The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - November 11, 2025


The University of Chicago, Free Thinkers Unite, and a Magical Bookstore (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_914)

Topics
University of Chicago trip Consilience by E.O. Wilson
Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Milton Friedman Hayek Thomas Sewell E.O. Wilson Adam Smith Galen Suicidal Empathy Roger Scruton Dick Thaler Powell
Suicidal Empathy - My Lecture at the University of Chicago (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_913) The Right to be Human - Biography of Abraham Maslow (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_915)

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

145.46

Word count

1,809

Sentence count

153

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

I just returned from a trip to the University of Chicago where I spoke at the Freedom of Intellectual Navigation Conference. It was wonderful to be with clear thinking, reasonable, reasoned academics, true intellectuals who were not stifled by cowardice and a herd-like mentality. It almost made me long for a time where I might have had a nice job.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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 Hi everybody, this is Scott Saad. I hope that you're doing well. I just returned a couple of days ago from a trip to the University of Chicago where I spoke at the, let me get the title right of the conference, the Freedom of Intellectual Navigation Conference, which was organized and hosted by Dorian Abbott.
00:00:23.240 Many of you might remember that he was a guest on my show, phenomenal guy. And so this was a conference where many folks who are, many academics who are free thinkers who've had a price to pay for speaking against the orthodoxy were present at this conference.
00:00:46.780 It was wonderful to be with clear thinking, reasonable, reasoned academics, true intellectuals who were not stifled by cowardice and by herd-like mentality.
00:01:02.140 And I interacted with many of them, you know, at various social settings, at lunch, at dinner, just lovely folks, met some new people, some of whom are from the University of Chicago, people that I did not know who were also lovely.
00:01:20.520 And so this may seem, well, what's so surprising about this? Well, it is surprising in that, as you probably might imagine, it hasn't always been easy to be me in academia, because I've always spoken my mind, I've always taken positions that are contrary to what is the acceptable, you know, orthodox position to take.
00:01:40.140 And to now find myself amongst, you know, top academics who, all with whom, you know, I share this, this bent to never buck under pressure was just, it gave me great solace.
00:01:55.540 So thank you, Dorian. Thank you to the University of Chicago for, you know, organizing and hosting this conference.
00:02:02.180 I give a talk on my forthcoming book, Suicide Empathy. I have posted it. The lecture was recorded on my wife's phone, so the audio is not great, but you could listen to it on my X platform, on my YouTube channel, on my podcast.
00:02:19.020 The University of Chicago campus is absolutely gorgeous. The Hyde Park area is gorgeous. I'd never been to University of Chicago, even though several of my former professors at Cornell ended up at University of Chicago.
00:02:31.500 So my professor in, you know, behavioral decision-making, Dick Thaler, who was my professor at Cornell and my PhD, he then went on to win the Nobel Prize in 2017, left Cornell, went to University of Chicago.
00:02:46.040 Another one of my professors at Cornell, Pradeep Shindakunta, who is a mathematical modeler and, you know, in consumer choice, so like an applied econometrician, also left to the University of Chicago.
00:03:00.920 I know several people at University of Chicago. So just love the place. It almost made me long for a time where I might have, I think that I would have had a really nice fit for me to have been at University of Chicago.
00:03:14.460 Of course, I'm perfectly happy where I am currently, but at Ole Miss, as some of you may know, I'm currently at Ole Miss at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of Academic American Freedom.
