The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Protecting Our Civilization on Mississippi Public Broadcasting! (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_988)

00:00:00.000 you're listening to sit down right here with russ latino joining us now is dr gad sod

00:00:19.880 uh professor public intellectual author of several best-selling books the parasitic mind

00:00:25.840 And a new book that's coming out, I think, in just a couple of weeks, Suicidal Empathy, that is already a bestseller, as I understand it.

00:00:35.060 Welcome to The Sit Down.

00:00:36.900 Great to be with you. Thank you for having me.

00:00:38.560 Yeah, thanks for coming on.

00:00:39.560 So you started in evolutionary psychology, understanding human behavior, but have very much grown into a public figure, a public commentator on human behavior.

00:00:54.460 What was that transition like from point A to point B?

00:00:59.200 You know, I've always loved publishing academic papers.

00:01:04.000 This is how we advance knowledge, you know, irrespective of which discipline we're working in.

00:01:09.020 But I grew a bit impatient with the speed at which information flows within academic settings, right?

00:01:17.920 If you publish an academic paper and it is highly successful, that means that probably you'll get 100 citations in 10 years.

00:01:27.820 Well, 100 citations means that, you know, 100 other academics have cited that work maybe in a decade.

00:01:33.880 Well, I can get on a show, Joe Rogan, and I can have 20 million people consuming that knowledge.

00:01:41.820 So I view my job as an academic as one that is twofold.

00:01:47.320 I have to create knowledge, but then I have to disseminate knowledge, and all bets are off when it comes to disseminating knowledge.

00:01:54.560 So here I'm a bit different than many of my colleagues who've always felt comfortable only operating within the ecosystem that they're familiar with.

00:02:03.640 I'd like to say that I was certainly one of the first ones to appreciate these types of interactions.

00:02:09.560 So thank you for having me on.

00:02:11.640 Yeah, no, it's resonant with me.

00:02:13.200 I worked for a little while for an advocacy organization, a national advocacy organization,

00:02:18.120 that had a nine-figure-a-year budget, and part of what I managed were university-center

00:02:21.780 investments.

00:02:23.340 And I can remember having internal conversations, Dr. Saad, about just what you described, which

00:02:27.720 is, like, it's wonderful that we're investing in university centers, but Tucker Carlson

00:02:32.400 has three million people watching him at night, or Joe Rogan has 20 to 25 million people.

00:02:36.700 So as a matter of scale, the message is not getting to where it needs to be if you want

00:02:41.400 to really effectuate public change.

00:02:43.200 exactly right now i'll tell you a quick story that i first recounted in the parasitic mind

00:02:49.420 in chapter one back in 2017 i had been invited to stanford business school i mean that that would

00:02:56.020 certainly be one of the meccas of academia and i was there to speak exactly when you kindly

00:03:01.560 introduced me on my evolutionary psychology work the night before as often happens in these academic

00:03:07.860 visits the host who was tasked with you know keeping me company took me out to dinner and

00:03:13.140 As we were sitting for dinner, he looked at me and said, oh, I didn't know that you're

00:03:18.160 someone who goes on Joe Rogan very often, that you're friends with him.

00:03:20.940 I said, yeah, yeah, I've been going on for many years.

00:03:23.200 And so he, with an air of haughty disdain, he says, yeah, well, you know, we don't condone

00:03:28.040 that at Stanford.

00:03:29.160 I said, you don't condone what at Stanford?

00:03:31.480 He goes, well, we don't do research so that it could be sexy enough so that we could then

00:03:36.560 talk about it on Joe Rogan.

00:03:37.800 I said, well, I don't do the research so I can appear on Joe Rogan either.

00:03:41.880 But if I'm doing research that is interesting to the public, ultimately the public is the taxpayer that pays our salaries, then surely I'm going to take that opportunity.

00:03:52.320 I'd rather go on Joe Rogan, and these are the exact words I said, than have someone publish a paper that will be read by your mom, your wife, the editor, and two reviewers.

00:04:04.040 He apparently didn't like that answer, but that's the truth.

00:04:08.060 Yeah, there's a great deal of elitism and ivory tower sort of thought process that goes into that there.

00:04:13.420 I am curious, you moved from Lebanon originally in your younger life, and then to Canada, and now you're in Mississippi at some level, working with the University of Mississippi Declaration of Independence Center.

