← Pod Force One
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Pod Force One podcast. I'm Miranda Devine. Today we're joined by Dr. Gad Saad, scholar of the Declaration of Independence center in the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. He's author of the upcoming book Suicidal Empathy. Gad Saad, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Force One. It's a real honor to speak to you finally. Having read you and listened to you for so long, I wanted to ask you about your latest book, Suicidal Empathy, which seems to be really what ails the west at the moment. And so can you tell us just from the beginning how you came up with that concept?
- [00:44]
B
Thank you so much for having me on. Great to finally e meet you at least hopefully in person soon. So I have to step back to one of my previous books to explain how I got to suicidal empathy. So, in the parasitic mind, I was arguing. Arguing that in the same way that a wide range of animals can be parasitized by actual brain worms. So, for example, a wood cricket abhors water, but when it is parasitized by a hairworm, the hair worm needs the wood cricket to jump into water, commit suicide so that the wood cricket could complete its reproductive cycle. And so that was my epiphany. Then I said, okay, well, I'm going to use that neuroparasitological framework to argue that human beings can also be parasitized by ideological parasitic ideas. But in order for me to completely hijack your capacity to think, I need to parasitize two systems. Your cognitive system, your thinking system, which is the parasitic mind, but also your emotional system, which is suicidal empathy. And so it's a one, two punch. The parasitic mind dealt with my thought processes. Suicidal empathy deals with my emotional system.
- [02:00]
A
That's brilliant. So it's heart and mind.
- [02:03]
B
It's heart and mind, exactly.
- [02:04]
A
Yeah. And so would you say that, for instance, what's very popular in America at the moment is Trump derangement syndrome? Is that an example of suicidal empathy, parasitic mindset, some sort of brainworm that's going. Cause it doesn't seem to be just a normal antipathy to a political figure. It really seems to be a derangement, a psychiatric ailment. People are obsessed and compelled to attack others who they think they suspect might harbor sympathies towards Donald Trump.
- [02:43]
B
Right, so I'll answer the TDS question and then I'll go back to explain what suicidal empathy is. Exactly. So tds, you're right in that it speaks not so much to suicidal empathy, but to a specific form of parasitic thinking, which I discuss in the parasitic mind. So going back to this dichotomy of thinking versus feeling it, in many cases it makes perfect sense for us to invoke our emotional system. So for example, if I am selling you perfumes, well, I won't sit there and tell you, Harvard physiologist decided that the optimal molecular structure, right? Because there I would be invoking your cognitive system for a product that's a hedonic one. So rather what I'm going to do there is simply show you a sexy girl with her hair flowing, riding a horse, and then I'll put some French sounding name for the brand, right? So in some cases I need to invoke your cognitive system. In other cases I need to invoke your emotional system. Now, now, Trump derangement syndrome arises from the misapplication of the wrong system in that particular context. When judging whether a political leader is one that I should vote for or not. You'd like to think that I am going to invoke my cognitive system, but I don't. Because whenever you speak about people who suffer from tds, they always give you an affective based response. He disgusts me. He's grotesque. He speaks like a cantankerous, you know, eight, eighth grade brawler, right? They never say, I detest Donald Trump because I don't respect his monetary and fiscal policy. Right. It's, it's always driven by what I call an esthetic injury. Right? And why is it an aesthetic injury? Because all of the highfalutin folks with the progressive lisp have taken on certain affectations, have gone to certain schools, cross their legs a certain way to demonstrate that they belong to, as Thomas Sowell said, the anointed ones. And that's what defines my identity as a progressive member of the castrati club. But Donald Trump comes along and he doesn't exemplify those traits. So if he can ascend to the highest office in the world, this invalidates all of the effort that I have put into fabricating my own personhood as a progressive person. Therefore, he is literally an existential threat to my personhood, to the beautiful facade that I have constructed. So, yes, you are right. TDS is a psychiatric disorder due to emotional processing rather than cognitive processing.
- [05:32]
A
Interesting. And just before we get to suicidal empathy, a bit more on tds, because it seems to afflict in, certainly in my experience, women particularly harshly. And I've always wondered if it's because they have, you know, want of a better term, daddy issues. Because Trump is sort of unabashedly male. He's very sort of paternal or patriarchal, whatever you like. He's an alpha male, which I guess has been almost stamped out because of toxic masculinity tropes and so on. And young girls maybe don't have a father. They grow up thinking that men have to be, you know, castrati, as you mentioned. Is that part of the problem, that Trump's just too alpha male?
- [06:22]
B
So I'm not sure if I would link it to sort of a Freudian daddy issue. But certainly I can argue, I mean, to your more general point, that the. Both the men and the women who are intimidated by someone who exudes the sort of hyper masculinity of Trump are people who don't like evolved gender roles. Right. The. The gender roles that we have learned to accept for all, say, only a couple of hundred thousand years that have been perfectly reasonable for the 117 billion people that have lived on Earth and since we became Homo sapiens. If I've been taught at Oberlin College that masculinity is inherently pathological, to your point, then of course I don't like someone who exudes that. By the way, I can link it to my own personal life. Usually I get emails from, you know, Special Forces, military, and Navy Seals saying, oh, my God, I love you. The ones who don't. The ones who don't like me are the super smart, progressive lisp guys in academia who think that when I use a very offensive term like castrato, that's just unbecoming of a professor. So they wilt away and cry because I'm not exuding professorial traits, which, of course, by the way, I usually outrank them as a professor. All of them combined with. But I'm exhibiting meanness. I'm a mean Middle Eastern guy. So the same principle applies to Trump.
