The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - ‘Thank God For ELON!’ Dr. Gad Saad on Musk, Trump, Charlotte Murder and Woke (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_880)

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Global News Today. I'm Micheál Pernigás and joining me today is Gad Saad,

00:00:16.520 the visiting scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American

00:00:20.640 Freedom at the University of Mississippi.

00:00:22.440 Thanks so much for your time, Gad. A story that shocked the entire world. A young Ukrainian 0.98

00:00:32.220 refugee has been butchered in Charlotte. Isn't this a textbook case of suicidal empathy? That's

00:00:38.740 the name of your upcoming book. I don't want to name the assailant himself. He's a scumbag and he

00:00:43.340 doesn't deserve any publicity. Isn't this a case, a title case for your book? 1.00

00:00:48.560 It is in that what suicidal empathy, the way it works, let me offer a quick explanation and then

00:00:57.980 link it to that specific case. So empathy is a beautiful, noble virtue. It is something that

00:01:05.160 we need to have as a social species for you and I to have a meaningful conversation, Micheál. I need

00:01:11.440 to have theory of mind as you do. In other words, we need to put ourselves in each other's minds to

00:01:17.100 be able to have a meaningful interaction. So it is perfectly reasonable to argue that empathy is

00:01:23.620 a laudable, noble virtue. The problem arises when empathy misfires. And before I explain how it

00:01:31.960 misfires, let me draw an analogy. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is the misfiring of an 0.99

00:01:38.200 otherwise adaptive process. So for example, the fact that you and I shake hands and I notice that you

00:01:44.080 have a cold, I might go ahead and wash my hands because I don't want to catch your cold. That is

00:01:49.340 perfectly adaptive and it makes evolutionary sense for me to do that. But OCD is when I spend eight

00:01:56.340 hours a day washing my hands in scalding water until my skin is falling off. I can't make it to work

00:02:03.520 because I'm obsessed with washing my hands. So what started off as an adaptive mechanism becomes

00:02:09.840 maladaptive when it misfires. So that's exactly my argument for suicidal empathy. When empathy

00:02:17.120 starts misfiring in ways that you target your empathy toward the wrong target, you're orgiastically

00:02:26.760 empathetic for all of the wrong times and the wrong situations, that becomes suicidal empathy. So in that

00:02:33.680 particular case, what you have is an incredibly lax justice system, penal system, that basically argues

00:02:42.240 along the following lines. It is unfair to not give hardened felons 637 chances or second chances

00:02:51.700 because they've already been victimized by the racist society of white supremacy. Therefore, what is the

00:02:58.820 point of us punishing them harshly? Don't they deserve a 138th chance? And it is literally what

00:03:05.500 happened in this case. This guy had been arrested for 14 prior crimes, but yet we should give him

00:03:11.260 a 15th chance at redemption. It results in suicidal empathy and the death of this beautiful Ukrainian 0.56

00:03:17.860 refugee. The alleged killer had 14 prior arrests. A judge released him after his 15th. Should judges like 0.93

00:03:24.840 this face justice themselves? Look, that's a tricky one in that you would like to think that a judge is

00:03:33.660 not going to always be personally held liable for judicial decisions that they make, because then in

00:03:40.880 that case, they will always take the decision that is least likely to result in repercussions on them.

00:03:48.260 So it's a tricky one. You can't always say, irrespective of the context, they should be held

00:03:52.720 accountable. But certainly, if you are letting hardened felons get out of prison time and time

00:04:00.440 again, because you have been completely parasitized by suicidal empathy, then I see no moral, ethical,

00:04:07.060 or legal reason why you should not be held accountable for that decision.

