna see the strutting honey badger come along,

01:13:12.420 they go, oh, sorry, sir, we didn't mean to disturb you, and they cross the street.

01:13:16.660 Now, why is that?

01:13:18.000 Because while it may be physically small, it stands incredibly tall.

01:13:24.060 It stands its ground.

01:13:25.680 So when I ask people and I implore them to activate their inner honey badger, I'm not

01:13:30.400 asking them to be physically violent or you know physically domineering but i'm asking them

01:13:35.680 stand tall and defend print you know principles that you believe in if your professor is arguing

01:13:42.240 that of course men too can bear children say are you insane professor right i mean or maybe if you

01:13:50.840 don't want to say it in such a jocular manner take the opportunity to challenge whether it's

01:13:55.800 your professor or your rabbi or your imam or your mother, never let an opportunity where somebody is

01:14:03.820 murdering truth so callously to go unchallenged. Now, the reason why many people don't do it

01:14:10.600 is multifaceted. One, I've always argued that the seven deadly sins should add an eighth one,

01:14:16.820 cowardice, although arguably you can put cowardice as part of apathy, but okay, fine, whatever, or

01:14:22.840 sloth-like behavior. But also people are very keen to diffuse the responsibility onto others,

01:14:31.980 right? Gadsad has broad shoulders. He's got this. He'll handle it on my behalf. I'm too busy with

01:14:38.500 my daily life to really worry about these issues. Well, if all of us diffuse our responsibility

01:14:44.140 onto a few people, you're not diversifying the risk, right? It's only a few of us that are then

01:14:50.200 serving as the voice for everybody else.

01:14:52.620 I've said this before, but it's worth repeating.

01:14:55.380 Probably the most typical template of an email

01:14:59.880 that I received from a fan is the following one.

01:15:02.820 You ready?

01:15:03.960 Dear Professor Saad, many nice compliments.

01:15:08.280 Here is the last line.

01:15:09.980 If you choose to read this letter on your show,

01:15:13.760 finish the sentence for me.

01:15:15.020 please do not mention my name i write back dear so-and-so thank you for your kind words don't

01:15:24.720 you think the last sentence in your email is precisely why we are where we are and usually

01:15:30.000 you can i can almost hear them squirming uncomfortably right and these many of these

01:15:35.500 guys are tenured professors they're protected they can't be fired yet they're cowardice

01:15:43.440 their tepidness is astounding.

01:15:46.180 So all I would ask people to do,

01:15:48.240 as best as you can,

01:15:49.580 politely, have conversations,

01:15:52.260 and may the best ideas win.

01:15:54.520 Thank you.

01:15:57.080 Applause

01:15:57.560 It is now your turn, audience,

01:16:03.920 to submit questions.

01:16:05.180 So if you haven't already done so,

01:16:07.020 you have an opportunity through the QR code to do that.

01:16:10.820 And I, in theory,

01:16:13.440 should be able to receive them.

01:16:18.140 So let me reload this so that some of them appear.

01:16:28.020 Ah, good.

01:16:29.760 What's an example of a society that successfully

01:16:32.640 balanced compassion with self-preservation?

01:16:37.320 The West until five to ten years ago.

01:16:43.440 Right. Yeah, that seems right. What's the new point of diminishing returns of empathy as we transition back from globalism to nationalism? Is it the nation, the West, communities? I don't understand what I mean.

01:16:58.600 I think the idea is that it's certainly screwy

01:17:04.700 to have empathy increase as the distance goes,

01:17:08.660 but you might think there are certain, as it were,

01:17:11.840 thresholds where it changes.

01:17:14.220 And where are those thresholds?

01:17:16.360 Is it a matter of your nation, your neighborhood,

01:17:19.260 your civilization, your family, your tribe?

01:17:21.780 Yeah, I mean, it's going to sound as though

01:17:23.760 I'm giving a flippant cop-out answer.

01:17:26.840 your empathy has to be meted out in ways that do not violate evolutionary rules, right?

01:17:34.340 So, for example, kin selection, for those of you who may not know what that is,

01:17:40.780 kin selection is the mechanism that explains why you would jump into a river

01:17:45.400 to save three of your children, even though that results in your death, right?

01:17:50.820 If evolution did not operate at the gene level, that kin-based altruism could never arise

01:17:58.420 because I would never want to kill myself, the organism that is endowed with the desire

01:18:04.140 to survive, in the service of saving three of my children.