- [07:59]
A
Right. So suicidal empathy seems to be everywhere and not going away. And just recently, we've had the new pope, Pope Leo, following in the footsteps of his predecessor in chastising President Trump's influence immigration policies, which actually means his deportation of the millions of illegal aliens that arrived here, ushered in by Joe Biden with the blessing of Pope Francis. And then the American bishops also just put out a similar kind of message about this and talking about being more empathetic to, they say migrants, but this is. We're talking about illegal migrants that are being deported, many of them criminals, rapists, murderers, et cetera. I'm Catholic, so I'm allowed to criticize the Pope. I mean, you're allowed to too. But I, I just, I'm pointing out, I'm not being an anti Catholic when I say this, but it just seems to be so hypocritical from a Vatican that has a big wall around it and doesn't allow any old, you know, homeless crazy criminal to come inside and has guards. And so what gives there? Why do these, you know, great leaders of a church, why are they doing something that's so inherently illogical and is going to alienate half, at least half of America, Right.
- [09:33]
B
So I'll first explain what suicidal empathy is and the, that I use and then we could apply it, whether it be to the Pope or to a million other domestic or foreign policies. That's why the term has become so viral, because it really, with two words that explains everything. So the way, the way that I came up with the concept of suicidal empathy stems from an earlier recognition I had in my earlier books. So my, my scientific work, you know, outside of, you know, my engagement in the public sphere is to apply evolutionary psychology and studying human behavior in, and consumer behavior in particular. And in my earlier books, when I was trying to explain why is it that we are, if we are an adaptive animal, right, that that was shaped by the forces of evolution, why do we engage in dark side consumption, Internet, Internet pornography addictions, pathological gambling, compulsive buying eating disorders? How could an adaptive creature engage in such maladaptive behaviors? So that was my original writing on the topic.
- [10:40]
A
And what is, sorry, what is an adaptive creature?
- [10:43]
B
Oh great, okay. Thank you for asking that. So evolution basically argues that the reason why animals, including the human animal, are so well adjusted to their environment, it's because through a long process of selections, traits that either confer a survival advantage or a reproductive advantage will be selected over traits that, that don't have those qualities. So for example, you and I come from ancestors that have evolved gustatory preferences for fatty foods. Why? Because we evolved in an environment of caloric uncertainty and caloric scarcity. Therefore it would be adaptive for us to hold those taste bud preferences. The peacock's tail evolved to be this big, iridescent, iridescently colored, burdensome tail, in this case, not because it confers survival advantage to the peacock. As a matter of fact, it reduces its survivability. So how could it have evolved? Well, because we know that life is a two step process. I have to survive, but then I have to reproduce. I could survive all you want if I don't extend my genes. It's a Darwinian dead End. Right.
- [12:00]
A
Right.
- [12:00]
B
So in this case, what? The peacock's tail is signaling to the peahens. Look at my huge tail. Which increases my chances of falling prey to predators. And yet, here I stand. Therefore, that is an honest signal of my phenotypic quality. So when I say when I use the term adaptive, I mean adaptive, either in the sense of it confers a survival advantage or it confers a reproductive advantage. Okay, so now, how could I be an adaptive creature and engage in maladaptive behaviors? And so here I argue that many psychiatric conditions are simply a misfiring of an adaptive process. So let me explain what I mean by that. Take, for example, obsessive compulsive disorder. It's a. It's a deeply debilitating psychiatric disorder, but it is rooted in an adaptive process that misfires. And so let me explain what I mean by that. If you. And if I have the pleasure of meeting you in person, Miranda, and before you come up to shake my hand, I noticed that you sneezed several times into your hand. I will now code this as it looks like Miranda's probably suffering from some cold that I don't wish to catch. So I will politely shake your hands, and hopefully, when you're not noticing, I will go to the bathroom and wash my hands properly. So the scanning of the environment for potential threats is a perfectly adaptive process. But if I now am stuck for eight hours a day washing my hands in an infinite loop while my skin is falling off, I can't get to work, and I get fired because I have germ contamination, ocd. What started off as an adaptive process becomes hyperactive and misfires. So now you see how it's going to directly lead to suicidal empathy. Empathy, when it's properly modulated, is a perfectly adaptive virtue to hold. As a matter of fact, we are a social species, and social species should have evolved the capacity to empathize with others. As a matter of fact, the cognitive component of suicidal empathy, which is called theory of mind, is something that autistic children fail on. The way that we diagnose children as being autistic is we give them a theory of mind test, which they invariably fail. So, contrary to all of the hit pieces that are already coming out against me even before the book is out, which basically says that Gad Saad is the Jewish diabolical puppeteer behind Elon Musk, who is pushing Elon Musk to create a world void of empathy. Of course, nothing of that makes any sense. What I'm arguing is that the dysregulated empathy, where you no longer target the empathy to the correct target, where you hyperactivate your empathy, that leads to suicidal empathy.
