Gad Saad Interview: Can Too Much Empathy Destroy Society?

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:04]Godsad, it is so great to have you here with us.

[00:00:07]>> Pleasure to be with you, sir.

[00:00:09]>> So, congrats on the new book. I know this has been a long time in coming.

[00:00:12]This is a concept that you've been talking about for a while. Um, let's begin with a definition. Let's start, you know, let's let's create a foundation here. this idea of suicidal empathy. You know, it's so interesting growing up and even today, you know, the one thing we often hear is that society and the world doesn't have enough empathy. We need to do a better job of teaching empathy to our children. And it's interesting in reading your book is that you sort of take the opposite side or you talk about the perils of that.

[00:00:39]You say that too much empathy can destroy societies. So, explain the concept of suicidal empathy especially in a world where well, empathy typically is viewed very positively. Yes, thank you for that question. So, like many things in life, as Aristotle explained to us several millennia ago, too little or too much of anything is not good. This is known uh in Aristotleian logic as the golden mean.

[00:01:07]So, for example, if a soldier is cowardly, therefore he doesn't exhibit enough courage, that's not good. If he is too courageous to the point of becoming a reckless martyr, then he's going to die very quickly. And so much of life is about finding that sweet spot. And that exact uh insight applies to empathy. Too little empathy or no empathy makes you a psychopath. Too much empathy, but not just too much. First, it is hyperactive.

[00:01:37]It is invoked in the wrong situations and it targets the improper targets. put all those together into one soup and you end up with suicidal empathy. And if I can just kind of give a bit of a theoretical framework of how I came up with the idea. So if you look at many psychiatric uh dysfunctions, they are often a maladaptive misfiring of an otherwise adaptive process. And I know it's a mouthful, so let me break it down for you. So let's let's take for example the idea that humans have evolved the ability to scan the environment for possible threats. So if you and I were to meet one day wherever in New York and prior to us meeting I notice that you are incessantly sneezing into your hands then I will after I shake your hands because I scan the environment and notice that I will head off into the bathroom and wash my hands to ensure that I don't catch your cold. So that scanning of the environment was perfectly adaptive and evolutionarily appropriate. On the other hand, OCD, which is the maladaptive misfire misfiring of this otherwise adaptive process, if I suffer from germ contamination fears, rather than washing my hands once, attending to that threat, and moving on with my day, I'm stuck for eight hours in an infinite loop until my skin is falling off and scolding hot water. I'm I'm stuck in this loop. Well, that was the epiphany I had to then argue empathy when invoked in a well modulated evolutionarily relevant range is perfectly wonderful. As a matter of fact, we expect a social species to be empathetic. But too much empathy in the wrong situations towards the wrong people results in the death of western civilization.

[00:03:26]>> All right. So, let's let's pause on society for a second. curious examples as an individual. Are there ways that suicidal empathy um can you give me a couple examples of how that might work on an individual level?

[00:03:40]>> Oh, absolutely. I could do it individual ecological.

[00:03:44]>> So, let's start with let's start with a person like what are ways that somebody could be suicidally empathetic and then we'll get to the society. So uh very early in the book I give the example his name escapes me I don't have it readily available but a incredibly kind compassionate anti-feminist oh no feminist anti-racist Norwegian man was sodomized was raped by a noble Somali immigrant right and because the Norwegians are very kind and empathetic they don't believe in long harsh uh sentences you have to be kind to to your rapist and therefore After he served a few years, I think it was maybe three years in prison, certainly not what we would consider a very severe punishment, he was then going to be deported back to Somalia. So the guy that he sodomized felt incredible existential angst because his his rapist once we send him back to Moadishu might not be able to fully self-actualize and flourish as Abraham Maslo explained to us many years ago. So the fact that his emotional system is misfiring in a way that certainly as an evolutionary psychologist I wouldn't expect him to have empathy towards his rapist would be an example at the individual level. So, so effectively his empathy is potentially leading to a convicted rapist going back out onto the streets of Norway and it's unclear whether that he's been uh given the treatment or uh you know is is in a place where he wouldn't commit that same crime again.

[00:05:21]>> But all I mean in a sense you're attributing too much charitable explanation for his suicidal empathy. It's not necessarily that he's concern it. He really feels that if he is a good person, this is the Norwegian guy and recognizing that the Somali is a rapist of color. So, you know, he's already growing up in a world of white supremacy. Even when he lived in Moadishu where there are no whites, he was under white supremacy.

[00:05:50]>> So, I'm curious sort of like taking this further like you know back here in the US for a second where we have the largest prison population on earth. Uh, in fact, we have 20% of the world's prisoners despite the fact that we only account for 5% of the global population.

[00:06:07]So, there's been a lot of talk for many years, and it's certainly a subject that comes up in your book about criminal justice reform. And where do you find that balance between uh you know putting too many people away for too long uh and also uh ensuring there is some sense of criminal justice reform to deal with what is clearly has an aspect of institutional um that we have an institutional problem here in the US if you if you catch where I'm going.

[00:06:35]>> Yeah. I mean in a sense it speaks back to the golden mean of Aristotle, right?

[00:06:39]It's about finding the sweet spot. We can have a totally reasonable debate as to whether we should be metting out long sentences for people who engage in uh the consumption of recreational drugs.