00:03:30.280 So all that to say, amazing trip to the University of Chicago.
00:03:36.060 But then I wanted to add now a book file angle.
00:03:41.180 I did release a short clip while in Chicago of the books that I bought, but I want to spend a bit more time talking about them.
00:03:48.860 But I found this unbelievable bookstore, Powell's Bookshop.
00:03:55.020 It's about a 10, 15-minute walk from the university.
00:03:58.780 Unbelievable. It's sort of like one of those used bookstores that you dream of, that you hope still exist, but few of them exist.
00:04:05.520 Well, this one existed.
00:04:07.220 Well, before I get to that book, the books that I purchased there, this is the book that I'm currently reading.
00:04:12.900 It's the book, it's the first biography of Thomas Sowell.
00:04:20.460 And as, of course, you may know, Thomas Sowell was, obtained his PhD at University of Chicago.
00:04:28.060 And, of course, Milton Friedman is from University of Chicago, a whole bunch of other economists.
00:04:33.200 I mean, that's why you talk about the Chicago School, both of economics and how to do empirical social science.
00:04:40.640 It's just really, I mean, just being there, it felt so at home.
00:04:45.160 Now, let me share with you the books that I purchased at that bookstore.
00:04:51.440 And I should have bought some more, but anyways, it doesn't matter.
00:04:55.560 I'll go back.
00:04:57.220 We were talking about Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner, biography of Milton Friedman.
00:05:05.800 I'm panicking. I don't know how I'm going to find time to read all the books that are in my personal library.
00:05:10.180 I tell you.
00:05:12.060 First book right here, Milton Friedman.
00:05:14.900 You ready?
00:05:19.360 Hayek, the classic, The Road to Surf Them.
00:05:23.920 I don't, I would have liked a sort of more austere looking version rather than this kind of, you know,
00:05:30.600 somewhat less than impressive paperback, but of course, it's the content that we're going for.
00:05:39.960 Here is Hayek.
00:05:42.320 Oh, my goodness.
00:05:44.000 Oh, my goodness.
00:05:45.320 Oh, my goodness.
00:05:46.420 There's a biography on Ludwig von Mises, right, who precedes Hayek, you know, as sort of being the architects of the Austrian School of Economics.
00:06:00.640 Well, the author of this biography is still alive.
00:06:05.300 He's 95 years old.
00:06:06.700 I thought of reaching out to him.
00:06:08.580 I'm not sure if he would, he's reachable or if he would actually come on my show, but my God, it would be amazing.
00:06:14.940 I saw a copy of this book signed by the author, I think, for $925 or $975 at the Antiquarian Bookstore in Palm Beach.
00:06:31.120 And at the time, I had thought of purchasing it, but I guess I got for much less money this unsigned version, Ludwig von Mises.
00:06:38.640 So, so far, we've done Hayek, we've done Friedman, we've done Milton von Mises.
00:06:46.080 I'm finishing the biography on Thomas Sowell.
00:06:51.220 Oh, you ready?
00:06:53.240 Oh, my goodness.
00:06:54.500 Sir Roger Scruton, conservatism, an invitation to the great tradition.
00:07:01.980 Wow.
00:07:03.000 Unbelievable.
00:07:05.300 Oh, here we go.
00:07:06.860 Let's go back to the granddaddy of economics.
00:07:10.060 Biography on Adam Smith.
00:07:14.020 Remember Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, a biography.
00:07:18.020 I mean, I can't wait to devour these books.
00:07:20.580 This is unbelievable.
00:07:22.860 This one, of course, you've heard me speak often about E.O. Wilson.
00:07:27.080 Any of you who've yet to purchase E.O. Wilson's work, especially his late 90s book, Consilience, you must.
00:07:34.420 When you finish this chat, you go out, you press the order button, or you go to a used bookstore, or you go to a new bookstore, and you purchase Consilience.
00:07:43.980 The idea of Consilience has been central in my own academic career.
00:07:48.120 Unbelievable book.
00:07:48.920 But I found this beauty.
00:07:50.180 Oh, my goodness.
00:07:52.240 The Origins of Creativity by E.O. Wilson.
00:07:56.480 I recently actually finished his autobiography called Naturalist, and I so regret that I never reached out to him to invite him on the show prior to his passing.
00:08:07.840 I only got to see him once in person.
00:08:10.980 We never met in person.