- [15:11]
A
I mean, normally empathy is for the people closest to you, your friends, your families, your neighbors, your community. And a lot of the suicidal empathy seems to be from people who prefer to feel sorry for people a million miles away that they'll never meet. You know, illegal migrants from other countries, for instance. Why? I mean, is that part of the bug in the system?
- [15:35]
B
It is. I mean, so. And I want to come back to answering the Pope 1. Although. Although you now can see where I would go with that. Yeah, look, so one of the terms that I introduced, which I'm sure someone is going to now steal and pretend that it's theirs, but it's on record. You can't steal it. So there is a form of suicide in. In Japanese culture. Japanese culture, very much like in the Middle east, there is. It's a culture of honor and shame, right? There's not. There's nothing worse than losing face. There's nothing worse than engaging in an action that is shameful. So one of the ways that you go on the path to redemption, if you've been. If you've engaged in a shameful act, say in the samurai culture, is to engage in seppuku, right? Which is a ritualized form of suicide whereby that's my only path of redemption to saving my honor. Well, I then take that principle and I argue that suicidal empathy is a form of civilizational seppuku, right? Because here, what's happening to the people who suffer from this fatal affliction, you have to argue that the west is an inherently evil place that has brought existential shame to the world, right? We are a transphobic Islamophobic. We're built on slavery. So what better way to demonstrate that I am willing to now stand before you, as Martin Luther said, here I stand. I'm going to stand before you and commit civilizational seppuku. And so the Pope is infinitely kind, he's infinitely tolerant behind, as you said, his very high walls. So he can afford the luxury of engaging in this form of beautiful and divine suicidal empathy.
- [17:27]
A
But. But why would the west, which doesn't have that culture of honor and shame, want to engage in seppuk?
- [17:34]
B
And that's why the one, two punch of parasitic mind with suicidal empathy, I'd like to say, with all due modesty, explains it all. Because in order for me to succumb to suicidal empathy, you have to first lay the ground with all of these parasitic Ideas that have been allowed to be spawned and then flourish first in academic university ecosystems and then they make breakout into every nook and cranny of society. They even become our former prime minister called Justin Trudeau. Right? So now let's, let's, let's give a concrete, tangible example. Cultural relativism is one of the parasitic ideas that I discuss in the parasitic mind. Cultural relativism basically removes the deontological possibility that there are absolute moral truths, right? Who are you racist to judge the, the ways of another culture, if some other noble culture in Afghanistan or whatever wishes to cut off the clitorises of five year old girls? Shut up. Racist. Right. So they, so if there are no absolute moral truths, then that makes me impotent to, to make, to take deontological positions about what is right or what is wrong. So now you could see how once I have hammered you with enough indoctrination in universities about, in this case, cultural relativism, then it becomes very, very easy to allow the parasite, the emotional parasite of suicidal empathy to take place. Because, for example, I no longer feel comfortable saying things like not all immigrants are equally likely to assimilate in the West. That feels icky to me, that feels gauche to me. I much rather believe that all immigrants are beautiful. And hey, your buddy Elon Musk is an immigrant and you, hypocrite, Gad Saad, are an immigrant. So why do you rail against illegal immigration? Which of course has the same amount of logical power as to say that since your house cat Fido is a feline, and since the wild lion in the jungle is, is a feline, you should equally be willing to cuddle up in Africa with the wild lion because he is also called a feline. So you've got house cat, feline, you've got lion feet, lion. Therefore it's indistinguishable. So it takes the one, two punch of first I soften your cognitive defenses and then let the bathing into suicidal empathy take over.
- [20:13]
A
So it's almost like you have to be infected by some of these mind viruses to weaken your immune system or your cognitive emotional immune system, and that then opens you up to the suicidal empathy, the disease that will kill you.
- [20:31]
B
Perfectly stated. That's exactly right. Maybe you weren't going to go there, but just to kind of apply it to the most outlandish case. We are a sexually reproducing species made up of two phenotypes. They're called male and female. Right? And that applies to every sexually reproducing species. And to. To. To quote a figure that I mentioned a bit earlier in our conversation, this is a real estimate. One estimate is that there have been 117 billion humans that have existed in the totality of Homo sapiens as a. As a separate species. Well, until 15 minutes ago, when we took progressive biology classes at Oberlin College, we used to be able to very clearly navigate through the very difficult conundrum of what constitutes male or female. We never had any difficulty with that. But then, now we need specialized physicians and researchers to explain to us how we're going to assort who competes in the Olympics in female or male sports. Such a departure from reality could only come about if your mind and your emotional system have literally been parasitized by these mechanisms that I speak of.
- [21:51]
A
Is this parasitic invasion, Is this a deliberate plan by some group or some academics to actually weaken humanity? Because it seems a lot of these parasitic worms, these mind viruses, are fairly recent. Or have they always existed?