00:04:12.460 And Elon Musk himself, he has shone a huge amount of light on this story. A lot of the mainstream media

00:04:18.480 ignored it. I think this is the perfect example of the importance of freedom of speech and the

00:04:25.020 importance of him buying X. Indeed. So the minute that I found out, maybe not the minute, but probably

00:04:34.840 within the next day or two, when I found out that Elon had bought what was then Twitter, I put out a clip

00:04:42.540 on my channel, The Sad Truth, where I basically explained that of all great initiatives and great

00:04:51.360 accomplishments that Elon Musk has ever or will ever do, none will come remotely as impactful as him

00:05:01.120 having bought that platform. Because for better or worse, that platform is the central public square

00:05:08.900 where ideas flow at a feverish velocity. I know just from personal experience, what the things that I could

00:05:16.700 say or the things that would get me punished, and you know, I'm probably the most irreverent, outspoken

00:05:21.780 professor on earth. You know, if I were to say that women, you know, do not have penises, well, I stood the 0.98

00:05:29.420 chance of having my account shut down. And so what Elon has done is he's come along, completely removed the 0.99

00:05:36.160 shackles that we were all being restrained by. And so thank God for Elon.

00:05:41.820 President Trump has responded quite forcefully. He's also recently sent in regards to crime, the National Guard into

00:05:48.960 D.C. While Democrat run cities are spiralling into chaos, why do leaders of these cities resist law and order?

00:05:56.940 Yeah, that's a great question. So let me give you one of those professorial psychologist answers.

00:06:01.640 There's a great book by two French psychologists, they're actually evolutionary psychologists, their names are

00:06:08.700 Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier. They wrote a book called The Enigma of Reason. And in that book, what they argued is

00:06:17.200 that our faculty of reasoning did not evolve to seek some objective truth, but rather, regrettably, our faculty of

00:06:26.460 reasoning only evolved to win arguments. Now, that's quite a pessimistic view, because it basically says

00:06:33.280 that for most people, the truth doesn't matter. What matters is that I am proven to be right, even if I'm

00:06:40.920 wrong. So when Donald Trump does something like solve crime in D.C., the other camp doesn't say, attaboy,

00:06:49.640 great job, great job, President Trump, they have to find a way to stand against it. And as the old joke

00:06:56.300 says, if Donald Trump were to personally cure cancer, the Democrats would come out and say,

00:07:03.120 look how evil he is. He's now made sure that a whole bunch of oncologists will be out of a job.

00:07:10.580 So that's really regrettable, because again, it shows you that certainly politics is not about the

00:07:17.680 adjudication of different ideas until we reach truth. It's simply about making sure that my team

00:07:24.040 is right and your team is wrong. Has Donald Trump, has he proven a lot of the Democrats wrong?

00:07:33.540 My goodness, what hasn't he proven them wrong on, right? I mean, did we need in the 21st century to

00:07:40.220 have, as I think it was his first executive order, that there is such a thing as male and female,

00:07:46.880 and we know exactly what those two sexes are? Until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people who 1.00

00:07:53.960 had existed on Earth seemed to exactly know how to navigate that very, very difficult conundrum of

00:08:01.220 identifying what male and female is. But when you are parasitized by idea pathogens, as I explained

00:08:07.260 in my book, The Parasitic Mind, you then have to have an executive order by the president of the United

00:08:13.140 States saying that there are only two sexes called male and female, and we know what they are. So he

00:08:18.800 proved them wrong there. He proved them wrong about closing the borders, right? It took him 15 seconds

00:08:24.620 to close the borders, right? He proved them wrong on pretty much anything and everything. So ideas

00:08:31.160 matter. And, you know, people think that, you know, I've got posters of Donald Trump in my bedroom.

00:08:38.260 It's not that, right? I don't succumb to the cult of personality. As a matter of fact, I'm Canadian.

00:08:43.540 So it's not as though I've got a direct dog in that fight. But certainly, if you believe in American 0.99

00:08:50.700 freedom, then you have to believe that the Republican Party and Donald Trump exemplify those

00:08:57.000 American freedoms much more than the Democrats do.

00:08:59.380 And you're an expert in evolutionary psychology. How did we go from protecting the tribe to protecting

00:09:09.260 predators at the tribe's expense?

00:09:13.540 Well, that's where suicidal empathy comes in, right? So I argue that history is basically the

00:09:21.340 following story that I'm going to explain now that the average five-year-old will understand.

