The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - May 24, 2026


Discussing Suicidal Empathy - Fox Across America with Guest Host Tom Shillehue (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_997)

Topics
suicidal empathy in Europe suicidal empathy movements
Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Suicidal Empathy Jimmy Fallon Mother Earth Arnold Toynbee Tommy Robinson Greta Thunberg Tom Shalhoub Jimmy Fallow Aristotle Sympathy Gutfeld
My Address at the World Symposium Against Antizionism (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_996) Instant #1 NYT Bestselling Author Self-Flagellates to Honor George Floyd (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_999)

Episode Stats


Length

16 minutes

Words per minute

161.27

Word count

2,642

Sentence count

119

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

21

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Jimmy Fallon talks to author Gad Saad about his new book, Suicidal Empathy, Dying to be Kind, and why he thinks the West is committing suicide via the concept of "suicidal empathy" and why it's the key to civilization's demise.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 From everywhere USA, it's Fox Across America with Jimmy Fallon.
00:00:24.800 Fox Across America with Jimmy Fela.
00:00:29.080 I am your guest host, Tom Shalhoub, because Jimmy is tired.
00:00:32.880 He's exhausted.
00:00:34.060 He's been doing comedy all weekend.
00:00:35.780 You know, he does that Fox News Saturday night.
00:00:37.640 He tapes it on Friday.
00:00:39.060 Then he goes out and he does his comedy dates.
00:00:42.780 And so, you know, I guess we don't begrudge him if he's travel exhausted on a Monday.
00:00:51.320 So it's great to be here.
00:00:52.920 And I wanted to use this opportunity to speak with my next guest, Gad Saad.
00:00:59.920 He's an author, and his new book is Suicidal Empathy.
00:01:05.200 And it's great to be able to talk to him, not on a frivolous panel on The Gutfeld Show.
00:01:11.060 Gad Saad, welcome to the show.
00:01:13.140 Good to be with you, Tom. Thanks for having me.
00:01:15.480 Usually you and I, we don't have much time to talk because you're sitting next to me on a little comfortable chair on The Gutfeld Show.
00:01:22.140 But this is a good chance to go in depth on your book, Suicidal Empathy, Dying to be Kind.
00:01:28.460 Did you coin this phrase?
00:01:29.600 Because I even mentioned this phrase on Gutfeld the other night.
00:01:32.040 And I thought, oh, I better credit Gad Saad with this.
00:01:34.800 But is it your phrase or did you just are you the latest person to popularize it?
00:01:39.140 Or did you coin it?
00:01:40.580 Oh, no.
00:01:41.120 I coined it.
00:01:42.120 You did?
00:01:42.760 Okay, good.
00:01:43.540 You know what?
00:01:44.180 You've had such an effect that the phrase is now part of the culture.
00:01:48.880 It is.
00:01:49.220 And so sometimes I guess, or maybe I wasn't aware that, you know, you're the guy that
00:01:53.620 came up with it, but let's, you know, tell our listeners about the book and how you came
00:02:00.540 to write it.
00:02:02.020 So empathy is a beautiful virtue for human beings to possess.
00:02:08.380 We are a social species.
00:02:10.380 For you and I, Tom, to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put myself in your mind and you
00:02:15.600 need to do the same thing, vice versa.
00:02:17.360 that's called cognitive empathy or theory of mind.
00:02:20.940 But like Aristotle explained to us several thousand years ago,
00:02:24.880 all good things in moderation, right?
00:02:26.860 He talked about the golden mean.
00:02:28.580 Too little of something is not good.
00:02:30.280 Too much of something is not good.
00:02:32.080 And much of life is about finding that sweet spot.
00:02:34.760 And that exact principle applies to empathy.
00:02:36.920 If I have no empathy, I'm likely to be a psychopath.
00:02:40.120 But if I have too much empathy,
00:02:41.900 if it hyperfires in the wrong situations toward the wrong targets, then you get what I call
00:02:50.160 another one of my coined terms, civilizational seppuku. For those of you who don't know,
00:02:56.240 seppuku is the ritualistic suicide that the samurai would engage in. If they engaged in an
00:03:04.240 act that brought them great shame, they would do a self-disembowelment because that would be the
00:03:10.500 only way for them to seek redemption and seek penance. Well, I argue that the West is committing