00:04:31.140 How does a Lebanese-Canadian end up in Mississippi?

00:04:34.680 well the incredible thing maybe this is the first time that the story is being told in

00:04:40.220 in a public setting i was once tweeting something you know or you know maybe the the sads need to

00:04:47.480 move i don't remember the exact timber of what i was saying and i just happened to notice a response

00:04:53.820 from a you know pretty well connected uh gentleman from mississippi saying well something to the

00:05:00.480 effect of you know well we'd love to have you in Mississippi let me know if this is something that

00:05:05.440 interests you now it was unbelievably fortuitous that I had even hung around long enough to notice

00:05:11.440 that reply because oftentimes you know when you have a large platform I mean you're going to get

00:05:15.620 millions of replies you don't see most of them and so I actually replied to the gentleman and said

00:05:20.480 well you know please send me an email very shortly thereafter he sends me an email says do you mind

00:05:27.240 if I connect you with somebody at the Declaration of Independence Center, who happened to be Stephen

00:05:32.280 Scaltetti, whom you just had a chat with, and Rankin-Shirling. Within a week or two, we held

00:05:38.760 a Zoom meeting, and shortly thereafter, we were talking about how this guy could move to Mississippi,

00:05:45.280 and it happened. Sometimes life is magical that way. We're hospitable and persuasive,

00:05:50.280 is what I hear. You are. You are. I'll tell you another very quick story before you go on.

00:05:54.440 you know we are a storytelling animal so oftentimes it is these stories that resonate the most with

00:06:00.860 people. Last year I was being courted by several universities some of which at the time were

00:06:07.000 laying a lot of money at me and so when I had gone down to visit Mississippi for the first time and

00:06:12.840 visit you know Rankin and and Steven and the rest of the gang at Ole Miss when I returned I told my

00:06:19.620 wife, I said, I think Mississippi is now number one on our to-go list. She goes, are you sure?

00:06:25.460 Here's how much they're going to offer you. Here's how much this other school is going to offer you.

00:06:29.520 Are you sure you want to be there? And then believe me, I was able to convince her because

00:06:33.400 earlier in October, the whole family came down. They saw the magic of the place. They now understand

00:06:38.620 why we belong there. Now, I don't want to sound like too much of a homer, but Oxford is a special

00:06:43.300 place. It's God's country. So we're glad to have you there. I'll tell you what drew me to

00:06:49.200 your work and your commentary originally, and I've been out of college now longer than I care

00:06:54.300 to admit, about 23 years. When I was in college, these concepts of moral relativism, of postmodernism

00:07:01.840 were very much the hubbub amongst college professors, right? And the thought process was

00:07:09.280 very much so all cultures are equally valid, there are no real truths, you know, everybody can define

00:07:17.060 for themselves, what is moral and immoral. And it always struck me as a logically bankrupt set

00:07:25.180 of thought processes that were at some level rooted in a really naive view of human nature,

00:07:32.200 right? That what divides us from my perspective is that there are people who believe that human

00:07:38.800 nature is flawed and subject to evil, and there are people who look at human nature as being

00:07:44.760 perfectible. And because of that, they'd say, well, all cultures are equally valid because they can

00:07:49.740 all arrive at that point of perfection. I'm curious if that thought process resonates at

00:07:57.120 all with you. I think it does based on the writing that I've read from you.

00:08:00.560 Right. So in the parasitic mind, I basically argue that in the same way that many animals,

00:08:08.000 including humans, can be parasitized by a wide range of parasites. For example, a tapeworm

00:08:14.200 can parasitize your intestinal tract. But a neuroparasite is one that needs to end up in

00:08:20.400 your brain, altering your neuronal circuitry to suit its interest. So for example, a wood cricket

00:08:27.020 abhors water. It wants nothing to do with water. But when it is parasitized by a hairworm,

00:08:32.260 The hair worm needs the wood cricket to jump, happily commit suicide into water because then the parasite can complete its reproductive cycle.

00:08:42.580 So that was my epiphany.

00:08:44.120 I then said, aha, I'm going to use this mechanism, this framework to argue that human beings can suffer from ideological parasites, postmodernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism.

00:08:57.000 but I would add a slight twist to what you were saying regarding the genesis of a lot of these

00:09:03.900 idea parasites. I think that all of those parasitic ideas start out with a noble objective

00:09:11.360 and then in the service of that noble objective, if you need to murder truth, so be it. So for

00:09:18.480 example, equity feminism is the idea that men and women should be treated equally under the law.