- [22:19]
B
Fantastic double question. So let me answer the first part first. No, I don't think. I mean, yes, people do today misuse these for nefarious purposes, but at their origin, I argue that these parasitic ideas started from a noble reflex. So take, for example, so. And they start off with a noble reflex because they then free us from the pesky shackles of reality. So let's take, for example, cultural relativism. Cultural relativism was started, actually, I think. Are you currently in New York?
- [22:56]
A
Yes.
- [22:57]
B
Yeah. It was started by a Jewish anthropologist named. And just like you said, you can criticize Catholics. I can say that he's Jewish because I'm Jewish. So Franz Boas was the originator. He's. He's a cultural anthropologist who was the originator of this concept of cultural relativism. Because the idea was that a whole slew of nefarious folks had taken biological principles as applied to human beings and misuse them. So let's now create a new reality where biology ceases to matter for human beings, and hopefully we could all hold hand and sing Imagined by John Lennon, and we will all live happily ever after. So in the service of what started off as a noble reflex, if we have to murder and rape truth in the service of that noble goal, so be it. Which is a consequentialist form of approaching truth. Right. I argue in the parasitic mind that there are certain principles that have to be deontological. Freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, presumption of innocence. They can't be. I believe in this principle. But the second that you say, but you're sinking into consequentialism. And hence it's a violent, by definition, a violation of a deonthological principle. So I don't think. So to your first question. I don't think that they originated because of some sort of, you know, evil, diabolical, Soros type person.
- [24:25]
A
Yeah.
- [24:26]
B
Now to your second question. The capacity for the human mind to be parasitized is not a contemporary thing. It is a regrettable feature of the architecture of the human mind. What is contemporary are the specific parasitic ideas. Right. So 300 years ago, not too far from New York where you are, we used to think in Salem that it might be a good idea to maybe throw some women into the water. And if they swim, this proves that they are witches. And if they drown, oops, I guess Linda wasn't a witch. And we organized our society along that parasitic idea. We also thought 700 years ago that the Jews were the progenitor, progenitors of the Black Plague. So the capacity for us to believe complete irrational nonsense is. Is as clear as us having two eyes. What is unique about the current moment are the specific mind viruses which, when you put them into a cocktail, leads us to jumping off the abyss of infinite lunacy.
- [25:34]
A
Interesting. And do you think the reason that that cocktail now is so toxic is because of more connectivity with social media and the Internet? Or perhaps everyone went nuts during COVID.
- [25:50]
B
No, I don't think it's. It's. I mean, certainly Covid, you know, accelerated. It's kind of like the shingles virus. It could lay dormant in you. Then there has to be some catalyst that makes it come out when you're 55 or 62. So in that sense, yes, you're right. But I think it's a problem that has been festering depending on which parasitic idea we're talking about. It's something that took between 50 to 100 years to lead us to where we are now. So, for example, the cultural relativism mind virus that I mentioned earlier, that's about 100 years old with Franz Boas, postmodernism is more like 50, 60 years old. So. So this is not something that happened cataclysmically overnight or because Covid came up, you had to soften the cognitive and emotional defenses of people over many, many generations for us to end up where we are. And by the way, this speaks to another question that I often receive from, from all sorts of people, which is, now that Donald Trump is in power, are we going to see the eradication of all this? And my answer I am sorry to say, is an emphatic no. Now, it certainly helps that it's Donald Trump rather than the cackler, but it doesn't mean that, that we, we've gotten rid of polio because Donald Trump came about. Yes, he could very quickly, through executive orders, reverse a lot of the insanity. No more, you know, men playing in women's sport. Here's an executive order. But in the same way that it took 50 to 100 years for these ideas to be internalized as normal amongst many of our intelligentsia, I'd like to think that it won't take 50 to 100 years, but it's not. It begins and ends with Donald Trump.
- [27:37]
A
Are there some people who are immune to the mind viruses?
- [27:42]
B
That's a great question. So one of the studies that I was doing currently with one of my graduate students was seeking to exactly address your question, which is, what are some individual differences that can help us? So in the same way that, that you could have a particular expression of a gene that makes you more susceptible to get a particular disease. It's the same principle here. So I don't have a definitive answer for you, but I certainly would argue that getting an education at a liberal arts college greatly increases your chances of falling prey to this nonsense.
- [28:25]
A
But there are people that we know, or I know, who have been to very liberal colleges and they somehow managed to come out intact or in fact, kind of radicalize the, in the other direction.
- [28:40]
B
Oh, that's good to hear.
- [28:41]
A
Yeah. I mean, is there, I guess, for parents worried about protecting their children from the Woke mind virus, as Elon Musk likes to call it, is there any tips or anything you've picked up about any sort of immunity you could confer to your children?