[00:06:51]And of course that has tilted. Certainly in Canada we've we've uh it's no longer criminalized uh to to to have I think we were probably the first country maybe or one of the first countries to decriminalize uh marijuana use. So that we can certainly have a discussion about. But on the other hand of that inverted U curve, having felons who have been previously interacting to to put a warm euphemistic term, having been arrested for endless I mean literally I mean you have guys that 100 times, 120 times, 150 times. It's very nice to be empathetic and give someone a second chance, especially if they made an error of judgment when they were 15. Maybe we can debate whether that's possible. But if over the past 20 years you have interacted with the judicial system on 187 times and by the way it was a fraudian slip that I used 187 187 is the code for murder. I didn't mean to to use that. Well then probably we you don't deserve another chance. So somewhere between uh decriminalizing marijuana and not giving people 30-year sentence for smoking a joint and allowing a triple murderer to go free because he did it when he was only 21 so he didn't know any better is a sweet spot.

[00:08:07]>> Got it. All right. So individual to society here. You talk about how uh effectively suicidal empathy on a societal level and you focus on western uh you focus on western societies can destroy those societies. you call it a self-eing virus. Um do you have a sense as to when we first start to see this uh idea of suicidal empathy come about?

[00:08:32]What what what is the origin of it and and how did it spread?

[00:08:34]>> Yeah, fantastic question. So here I'm going to talk about the one-two punch of two of my books. So the paras so the parasitic mind and suicidal empathy really go together. And let me explain what what was my theoretical framework for doing so. I in the animal king and at first it's going to sound as though I'm going on a evolutionary biology tangent but I'm going to bring it all back for you.

[00:08:57]>> I trust you.

[00:08:59]>> In the animal kingdom there is a field called parasettology. Paracettology is the study in the animal kingdom of host parasite interactions. So, a tapeworm could be a parasite that parasitizes your intestinal tract. A neuroparasite is a parasite that needs to end up in the host's brain, altering its circuitry to suit typically its reproductive interest. So, the so a classic example that I often use, but there are myriad others would be the wood cricket. The wood cricket abhores water. It wants nothing to do with water. But when it is paracetized by a neuroparasite called a hairworm, the hairworm needs the wood cricket to jump into water merily committing suicide so that it could complete its reproductive cycle. That was my epiphany for in the parasitic mind in my previous book 2020 book and then saying that human beings can not only be parasetized by actual physical brainworms for example toxopplasma Gandhi but they can be paracetized also by ideological brainworms postmodernism cultural relativism social constructivism radical feminism identity politics and so on. So now I'm going to come to your question. The way that you end up with suicidal empathy is you first have the spawning of all of these dreadfully parasitic ideas. All of which were spawned on university campuses because it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the absolutely most abhorrent and dumb ideas because most academics are fully decoupled from the auto autocorrective feedback loop of reality. And and you say this as an academic >> and I say this as an academic. So as you might imagine, some of the academics don't invite me to the cool kids parties. Uh but that's okay. I I transcend those those parties. So let's take a specific example to see how it then links to suicidal empathy.

[00:10:59]One of the parasitic ideas that I just mentioned when I listed a whole bunch of them was cultural relativism. Cultural relativism unfortunately is a parasitic idea that was started about a 100 years ago by a Jewish professor, a Jewish anthropologist by the name of France Boas who argued that there are no real human universals. Every culture has to be viewed within the context of idios its idiosyncratic realities and therefore for you to judge other cultures using your prism is simply wrong. Well, if I believe that, then I become impotent to say things like the cutting off of clitorises of 5-year-old girls is a is not a is not something that we want to condone here. Having child brides is not something that we want to condone here. Having u societies that typically view uh Jews as cockroaches is probably not something that we want here because who are we to impose our values on the noble others?

[00:11:58]Well, that original parasitic idea then makes me immunable to be parasetized by suicidal empathy. Therefore, everybody is welcome into my societies because we are all equally likely to assimilate in this beautiful melting pot.

[00:12:14]>> So, everyone has a right. The idea there is everyone has a right to their beliefs and I cannot judge them even if I find it personally abhorrent.

[00:12:22]>> Exactly. Who am I to judge? It's all exactly >> it is impolite. Um it's mean. It's not empathetic.

[00:12:28]>> So, this came out, how long has this been around for? As you said, this sort of sprouted out of uh university campuses.

[00:12:34]>> So, it depends on which parasitic idea you're talking about that eventually led to suicidal empathy. So, uh say cultural relativism would be about a hundred years ago. Postmodernism, which by the way is the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas because it removes the possibility of an epistemology of truth. So for example, the scientific method says that if we apply this epistemology, we can get closer to a truth via the scientific method. Well, postmodernism says absolutely not. We are fully and completely shackled by relativistic concerns, by our idiosyncratic uh biases. So there are no absolute truths to speak of. And now that parasitic idea started about 50 years ago with a bunch of French bullshitters. So Jacqu Deerida, Jacqu Lon, Michelle Fuko, I mean there are others but those would be sort of the the holy trinity of of bullshitters. Uh that's about 50 years ago and then that eventually seeps its way into everything. So I I've been a professor for 32 years. I've sat on granting agencies committees where you know people are talking about you know quering of architecture and the quering of mathematics and the quering of engineering and of chemistry. Well that all comes from the fact that up could be down left could be right. Men could be women. We are no longer shackled by the you know the shackles by the pesky shackles of reality right we it's completely liberatory up is down freedom of slavery. So it started about 100 years ago. It went on overdrive about 40 50 years ago. And then once we completely eradicate your ability to think your cognitive system, this is when I could then hijack your emotional system via suicidal empathy.