00:09:24.360 Based on that very narrow definition of feminism, you and I would probably put up our hands

00:09:29.260 and say, yeah, yeah, sign me up. 1.00

00:09:30.560 I'm an equity feminist. 1.00

00:09:31.940 Radical feminists come along and say, well, wait a minute, in order for us to effect quicker 1.00

00:09:38.560 change and squashing the patriarchy, let's promulgate the idea that there are no innate 1.00

00:09:44.680 sex differences.

00:09:46.040 All sex differences are due to social construction because then that lays the field for us to 1.00

00:09:52.420 be able to, you know, impose our feminist utopia. So, in the service of their ultimate objective, 0.99

00:09:58.460 if they happen to destroy reality, so be it. So, I think each of those parasitic ideas

00:10:04.880 free us from the pesky shackles of reality.

00:10:09.420 What you're saying makes me think of sort of my faith tradition in Christianity,

00:10:15.900 which is there was a moment in the New Testament where James and John essentially want to call

00:10:20.960 fire down on a village that is acting as apostates act. And Jesus instructs them that you have to

00:10:28.980 worship in both truth and love. And it strikes me that we err both directions. There are some people

00:10:38.300 who want to call down fire and show no empathy at all towards other people.

00:10:43.340 And then there are other people who have this very sort of milquetoast, weak version of love

00:10:49.140 in mind where there is no correction, even if the thing that the person is doing ultimately

00:10:55.500 harms that person.

00:10:57.140 That's the essence of suicidal empathy, isn't it?

00:11:00.140 Yeah, that's a beautiful way to set it up.

00:11:02.080 So let me give my narrative for how parasitic mind follows or precedes suicidal empathy.

00:11:10.380 We are both a thinking and feeling creature.

00:11:15.020 So it's wrong to say, you know, it's reason and not emotion.

00:11:18.480 We've both evolved a cognitive system and an affective system.

00:11:24.260 Parasitic mind explains what happens to a human being when their cognitive system is parasitized.

00:11:31.760 But in order for me to completely own your ability to think, I have to then hijack your affective system.

00:11:39.480 That's where suicidal empathy comes in.

00:11:41.260 And let me explain the theoretical framework of how I came up with this idea.

00:11:45.020 we know from evolutionary theory that many psychiatric disorders are the misfiring of an

00:11:53.580 otherwise adaptive process and i know it's a mouthful so let me break it down so take for

00:11:58.280 example ocd when let's say you have germ contamination fear right the person who

00:12:04.680 suffers from that form of ocd is stuck in an infinite loop in their bathroom washing their

00:12:10.680 hands in scalding hot water until their skin is falling off. But that mechanism is actually rooted

00:12:17.740 in an evolutionarily appropriate process if it is done within well-modulated regions. So let's say

00:12:25.180 I have the pleasure, Russ, of meeting you in Oxford soon. And I noticed that prior to you coming up to

00:12:31.400 me, you're incessantly sneezing into your hands. Therefore, you seem to have a cold. Well, I will

00:12:37.540 discreetly so that I don't offend you. After I've shaken your hand, I'll head off into the bathroom

00:12:42.740 and wash my hands. Therefore, scanning the environment for environmental threats makes

00:12:48.060 perfect evolutionary sense. The problem with some of these psychiatric disorders is that they

00:12:53.700 misfire. They become hyperactive, right? That's exactly the principle with suicidal empathy.

00:13:00.120 Empathy itself is a perfectly relevant evolutionary virtue because we're a social species. In

00:13:07.440 order for you and I to have a meaningful interaction I need to put myself in your mind and

00:13:11.580 vice versa so it's perfectly reasonable to be empathetic I want to have a spouse who's empathetic

00:13:16.860 I want my physician to be empathetic so this is not an attack on empathy full stop it's an attack

00:13:24.740 on dysregulated empathy hyperactive empathy that is invoked in the wrong situations and towards

00:13:32.300 the wrong targets. That results in what I call civilizational seppuku. Seppuku was the Japanese

00:13:39.240 practice whereby a samurai, when they lost honor, the only way they can redeem themselves is to

00:13:45.820 literally engage in self-disembowelment. That's the only way they can regain their honor.