01:18:07.300 But if you recognize that your three children, each of them, share on average 50% of their

01:18:13.700 genes with you, then it would make perfect evolutionary sense for you to have evolved

01:18:18.600 this altruistic impulse to be willing to sacrifice yourself in the service of saving your three

01:18:24.300 children. So that would be an example of an evolutionary condition that would predict

01:18:29.920 under which conditions you should risk your life or not. So empathy follows the exact same set of

01:18:36.360 dictums, right? It has to be wedded to an evolutionary rational calculus. That's the best

01:18:42.740 that I can say. Ah, good. Um, next question. Why do large companies promote suicidal empathy?

01:18:50.860 What's in it for them? Uh, so in, in one of the passages in suicidal empathy, I talk about the,

01:19:00.040 uh, evolving role of the social contract between companies and consumers. This is about a hundred

01:19:09.460 year story but i'll explain it very quickly a hundred years ago it was the the contract was a

01:19:16.160 production-centric contract meaning that as long as i can produce something to meet demands that's

01:19:24.900 what was expected of me as a company so does anybody remember henry ford's famous quote that

01:19:31.460 speaks to that somebody's shaking their head what is it exactly you can have the

01:19:39.180 customer can have the car in any color he wants as long as it's black. So what is he effectively

01:19:44.400 saying? I don't care about the consumer heterogeneity preferences. My job is to simply

01:19:52.340 produce cars that meet consumer demands and that ends. Next stage was a marketing or consumer

01:20:03.920 centric contract, which is I need to produce products that meet demands and that cater to

01:20:11.480 consumer preferences. So therefore, I will create the car in multiple colors. The next evolution of

01:20:19.140 the social contract between the firm and the customer was I need to do those two first things

01:20:24.160 without harming any third parties. So for example, don't harm the environment. So that would be then

01:20:32.420 green companies. The fourth stage that then speaks to that question, which will be woke capitalism,

01:20:39.660 is that I should do those first three things, but fourthly, I should be proactive in seeking

01:20:47.740 social justice as an inherent feature of the fiduciary responsibility of my company. No.

01:20:56.520 Companies operate on maximizing shareholder profits

01:21:01.140 as your fiduciary responsibility.

01:21:03.560 It's not to render queer people more visible in ads.

01:21:08.820 That's not part of your responsibility. 0.73

01:21:12.060 But it is if you were the last disastrous campaign of Jaguar.

01:21:18.280 Did we all see that one?

01:21:20.580 Jaguar produces, what is it that Jaguar produces?

01:21:23.360 Oh yeah, cars. 1.00

01:21:24.320 And then what you saw was all of these transgender people of color sashaying an incredibly exaggerated sort of voguing. 1.00

01:21:34.420 There was no car shown. 1.00

01:21:36.900 And if you remember, Elon Musk then wrote in his inimitable style, he said, hey, Jaguar, do you still produce cars?

01:21:47.460 Because what is he speaking to there?

01:21:49.640 How is it that your ad campaign has no mention of the product that you're in the business of producing?

01:21:58.980 Well, because they have now higher values, and that is to render the marginalized communities that were invisible, render them visible.

01:22:10.100 That's their real mission.

01:22:11.500 That makes no sense.

01:22:12.960 That's not what we should be teaching in a business school. 1.00

01:22:15.420 I see many jaguars around, but they're all Waymos. 1.00

01:22:19.640 This, I think, is an interesting question. 0.94

01:22:23.480 What do you feel is the strongest criticism of your thesis that you take seriously?

01:22:28.400 Of suicidal empathy?

01:22:29.680 Of suicidal empathy, yes.

01:22:32.080 Well, it's actually, I'm sorry to say, it's not a valid criticism.

01:22:36.620 It's the one that we alluded to earlier.

01:22:38.640 It's the misunderstanding of what I'm saying,

01:22:41.260 and they usually say, you really are a callous, dark person.

01:22:46.160 you're trying to eradicate one of our most beautiful virtues.

01:22:51.780 And that, again, speaks to a bafflingly incorrect view

01:22:56.000 of what I'm trying to say.

01:22:57.260 So if any of you eventually read the book

01:23:00.180 and have some valid criticisms, send me an email.

01:23:03.280 I'm all ears.

01:23:04.980 Should we have empathy toward people

01:23:07.660 who are suffering from suicidal empathy?

01:23:10.560 Call it higher order.

01:23:11.880 That's like meta, yeah, higher order.

01:23:16.160 If it ends up affecting negatively,

01:23:20.880 if their suicidal empathy is something

01:23:23.560 that has zero effect on anybody else,

01:23:26.460 then I'll be empathetic to their degeneracy.

01:23:28.960 But if their suicidal empathy has an effect

01:23:34.780 on the future trajectory of my children and yours,

01:23:38.540 then I'm not empathetic to their suicidal empathy.

