The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - May 18, 2026


Discussing Suicidal Empathy with Rob Schmitt on Newsmax (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_993)

Topics
suicidal empathy in murders
Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Ramel Burke Gadsad Suicidal Empathy Miranda Devine Ross Falzone Aristotle
Discussing Suicidal Empathy on Gutfeld! (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_992) Discussing Suicidal Empathy on One Nation with Brian Kilmeade (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_994)

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

172.98

Word count

891

Sentence count

69

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A recent tragedy here in New York is a reminder of the costs of suicidal empathy. A 76-year-old retired teacher was thrown down the steps of a subway station by a man who should have never been on the streets. The accused killer, this 32-year old repeat offender, is smiling in a courtroom. That should anger you.

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.
00:00:00.080 Welcome back. A recent tragedy here in New York, a reminder of the costs of suicidal empathy.
00:00:06.220 76-year-old retired teacher Ross Falzone thrown down the steps of a subway station by a psychopath.
00:00:13.640 Falzone was killed by a man who should have never been on the streets.
00:00:18.340 The accused killer, this 32-year-old repeat offender, Ramel Burke, smiling in a courtroom.
00:00:26.060 That should anger you.
00:00:26.980 Police say he was released from the psych ward the same day that he killed Falzone.
00:00:31.340 The New York Post's Miranda Devine revealing that a liberal New York woman
00:00:35.640 who was attacked by that man just before he killed Falzone,
00:00:42.720 the 23-year-old refusing to cooperate with prosecutors after Burke attacked her on a subway as well,
00:00:49.620 she said, because maybe part of me was like, I don't want to put another black man in jail.
00:00:55.580 And now because she didn't cooperate with police, he went out just weeks later and murdered a retired schoolteacher by throwing him down the stairs.
00:01:04.900 Dr. Gadsad is the author of the book Suicidal Empathy.
00:01:09.100 It is a book that is exactly about moments like this and what we're doing to ourselves to achieve some kind of ridiculous virtue.
00:01:19.480 Doctor, good to have you back on.
00:01:21.140 Your reaction to that story and talk about, you know, this is exactly your point.
00:01:24.620 Right. I mean, it's too bad that that story didn't happen in times included in the book. But the regrettable feature here is that I've got a million such cases in the book. I mean, it's simply incredible.
00:01:39.400 What I'd like the listeners and viewers to understand is that the book is not about an attack on empathy. Empathy is an evolutionarily selected trait. We are a social species, so it makes sense for us to have empathy as a virtue.
00:01:55.940 For you and I to have a good conversation, I need to put myself in your mind and vice
00:02:00.520 versa.
00:02:01.000 That's part of cognitive empathy.
00:02:03.100 But like most things in life, like Aristotle explained to us several thousand years ago,
00:02:07.420 all good things in moderation.
00:02:09.120 Too little of something is not good.
00:02:11.000 Too much of something is not good.
00:02:13.140 And much of life is about finding that sweet spot.
00:02:15.960 So too little empathy or no empathy makes you a psychopath.
00:02:19.120 path, too much empathy when it hyperfires to in the wrong situations towards the wrong targets,
00:02:26.300 you end up with a malady that can destroy the West. And there's no and there's no empathy for
00:02:32.120 the innocent. You know, that's one thing that you never find. There's tremendous empathy for
00:02:37.140 criminals and for people that I guess are viewed as somehow victims of society as they victimize
00:02:43.560 us. Exactly. So in the case of these recidivist criminals, the idea is that they are born as
00:02:50.900 beautiful human beings, and it is only the fact that they have been socialized into a life of 1.00
00:02:56.780 criminality. In this case, it's a black individual who undoubtedly had to go through the horrors of
00:03:02.980 living in the white supremacist United States. So in that case, why would you then double punish 0.77
00:03:09.040 him. He's already been punished by being a black man in the United States. Now you're going to 0.99
00:03:13.700 punish him by presuming that he's got personal agency. God forbid, he probably needs another
00:03:18.460 200 chances before we actually throw away the key. You got to wonder what that 23 year old woman 1.00
00:03:23.500 feels knowing that this has happened, you know, because she didn't want to prosecute. She didn't
00:03:27.640 want to help the police. He'd be in jail. This wouldn't happen. Indeed. Frankly, I hate to say
00:03:33.060 this, but I bet you that she probably doesn't even feel any guilt. I'll tell you an even more
00:03:37.660 incredible story than the one that you just discussed. There was a gentleman in Norway who
00:03:42.020 was raped and sodomized by a Somali migrant. The Somali migrant ended up serving a very small 0.99
00:03:48.680 sentence in Norway because the Norwegians are very kind and empathetic. After he was released,
00:03:54.780 he was going to be deported back to Mogadishu. The guy who had been raped by him felt horrible 0.92
00:04:01.840 existential angst because now he wouldn't be able to his rapist wouldn't be able to fully flourish
00:04:08.420 in Mogadishu. Poor guy. That's just it's just unbelievable. And it I guess doesn't surprise me
00:04:16.800 anymore. But the extent of that is just surreal. Real quick, before I do let you go, you see the
00:04:23.080 judge that let the guy off in Boston, the guy that shot up like 50, 60 rounds, he shot at people,
00:04:28.080 injured two people. He had only gotten five years in jail for firing 13 shots at police officers.
00:04:33.960 They went to the judge's house. She said, I don't even remember the case.
00:04:37.580 At what point do we need to start holding to account the judges that are allowing these people
00:04:42.920 to continue to victimize society? Look, life is about cause and effect relationships. Once you
00:04:48.560 violate that relationship between what you do and the consequences of that, which is the case with
00:04:55.100 many of these liberal judges, you end up
00:04:57.220 with nihilism.
00:04:59.040 Nihilism.
00:05:00.600 Dr. Gadsad, we appreciate you coming on.
00:05:02.740 It is a wonderful book.
00:05:04.380 Thank you so much for joining us.
00:05:05.920 Suicidal Empathy is the name of it.
00:05:07.480 We appreciate it, sir.
00:05:08.420 Cheers. Take care.