The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - May 19, 2026


Discussing Suicidal Empathy on One Nation with Brian Kilmeade (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_994)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Suicidal Empathy E.O. Wilson Brian Elon Musk Aristotle Porter Gadd
Discussing Suicidal Empathy with Rob Schmitt on Newsmax (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_993) My Chat with Harvard Political Philosopher Dr. Harvey Mansfield (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_995)

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

174.82

Word count

1,078

Sentence count

60

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I sit down with author and best-selling author Gad Saad to discuss his new book, Dying to Be Kind, and why he thinks we're living in the age of "suicidal empathy" and why it's ruining America.

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 .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So we may think we live in the information age, but we're also living in the age of empathy,
00:00:05.440 suicidal empathy, to be more precise. And what exactly does that mean? Suicidal empathy is a
00:00:11.280 tragic manifestation at the civilization level of the well-known proverb, the road to hell is
00:00:16.200 paved with good intentions. And it's that sentiment that is destroying Democratic-run
00:00:20.160 cities and states. I'm pro stealing from big corporations because, you know, they steal quite
00:00:26.820 a bit more from workers. Congresswoman Porter, your thoughts on the idea of funding health care
00:00:32.180 for undocumented immigrants statewide? Yes. Thank you for joining the call to get ice out of our
00:00:39.160 cities for us to dismantle this department that is not just rogue, but unlawful.
00:00:49.820 Joining us now, the author of a brand new book, Suicidal Empathy, bestseller. It's Dying to be
00:00:54.300 kind. Gad Saad, thanks so much for joining us. I appreciate it. Always good to see you.
00:01:00.320 Likewise. Thank you for having me, Brian. I cannot believe you write a book to get a
00:01:03.440 perspective on society, but you could rip the news from the headlines that backs up your title.
00:01:09.280 First off, I question if there are even good intentions behind some of the empathy that
00:01:14.880 we're witnessing. I mean, I think that many of them do truly believe that they are, you know,
00:01:21.320 as they stroke their hair in the mirror of moral preening, they think that they are good people. 0.99
00:01:26.480 It's unfair that illegal immigrants can't come and live the good life in the United States. 0.96
00:01:32.520 It's unfair that felons don't receive a second chance, ergo 157th chance. 0.99
00:01:38.360 It's unfair that trans women with penises can't compete with biological women. 1.00
00:01:43.440 So many of the people that I speak to genuinely believe that the positions that they take 0.99
00:01:48.900 are rooted in some higher transcendental morality.
00:01:52.980 Right. And is that why you wrote the book?
00:01:54.560 You felt you had to take a step back and figure out what was going on here?
00:01:59.640 Exactly right.
00:02:00.540 So The Parasitic Mind, my previous book,
00:02:02.980 looked at what happens when our cognitive system is hijacked,
00:02:06.920 our thinking processes.
00:02:08.520 But for me to fully parasitize you, 0.80
00:02:10.780 I have to hijack both your cognitive system and your emotional system.
00:02:15.880 So that's exactly what I do in suicidal empathy.
00:02:18.020 empathy. I basically argue that I need to get to your affective system in order to truly own your
00:02:25.700 capacity to engage in critical thinking. Or they just people rip you as a horrible person. If you
00:02:30.060 say to yourself, that's not practical to give everybody health care. It's not practical to
00:02:33.860 open up our borders because our car car, uh, our, our country is richer than yours. I want to rip
00:02:39.780 something actually from the headlines from a couple of days ago. It's about a 23 year old
00:02:43.040 female student who was a victim, and then later acted out, and it cost somebody their lives.
00:02:48.740 Quote, I regret it 100%, and I actually feel really bad that a man lost his life.
00:02:53.700 Maybe a part of me was just like, I don't want to put another black man in jail, but 0.63
00:02:58.560 at some point, if you are a criminal, you're a criminal, and he was scary, he was a scary 0.98
00:03:03.420 guy.
00:03:04.060 And to back it up, essentially, this guy went and killed somebody, but assaulted her first, 0.98
00:03:08.420 and she didn't press charges to turn him in because he was black. 0.74
00:03:11.400 yeah well this is an incredible story of course and had it happened a bit earlier it would have
00:03:17.660 made it to my book but i've got a story that's even much wilder than the one that you just
00:03:22.520 discussed i discuss in the book a story of a super progressive liberal white woman who decides to go
00:03:29.560 down to haiti to demonstrate that this stereotype of the violent black man simply does not hold
00:03:35.660 true. And she finds out when reality slaps her that she's taken up to the top of a rooftop and
00:03:42.780 repeatedly raped by a Haitian man. At the end of which she concludes, she wrote this in an actual
00:03:49.100 essay, that she was thankful for what he did to her because ultimately it demonstrated that it 0.99
00:03:55.580 was white supremacy that caused the black man to rape the white woman. That's what suicidal 1.00
00:04:01.560 empathy looks like brian it's crazy uh i gotta have an excerpt from your book and then maybe
00:04:05.860 you could comment on it once the suicidal empathy of socialism is coupled with the degeneracy of a
00:04:12.360 woke ideology you're no longer a free and dignified human being but an empathetic worker
00:04:18.580 ant slaving for a greater goal because yeah yeah so let me tell you where that comes from so
00:04:25.480 E.O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who studied social ants, gave one of the best answers to
00:04:33.280 the following question. Professor Wilson, what are your views on communism? And he said,
00:04:39.060 great idea, wrong species, meaning that social ants are communistic because there's a reproductive
00:04:45.280 queen and then the rest of the ants are interchangeable cogs in the wheel, right?
00:04:50.640 There are worker ants and warrior ants, completely interchangeable.
00:04:54.640 But human beings are not worker ants.
00:04:57.060 Human beings, some of us are taller, shorter, harder working, less harder working, more assertive, less assertive.
00:05:02.920 So to try to impose a sociopolitical economic system, in this case communism or socialism, on a species that is hierarchical will always fail as the data has shown it over and over again.
00:05:16.240 So that was just a perfect example.
00:05:17.640 And we should also realize, too, I mean, people should have compassion.
00:05:21.540 You should have empathy.
00:05:22.820 But it's got to be logical and it's got to be rooted in some type of end goal, right?
00:05:29.260 Well, it's got to be.
00:05:30.460 Look, empathy is a wonderful virtue.
00:05:33.120 We are a social species.
00:05:34.760 Therefore, part of the way that we engage in a lubricant of our sociality is to be empathetic towards each other.
00:05:41.180 But like Aristotle explained to us several thousand years ago, all good things in moderation.
00:05:47.100 Too little empathy makes you a psychopath.
00:05:50.360 Too much empathy invoked at the wrong circumstances towards the wrong target results in civilizational collapse.
00:05:57.720 All right, Gadd, congratulations.
00:05:58.820 By the way, I'm sure it helps sales when Elon Musk says everyone's got to buy this book,
00:06:03.040 Suicidal Empathy, Free the Wolves, Dying to be Kind.
00:06:06.520 Thanks so much, Gadd.
00:06:07.480 Appreciate it.
00:06:08.880 Thank you so much, Brian.