01:23:41.040 Ah, okay, good.

01:23:42.560 Yeah, this next question is about

01:23:45.460 the connection between suicidal empathy and Christianity. 0.95

01:23:48.880 I realize you're not a Christian,

01:23:50.220 so maybe this is not the best question for you,

01:23:52.440 but St. Stephen prayed for those stoning him,

01:23:57.060 and Jesus said, you know, love your enemies and so forth. 0.58

01:24:03.440 Is suicidal empathy just being Christian? 0.58

01:24:07.960 No, so I briefly allude to it in suicidal empathy 0.69

01:24:11.180 where I say that a lot of those edicts in Christianity

01:24:15.760 don't speak within the earthly realm.

01:24:19.760 You know, right?

01:24:21.680 You know, be forgiving of your enemies and so on.

01:24:25.400 That is a gateway for me to ascend to the afterlife.

01:24:31.060 I'm not sure that in the earthly realm of...

01:24:36.000 Because if...

01:24:37.480 Then how did the crusaders do what they did?

01:24:39.560 I mean, they seem to not always be very kind to their enemies, so did they misread those Christian edicts?

01:24:45.480 So I'm hardly a Christian theologian, but my understanding is many of those empathetic things don't necessarily apply within an earthly realm.

01:24:54.660 That said, and I'm sure she'd be happy that I mentioned it, there was a book that came out a few years ago called Toxic Empathy that was very much rooted within a Christian framework.

01:25:07.020 And her book was about what happens when Christian ethical systems are taken advantage of by this plea to empathy.

01:25:20.720 Whereas, of course, my argument is much broader.

01:25:23.740 It is not restricted to the Christian ethos.

01:25:26.560 Yes, absolutely.

01:25:28.580 How much of the current hyper-feminization of Western culture do you believe comes from denying biological sex differences?

01:25:37.020 a lot, of course.

01:25:39.340 And by the way,

01:25:40.660 so on average,

01:25:41.720 women score higher on empathy than men.

01:25:44.220 I mean, well-regulated empathy.

01:25:47.140 And they also,

01:25:48.500 although I don't have the empirical evidence,

01:25:50.340 I haven't done the study,

01:25:51.700 but certainly, anecdotally,

01:25:54.120 you have a greater preponderance

01:25:56.100 of suicidally empathetic people amongst women.

01:25:59.980 So hashtag refugees welcome 1.00

01:26:02.340 as those refugees are gang raping you. 1.00

01:26:05.100 Those are always being held by very kind, empathetic women, usually that have aposomatic 0.99

01:26:11.300 coloring of their hair.

01:26:13.260 Aposomatic coloring is the fancy word for, aposomatic colors are warning colors in the

01:26:20.260 natural kingdom.

01:26:22.440 So, for example, an Amazonian frog has very vivid colors.

01:26:28.820 Now, you would think it should be the opposite that he has.

01:26:31.500 He should have camouflaging so that the predators can't see him.

01:26:36.060 But when an Amazonian frog has such vivid colors, what is it that he's communicating?

01:26:42.320 He's saying, if you can see me, it's probably because you don't want to have a go at me.

01:26:48.260 Stay away from me.

01:26:49.500 So I took this principle from evolutionary biology, and in the parasitic mind,

01:26:53.780 I argued that many of the super progressive folks, and this is actually totally true,

01:27:00.160 have aposomatic hair coloring.

01:27:03.480 I am so venomous in my wokeism.

01:27:06.600 Stay away from me, right? 1.00

01:27:08.180 And so they're just piggybacking on the Abizonian fraud. 1.00

01:27:11.740 So yes, women are much more likely than men

01:27:14.960 to succumb to suicidal empathy.

01:27:17.880 The other group that is likely to be

01:27:21.960 quite suicidally empathetic are what I call,

01:27:26.080 forgive me, I'm going to use a colorful word,

01:27:28.720 but it's a real word,

01:27:30.160 from science. Sneaky fuckers. Anybody, if you've read the parasitic mind, you might know what 1.00

01:27:39.060 sneaky fuckers are. Sneaky fuckers are actually, that is a real term from zoology. The fancier 1.00

01:27:46.880 term is called kleptogamy. It basically means a mating strategy where you steal mating

01:27:55.360 opportunities. Now many species have this strategy whereby, for example, the males will come in two

01:28:03.820 phenotypes. There is the standard very sexual dimorphic male, like who looks masculine. Then

01:28:11.420 there is another type of male that mimics females within that species. So when that sneaky fucker 1.00