00:08:12.520 I got to see him once.
00:08:14.180 He was, I think, giving the plenary address at APA, American Psychological Association.
00:08:20.360 I don't know, maybe 15, 18 years ago.
00:08:23.140 I can't remember exactly what it was.
00:08:24.820 And I was in the audience.
00:08:26.020 Just an unbelievable guy.
00:08:27.440 The consummate gentleman scholar, like a southern gentleman.
00:08:31.800 Just unbelievable.
00:08:33.080 Originally, he's from Alabama.
00:08:34.260 So close to my home in Mississippi.
00:08:36.780 That's the next one.
00:08:38.040 Wait till the next, wait till the last, the last two.
00:08:41.320 Oh, my God.
00:08:42.340 Oh, my God.
00:08:43.260 Check out this one.
00:08:44.300 Sort of more antique.
00:08:46.000 You ready?
00:08:47.000 This is a book, sort of kind of a, if you see, I don't know if you could see it, F.A.
00:08:52.660 F.A. Hayek.
00:08:53.660 It's a book that's kind of a intellectual biography of some of Hayek's key ideas.
00:09:02.720 Hayek, another Hayek book.
00:09:05.540 And then finally, now this one's going to blow your mind.
00:09:09.260 So I, the gentleman that was helping me at the bookstore, just a great guy, a lover of books.
00:09:16.020 He sees how excited I am.
00:09:18.200 I'm sort of running around like a chicken without a head in the bookstore because I'm just so excited to be in there.
00:09:23.000 And so I tell him, do you have a book on Galen, the ancient physician?
00:09:35.400 And he goes, you mean Galen?
00:09:38.420 And it's because, you know, in French, you pronounce it differently.
00:09:42.280 And so I kind of came up with a combination of French-English.
00:09:46.620 So Galen, who was, you know, after Hippocrates, and he says, you know, we don't have an exact book just on Galen.
00:09:55.560 Although there is a book called The Prince of Medicine by a historian of medicine, I think from the University of Georgia, a recent book.
00:10:03.260 I reached out to her, very excited to invite her on the show to discuss, you know, the life of Galen.
00:10:10.700 She never responded to me.
00:10:11.980 So anyway, so he says, I don't think we have a book only on Galen.
00:10:16.180 And then I'm, you know, doing my archaeological digs in the bookstore to find, and I come across this beauty.
00:10:24.020 Look at this.
00:10:25.000 Look at this.
00:10:26.800 Look at this.
00:10:27.980 Galenism, Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy.
00:10:32.360 Now, this is a very technical book.
00:10:35.140 And what I was, it's an old book, 1973, Cornell University Press, which is, of course, my alma mater.
00:10:43.780 And it was based on a series of lectures that this historian of medicine, he's actually a physician by training, he gave at Cornell.
00:10:53.280 So I said, I have to have this book.
00:10:54.800 So this is part of my antiquarian collection.
00:10:57.920 I mean, I'd love to think that I'm going to read all of it.
00:11:00.120 Some of it is incredibly, you know, arcane technical stuff about that you'd really have to be an ancient, you know, medical historian to really be into.
00:11:12.460 But I just had to get it.
00:11:14.320 So there you go.
00:11:15.080 Those are the eight books that I've added.
00:11:17.460 And as you might imagine, to my wife's dismay, she's like, when is this disease going to stop of my collecting books and desperately trying to read all of them?
00:11:29.360 And I said, never, it shall go on forever.
00:11:32.400 So bottom line, unbelievable trip to University of Chicago.
00:11:36.420 What a magical institution.
00:11:39.220 Thank you for your hospitality.
00:11:41.060 Thank you to Dorian Abbott.
00:11:42.460 People, one important life lesson I give you, read, read, read, read.
00:11:49.920 There is nothing more cosmically enriching than to see the content of your mind expand because of all of that beautiful knowledge that is contained in books.
00:12:06.220 And surrounding me right here, there are hundreds of books that I've yet to read.
00:12:10.960 And imagine how much more knowledgeable I will be once I have the opportunity to read all of these.
00:12:18.600 So go out there, read. 0.69
00:12:19.720 Don't waste time doing silly things.
00:12:21.960 Life is short.
00:12:22.860 Every moment is precious.
00:12:24.660 Read.
00:12:25.420 Take care, everybody.