00:09:26.720 History is the following. There are two tribes on each side of the river. Each members of each tribe

00:09:34.820 look at the resources and other desired objects on the other side of the tribe and want to steal it, 0.61

00:09:43.080 right? That's why the Ten Commandments have, do not covet thy neighbor's wife, right? Covetousness 0.77

00:09:49.840 is a ugly trait. Envy is an ugly trait. But the only thing that stops tribe A from, you know, 0.95

00:09:58.120 attacking tribe B is that they know that the people in tribe B are likely to have men who are not going

00:10:05.420 to be very happy about that approach. And therefore, they have to think twice before attacking. And it is

00:10:10.640 that mechanism that keeps people in check. Now, imagine if you become parasitized, for example,

00:10:17.880 by orgiastic pacifism, right? So that the highest virtue in my society is one whereby I will never,

00:10:27.300 under any circumstances, respond to you with violence. Well, what do you think will happen

00:10:33.680 to a society that is organized around orgiastic pacifism? It likely will cease to exist very

00:10:39.840 quickly. And so that's why I use the framework of the parasitic mind and suicidal empathy to explain

00:10:47.640 the nature of your question. Because nothing else could explain from a survival perspective,

00:10:53.400 we've evolved the most fundamental need for survival to protect ourselves, to protect our loved one,

00:11:00.220 to protect our children. But once those instincts become sublimated in my desire to demonstrate to the

00:11:09.420 world that I am infinitely tolerant, compassionate, generous, and empathetic, we end up having major

00:11:16.140 problems. Elon Musk has offered $1 million to fund murals of Irina Zarutska across US cities. Is this

00:11:24.100 not the kind of moral clarity and courage that's needed right now? Exactly. I mean, one of the reasons

00:11:30.180 why Elon Musk, Donald Trump, first of all, our gentlemen that I admire greatly is because to me,

00:11:38.440 they exemplify something that I discuss as a key call to action in the last chapter of the

00:11:45.620 parasitic mind, which is activate your inner honey badger. So some of your viewers or listeners may not

00:11:51.800 be familiar with why I'm using that imagery. The honey badger, the African honey badger,

00:11:57.940 has been rated as the most ferocious and fierce animal in the animal kingdom. Now, that's quite a

00:12:06.260 big title because it isn't a big animal. It's the size of a small dog. And yet, adult lions will cross

00:12:13.720 to the other side of the street when they see Mr. Mean Honey Badger. Now, why is that? Because the

00:12:18.680 honey badger doesn't care. It stands tall, despite the fact that it is small in stature. So Donald Trump

00:12:26.440 and Elon Musk are not encumbered by political correctness. They're not encumbered by ensuring

00:12:35.180 that they are going to be invited to the cool kids parties. They stand tall, even though they are

00:12:41.240 literally tall men. They stand tall, fully capable and willing to defend their principles. And that's

00:12:47.340 why I implore people to activate their honey badgers. That's why I think Elon Musk and I have a strong

00:12:54.400 affinity for one another because, regrettably, while I'm not nearly as tall as him in stature physically,

00:13:01.240 I'm certainly someone who walks like a honey badger. And so that tends to attract similar-minded

00:13:06.780 people. Whereas, on the other hand, most of my academic colleagues are what I call members of the

00:13:13.460 invertebrate castrati, meaning that they don't have any spines, nor do they have any, I hope I can say on 0.99

00:13:19.840 your show, any testicles. Right? They're whiny. They're wimpy. They're afraid of their shadow. 1.00

00:13:26.400 They'll never utter a word that might draw back anything against the accepted orthodoxy.

00:13:32.240 That's not how an academic should be. An academic should be an intellectual Navy SEAL.

00:13:37.020 And Donald Trump and Elon Musk certainly exemplify those qualities.

00:13:42.680 They're honey badgers, and you're a honey badger as well, it seems.