01:28:19.840 shows up with the dominant male. 1.00

01:28:23.060 The dominant male is confused and lets him in,

01:28:27.720 and then he engages in surreptitious coupling

01:28:30.820 with the females. 0.97

01:28:32.220 I argued in parasitic mind 0.88

01:28:34.840 that extremely sensitive guys

01:28:38.720 who wear foulard, who hug the tree,

01:28:41.980 who go to Greta Thunberg rallies 1.00

01:28:44.740 are engaging in a form of sneaky fuckers. 0.98

01:28:47.820 I'm incredibly sensitive, I'm incredibly kind, you don't have to really worry about me, I'm not like those other Navy SEAL types that suffer from toxic masculinity, you could trust me, right? 0.99

01:29:01.540 And therefore, hopefully one day I can get in that surreptitious mating opportunity with you when your guards are down. 1.00

01:29:09.320 Sneaky fuckers suffer from suicidal empathy. 1.00

01:29:12.260 okay the next question is it's hard to follow that one up um is suicidal empathy a modern 1.00

01:29:21.100 phenomenon uh or can we look to history for examples of the effects on society and where

01:29:26.240 this all leads i would comment that a recent survey found that a majority of men think about

01:29:31.540 the roman empire several times a week uh i know i do and so so the question is yeah is the roman

01:29:38.700 Empire or other empires in the past? Have they fallen in a similar way? So I'm going to answer

01:29:44.740 in a slightly oblique way, but I think it'll get to your question. Early in the book, I tell the

01:29:50.900 story of the eminent British historian, Arnold Toynbee, who did a 12-volume study of why

01:30:00.560 civilizations eventually die. And the maxim of that 12-volume study is civilizations die not by

01:30:09.740 murder, but by suicide. So the difference between what he's already realized and what I'm saying

01:30:17.440 is that there are many pathways to committing civilizational suicide. What I'm arguing in

01:30:26.260 the current era is that we're committing civilizational suicide via the dysregulation

01:30:33.220 of empathy. That is unique to the current period. And by the way, another term that I introduced in

01:30:38.020 the book that probably will go viral just like civilizational, just like suicidal empathy,

01:30:44.500 I call it civilizational seppuku. Seppuku is the Japanese term exactly for in cultures where you

01:30:54.240 have honor and shame, where losing face is a really disastrous thing, a fatal thing, say the samurai

01:31:02.100 class, if you engage in an action that brings you shame, the only way that you can seek repentance

01:31:10.280 for that is to commit self-disembowelment, meaning seppuku. Well, I argue that the West is currently

01:31:19.580 committing civilizational seppuku again because of what you referred to earlier this existential 0.91

01:31:26.760 guilt we are the product of a racist misogynistic islamophobic transphobic society we live on stolen 0.97

01:31:36.500 land we killed the the indigenous people therefore there is nothing to celebrate about our society 0.98

01:31:42.600 we are here by original sin maybe not in the christian sense or maybe in the christian sense 0.99

01:31:49.240 And therefore, the only way to seek a redemption, a repentance, is by committing civilizational seppuku. 0.70

01:32:00.540 Good.

01:32:01.700 There are some people on the left who have somehow managed to avoid suicidal empathy.

01:32:07.280 So there is, I think, definitely a political correlation here.

01:32:10.760 But it's not perfect.

01:32:11.980 Bill Maher might be an example of someone who not only has not succumbed to this,

01:32:17.160 but points out this problem in others.

01:32:20.300 How is it possible for people who share a similar ideological perspective

01:32:25.440 to, in some cases, avoid the infection?

01:32:30.220 I mean, again, this may sound like an unsatisfactory answer to you,

01:32:33.800 but there are natural variations across people.

01:32:36.760 Why did this person get cancer and not that person?

01:32:39.600 So we could only talk about statistical regularities, as you mentioned earlier.

01:32:45.040 We know for a fact that people on the left are astoundingly more likely to succumb to

01:32:51.080 suicidal empathy.

01:32:52.400 I mean, they're literally called the party of empathy, right?

01:32:55.300 So, but that doesn't mean that from the cesspool of kind and compassion, you can't get someone

01:33:02.120 who has a unique personhood that makes them inoculated against this nonsense.

01:33:06.440 Bill Maher might happen to be one of them.

01:33:08.060 but I would say it's almost exclusively the case

01:33:11.360 that it is an affliction of the left.

01:33:14.180 Ah, right.

01:33:15.840 Let me ask a question that's closer to philosophy.

01:33:20.200 In the book, you talk about the contrast

01:33:22.280 between consequentialist views,

01:33:24.800 where the value of something depends on the consequences,

01:33:28.300 and deontological Kantian sorts of views

01:33:31.720 that are much more absolute.