00:13:50.980 Well, I argue, regrettably, that the West suffers from civilizational seppuku.

00:13:56.420 and and i'm a mississippi yokel so so let me tell you how i think about this and maybe get

00:14:02.300 your thoughts but like at some level you you can tell looking at me i'm a portly guy i've had too

00:14:06.340 much fried chicken and catfish in mississippi you'll get used to that when you're here um

00:14:10.560 we have gone through this phase where the american mentality is not only hey we're not going to be

00:14:17.360 rude right so if i walk out in the street it would be very rare for somebody to walk up and 0.96

00:14:21.960 be like, dude, you're fat. But we've gone from, hey, don't be rude, to actually let's celebrate 0.84

00:14:28.560 something, right? This whole fat positivity thing, right? And at some level, we're actually

00:14:36.120 celebrating things that are harmful to people because we don't want to be rude or we want to

00:14:42.320 be accepting. You know, you talked about the other day on X, and you've got 1.2 million followers on

00:14:47.960 It's incredible. But you talked about this the other day, that if you look at instances of self-reported mental health disorders, that across the political spectrum, you see this huge slide from the far left to the far right, where the far left is now indicating mental health, self-identifying mental health at plus 60 percent.

00:15:07.200 so that we went from let's not stigmatize mental health problems to literally kind of let's

00:15:13.600 celebrate it let's talk about how brave we are for wallowing in our self-misery and it just

00:15:19.200 strikes me as counterproductive to the fabric of society perfectly stated as a matter of fact in

00:15:24.520 this book which is the book between these two this one came out in 2023 the sad truth about

00:15:29.920 happiness to your point about that figure that you're talking about political orientation

00:15:34.140 and correlating that with mental health issues in the book i talk about this unequivocal finding

00:15:41.520 that has been repeatedly reported by many researchers showing that political orientation

00:15:47.180 and happiness scores today to some extent you can argue that happiness is sort of the opposite

00:15:53.440 side of the coin of suffering from say depression right well it might not surprise your

00:15:59.520 lovely listeners in Mississippi, more conservative I am, the higher my happier score. More progressive

00:16:08.860 I am, the lower my happier score. And I think I have a plausible explanation for that. Maybe you

00:16:14.440 could tell me what you think of it. So I argue that the conservative person wakes up in the

00:16:19.560 morning filled with gratitude. I live in a free society. I have freedom of speech. I have freedom

00:16:26.340 of conscience. I have freedom of assembly. It may not be a perfect society, but out of the full

00:16:31.040 panoply of societies, I am really grateful to be here. I'm grateful to be in Oxford, Mississippi.

00:16:36.380 It's a beautiful place. Therefore, sure, I could change things, but I'm happy. On the other hand,

00:16:41.840 the progressive wakes up in the morning and says, I live on stolen land. I live in an Islamophobic, 0.59

00:16:47.240 transphobic, misogynistic society. I've committed genocide against the indigenous people. I'm a 1.00

00:16:53.060 terrible person and so on. So I'm self-flagellating. So here's an idea. Around the corner, if I could

00:16:59.820 simply burn down the current society and socially engineer the new society, around the corner lies

00:17:06.880 unicornia. So I can't be happy today. I'm filled with existential angst. I think that tells the

00:17:12.920 same story as the finding that you talked about on X. Is there a world in which, because you

00:17:18.100 described positive motives or at least potentially good motives with some people who are like, hey,

00:17:24.200 let's just tolerate everything. Let's not make anybody feel bad. Let's not confront people with

00:17:28.780 truth. Is there an element that could actually be insidious about that in that when I was, again,

00:17:36.220 when I was in college, all these concepts were floating around and the message was, hey, you

00:17:41.560 just need to be more tolerant, more accepting, not question these things. But what I figured out was

00:17:46.520 that those were people who were operating from positions of weakness with their social

00:17:51.560 views, and now that some of those social views are no longer in positions of weakness, they're

00:17:56.500 no longer interested in relativism and postmodernism.

00:17:59.540 Right.

00:18:00.680 Absolutely.

00:18:01.280 I mean, there are many downstream effects, both in the quality and flourishing of your

00:18:08.100 personal life and at the civilizational level, where bad ideas will have negative consequences.

00:18:13.820 Let's take an example.

