The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - March 02, 2025


Ramadan Mubarak and Slava Ukraini (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_796)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Ramadan Mubarak Zelensky Trump Putin Ole Miss Kareem Vance
On the Death of Babies in the Israel-Gaza Conflict (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_795) A 30+ Year Friendship Ended Over Trump (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_798)

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

131.98

Word count

964

Sentence count

67

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Trump and Zelensky got into a heated exchange this week, and I weighed in on it. I m not a chameleon, but I do know how to act in certain contexts according to social norms and the norms of that particular environment. And so the way I might speak to my soccer buddies in the locker room is different than how I speak to the president of a university.

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 .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.280 Hi everybody, I just returned last night from another trip.
00:00:06.900 It was my third one in the past month.
00:00:08.920 I went to Savannah, Georgia to speak at a Republican party event.
00:00:19.900 And subsequent to which I went to Jackson, Mississippi to meet some people from Ole Miss
00:00:25.100 and many of the powerful politicians in Mississippi, all of whom were absolutely wonderful.
00:00:35.020 And then went to Oxford, Mississippi to visit Ole Miss and visit the Center, the Declaration
00:00:47.000 of Independence Center, met the director, the associate director and all the rest of people.
00:00:51.340 I've never experienced so much love and support, so it was a truly wonderful trip.
00:00:56.640 But the point of today's episode is to talk about two things.
00:01:02.680 Number one, what took place between Zelensky and Trump and Vance this week, the interaction.
00:01:13.160 Admittedly, I did not watch the full clip, which puts things in context.
00:01:20.100 But I certainly watched the snippets where there was heated exchanges.
00:01:25.960 When I weighed in on social media about those exchanges, it in no way is a position on whether
00:01:34.400 I support Putin or not.
00:01:38.120 My position was absolutely independent of anything about Putin and anything about who is the aggressor
00:01:47.660 or the victim or the aggressor in this dynamic.
00:01:52.920 But of course, I receive endless hate about, you know, I'm so disappointed in you.
00:01:58.960 I'm so sad for you.
00:02:00.420 I've lost respect for you. 0.99
00:02:02.180 F off. 0.90
00:02:02.740 How about that for my response?
00:02:05.120 My point was to talk about the importance of protocol.
00:02:10.400 And believe me, it's not as though I'm someone who, you know, tempers their speech to be phone
00:02:18.700 nice and so on.
00:02:19.560 But I do know how to act in various contexts according to the social demands and the norms
00:02:28.320 of that particular environment.
00:02:30.980 And so the way that I might speak to my soccer buddies in the locker room is different than
00:02:35.960 how I speak if I'm meeting the president of a university.
00:02:39.680 It doesn't make me a chameleon.
00:02:42.340 It makes me someone who is sufficiently socially gracious that I know how to modulate my actions
00:02:50.140 depending on the context.
00:02:51.460 When Zelensky shows up and litigates his position openly in front of the media in a very, very
00:03:02.260 hostile and disrespectful manner, that matters.
00:03:06.100 It's as if I invite someone to my house and I give them a huge panoply of hospitality in
00:03:13.780 terms of food, but they're pissed off because I didn't have the right kind of wine that they
00:03:19.700 prefer, or I didn't buy the type of fish that they wanted, even though I spend $4,000 to
00:03:27.040 host them.
00:03:28.260 You would probably say that's an ingrate and polite guest.
00:03:32.280 Now, in this case, there are different estimates.
00:03:34.640 Trump says that the U.S. has given $350 billion.
00:03:38.020 Others have said it's in the order of $125 billion.
00:03:41.220 We can split the difference.
00:03:42.460 But many, many billions of U.S. taxpayers have been spent in the defense of Ukraine.
00:03:52.680 I'm not discussing whether it is money well spent or not.
00:03:55.560 I'm talking about the sense of petulance, the sense of entitlement that you come and
00:04:02.080 you lecture. 0.99
00:04:02.740 You shut the F up. 0.99
00:04:04.180 You say, thank you, sir. 0.96
00:04:05.820 I look forward to working with you.
00:04:07.540 And you swallow your tongue. 0.94
00:04:09.140 That's what I was referring to.
00:04:10.540 It doesn't take a fancy expert in geopolitics to understand that if you're going to beg for
00:04:18.860 more money, then you probably should be very modulated in how you speak to those who are
00:04:25.940 going to open the purse strings to give you that money, to open up the coffers.
00:04:32.140 So that's all I was saying about that story.
00:04:34.140 Secondly, today I opened up my Twitter feed and literally almost every single post on my feed
00:04:44.320 was Ramadan Mubarak and Ramadan Kareem from every basketball team, every soccer team, every
00:04:52.600 NFL team, every government agency, every politician, every athlete.
00:04:58.640 Now, why is that a problem?
00:05:02.960 20 years ago, nobody said Ramadan Kareem and Ramadan Mubarak in the West because the number
00:05:08.820 of Muslims in the West weren't sufficiently high that you felt the pressure to pander to the Islamic
00:05:16.680 population.
00:05:17.320 Now, if the Muslim population is 3% or 5% or 10% in different places and you're already having 1.00
00:05:25.780 halal in cafeteria, halal in all restaurants, halal in all groceries, religious accommodations
00:05:33.340 everywhere, Ramadan Mubarak all the time. 0.99
00:05:37.460 What happens when it's 25% when it's 50%?
00:05:41.000 Do you think that that might be the reason why 56 countries today around the world are
00:05:45.980 nearly entirely Islamic?
00:05:48.600 Not everywhere that Islam goes, it is only done through the sword. 1.00
00:05:52.320 It is done in a multitude of ways, oftentimes precisely because of the West's suicidal empathy.
00:06:01.000 I discuss all this in my forthcoming book.
00:06:03.800 The parable of the boiling frog is really apt here.
00:06:07.840 Remember it.
00:06:08.560 This is what's happening.
00:06:09.520 So what if there is public prayers that block the sidewalks and the streets?
00:06:15.720 Can't you just wait a few minutes until we finish our prayer?
00:06:18.640 So what if the corridors in the plane are blocked because I now have to pray?
00:06:24.440 Can't you be respectful and suicidally empathetic a bit more?
00:06:28.520 So what if we conform to halal even though the great majority of the country is not Islamic?
00:06:34.260 Shouldn't you be kind and at least appeal to us?
00:06:38.680 That's the problem.
00:06:40.680 It doesn't take much for you to walk around and give the religious salutations to every religion.
00:06:49.760 But I don't remember the last time I faced having to give salutations to Hinduism, to Jainism, to Buddhism, to Shintoism, to Seventh-day Adventists, and on and on.
00:07:03.120 10,000 plus religions, it used to be Judeo-Christian, but now it's Ramadan Mubarak. 0.99
00:07:10.380 That's what I was referring to.
00:07:12.620 So remember the boiling frog parable and remember who warned you.
00:07:17.660 Take care, everybody.