[00:14:25]>> Um the West is a big place. Curious as you sort of I don't know if you run a scale here of the countries that are most suicidally empathetic right now when you look at the policies least. uh who's the granddaddy of them all you know whether it's in Western Europe where does the US stand right now on the suicidal empathy scale >> so let me in in answering that let me you know give some anchors of some other societies so I've recently taken to assigning a very very uh laudable and prestigious award this is stage five suicidal empathy we know from medicine that stage four is really bad right you have stage four god forbid pancreatic cancer stage is like near death or death, right?

[00:15:06]>> Stage five, you're in the death spiral.

[00:15:09]It's gone and everybody's going with you. Well, you'll be very happy to know that I recently entered the following country into stage five suicidal empathy. Canada, Britain, Sweden, and we can I'm I'm I'm toying with whether Norway should receive full-fledged membership in uh suicidal empathy stage five, and then we can debate otherwise. The United States is nowhere near there. Let's give it a stage one, stage two. It is in it is bathing in the very warm waters of suicidal empathy, but not fully because there are certain inoculation mechanisms against suicidal empathy that are unique to the American experience. Having the First Amendment offers you a leg up in terms of it's it's much harder to restrict free speech, whereas all of the other Western traditions don't have the First Amendment. And so so I think I'm certainly seeing the reflex for the United States to quickly go up in that scale. But the good news is you're nowhere near stage five yet.

[00:16:16]>> So how do you how did you enter those countries based on your scale into stage five, Gad? like what does um what have they done to get themselves there and is that mean it's irreversible?

[00:16:27]>> Right. So probably the the quickest way I mean the it's a multi-prong trajectory to enter stage 5 but the most direct way to ensure that you commit another term that I introduce in the book civilizational sepuku. Seukoku is a uh Japanese uh ritualistic suicide because Japan is historically still is a country of a culture of honor and shame.

[00:16:56]>> Right. The the the samurai culture.

[00:16:58]>> Exactly. The samurai culture. So if I am a samurai and I engage in actions that bring me great shame, the only way I can expiate that shame is to engage in self disembowelment and kill myself. That's called sepuku. And therefore I took that principle and I said well okay the west is engaging in civilizational sepuku. So the quickest way that you can engage in civilization sapuku and enter stage 5 is through your orastic open border immigration policies because it doesn't take a thousand years for the fabric of your society to change if you let in millions of people that don't share any of the deontological foundation principles on which the host society is based on. Right? So if for example you have people coming from societies where a wide range of nonpartisan surveys have identified that of the surveyed people somewhere between 95 and 99% of the surveyed people have endemic Jew hatred as a foundational feature of their personhood. Then if you let in hundreds of thousands of those people or millions of those people, it doesn't take fancy professor Gats to explain to you that the whole society is likely to have an increase in Jew hatred, right? You don't need to be a fancy professor to get that.

[00:18:21]>> So you're talking about the concept, you know, assimilation, right? Is different European societies uh versus America. We like to refer to ourselves as a melting pot here in America, not far from where I live in New York City in Manhattan. I can go over to Queens and I can hear in a matter of a few miles 150 languages basically every religion on earth. Um we take pride in that here in the US. Um and some would push back like no there there is an ability uh to assimilate here and frankly uh you know in in making the arguments that you're making with these wide you know you're brushing with these very wide strokes here broad strokes uh that you know ultimately you are um making a lot of assumptions there um when it's really individual like individuals can be different uh and just because there's been some examples doesn't mean that we need to condemn entire societies, cultures or block entire countries or faiths from from immigrating, >> right? Uh I for a second I thought I was on the Pierce Morgan show because Pierce has made sure to always make that exact argument with me. So let me let me see if I could try a few analogies that I tried with Pierce in answering this question, but but he was completely impervious to to any rationale that I could throw at him. Do do you have any children? May I ask you this? Do you have a do you have a daughter?

[00:19:41]>> I I do. I have a daughter with another one on the way. Okay, congratulations.

[00:19:45]Maz uh if later your daughter tells you, "Hey, daddy, uh I'd like to really cut through a dark alley where there is young men who are loitering around. As a father, would you give her the following statistical reasoning?" Uh look, sweetie, the great majority of men are never going to rape. So the fact that a few a minuscule number of men rape, you're marginalizing half of humanity called males, therefore I would like you to fight against that bigotry uh that misanthropy, right? Not misanthropy, misandry and uh walk through that alley.