00:18:14.640 if for example i believe that i don't have personal agency in other words i'm not the

00:18:20.920 architect of my life's trajectory then that will completely alter the way that i interact with

00:18:27.500 feedback from the world so for example there's something called in psychology called the

00:18:31.920 self-serving bias which is i attribute successes internally and i attribute failures externally

00:18:38.040 right so i did well on the exam because i'm a smart person and i studied hard i did poorly on 0.63

00:18:43.500 the exam because Professor Saad is a mean bastard okay and for many people that makes perfect sense

00:18:48.560 it's an ego defensive strategy but if that mechanism hyper fires so that all of my faults 0.97

00:18:55.500 all of my failures are always blamed on external agents I could never learn from my mistakes right

00:19:02.460 so if I am a budding entrepreneur and every time that I start a new venture it always fails and my 1.00

00:19:10.320 conclusion is always it's because the customer is an idiot. It's because they don't understand 1.00

00:19:15.480 what a visionary I am. Then I'm never going to be able to identify some things that I might be

00:19:22.120 systemically doing across all of these ventures. So bad thought processes are not just things that

00:19:28.940 we discuss in the ivory tower. Bad ideas have bad consequences. Good ideas result in the flourishing

00:19:35.560 of the individual and civilization. So, I wish I was Rogan and had three hours with you because

00:19:40.720 there's a lot of stuff that I'd like to really get in depth with you. One of the things that

00:19:45.360 I'll ask you quickly is, you've been portrayed by some as being Islamophobic. From Lebanon,

00:19:52.700 obviously experience and understanding the Middle East. How do you respond to those charges?

00:19:57.700 it's of course it's idiotic uh islam is a set of codified principles those principles are not an 0.99

00:20:06.760 individual just like i could look at communism and say does communism result in the maximal 0.99

00:20:13.780 possible flourishing of individuals in a society and i can answer yes or no islam has certain

00:20:20.720 principles those principles are either congruent with western values with american freedoms or 0.76

00:20:27.080 they're not well i'm here to tell you that the most foundational tenets of islam couldn't be

00:20:33.260 any more incongruent with american foundational values that doesn't mean that i think that 0.63

00:20:39.340 individual muslims may not be as lovely as anybody else as peaceful as anybody else they are part of

00:20:46.780 the same normal distribution as any other grouping there are nice jews and mean jews there are nice

00:20:52.420 Christians and mean Christians. But Islam is a codified set of principles. Depending on whether 0.65

00:20:58.780 we think those principles are congruent with our values should decide, for example, the extent to

00:21:04.880 which we open our societies to Islamic immigration. So I reject that appellation. It's silly and

00:21:11.420 imbecilic. Yeah, I just, I think it's important, at least from my vantage point, to recognize that 1.00

00:21:18.560 not all cultures are equally valid. There are cultures that produce better outcomes than other

00:21:22.180 cultures. You are coming to Mississippi. Do you want to speak about that briefly and when the 1.00

00:21:28.900 book is coming out? Right. So the book will be out on May 12th. So in a few Tuesdays from now,

00:21:36.840 it's actually really quite important if people are interested in buying the book to pre-order it,

00:21:41.960 because what happens with the pre-orders is that they are accumulated so that on day one of the

00:21:47.080 release they all count as sales so then you quickly can hit the best sellers list and then

00:21:52.160 it becomes sort of an avalanche so if you're interested in the book please pre-order asap

00:21:56.420 i am coming to old miss i wanted to specifically have the pre-launch of the book in mississippi

00:22:04.360 as a honor and as a tip of the hat to beautiful oxford dr saad thank you for joining us today

00:22:09.860 the sit down is a production of mississippi public broadcasting think radio made possible

00:22:13.780 Thanks to generous support from listeners just like you.

00:22:16.800 If you enjoy the guests and sit-downs we bring each week,

00:22:18.780 please consider contributing to help keep this show and shows like this on air.

00:22:22.740 Visit mpbonline.org or show your support using the MPB Public Media app.

00:22:26.760 Today's show was produced by Jermaine Flood,

00:22:28.580 live stream production by Abram Nani.

00:22:30.180 Thanks to our guest, Dr. Gad Saad.

00:22:32.120 I'm Russell Tino.

00:22:32.880 Join us here next week on Wednesday for a new episode of The Sit-Down,

00:22:36.420 heard only on MPB Think Radio.

00:22:43.780 You

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

Protecting Our Civilization on Mississippi Public Broadcasting! (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_988)

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