00:03:17.060 civilizational seppuku via suicidal empathy. Seppuku. Is there another word for that? Because
00:03:23.700 I was thinking, you know, when you said that, what's another, I thought they called it something
00:03:28.580 else when they stabbed themselves. Well, there is the term harakiri. Of course, you might be also
00:03:33.500 thinking about kamikaze who commit suicide, but that's through, you know, flying their 0.89
00:03:39.900 planes onto. So Japanese culture, as I explain in the book, has various forms of ritualistic
00:03:47.920 suicides. And so in the early part of Suicidal Empathy, I explain how different cultures
00:03:53.340 throughout history have practiced various forms of suicide. As a matter of fact, there is a very
00:03:59.960 esteemed historian by the name of Arnold Toynbee, he wrote a 12-volume set trying to examine what
00:04:09.800 causes civilizational decay. And then the final maxim that he came up with was that
00:04:15.420 civilizations don't die by murder, they die by suicide. And what I'm doing in the book is
00:04:21.880 arguing that the way we are currently committing suicide in our civilization is via dysregulated
00:04:28.200 empathy i don't even know if you're aware of this um you know i went on to wikipedia i'm going to
00:04:36.640 take this right off of wikipedia here it says the term suicidal empathy has been compared to the
00:04:42.980 great replacement theory uh the great replacement theory a white supremacist conspiracy theory
00:04:49.100 it's unbelievable as both posit the imminent destruction of western societies in the name
00:04:54.540 of immigrants. Were you aware that Wikipedia compared these two? And they don't give evidence
00:05:00.120 for it. They just said it's been compared to the Great Replacement Theory. I wasn't aware of that
00:05:04.740 particular comparison, but I could tell you, Tom, that well before my book had come out and, you
00:05:11.640 know, you know, the term was already in the, as you said, in the common lexicon, there were maybe
00:05:19.060 10, 12 hit articles that had been written against me in my book, even before people could have read
00:05:26.120 it. And so as the old maxim says, you know that you've lived a good life by the quality of your
00:05:32.240 enemies. So I must be on top of that mountain because I'm drawing all kinds of idiots who are 1.00
00:05:38.220 coming after me. And would you say that the United States or Europe is more, has traveled further 0.99
00:05:47.500 down the road of suicidal empathy no definitely europe is much further ahead as a matter of fact
00:05:54.400 i have now started a new tradition where i uh announced to the world the countries that have
00:06:02.960 entered stage five suicidal empathy we usually know that it ends at stage four and i'm here
00:06:10.020 proud to tell you again in case you haven't been following my appellations canada is in stage five
00:06:17.780 Britain is in stage five.
00:06:19.940 Sweden is in stage five. 0.73
00:06:21.700 But luckily for Americans, you're still far from that.
00:06:24.880 Although there are indications that Americans are desperately trying to catch up to Europe.
00:06:33.200 But God willing, we shall stop the tide.
00:06:35.820 It is interesting because you look at, I mean, I said Europe, but really you have to take each country on its own.
00:06:41.300 Sweden, you're right.
00:06:42.300 A lot of the Nordic countries.
00:06:44.300 But when I visited Sweden, I was in Stockholm and I would go to some of these, you know, whatever, just places you go to hang out, get a cup of coffee or go to a bar.
00:06:53.420 And I got the feeling that the right wingers in Sweden are very right wing.
00:06:59.800 You know, it's like these countries that have gone down the road of suicidal empathy.
00:07:05.220 There is a backlash to it.
00:07:06.840 And then, for instance, someone in London, you've got Tommy Robinson, right?
00:07:11.500 I mean, I don't even describe him as extreme.
00:07:13.420 I'm not saying he's extreme right wing. To me, he is a he's obviously he's against the immigration that's happened there.
00:07:19.920 They've painted him as a far right person. But do you notice in Europe, for instance, the far right in France, the far right in in in England and in some of these Nordic countries, there is a growing backlash.
00:07:33.360 It may be smaller than the United States, but it's kind of very powerful.
00:07:36.340 yeah but for about 20 years now i've been warning people that the backlash was going to come in one
00:07:45.900 form or another we can either resolve this issue peacefully but that window is closing very rapidly