[00:20:26]No, you would probably say that maybe you won't use the words I'm about to use, but that's the sentiment you would say. Life is about navigating through statistical regularities and therefore I will make decisions based on that statistical landscape. So let's apply it to what you just said. It might well be that the great majority of Muslims don't rape and that has to be true. But we also know that since 911 alone there have been this is there are several nonpartisan databases. I'm giving you the most conservative charitable one. Uh there have been 48,000 plus Islamic terror attacks since 9/11 alone in roughly 70 countries. So the fact that out of two billion people a small subset ended up committing Islamic terror in no way attenuates the dangers of Islam. Right? because many people may not participate in those attacks, but they're not going to step up to stop those attacks from happening. Right? We know, for example, from 1400 years of history, it it's very very clear the data that there are now 56 countries who are that are part of the OIC, organization of Islamic Cooperation, that once upon a time had 0% Islam. Then you closed your eyes and you opened your eyes. Many of those societies are now 99% Muslim. And the fact that most Muslims didn't do this or didn't do that didn't change that reality. So since you're in New York, let me give you one other analogy and then I'll se the floor back to you. Uh in 2001, the sky skyline of New York irre irrevocably was changed. Two two things called the twin towers fell down. Did it take 190 million terrorists to do that? No. What did it take? 190,000? No. 19,000? No.

[00:22:24]Oh, it only took 19 committed terrorists to alter the landscape. So, the idea that, you know, out of two billion people, a small percentage are doing this doesn't re resonate with anybody that understands statistical reasoning.

[00:22:39]What is your goal when it comes to uh convincing people of your argument of finding a middle ground here uh in an environment where any of the things and happy to go further into some of your quotes um suddenly people are like they don't even engage. They want to engage.

[00:22:56]They're like this guy is a bigot. Um where do you come down on that? Where are you finding sort of uh a middle ground? How are you convincing folks?

[00:23:05]How how do you think about your your role there and your goals there? God.

[00:23:08]>> Yeah. Uh great question. So as somebody who studies psychology of persuasion, right? I'm housed in a business school, right? So I apply evolutionary psychology to to understand consumer psychology, right? And so therefore I've lectured on psychology of advertising. So there are different persuasion techniques that are appropriate in different contexts.

[00:23:33]Right? So one of the things that academics are not very good at is that they can't alter their mode of communication as a function of the needs of different audiences. That's why I get to go 11 times on Joe Rogan and 99.99% of professors don't because while they may be very good in communicating within the sterile ecosystem of a peer-reviewed paper and I'm not denigrating that. I've published many many of those. That's the only way that they know how to communicate. But to roll with Joe Rogan and be able to attract and keep the attention of 20 million listeners and viewers is not something that most professors can do. Therefore, when I go to give a talk at Stanford or Harvard or Cornell, my alma mater, I can be as professorial as anybody could ever hope to be. But then when I interact on X with other people, I can joke. I can act like a buffoon. I could be satirical because I recognize that I am in the business of trying to change people's minds. I it can't be a single universal key of communication modality. I will use different approaches in different context. And to that point, by the way, so I get approached, you know, luckily, knock on wood, 99.9% of people who approach me have always been uh supporters of my work. You you may or may not be surprised that more often than not people approach me not because I said something that was deeply profound in my professorial modality but they thought that this particular satirical technique that I use is hilarious and had the entire family in stitches. But my highfulutin progressive lisp colleagues would never dare engage in lowly comedy because lowly comedy is reserved for the corrections officer and the welder. But we're in the ivory tower. We it what we do is too serious to make fun of ourselves and others. So so no. So I don't accept the premise that I need the middle ground. I basically am in the business of changing minds and I will use all possible modes to hopefully achieve that. Okay. So, I I want to ask you about something you wrote. I mean, I can ask you a million things you you wrote. You had a line this week on X.

[00:25:55]The feminization of the West creates the fertile landscape for suicidal empathy.

[00:26:00]Referring to feminization of the West here. Um, why ascribe gender roles here?

[00:26:05]You know, some people fight back. What about toxic masculinity there? Uh, God, and what are you calling the fe feminization here of the West?

[00:26:15]>> Right. So it's it's literally to pathize half the phenotypes of homo sapiens, right? Homo sapiens are a sexually reproducing sexually dimorphic species.

[00:26:27]Let's apply it to two places. So so first the opposite of feminization is to is is masculinity, right? But in our women's studies programs, we've been taught that that is actually a pathology. It is toxic, right? Well, let's apply it to >> it's harsh. It's not humane and it, you know, it leads to mistreatment and overreaction and and death and destruction globally.

[00:26:52]>> Exactly. So therefore, that feminization that results So let me get professorial in the universities. We should be pursuing an epistemology of truth. Truth is what matters. We're in the business of truth seeeking. Well, now in the university, we have a competing ethos.

[00:27:10]It's called the epistemology of care.

[00:27:13]Right? Because sometimes the pursuit of certain truths can be hurtful. That's a feminine reflex. Right? So when I sit in departmental meetings, regrettably, I often times don't know if I'm sitting in a top business school departmental meeting or I'm in a kindergarten class because the manner in which the female administrative leaders are handling the thing. How's everybody doing? How is everybody? It's kind. It's empathetic.

[00:27:46]Meritocracy is less important than care.

[00:27:50]Now, that doesn't mean because you're probably going to get someone say, "Are you saying that women can't be excellent in universities?" Of course, I'm not saying that.

[00:27:56]>> Right. No. And and in fact, we had a book on recently about female CEOs and some of these characteristics actually leading to companies being more successful when they adopt some of these characteristics.