00:13:45.260 Elon Musk has proved himself to be a staunch defender of free speech. I've seen you say on

00:13:50.520 Twitter that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his ultimate defense of free speech.

00:13:57.540 100%, 1,000%. Listen, Barack Obama won a Nobel Prize, I think it was even before he had assumed the

00:14:09.760 presidency, or maybe within a few days of assuming, or whatever. I don't remember the exact temporal

00:14:13.980 timeline, but it's because he had uttered some hopeful message or some nonsense, right? I mean,

00:14:21.580 I have antiquated socks, socks that I no longer wear, that are substantially more worthy of the

00:14:30.260 Nobel Prize than Elon Musk, excuse me, than Barack Obama. So if Barack Obama can win a Nobel Prize for

00:14:38.560 doing literally nothing, then how many Nobel Prizes should Elon Musk win for having freed us from the

00:14:46.240 shackles of, as we say in French, les bien-pensants, the well thinkers, the politically correct class.

00:14:53.980 He deserves it ASAP.

00:14:56.240 People have spoken ad nauseum about Elon Musk. You said in your last interview here on the station

00:15:02.260 that he's a very humble man. He is. You know, we've had a chance to meet. I spent maybe four and a half

00:15:09.840 hours with him at his home. He had invited me down to discuss all sorts of important issues. We had a

00:15:16.600 chance to both have, you know, an intimate discussion about family dynamics, but we also discussed, you

00:15:23.640 know, preserving human consciousness and interplanetary travel. And we were able to oscillate from very

00:15:30.660 personal, intimate things to very grand, abstract things. No ego, no obnoxiousness, no attempts to,

00:15:39.140 you know, try to, you know, outdo, outrank each other. Just two guys, hopefully with good ideas,

00:15:47.020 sitting together, who respect each other, having a fun conversation. I felt as though he had zero ego.

00:15:53.020 And if anything, after, you know, meeting him personally and chatting with him, I only learned to

00:15:58.020 admire him that much more. We know that Elon Musk and President Trump are two enormous characters.

00:16:03.800 They had a very huge falling out, especially on social media. Are you hopeful that they can make

00:16:09.280 amends? That's a great question, because when I first heard of their rift, actually, it was a friend

00:16:16.340 of mine who used to be a former student of mine who wrote to me and said, hey, what do you think of

00:16:20.700 your two guys fighting? And I was traveling. I said, what are you talking about? And so he was the one who

00:16:25.100 broke the story to me. And I looked at that with great regret, because, look, the United States in

00:16:31.880 particular, but the world in, you know, more generally, is a much better place if those two,

00:16:38.880 you know, gigantic leaders see eye to eye, right? So it is my hope that, I mean, it certainly seems as

00:16:46.720 though some of the venom has softened. So in an ideal world, they will hug it out, go back to being

00:16:54.080 friends, and we will all benefit from that renewed friendship. Could you broker a peace?

00:17:00.740 Well, I can certainly try. I don't know if I can deliver. I'm very, I'm very well calibrated

00:17:07.080 about what I can or can't do. So I can certainly reach out and try to broker it, whether they'll

00:17:12.900 listen to me or not, or, you know, whether it happens or not. Inshallah, only God knows.

00:17:18.600 A story that's absolutely dominated in the news over the past week. It was the frankly

00:17:22.980 Orwellian arrest of the Irish comedian Graeme Linehan for his tweets made in the UK where

00:17:27.720 he criticised the trans movement. What was your reaction, Gad?

00:17:31.840 Yeah, I mean, in a sense, I was surprised because it's as if we're back to being in 2020 or 2022.

00:17:39.340 But that actually speaks to a point that I've often made, where people write to me and say,

00:17:44.820 hey, now that Donald Trump has started his second term, Dr. Saad, can we expect that all of this

00:17:51.940 woke parasitic stuff will go away? And my answer is always an emphatic no, unfortunately. Yes,

00:17:57.580 it's good that Donald Trump won. That doesn't mean that all of the nonsense and the Orwellian

00:18:02.920 degeneracy is going to magically go away. It took 50 to 80 years for many of these ideas to first be

00:18:09.900 spawned on academic campuses. So it's going to take a while for us to fully eradicate them. But

00:18:14.980 to your more specific point, I'd like to contextualise what happened with that comedian

00:18:21.300 with something that I talk about in the parasitic mind, and that is the distinction between

00:18:25.900 deontological and consequentialist ethics. Let me break it down for you very quickly.