- [29:01]
B
Yeah, another fantastic question. So I remember in, I think my daughter was in grade six and she came home to me and said, oh, our science teacher has all sorts of blm, I don't know, all that nonsense on her thing. So I wrote very politely to the principal. Usually when principals receive emails from me, they usually go into a bit of a panic because they know it's. Even though I'm very, I'm very polite, they know it's probably not a good fight to have. I said, look, I'm a university professor. I have a very big platform. Yet when I put on my hat as a professor, when I'm teaching evolutionary psychology, I have very strong pedagogic discipline whereby I don't incorporate my views of what I think of Justin Trudeau or not. If I'M teaching evolutionary psychology. So if I can grant that courtesy to adults who are in my classes, surely your moronic science teacher should not be putting up blm. Guess what? The BLM sun went. The BLM sign went down. Now, why did. Now why did that happen? It happened because I was on the job, right? I was present. I was willing to fight it. So, you know, there is no magic recipe, right? It simply involves people willing to take a stand, right? Now, I understand not everybody has the unique personality traits that make them more honey badger versus less honey badgers, but you simply can't diffuse the responsibility onto others. And this is why, in the last chapter of the Parasitic Mind, I use the term activate your inner honey badger. And for those of you, your viewers and listeners who may not know why I referenced that animal, the honey badger has been rated as the fiercest animal in the animal kingdom. Now that. That's a big title to have. There are a lot of ferocious animals. It's the size of a small dog, and yet adult lions cross the street to the other side and say, sorry, Mr. Honey Badger, I didn't mean to offend. I'll go through that. Now, why does. Why is it that everybody is so intimidated from the honey badger? Because it never backs down. It is insanely ferocious. Now, I don't mean to say, when I ask people to activate your inner honey badger, I'm not invoking you to become physically violent, but I'm certainly invoking the fact that if there are first principles that are worthy of defense, stand tall and be a honey badger. So when your professor says, you know, the United States continues to be a white supremacist society where, you know, there is a genocide of transgender people and people of color, put up your hand politely and say, hey, professor, can you share with the class the data that shows that there's an ongoing genocide of transgender people? But it is a lot easier for a 22 year old who is afraid that they may get a bad grade on their participation grade to allow that to happen. Now, when that happened that time, truth died a bit. Take that sort of quiet acceptance of nonsense multiplied by 73 billion interactions, and suddenly we all stand up just like Malcolm Gladwell and say, how dare you say that men have an innate physical advantage over women, Right? How? By the way, how could it be that someone who has made millions of dollars writing books where ostensibly he's supposed to somehow understand the research that guys like me create, and yet he could stand on the side for many years, until recently, he saw that the Winds were changing and said, yeah, oops, I guess I was lying when I said that. Right? But that's because he's a calculating schmuck, right? He doesn't believe the truth. He believes in making sure that I get invited to the Cool Kids party on the right side of what's the park in New York? What's it called? The. What's Bryant Park? No, no, the. The main one. Central Park.
- [33:13]
A
Central park, yeah.
- [33:14]
B
Right. I need to be invited to the Cool Kids party so that the Manhattan elite accept me. And if I have to say that men too can menstruate and in order to be accepted, so be it, while other guys like me are maybe pathologically so incapable of digesting bullshit and therefore I'm a honey badger and let it.
- [33:34]
A
Be as it is, and so may it be forever. So let's go back to your childhood. I think you grew up at a time and in a society in Lebanon that was actually practicing the opposite of empathy, suicidal empathy or otherwise.
- [33:55]
B
Right? Yeah. So I. So for the viewers and listeners who don't know, I was born in Lebanon and raised in Lebanon till the age of 11. We were part of the last very small, dwindling community of Lebanese Jews. My parents were well entrenched within Lebanese society. So despite the fact that all the writing was on the wall that it was probably best to have left Lebanon many years earlier, they didn't. Then the Lebanese civil war broke out. All brutality is usually judged by the standard set of the Lebanese civil war. And so it became impossible after the experiencing the first year of the Lebanese civil war to remain there. So we left. How did I become a honey badger in light of that childhood? Look, I think much of who I am or who most people are, is an inextricable mix of our genes and our environments. But I do think that much of my honey badger mindset is simply an indelible part of my personhood. But I could point to specific instantiation in my childhood where I express that honey badger attitude. So, for example, when we would go to a synagogue, and I briefly mentioned this in the opening chapter of the Parasitic Mind, when we would go to synagogue on Saturdays in Beirut, I remember asking my father at a very young age. It must have been five, six maybe. You know, why are we now standing up? You know, there's like in any religion, there are all sorts of rituals that you do. Now you stand up, now you sit down. Now you do the macarena to the left. Now you do to the right. And so being an inquisitive child. I asked my dad, you know, why are we doing this? And he's like, you know, just shut up and do. And that pissed me off. I remember very clearly that turned me off. While. While I'm very much wedded to my Jewish identity, I'm not incredibly practicing in the religious part because it's very hard for me to accept that the grand God of the universe cares whether I light the candles at 4:21, but don't do it at 4:22. 422 makes you a really evil person. 421 is when I said that you should light the candles. And so that sort of irreverence to orthodoxy, to groupthink is something that has been with me forever. So I'd like to think it's part of my genes.
- [36:19]
A
And also I pick up a lot of optimism, which your parents must have had in spades, considering they hung on in Lebanon hoping for the best.