[00:28:05]>> Yeah. I'd love to see those studies. Uh yeah. Yeah. Send me those. Uh so as a general rule, what would be the feminine traits that would result in superior performance of those companies that otherwise men are unable?

[00:28:21]>> Making people feel heard, creating a creating a dynamic within your company where people feel open to ideas, aren't immediately condemned, that there's more teamwork and less individualism. Listen, you know, like I I think there's a lot of studies in the corporate world and depending on the sector that you're in, uh where they they have found that uh adapting um some feminine charact like I'm not talking about as you referred to feminization completely, right? There's there's got to be a balance here. And to your previous point that we began with Aristotle, there's a there's sort of a balance between everything, right? On the spect everything's on a spectrum. Uh well and I mean that speaks to the fact that earlier I said that there are I want a bold guy but I also want him to be strategically kind and empathetic.

[00:29:06]Right? So it's not right. I mean I don't when my children were young I didn't whip them during reading hour before I put them to bed. I'm incredibly gentle as I you know tuck them into bed. Right?

[00:29:18]So again we have behavioral plasticity.

[00:29:21]I'm not only made up of toxic masculine traits. As a matter of fact, uh and I mentioned this very briefly in the book, uh I'm a huge animal lover. So, it's it's almost impossible to find someone who's as empathetic as me towards sort of animal cruelty when I see those commercials with the SPCA with animal cruelty. I run out of the house cuz I don't want to hear about it. So, so it's not as though those two things can't coexist. What I'm talking about is the defining ethos that drives a company or that drives foreign policy or that drives a university. Those have to be rooted in meritocracy and excellence and competition. Now, that doesn't mean that women can't access those qualities, but what what they're saying in many cases is no, what's more important than competition is cooperation. What's more important than the ethos of truth is the ethos of care. We can't have that.

[00:30:19]>> Extrapolate this. So let's extrapolate this out a little bit because you know a lot of what we saw sort of there were a lot of lessons learned from World War II. Um especially in Europe. Um and it's led to effectively the world that we're in today 80 years later. And you know uh that cooperation above all right uh openness of your society. uh there's also a guild complex particularly in Europe due to colonialism and the legacies of colonialism and you know what sort of uh I don't know how much thought you've given to this like the you know the lessons that we learn from what was the probably most tragic human event uh in in modern human history um and you know where where the world stands today as you sort of like zoom out here >> I mean there are several ways I can I can take this I'll I'll take one shot uh when Chamberlain was using his appeasement strategy He was engaging in a manifestation of suicidal empathy >> when when he was going to Hitler and be like, "Okay, you can take this, but then you're going to stop there."

[00:31:16]>> Yeah, you got to stop. But I mean, you're you're a good guy, Hitler, right?

[00:31:19]You don't really have any nefarious uh designs. Oh, absolutely not, buddy.

[00:31:24]Nothing. No way. I mean, look at my beautiful >> Just just let me have Austria.

[00:31:29]>> Exactly. Okay, so we're good. Uh appeasement strategy would be for 47 years the Iranian regime doing what they're doing. And one generation after another, irrespective of political orientation, both Republicans and Democrats going, "Come on, can we can we tone it down?" And then somebody comes along who apparently doesn't suffer from suicidal empathy, who says, "You know what? You've held the world hostage long enough." There is a dynamic whereby might is right. Certainly in the Middle East, they understand that calculus.

[00:32:02]We're about to go to war.

[00:32:03]>> No one's ever accused President Trump of being too empathetic.

[00:32:07]>> [laughter] >> Right. Fair enough. Uh but frankly, in this case, I think uh do do you support the fact that he not that I want to turn it on to you, you're the host, but uh would it have been better to kind of appease the Iranians forever more or was there a time when we draw the the line on the side and we >> I could make arguments for both sides. I could also discuss the merits of planning and strategy going into major conflicts like that and you know addressing potential scenarios. But I but I guess the larger point you know that I find so interesting is the impact that you see uh suicidal empathy happen h having on the west as we you know make our way through the 21st century here and the biggest adversary/competitor is China. uh and we watch you know all all of these various things unfold and there's a feeling you know as we kind of work in the post 911 context that uh you know the US went overboard and there was a risk of overreach there and and so you know and we live in a world now where technologically speaking I'm know I know I'm throwing a lot at you but I know you can handle it where we have these devices in our pockets and now we watch wars which have taken place for thousands of years but we see them happening in real time in short clips and we open up our social media pages.

[00:33:23]It's like, oh my, oh my god, that the war that's terrible what's going on there. Even though war has been happening for a very long time, but it's much more personal these days and and the coming uh at a time where again you see suicidal empathy peaking in certain places and growing. You know, curious how much thought and I know this is speculative that you know what that means foreign policy and how countries conduct themselves and uh in in this reality that we live in. Well, again, yes, there there are many ways we can go with this question, but to kind of tie it to earlier part where we were talking about feminization, I mentioned the university context, you know, that Canada has under Trudeau and also I think Sweden has they developed a feminist foreign policy. That's official doctrine. It's a what the hell does that mean? What what does it mean for a nation to hold a feminist foreign policy? Right? It's a rhetorical question, but so but to answer your question more more broadly, I I've I had a viral a clip that went viral at one point where I said, "Let me explain to you all of history in 3 minutes." You ready? There is a river and there are a tribe on either side of the river. Each of the men in either of the tribes is coveting the resources in the other tribe. Hence, that's why one of the ten commandments is do not covet. Yes. And so and those those resources could be anything. You have better access to water. You have oil. You have prettier women. Whatever the resource might be.