00:18:32.040 Deontological ethics are absolute statements. So for example, if I say,

00:18:36.580 it is never okay to lie, that would be a deontological statement. A consequentialist

00:18:42.720 statement would be, it's okay to lie if you wish to spare someone's feelings. So if your wife might

00:18:48.940 ask you, do I look fat in those jeans, then you might want to put on that consequentialist hat and

00:18:54.640 say, absolutely not. You've never looked more beautiful. It might be a small white lie, but you're

00:18:59.360 doing it out of love for your partner. And so there's a consequentialist ethos to it. But when it comes

00:19:05.620 to foundational principles, presumption of innocence in the justice system, freedom of speech, freedom

00:19:13.020 of inquiry, by definition, those have to be deontological. The second that you say, I believe

00:19:20.020 in freedom of speech, but the second you put the but qualifier, you're a degenerate who doesn't 0.95

00:19:26.100 understand what freedom of speech is. I am Jewish. I've had a very rough upbringing in my childhood in 0.96

00:19:32.680 Lebanon. Yet I support the right of Holocaust deniers to deny the Holocaust. There is almost 0.64

00:19:40.580 nothing that you could think of that is more offensive than denying the Holocaust. Yet if I wish 0.71

00:19:46.500 to live in a free society where freedom of speech is an enshrined principle, I have to put up with 1.00

00:19:53.900 idiots, imbeciles, racists and anti-Semites. So when Starmer says, hey, by you saying this, you are 1.00

00:20:02.180 marginalizing the noble, holy trans people, that is exactly a consequentialist ethos. And it hurts me to

00:20:10.980 no end that Britain, the place where many of these original principles, you know, were spewed, 0.60

00:20:19.420 is now turned into such a, not only Orwellian, but Kafkaesque reality. Terrible.

00:20:27.280 And speaking of Keir Starmer, what are your thoughts on him? 0.72

00:20:31.880 Well, Mrs. Starmer needs to see if there is a way for her to find some testicular fortitude. 1.00

00:20:40.380 Now, I say this, some people will say, oh, but why do you speak in such a direct manner? Why can't

00:20:46.080 you be more empathetic and kind? You know why? Because I'm disgusted that a country as founded

00:20:54.460 in the principles that we now call liberty and freedom in the West, including in the United States,

00:21:00.580 right, has sunk to such a low. When you can't talk about the grooming gangs in Britain, because you

00:21:08.640 don't want to offend a particular demographic group, where you care about managing the feelings of that

00:21:16.480 group more than you care about protecting the bodily integrity of your children, that's probably

00:21:24.480 not a good leader. So I don't have too many good things to say about that, Prime Minister.

00:21:29.480 You and your family escaped the civil war in Lebanon. Did real violence make you immune

00:21:34.640 to the fake trauma obsessions in the West? Yeah, great question. Look, one of the reasons why

00:21:42.200 it's very difficult for people to try to cancel me and so on, because if they use the victimology

00:21:48.880 narrative, the faux victimology narrative that is so often present in the West, then I pull out my

00:21:55.260 real victimology cards, then suddenly they, you know, they whittle away because real victim versus fake

00:22:03.820 victim. If that's the currency you want to use, then I'm going to win every single time. So because

00:22:08.820 of that, because of the horrors that I've seen growing up in the Middle East as a Lebanese Jew,

00:22:14.660 my parents were kidnapped by Fatah and tortured. We escaped execution. Death awaited us at every corner,

00:22:22.660 every second of every day for that first year of the civil war. Then I'm not very sympathetic,