- [36:27]
B
Yes. Look, I am. I am someone who is very optimistic by. By nature. As a matter of fact, my sort of, you know, the way that I can joke around and use sarcasm and also use buffoonish satire to make fun of stupidity, all that really does come from us. A sunny disposition, which, by the way, led accidentally, in a sense, or it wasn't. It wasn't an a priori thing that I wanted to do. Between parasitic mind and suicidal empathy. I wrote another book which regrettably hasn't received as much attention. It's a book on happiness, which I wrote largely because thousands of people would write to me and say, what's your secret, Professor? How is it that you deal with such difficult subjects, but there's always an apparent sort of twinkle in your eye and you can joke around and so on? Well, that's just because of my sunny disposition. That said, notwithstanding that I am very optimistic about the trajectory of the West, I am increasingly lesser so because I am not seeing the type of autocorrective reflex that would be required for us to set the ship straight. So, yes, I am optimistic by. By temperament, but becoming increasingly less so.
- [37:50]
A
So I'd love to talk about how we get back from suicidal empathy later, but I wanted to go first, more into, you know, what makes you tick, I guess, that childhood. Did you experience in that last year or that first year of the Civil War, did you experience any violence or see anything that scared you as a child? I think you were only like five or six.
- [38:14]
B
Yeah. So I saw more stuff than a thousand of my worst enemies should ever see in a Million years. But, yes, you're right. It started. My first clear memory of facing Jew hatred was in 1970. I hadn't quite turned six yet. And Gamal Abdul Nasser, who was the Pan Arabist Egyptian president at the time, he was highly revered by the, you know, Arabic societies because he was trying to unify all Arabs under sort of one pan Arabism. Right. And so when he passed away, as often happens in the Middle east, people take to the streets with all sorts of lamentations and screamings and so on. And as they were proceeding down our street, they were screaming, I mean, in Arabic, death to Jews. Death to Jews. And so I was sitting there on the balcony of our house and wondering why they screaming this. So when I turned to my mother, I say, why does screaming death to do? She's like, shut up. Put your head down. What another manifestation of just shut up and be quiet.
- [39:21]
A
Yeah.
- [39:22]
B
So that was my first occasion of sort of. That I remember of being vividly aware that, wow, there's something uniquely secretive or dark about us, which is, we're Jewish now. Next. The next time I remember was one of my brothers. I have three siblings, all of whom are much older than me. The next oldest is 10 years older than me. He was the Olympic. Not Olympic Lebanese champion in judo for several years in a row. And so he had been approached at one point talking about cultures of honor and shame. It was shameful for a Jew to be winning this combat sport all the time. So he was approached by some men who explained to him that it was time for him to retire because, you know, we wouldn't want an unfortunate accident to happen to him. And. And so he ended up moving before the civil war to Paris, France, to continue his judo career. And of course, the irony, as I explained in the Parasitic Mind, is that when we emigrated to Montreal at the start of the civil war, he joined us from France to Montreal, and he ended up representing Lebanon in the 1976 Montreal Olympics. So the same guy who. It was problematic that he was Jewish and was forced to leave Lebanon because he was Jewish, we could forego the fact or accept the fact that he was Jewish, because now he was going to represent us in the Montreal Olympics. There are several other stories. I'll mention one other one, this is about maybe a year before the start of the civil war. The teacher had asked us to get up and, you know, tell what we want to be when we grow up. And I want to be a soccer player, I want to be a nurse, I want to be a soldier, and one Kid grows up, gets up and says, when I grow up, I want to be a Jew killer. To everybody's laughter and raucous.
- [41:23]
A
Did they know that you were Jewish?
- [41:25]
B
Absolutely, absolutely. As a matter of fact, I still have three of the. You know how every year you've got a class photo that you take? And so I have three of the class photos from my days in Lebanon and I see the kid right in front of me who absolutely knew that I was Lebanese. I've always wondered, I've often maybe fantasize might be too strong a word. I've always thought, I wonder, given sort of my platform today. I've received all sorts of emails from people that are from my deep distance past. I have always fantasized that I would one day receive an email from me and say, hey, I am that guy. And boy, was I an asshole when I was nine. I'm still waiting for that email.
- [42:11]
A
Yeah, I don't think that'll ever happen. Someone like that is not going to ever, I think, have any humility, just even from that young age. And that must have been. I mean, how did that affect you? Did it just. Did you sort of brush it off? Or did. Did you worry about, you know, anti Semitism wherever you went?
- [42:35]
B
I mean, before the civil war, I just realized that, you know, for whatever reason, to be Jewish in the sea of non Jews was something that you shouldn't advertise. Where I really felt the second by second likelihood of my dying was during the. Once the civil war broke out. So there are many harrowing examples, some of which I explained in the first chapter of the Parasitic Mind, but not even close to all of them. Where then I knew that at any moment my life could be over. So I'll just give you one quick example. The day that we were leaving Lebanon, so we lived in an area that was very close to the Green Line, which separated east and west Beirut. That's where sort of the Jewish quarter was. So there is a whole no man's zone where you really didn't want to cross because you've got all of the fighting that's happening between those things. Now the Beirut International Airport, there were some road like militia blocks set up from the plo, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, where they had many of their camps. Now, what happened in Lebanon early in the civil war is whenever you would be stopped at a militia roadblock, they would ask in Arabic that the word is means your internal ID card. That internal ID card has very conspicuously written on it, your religion and now the Jews. It wasn't even written in Arabic. The word for Jew is yehudi. Jewish. It wasn't even written Yahudi, it was written Israeli. Israeli means Israelite. So it even creates more animus because you no longer are Lebanese. Somehow, even though we're fully Lebanese, we somehow become Israelites. Right?
