The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - May 08, 2026


Discussing Suicidal Empathy on Jesse Watters Primetime (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_991)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Suicidal Empathy Muhammad Ahmed Arnold Toynbee Elon Musk Gad Sads Farsi
SUICIDAL EMPATHY - Snippet from the Audio Book (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_990) Discussing Suicidal Empathy on Gutfeld! (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_992)

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

162.09

Word count

742

Sentence count

40

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Gad Sads, author of Suicidal Empathy, and scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at Ole Miss, joins me to talk about what suicidal empathy is and how it manifests itself in the world.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Gad Sads, the author of Suicidal Empathy, and scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at Ole Miss.
00:00:08.800 Gad Sads, what is suicidal empathy?
00:00:12.200 So empathy is a wonderful virtue to have.
00:00:15.740 We are a social species.
00:00:16.960 For you and I to have a good conversation, I need to put myself in your mind and vice versa. 0.97
00:00:21.740 But like all things, too little of it makes you a psychopath. 0.98
00:00:26.120 Too much of it.
00:00:26.980 So if it if it becomes hyperactive, if it is invoked in the wrong situations, if it targets the wrong targets, you end up with a society that's committing civilizational seppuku.
00:00:38.760 You're basically self disemboweling yourself. So empathy is great. Suicidal empathy is fatal.
00:00:45.080 So what would an example be current day of suicidal empathy? 0.80
00:00:48.700 So to argue that all immigrants are equally likely to assimilate within the American ethos would be a perfect manifestation of suicidal empathy. 0.73
00:00:59.180 Elon Musk is an immigrant to the United States. 0.81
00:01:02.160 Mohammed Ahmed, who just went to a summer camp in Waziristan with al-Qaeda, is also an immigrant.
00:01:09.180 They're probably not equally likely to assimilate well within the American experiment. 0.98
00:01:13.740 That's true, and we know that from experience.
00:01:16.900 Also, women in this country seem to be most afflicted with suicidal empathy.
00:01:22.320 How does that manifest itself? 0.94
00:01:24.540 Well, they are the ones who are holding hashtag refugees welcome as they are being gang raped by said refugees, right? 0.87
00:01:31.880 So there are many, many examples that I discuss in the book, and you and I talked about it offline, 1.00
00:01:36.220 that really seem almost as though they're impossible to believe that they could be true. 0.83
00:01:40.520 So a woman is gang raped by a bunch of guys from the Middle East. 0.76
00:01:44.080 She tells the police that they were speaking in German because if she were to truly say that they spoke Arabic and Farsi, that would marginalize the Middle Eastern community. 0.60
00:01:54.860 So when a woman who is being raped and victimized, her first reflex is to protect her rapists, that's probably suicidal empathy.
00:02:03.980 Does it generate from a hatred of your country?
00:02:08.380 Does it generate itself from guilt?
00:02:10.640 how does it how does it show itself well it shows itself in many many different ways so for example
00:02:19.360 the fact that people are incredibly islamophilic they love islam in the west would be one
00:02:25.360 manifestation of suicidal empathy it shows its way by the fact that you shouldn't put felons in 0.54
00:02:32.000 prison they've only been arrested 187 previous times why don't you be a nice guy and give them
00:02:37.720 a second chance, right? It shows its way in the fact that we should elevate indigenous knowledge
00:02:44.980 over the scientific method, because the scientific method is laced with white supremacy. So there
00:02:50.240 are an endless number of ways that bit by bit, the edifices of reason that define the West are
00:02:57.000 being clobbered. So you and I can see it. It's illogical. And you've seen people hurt by this.
00:03:02.600 Why can't they see it? And if you were to, I don't know, lay them down on the couch, Dr. Gad said, how would you cure this?
00:03:11.100 Well, I would tell them to read this book because the last chapter I offer an inoculation against suicidal empathy.
00:03:18.940 But it's a very difficult and almost intractable problem because if my personhood is defined by the fact that I am infinitely tolerant, infinitely compassionate, kind, magnanimous,
00:03:30.760 then it becomes very difficult to ever take a position that might seem as being non empathetic.
00:03:36.360 So it's a tough problem. But I'm up for the challenge. And do you think America can cure
00:03:41.200 this issue? Because you say in the book that a lot of civilizations, they don't perish from
00:03:47.840 a foreign country, you know, taking them over. They die from within. Exactly. So Arnold Toynbee,
00:03:54.060 I think that's who you're referring to, was a British historian who did a broad, exhaustive
00:03:59.340 study of all civilizations and their trajectories. And the maxim that he came up with is that
00:04:04.880 civilizations do not die by murder. They die by suicide. Now, in my case, I'm arguing that the
00:04:12.140 means by which we are committing suicide is by the dysregulation of an otherwise virtuous value,
00:04:19.460 which is empathy. So adaptive empathy is great. Suicidal empathy is fatal.
00:04:24.500 suicidal empathy Gad said one of my favorites go get it right now it's an
00:04:31.000 order Gad thank you so much