00:22:28.560 not only to faux victimology stories, but intergenerational victimology stories. Slavery did

00:22:37.460 happen in the United States, but not today. So you don't get to wallow intergenerationally because

00:22:45.200 something happened to someone who may or may not have been related to you 200 years ago. That doesn't

00:22:51.720 minimize the horrors of slavery, but it says that what makes you stand tall and with dignity in Arabic,

00:23:00.440 since I'm speaking on al-Arabiya, it's someone with shakhsiyya. Shakhsiyya means they have a strong

00:23:06.100 sense of self, someone with sharaf, someone who has honor. I overcome my victimology. Let me just,

00:23:13.000 just for you to know. So my family escaped the Lebanese civil war. My parents were kidnapped and

00:23:20.140 tortured by Fatah. My grandparents escaped Syria because they were Syrian Jews. My wife's family

00:23:27.620 also escaped Lebanon because for also religious reasons. Her ancestors escaped the Armenian genocide.

00:23:36.180 My brother-in-law's family escaped in the 1950s from Alexandria, Egypt because they were Egyptian Jews.

00:23:44.300 So within my lifetime, any family member that you could think of, whether by bloodline or by marriage,

00:23:52.780 has faced horrifying victimology. And yet here I stand, happy that I exist, hoping to create a better

00:24:01.560 world. Yes, my victimology story is part of my past, but what makes me who I am is that I've overcome

00:24:08.900 it. So stop whining and get off the couch and do big things. I agree with you, Gad. I'm from an Irish

00:24:14.920 background and I think obviously the Irish famine perpetrated by the British on Ireland, it was

00:24:20.460 absolutely abhorrent. But I don't necessarily, I try not to think about it too much and I try not to let

00:24:26.260 it define me. How would you go about teaching this kind of resilience to young people now?

00:24:32.200 Well, it's certainly, well, two ways. There are some things that the young people can do to build

00:24:40.340 resilience, but also there are things that the caretakers of the young people should do in order

00:24:46.960 to inculcate resilience in the young people. So let's start with the latter. When COVID finished,

00:24:53.280 and I actually discussed this in my forthcoming book, So Wasala Empathy, when COVID finished and we

00:24:58.580 were back to teaching in person, one of the first, if not the first departmental meeting we had

00:25:04.720 was bathing in orgiastic misplaced empathy. So here are the types of things that I would hear.

00:25:11.820 Well, the students are no longer capable because of the COVID lockdowns to actually sit for three hours

00:25:19.820 in a lecture. The students are no longer capable of taking notes. It's too onerous for them.

00:25:26.380 It's too much to expect of students to have to do evaluative exercises like exams because they

00:25:33.700 suffer from post-COVID stress. That's not how you build resilience. Let me draw a very good analogy.

00:25:41.520 This is actually from this book right here, my book on happiness. I start one of the chapters which

00:25:48.300 actually deals with resilience and anti-fragility. I use a quote from the great Stoic Roman philosopher

00:25:57.220 Seneca. I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but so I'll paraphrase it. He said that strong

00:26:04.680 trees with deep roots, with strong trunks, are those that have been exposed to heavy wind stressors.

00:26:14.520 That's precisely why they then evolve those strong roots. That's precisely why they evolve the strong

00:26:21.020 trunk. The trees that have not been exposed to the wind stressors are very brittle. They're easy

00:26:29.420 to uproot. By the way, that's exactly true of our immune system. So for example, if you take

00:26:35.840 autoimmune diseases like asthma, children who are raised in very clean environments end up having

00:26:46.240 greater incidence of asthma than children who are raised on farms with pet dander, with allergens,

00:26:54.400 because our immune system expects to be challenged in order to then mount an optimal response. So

00:27:03.180 at the very least, what we should be doing is rather than always hugging our children and saying,

00:27:10.020 they're there, it's okay, everybody gets a trophy. No, teach them about competition, teach them about

00:27:16.220 resilience, teach them about dignity, and hopefully those things become an integral part of their

00:27:22.520 personhoods. And one thing I detest, Gad, is the polarized nature of politics. I'm probably going to get

00:27:27.880 some flack for even speaking to you today by kind of some corners of the online media. As a Middle

00:27:34.040 Eastern Jew, how did growing up as a minority shape your rejection of identity politics?