- [44:28]
A
Right.
- [44:30]
B
So there weren't many roadblocks that you were going to clear unless you were protected by some of the people who would otherwise kill you. So now we had gotten some plo. You know what, you guys now in the west, see with all the keffiyeh and all the isis, that's called my childhood. So these guys came to our house fully armed to take us to the airport because there's no way you were going to get to the airport if those guys were not the ones who are protecting you. Now, what stops those guys from when they picked you up to just take you to a ditch and put a bullet in your head? Your life is worth a lot less than the cost of that one bullet. And I remember very vividly that the head of those guys, you know, I'm a young boy of 11 years old at this point, so I'm impressed by the big Kalashnikov, the big machine gun. He said, oh, do you, do you want to hold it? And I held it and I was so excited. Now imagine this is happening. I don't know if as we drive, this might be the last 10 minutes of my life. So now luckily it wasn't, they were honorable enough to. That's why, by the way, I always tell people I criticize Islam because it wanted to kill us, but it was also Muslims who didn't kill us. Right. So I don't attack individuals, I attack a set of ideological beliefs. Yes, there are great Muslims and they are very mean Muslims. Right. Just like in any other grouping of people. And so yes, I was very, very concerned about my life. By the way, after we emigrated to Canada, my parents kept returning to Lebanon very ill advisedly so because they were, they were having a hard time, you know, adjusting to life in Canada. They still had a lot of business interests in Lebanon and so on one of their return trips in 1980, they were kidnapped by Fatah and some very, very bad things happened to them. But luckily through our political connections, we were able to get them out before they executed them. So I mean, one day maybe people will make a movie out of my life and it won't be a pretty childhood, let me tell you that much.
- [46:53]
A
Just why did the, those PLO people, why did they help you I mean, was it. Were they paid or were they friends or.
- [47:01]
B
They weren't friends. I mean, we didn't know who they were. But, you know, so I. I can't speculate specifically about those guys, but I can offer some general mechanisms that can, you know, help you understand why that might have happened. So in Arabic society, there is a beautiful reflex of hospitality. Right? And hospitality doesn't just apply to the principle of, you know, if you come to my house, I'm going to be hospitable by giving you a great lavish meal. It implies that when a stranger is going through the harsh desert and some Bedouin guy greets you into his tent, you become a fundamental part of his dominion. He has to protect you. And by the way, there could be clear evolutionary reasons that could explain why we would have evolved that particular reflex of hospitality, because it's a tit for tat mechanism. Today I am stranded in the desert. Hopefully one day in the future when you are stranded, I will be kind enough to reciprocate you. So I expect that those PLO militia were humane enough to recognize that there's been a contract that's been entered here whereby these people are under your dominion and protection, and they were honorable enough to abide to it.
- [48:32]
A
Wow. And for your parents, did they ever go back to Lebanon again after they'd been tortured and captured?
- [48:41]
B
No. So after that, as they were leaving on that final flight out, some friends approached them who had been instrumental in getting incredibly high political involvement in freeing them. They said, look, we really love you, you are dear friends, you should never come back here. And they never did. But I can tell you, my dad had. In Arabic you say felish, which is like a type of. It's a type of paralysis that's temporary, akin to a stroke where his face had become lopsided because of the torture and the stuff. Eventually he regained it and he had a big scar on his face from some of the beating with the machine gun as a 15 year old at that point. So in 1980, I hadn't yet. I was going from 15 to 16. I remember that my biggest worry was whether my mother had been raped. And I remember only once, I only asked her once, never again. I asked that. She said no. I don't know if she lied or not, but yeah, it's not pretty.
- [50:04]
A
No. And what did that do to your personality? Do you think that seeing that horror.
- [50:13]
B
Well, it might explain why I am such a honey badger when trying to warn the west that you might not want to replicate that from Which I escaped. Yes. I could easily live out my life. I mean, there's enough Runway for me to escape what's coming to the West. So I could say, I've got a successful career as a well known professor. I've got a beautiful family. Why should I put myself out there? Well, because I might escape it, but your children and mine, Mirinda won't. Or they might escape it. Their children won't. And so someone has to be sufficiently courageous and altruistic to stand up and say, heed the warning of those who have lived it. You don't want to replicate it, but of course, what you've done in New York is a beautifully suicidally empathetic thing. You have elected a beautifully charismatic and smiley guy called Mamdani. Good luck to you. You've had a nice run.
- [51:14]
A
Tell us about Mamdani. What do you see in him? He. To me just, you know, everyone loves the smile. To me it seems very fake. And he dropped it on the night of the election too.