[00:34:56]And I really would like to cross the river and take all that's yours. The only thing that's stopping me is the recognition that there are men on the other side that would not be very happy with that outcome and that would respond violently to it and vice versa. In many cases, that stops us from taking a shot at each other. when I think that I can do it, I will take the shot. I just explained all of history for you right now. Imagine if one society decides it's called the West once it has been fully hijacked by suicidal empathy. The the historical dynamics that I just said no longer apply. The greatest highest laudable value that we ascribe to is unrestrained tolerance, compassion, magnanimity, empathy. Therefore, there is nothing worse than for me to exhibit violence, ranker, vindictiveness, machoism. As a matter of fact, I will give up my children, my heritage, my religion, my culture, my civilization before I ever demonstrate a lack of empathy toward those who wish to rape me. That's what suicidal empathy is. It sounds as though it's hyperbolic, but it isn't. I want to get into the political spectrum here because it's, you know, it seems to be mainly a focus of yours, the left, but it is interesting to see what's been developing on the right of late watching, you know, if you if you if I took the name away and gave you a quote from say Tucker Carlson um of late and said, uh, is this Tucker Carlson or is this Hassan Is this someone on on the progressive left? It might be challenging to decipher um where that quote is coming from. And so I'm curious as you've thought about suicidal empathy. I think it's pretty obvious as to why on the left it is pervasive, but curious as you think about the concept of suicidal empathy on the right and how that plays out.

[00:36:55]>> Yeah. So, and I'm I'm not trying to deflect, but that the answer the question you asked even applies better if you were to ask me how come all of the parasitic ideas that you discussed in the parasitic bind stem from the left. And here I've got a readily deployable answer which then I'll try to link it to the question now >> and then yeah then come back to my question.

[00:37:17]>> Yeah it's because all of the ideas that I discuss stem from professors academia is almost exclusively populated by leftists.

[00:37:29]>> Why is that by the way?

[00:37:31]>> Well there are many reasons. Do you want me if I go into it don't then accuse me of being >> Okay. Okay. No no no I I'll I'll I'll hold on that one. I'll let you finish your answer. So let me give you a concrete example. If you ask people on the right, do you believe in evolution, it's much more likely that people on the right would be resistant to it because it goes contra their religious beliefs.

[00:37:55]If you ask people on the left, do you believe in evolutionary psychology which is a sub field of evolution applying evolution to the study of the human mind then it is the leftist who are more likely to despise it. So evolution it's more the right evolutionary psychology is more the left. Why am I saying this?

[00:38:14]Because it speaks to your question. The idea is that any person irrespective of their political orientation has the capacity to be paracetized. And now I come to your suicidal empathy.

[00:38:25]Inherently suicidal empathy is more likely to be a manifestation of the left. The Democrats are called, drum roll, the party of empathy. So it is baked into the political orientation of progressivism to be kind and hug the trees.

[00:38:46]>> Right? I mean for many years we refer to the Democrats as the mommy party and the and the Republicans as the daddy party here in the US.

[00:38:51]>> Right? So I don't So So yes, I agree with you that if you gave me a quote by I I hate the fact that I even know who who he is, Hassan or Tucker Carlson, I may not be able to tell who's whom. But that's not be that's just because they're both saying insane stuff. Not because they're both equally likely to succumb to suicide.

[00:39:10]>> Not because you see the idea of suicidal empathy sort of seeping into to the right.

[00:39:15]>> I don't. But but if if you do, I'd love to hear what would be some ex I mean I'm not being facicious. I'd love to see what would be some manifestations of suicidal empathy on the right. I don't Well, here is one possibility and and I'm stretching and I'm thinking on on the spot.

[00:39:29]>> Yeah, >> it might well be the case that deontological isolationism, which is much more likely to be a libertarian right thing, >> right? Let's focus on here. Screw the world.

[00:39:43]>> Exactly.

[00:39:45]That could be a manifestation of ultimately suicidal empathy in that just because it's happening over there, you're very myopic to think that it won't be coming here, but it's it doesn't quite have the timber of socal empathy >> or even like the economic concepts which is like we want to revive certain industries here in the US like our only priority is like you know like we should put the prospects of every single American above everybody else in the world even though economically speaking we live in in this globalized world.

[00:40:16]>> Yeah, fair enough. But again, I think that simply demonstrates that frailties of thinking transcends political parties. Suicidal empathy at its core seems to be a much greater manifestation of the left than the right.

[00:40:32]>> Curious when we go to your origin story here. You grew up as a as a Jew in Lebanon at a time where there were not many Jews left and this was after the creation of Israel. this is in the 1960s and '7s. Coming from a society like that, coming from being a minority there, you've written about this, you've discussed this. Um, how has that impacted uh your view of how western society has evolved and and in particular coming from that background in that part of the world? What is it that the west especially today especially young people, people on the left, etc. don't get especially since we have to interact and right now there's a war going on with with that part of the world and we're not going to be unplugging from that part of the world anytime soon.