00:27:41.540 Well, it shaped it greatly. And that's why in chapter one of The Parasitic Mind, knowing that later I was

00:27:48.220 going to critique identity politics, I wanted to share my story because Lebanon is the perfect model 1.00

00:27:56.780 of what happens to a society that is perfectly organized along identity politics lines, right? And

00:28:03.320 in the case of Lebanon, it's according to which religion you belong to, right? So Lebanon, for example,

00:28:08.660 has what's called the confessional parliamentary system, meaning that who the president is going to be,

00:28:15.460 who the prime minister is going to be, who the speaker of the house is going to be, or the

00:28:20.120 parliament, how many seats are going to be assigned to different sects, is all based on your religion.

00:28:28.940 And as we know from Lebanon and Rwanda and Iraq and Syria and the Balkans, these kinds of fractured

00:28:38.160 tribal identity politics societies don't really end up, you know, with great outcomes. And so

00:28:46.060 it very much shaped my subsequent positions because what I love about the West, and I know it sounds as

00:28:55.000 though it's just a cliche at this point, but it isn't. It's a really important lesson. Individual

00:29:00.780 dignity supersedes collective identity. Yes, I may be a Lebanese Jew, and that is one marker of my

00:29:09.160 identity, but I present myself to the world and to Al Arabiya as God's side. I'm not a representative

00:29:17.480 of the Lebanese people. I'm not a representative of the Jewish people. I'm not a representative of

00:29:23.340 people who have green eyes. And so you judge me based on my qualities and my frailties. And so therefore,

00:29:30.560 there is nothing worse than collective tribalism. And by the way, if people only hear the last

00:29:37.740 minute of what I just said in the Middle East, and truly internalize it, the Middle East would be

00:29:43.960 one of the most stunning, gorgeous places imaginable on earth. That's what we hope, Gad. You're penning a

00:29:50.620 new book at the moment called Suicidal Empathy. Do you feel like a kid in a candy shop with the amount of

00:29:56.420 real world examples you're able to cover in your book? Well, the running joke is because now, you

00:30:03.300 know, I've been speaking a lot about suicidal empathy for, you know, a long time so that it's

00:30:08.300 really, it's gone completely viral. You know, millions and millions of people in perhaps 60 languages

00:30:13.440 are now quoting and citing my suicidal empathy concept. But I always, so people will write to me

00:30:20.420 and say, God damn it, when is this book going to be ready, Professor? And I say, how can I be ready? How can 0.94

00:30:25.860 it ever be ready when every single day when I wake up and I go on X, I now need to increase the size of

00:30:32.660 the book by 50 new pages? And so one of the most difficult parts, frankly, has been to try to rein that in

00:30:42.080 because I've already cut 11,000 words from my book. Because rather than using the 35,000 examples

00:30:52.520 that I can use as a manifestation of suicidal empathy, I now have to ask myself, okay, I can't

00:30:58.020 put all of these in the book. How should I strategically pick the best ones? So the biggest challenge for me

00:31:03.580 has not been to write the book, but rather to cut out sections of the book. It could be a trilogy.

00:31:12.080 From your lips to God's ear.

00:31:14.720 We're just out of time. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you, Gad. All the very best.

00:31:20.540 My pleasure. Take care. Cheers.

00:31:28.160 That's all we have time for on Global News Today. Be sure to join us tomorrow for more exclusive

00:31:32.200 interviews. Until then, goodbye.

00:31:42.080 Go on!

00:31:42.980 I'll see you next time.

00:31:56.640 We'll be right back.

00:31:59.280 We'll be right back.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - September 17, 2025

‘Thank God For ELON!’ Dr. Gad Saad on Musk, Trump, Charlotte Murder and Woke (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_880)

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