00:07:52.880 or the auto correction will eventually take place people will wake up out of their stupor and when
00:07:59.820 they do it won't be pretty and so you know as someone i don't know how much you know of my
00:08:05.500 personal history, you know, we escaped the Lebanese Civil War, we're Lebanese Jews. So that from which
00:08:11.240 I escaped in the 1970s is exactly where we will be heading if we don't resolve this problem. Now,
00:08:18.100 many people would always say to me in the past, oh, but professor, you're being hyperbolic. Do you
00:08:23.040 really think that it's going to happen here? Well, you have to have the capacity to extrapolate into
00:08:29.240 a future. It's not going to become Beirut tomorrow, but give these patterns enough time
00:08:35.460 to flourish, and it will be Beirut. It might take 100 years, but it is inevitable. If we don't 0.88
00:08:41.740 resolve this issue, it'll be bad for our descendants. I would say that in Lebanon, 1.00
00:08:49.800 you know, we're talking about these European countries that have experienced a backlash or 0.99
00:08:54.160 an awakening, whatever you want to call it, a red-pilling. I would say that Lebanon is one of 0.97
00:08:58.920 these countries, whether it's the Christian community in Lebanon or the Jewish community
00:09:03.220 in Lebanon, was it because it was particularly bad, what happened in Lebanon over the past
00:09:12.360 50 years? 1.00
00:09:14.740 Well, look, Lebanon is the perfect model of what happens to a society if it is organized 0.98
00:09:21.820 along identity politic lines, right?
00:09:24.800 So what the Democrats are trying to promulgate in the United States, they simply need to look to Lebanon to see what happens when everything is organized along.
00:09:37.320 In the case of Lebanon, it's along religious lines.
00:09:39.800 So in Lebanon, your internal ID card, I mean, it didn't matter how tall you were or what your name was or what your eye color was.
00:09:47.680 What was most important is which religious group you belong to.
00:09:51.280 So in the case of the Jews, we weren't even called Jews in Arabic, we were called Israelite.
00:09:57.000 So if you were stopped by a particular militia group on a roadblock when the civil war started
00:10:03.000 and they said, give us your internal ID papers, and it's written Israelite on you, they don't
00:10:09.200 remember that you're also Lebanese and that you speak Arabic. 0.99
00:10:12.140 You're an Israelite, here comes the bullet to the head. 0.98
00:10:15.260 Lebanon, by the way, is a confessional parliament, meaning that each of the parliamentary positions 0.99
00:10:20.720 is allocated depending on your religion the president and the prime minister and the speaker
00:10:26.440 of the house always have to be of a particular religion so no place where you have this type
00:10:33.520 of tribalism ever ends up well whether it be rwanda or the balkans or iraq or syria so i wish
00:10:40.500 that the united states wouldn't go down that road of balkanization let's talk a little bit about
00:10:46.540 empathy versus sympathy because sure to me empathy is almost like a literary thing you know
00:10:53.100 empathy was you know you're reading a book you have to empathize with the lead character or if
00:10:57.240 you're watching a movie even if it's like tony soprano there's empathy you know he's bad but
00:11:02.780 the only way the drama is going to work is if you put yourself in their shoes um contrast that with
00:11:08.460 sympathy why is it empathy why aren't we why why isn't it called suicidal sympathy right uh so very
00:11:15.820 early in the book, I actually speak exactly to the point you made. And I state right there that
00:11:21.600 I'm going to use, because colloquially, the terms sympathy, empathy, compassion are pretty much used
00:11:28.740 interchangeably. Now, there are very, very granular and boring distinctions, certainly in
00:11:35.300 academia. There are even 40, I think it was 43 definitions of empathy in the academic literature.
00:11:42.200 But we all understand exactly what it means.
00:11:45.840 It's exactly what you said you want to put.
00:11:47.580 So I feel your pain would be a form of affective empathy.
00:11:52.560 I understand your pain would be cognitive empathy.
00:11:56.460 Sympathy would be, for example, when somebody dies, you say, my sympathies.
00:12:00.840 It's a bit more passive than empathy. 0.99
00:12:03.140 So if I empathize with Guatemalan illegal immigrants who don't get the benefit of sharing 1.00