[00:41:13]>> Yeah, great question. Many things but I'll focus on two. Number one, I grew up in a society that is the perfect model of identity politics, right? Everything is viewed through the prism of your identity. More specifically, your religious belongingness.

[00:41:29]>> Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, Lebanon literally, if you can explain how the government works there, like depending on your faith, you can only have a certain role in the government.

[00:41:38]>> It's literally called a confessional parliament. Uh therefore, the president has to be of one religion, prime minister another religion, speaker of the house, other religion. If you're a Jew, sorry, that's just not buil baked into the confessional parliamentary system. So I saw what happens when a society aspires to the perfect model of identity politics. So when I see one of the two main political parties in the United States saying, "Hey, here's a great idea. Let's adopt what Lebanon and the Balkans and Rwanda did by baking the ethos of identity into everything that we do." I say, "Oh, let me put up my hand and tell you what happens as the ultimate destination." So that would be one. The second one I would say is that it usually the immigrants who come to the west who have sampled from the buffets of outside societies are some of the staunchest defenders of the western tradition. I'm thinking Ayan Hersy Ali I'm thinking God why not because we're prophets and we're smarter than Americans but Americans wake up and they think that the default value is that which they were born into it. It's the default value is to live freely. No, no, no. What makes American exceptionalism the experience that it is, it's that it's a small anomalous bleep out of all the buffets of societies. And so I stand here as an immigrant that comes from those other societies saying don't take a second for granted for what you've been given.

[00:43:10]>> So you u end the book with sort of uh the inoculation against suicidal empathy. It's like a a doctor uh coming up with a prescription. Curious, you know, as you go through and you have a list of a bunch of ideas there. Um anyone that sort of ranks above all or anyone that you want to dive into here about what needs to be adopted to say as we kind of take your uh idea earlier to prevent the US or other countries from going to stage five.

[00:43:38]>> Yeah, very good. Uh I mean I guess I can put several of them under the rubric of one and that is to actually and it speaks to our earlier point when we were talking about two billion and it's only a small minority. So it's really to understand how to apply statistical causal reasoning right and that then allows you to inoculate yourself against several manifestations of suicidal empathy. So for example, the I I talk about the false exemplar bias, right? So uh or or the false equality bias. Uh you men and women are equal under the law.

[00:44:16]They're not equal in their proclivity to do well in athletic uh competitions. Men run faster than women. Saying that does not make you a sexist bigot. Immigrants are equal under the law. That doesn't mean immigrants originating from all cultures are equally likely to assimilate. Right? So understanding how statistical causality and statistical inferencing can misfire and then protecting yourself against it goes a long way to inoculating yourself against suicide.

[00:44:50]>> How does one listening to this recalibrate their empathy without becoming cold or cynical? And I I guess you know a different way of asking that is like where is the line here? Uh where do you like where do you live between sort of in a football context between the 40 yard lines here in the US in American football like how do you ensure your empathy stays there where you're not undermpathetic right? You're not a cold-hearted cynical bastard but you're also not suicidally empathetic.

[00:45:14]>> I mean in a sense it's kind of it's going to seem as though I'm answering it in a flippant way but I'm not. you you breathe even though you don't consciously recognize that your respiratory system is an adaptation from evolution. Right? So empathy when it is expressed within well modulated evolutionarily relevant ranges is what feels natural to you. So let me explain what I mean by that. Take the trolley example that we often see in experimental philosophy when you're trying to calculate uh you know which how to engage in trade-offs who to save.

[00:45:51]There's a trolley that's you know coming down. It's about to hit three of your biological children and you could pull the lever and it could be diverted and hit five random stranger strangers. What would you do? Save your three children or five? Well, most people would say it wouldn't make them Hitler. It wouldn't make them callous. that say, "Look, if you're if you're forcing me to choose, I'm going to choose my three children."

[00:46:13]Well, that makes perfect evolutionary sense because it makes evolutionary sense for Mo and God to exhibit differential investment to their biological children than as as they might to random ch children in Bolivia.

[00:46:27]That doesn't mean that they don't want the Bolivian children to hopefully flourish. They're not going to willfully seek to harm those children. But if given a tradeoff calculus and I have to make a decision, I'm going for my children every time as will as will 99.

[00:46:42]So therefore do what feels naturally.

[00:46:45]Caring for your rapist, it is not natural. So So you have to inoculate yourself against that which doesn't come naturally. When you go in in the pool and you hold your breath, that doesn't feel natural because that's not what you've evolved. you don't have gills to exog uh oxygenate your your bloodstream.

[00:47:08]So I can't answer it in terms of how do you go in the 40 yard line, but you certainly can't be invoking an empathy module that violates every evolutionary tenant. Are there certain policies you've seen play out um you know as somebody who's been watching American politics in recent years uh where the US hit suicidal empathy levels and maybe it's it's come back especially given the you know uh last year's election >> come back meaning it's autocorrected in the good direction or >> correct yeah auto autocorrected and are there certain um are there certain through lines where you're like oh you you uh you are headed down a a dark path of suicidal empathy when it comes to certain policies So two that have been autocorrected very quickly uh number one closing the borders uh and saying you can't have a nation if 20 million people can come in because you are so kind. So so that's been done.