01:33:33.460 And then, of course, behind it all

01:33:34.760 is this evolutionary framework that is your home base.

01:33:38.180 So how do those interact?

01:33:40.680 And how does that sort of perspective get involved with these questions of suicidal?

01:33:46.080 Right, great question.

01:33:47.380 So deontological ethics, for those of you who don't know, are absolute statements of right or wrong.

01:33:54.300 It is never okay to lie would be a deontological statement.

01:33:58.540 If you say it is okay to lie to spare someone's feelings, that's a consequentialist statement.

01:34:04.060 So, my wife is sitting here in the audience.

01:34:06.980 She's probably heard me mention this joke a million times.

01:34:09.320 I always say, if you wish to have a very happy and long-lasting marriage, if you hear the

01:34:15.280 following question, do I look fat in those jeans, put on your consequentialist hat and

01:34:22.180 answer, no, you've never looked more beautiful, even if you might be slightly fibbing.

01:34:27.900 Why?

01:34:28.460 Because you care about your spouse's feeling.

01:34:31.560 you might be slightly engaging in a white lie, but it's for a good consequence. But there are

01:34:37.960 certain principles that by definition have to be deontological. Freedom of speech has to be

01:34:44.840 deontological. If you say, I believe in freedom of speech, but, then you're sinking into

01:34:50.980 consequentialism. I believe in freedom of inquiry, but, I believe in presumption of innocence, but

01:34:58.320 that doesn't work and by the way we saw it often in the last five six years right when when people

01:35:05.400 were celebrating the fact that donald trump had been had his account canceled on twitter all of

01:35:13.060 them said of course we believe in freedom of speech but not for an existential threat like

01:35:17.880 donald trump well i'm jewish i support the right of holocaust deniers to deny the holocaust there's

01:35:25.320 almost nothing that you could think of that is more offensive and insulting than to deny the

01:35:30.460 Holocaust. But in a free society, I have to be able to tolerate the falsehood spreaders, the imbeciles, 0.99

01:35:37.020 the racists, the haters. That's the price you pay for freedom, right? So Brett Kavanaugh, remember 0.99

01:35:44.380 when he was being confirmed and someone said, well, I think maybe it could be, I'm not really

01:35:49.760 sure, but I think 36 years ago, he was part of a gang of 16-year-old rapists that was going up and 0.61

01:35:56.540 down the eastern seaboard, raping everybody inside. And I think he actually raped me, but I don't 0.97

01:36:01.620 really have any proof. All of my very, very highfalutin professorial colleagues said, 0.60

01:36:08.000 oh, there you go. He's a rapist. We can't have him be a... I said, oh, what about this little thing 1.00

01:36:13.880 called, you know, we should maybe grant him the courtesy of presuming that he's innocent. No,

01:36:18.080 no no that doesn't apply to brett kavanaugh right what about our good friend the malibu meditator

01:36:24.400 sam harris who is all about writing books on he wrote a book called lying i mean literally the

01:36:31.720 book's called lying where he was extolling the values of never lying but remember when he went

01:36:38.720 on a show and said oh when there was a collusion between all of the social media companies and all

01:36:46.980 of the journalistic outlets to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop, that was okay because had it come out

01:36:59.120 what was in that laptop, then Orange Himmler would have become president again, and that would have

01:37:04.960 been an existential threat. So he believes in always telling the truth, but not when it comes

01:37:10.640 to the unique case of Donald Trump.

01:37:12.740 So my point to kind of wrap up

01:37:14.980 is that if you truly believe

01:37:17.440 that there are foundational principles

01:37:19.480 that are worthy of being deontological

01:37:22.620 within the American ethos,

01:37:24.460 you can't suddenly start flip-flopping

01:37:26.720 and no longer be deontological-minded

01:37:30.000 when it comes to your political opponents.

01:37:33.020 Very good.

01:37:33.820 Yes, Immanuel Kant thought the essence of immorality

01:37:36.520 was making an exception for yourself.

01:37:38.660 It may be that it also involves making an exception for everybody you don't like.

01:37:44.080 Well, you've heard the sad truth, so I hope you've gotten something and appreciated this.

01:37:50.920 I do want to remind you of The Parasitic Mind, as well as the new book, Suicidal Empathy.

01:37:57.880 And in addition, the book that just came out, what, three years ago?

01:38:02.940 Sad Truth About Happiness.

01:38:04.060 The Sad Truth About Happiness.

01:38:05.860 So let's all thank Gad Saad.

01:38:08.660 thank you very much

01:38:15.960 thank you all for coming

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - July 02, 2026

Discussing Suicidal Empathy at the Salem Center at UT-Austin (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1013)

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