00:12:10.960 in the experience of living in the United States, then I'm going to be even more proactive
00:12:16.240 and I'm going to ask my senators to enact open door policies because all people should
00:12:23.200 be allowed to come into the United States and benefit from its largesse.
00:12:27.120 So empathy is technically a bit different from sympathy, but for our purposes, we can
00:12:32.620 use them interchangeably.
00:12:33.960 I would think another issue around empathy is that it's certainly a lot easier to have
00:12:40.180 empathy for an individual because this is the whole idea you're putting yourself in their shoes
00:12:44.000 so when you're if you're in their shoes it's an individual thing how do you have empathy for an
00:12:49.160 entire class of people well that's why it's called suicidal empathy uh you never mind having empathy
00:12:56.360 for a whole class of people how about having empathy for mother earth right so if i am you
00:13:04.140 know, Greta Thunberg, I so love Mother Earth that to actually procreate becomes a form of
00:13:12.100 the raping of Mother Earth, right? So they are literally movements that say the only way for us
00:13:19.460 to actually exhibit true empathy in order for Mother Earth to heal would be to stop what is
00:13:27.200 the most fundamental driver of our existence, which is to reproduce, right? All sexually 0.97
00:13:32.280 reproducing species have two evolutionary goals in mind they first have to survive and but if you
00:13:39.140 survive but never reproduce your genes don't propagate so life is a two-step process survive
00:13:45.400 reproduce well imagine if i'm so empathetic towards mother earth that i say it is much better for me
00:13:52.820 not to reproduce in order to not add carbon footprint to mother earth than to actually do
00:14:00.320 what is most natural which is to find a mate and have children it's absolutely nihilistic hence
00:14:05.700 suicidal reminds me of the old i don't know who coined the phrase but it was always the liberal
00:14:10.440 the idea of the liberal loving humanity but hating human beings right yeah exactly that's exactly
00:14:17.840 right but go ahead before you go i i want to get your uh a quick comment on what do you think's 0.68
00:14:24.480 going on on the right vis-a-vis Israel? You know, it's talk radio or influencers. There's a growing
00:14:33.080 hostility to Israel. What do you think it stems from? I hate to say it because people are now
00:14:39.820 going to write me and say there's a distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. No,
00:14:45.600 there isn't. That doesn't mean that you can't, you know, address and critique specific policies
00:14:52.540 of the Israeli government.
00:14:53.760 Of course you can.
00:14:54.760 If you think that the extradition treaty
00:14:56.740 between the U.S. and Israel is a bad idea,
00:14:59.440 you can criticize it without being called an anti-Semite. 0.52
00:15:02.060 But if you suddenly become the type of person
00:15:05.740 that sees the entire web of causal connections 0.55
00:15:08.980 in the world linked somehow to Israel,
00:15:12.180 then that probably suggests
00:15:14.200 that you're more than just anti-Zionist. 0.71
00:15:16.580 You're probably anti-Semitic.
00:15:18.280 It really, I find it very disheartening
00:15:20.560 to see what's happening on the right.
00:15:21.980 Some of the people that you're probably thinking of were people that I knew well were, I mean, they were maybe if not friends, they were, you know, acquaintances of mine that have invited me on their show to see them now spend all day talking Israel, Israel, Israel.
00:15:37.120 It's simply soul crushing. 1.00
00:15:39.160 But for someone who comes from a history of Jew hatred, I suppose it doesn't surprise me. 0.97
00:15:44.980 Yeah. 0.99
00:15:45.300 And listen, this is the reason I know about this is I'm listening to them.
00:15:49.360 I'm out there.
00:15:49.820 I want to hear what they're doing.
00:15:50.960 i don't agree with them you know they can talk i'll listen to them i don't buy their arguments
00:15:55.860 but you know it's something it's going to be interesting going forward gad sad so great to
00:16:01.780 have you on here i could talk with you forever um perhaps we'll have another chance to chat and do
00:16:06.440 this uh long form the book is suicidal empathy dying to be kind hopefully i'll see you on a
00:16:11.100 gut felt panel soon thank you so much tom gad sad we'll see you again
00:16:20.960 You