[00:48:03]>> Right. Right. Yeah. You you you discuss at length in the book the idea of of the kind of open borders policy being sort of a prime example of suicidal empathy gone ary.

[00:48:10]>> Exactly. Number two, the fact that in the 21st century, we're having debates both with our with our confirmation hearings for the incoming justice, with our Olympic committees as to what constitutes male or female. Until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people that had ever existed, that's a real number, uh that had existed, seemed to be able to navigate through the very difficult conundrum of what constitutes male or female very, very easily. That wasn't a problem that was hard to solve. Well, Trump came along, executive order, no more of this and that was gone. Leia Thomas or whatever her name is, was no longer able to steal all of the medals from the female swimmers. So, that would be the two examples of good stuff, right? uh bad stuff.

[00:48:58]The fact and and I could come up with other ones, but I think this is the one that's most top of mind. the constant desire even amongst people that you would think are not suffering from suicidal empathy to say things like radical jihadi Islamism, extremist militant Wahhabi Islamism because those things if I put a lot of qualifiers before the word Islam and if I put a lot of isms that's why one of the satirical things I do I say is this self-radicalized Islamism ismism ism The more isms I add, the more I draw a distinction from the otherwise beautiful and peaceful religion of Islam. Many people in the current administration still do this. Now, I understand the pragmatism. You want to appear as though you're not going against someone's religion, but by doing so, you convince people that Islam is inherently beautiful. It's the variant that has nothing to do with Islam that's bad.

[00:49:59]That's suicidal empathy. I'll end here and I'm gonna ask you to sort of prognosticate uh about you know what especially I mean the world is unpredictable place as we know uh but curious as you watch this phenomenon evolve here um are there certain countries that you're watching you know it's so interesting there's going to be upcoming elections in like France and Germany where we do see the so-called far-right parties gaining in strength here partially due to some of the policies going back to you know whether it's Germany and Angala Merkel and and some of these policies that you discuss uh in your book but curious Are there certain countries that you're watching, certain trend lines that you're watching? Um, and I don't want to go too far out like 10 years from now, but in the next couple years >> that that what that are going to improve for the better or worsen for the worse.

[00:50:42]>> Either way, either way, I mean, do you see where do you see things getting darker? Where do you think getting lighter? Where do you where do you think is going to be one of the more interesting places to watch?

[00:50:49]>> So, I'll reframe this as a question of are you optimistic or pessimistic? And here it's going to And now here it's going to sound as though I'm doing a copout, but I really am not. I'm both optimistic and pessimistic. And let me explain why for each. I would be completely pessimistic if the following were true. There is no way to resolve this problem. There in the abstract, no solution exists. That would be the case if, god forbid, you went to see your physician. He says he or she says that you've got stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

[00:51:22]That particular cancer has absolutely no intervention strategy. You've got two weeks left. please get your affairs in order. That's not what we're facing.

[00:51:32]There are a set of autocorrective mechanisms and policies that could reverse the trend. So that's the optimistic part. Now here comes the pessimistic part. I don't see an iota of evidence that the west has the testicular fortitude to implement 1 millimeter of those autocorrective strategies. So positive, there is a solution. Negative, I don't see the stomach for anybody to implement it. So where does that leave us? I don't know.

[00:52:03]It depends on each country. Uh Hungary, for example, had certainly quote solved the immigration policy thing by putting the borders up and saying, "We are a unique culture. We don't want to be diluted." And I mean, and they literally are unique in that they speak one of the three languages that are completely orphaned from the tree of languages. So they really care about >> it's Hungary, Finland and is there >> and I think Estonia.

[00:52:29]>> Estonia. Yeah.

[00:52:31]>> Yeah. So Finland, you're right. Hungary.

[00:52:32]I always forget what the third one. Is it Slovenia or Estonia? I think it's Estonia. Uh but in any case, uh but then the new guy came in and two to uh I hate to admit it. I very quickly assumed when the new guy had won, knowing very little about him, that he would likely be less into protecting the borders. So, I put up a tweet that seemed to suggest that and very quickly people wrote back to me and said, "Well, I think you got this guy wrong because he's as staunchly nonopen border."

[00:53:03]>> Yeah. He was an Orban guy until about 3 seconds ago.

[00:53:05]>> Exactly. So, I think I was wrong there to assume that it was going to go in the other direction. So, it's hard to tell.

[00:53:12]Uh I think Canada is almost irre irrevocably damaged. Uh now does that mean that tomorrow we're all going to to go into the death spiral? No. But you have to have the imagination to extrapolate. If we continue in these current trends in 50 years, will Canada at all resemble the Canada that I came into in the mid70s? Absolutely not.

[00:53:34]>> We're going to leave it there. Good luck with the book. Good luck with the book tour.

[00:53:37]>> Thank you so much. A great conversation.

[00:53:38]It it kept me on my feet. So great job.

[00:53:41]>> All right. I want to thank Gad again for joining us. The book number one on the New York Times bestsellers list is Suicidal Empathy. It's available wherever you get your books, though we have a uh link in the show notes. You can follow Gad on his Sad Truth podcast spelled S A D like his last name, as well as over on X, where he is just G- A D S A D. I want to thank all of you for joining us and I'll see you back here on this podcast