- [51:27]
B
That's right. That's right. When in the minority act, act meek and like a victim. But once in the majority, look how I put up my finger. That's a very Arabic thing. Once in the majority, show no tolerance. Smite at the neck. Right. So this fake smile suddenly turns into a venomous viper once I am in charge. This is called 1400 Years of History. People should maybe read these things called books. So let me explain to you specifically, scientifically, his smile. I actually released a clip on my. On my channel about this. So the. The father of neurology is a French neurologist called Charcoal. His pupil was a French neurologist called Duchenne. Duchenne studied the. The physiological. The autonomic facial features that typically happen with certain emotions. So when you are exhibiting an actual, genuine, authentic smile, that's called a Duchenne smile because it is activating certain muscle facial muscles that could only occur if you are genuinely smiling. A non Duchenne smile is one that doesn't capture that authenticity. So we all have a family member who, whenever we take family photos, is always exhibiting the non Duchenne smile. So. So to me, it is absolutely. It astounds me that people could be so imbecilic and lobotomized as to take something that is so gargantuan in its non Duchenne quality and argue, he's got such a beautiful smile. Nothing could be further from the truth.
- [53:28]
A
It is bizarre, isn't it? And there must be something that's evolved in humans to Be able to detect a fake smile from a real one for, you know, because a fake smile is a predator. Have we lost that?
- [53:43]
B
Well, it. So I'm going to here link it to some evolutionary principles from my scientific work. Although this, this explanation is not mine. It comes from Robert Trivers, one of the truly great evolutionary biologists since Darwin, who last I checked, I think he, he should still be alive. He's probably now in his 80s. So, Robert Trivers, to your question, wanted to explain why is it that human beings have evolved such an uncanny ability to self deceive. Right. Never mind about deceiving others. Why do we fall prey to our own self delusions? And here he came up with a brilliant insight which is going to speak to what we're talking about, the Duchenne smile and non deshen smile. So he said that when you and I are having a conversation, we are engaged in an evolutionary arms race. I want to manipulate you to serve my interests while you're trying to detect any verbal or nonverbal cues in me that might suggest that particular Machiavellian intent. Yes. So it turns out, unless you're a psychopath, I mean literally unless you're a psychopath, that when we lie, there are certain small micro cues that serve as signals, as signatures of the fact that we are trying to deceive the other. So you will be very carefully looking for any of those signals in me to know whether I am truthful or not. Now, one of the ways I can ensure that those mechanisms are shut off is to first deceive myself. Because if I deceive myself, that's the perfect way to then serve as the next step, which is to deceive you. You won't pick up any of those signals in me because I have convinced myself that what I'm saying is truthful. So I think there is a lot of that in what is happening with those who are unable to detect that Mamdani is a venomous lizard.
- [55:41]
A
Interesting, because that's method acting you just described. You know, it's that you have to inhabit the character whether you're James Dean or Marlon Brando. And that's how you become very. You seem that you are that person. And in fact, somebody suggested to me, somebody very smart suggested to me that this is what Donald Trump does when he meets world leaders like Vladimir Putin and he gets criticized for gushing about them or being too positive about them. But he has to put himself, convince himself that he likes little Rocket man or Vladimir Putin so that he can do a deal with them.
- [56:18]
B
That's perfectly said. As a matter of fact, I've often been asked, when you typically lecture about your evolutionary psychology stuff, professor, do you get as much blowback from practitioners in business as supposed to, as opposed to, say, academics? And I say unequivocally, I get a lot less blowback from practitioners of business because they're not wedded to any ideology. So if I tell them, here are the evolutionary mechanisms to develop more effective advertising, they go, great. Right. Whereas if I am an academic that's been steeped and a parasitic idea called social constructivism. Everything is socially constructed. There are no biological imperatives. Then here comes Gad Saad on his biology horse while he. He threatens my existence because I'm wedded to a different ideology. Why am I saying all this? Because good business people are actually evolutionary psychologists, whether they've taken an evolutionary psychology course or not. So Donald Trump never took my evolutionary psychology courses, but guess what? He understands evolutionary psychology. To your point.
- [57:31]
A
Yeah. I mean, I feel about him that he has almost an animal instinct in reading other people and figuring out what it takes to get them to do what he wants.
- [57:42]
B
Exactly. And by the way, there is a lot of research that shows that. So Machiavellian intelligence, which sounds sinister, right? But. But Machiavellian in its more generalist general term is simply the. The capacity to be able to, you know, use your intelligence for various, you know, ulterior motives. Right. Which need not be nefarious. So, for example, there's a correlation between salesman success and Machiavellian intelligence. Not surprisingly, very successful salespeople are Machiavellian. High Machiavellian intelligence. So here's an example of how that applies. If I am a salesperson, it makes sense for me to not have a single sales pitch, irrespective of who my customer is. It makes sense for me to adjust my sales pitch to engage in behavioral plasticity depending on who the customer is. No kidding. Well, that's exactly what you said about Donald Trump. I come into a room, there are different world leaders. I read exactly what I need, which levers I need to pull to stroke their egos, and I act accordingly. That's called Machiavellian intelligence, and Donald Trump has a load of it.
- [59:00]
A
Now, last question, Gadsad, we talked earlier. You said that you're a naturally sunny person, but that you are increasingly pessimistic about our ability to pull back from the brink of suicidal empathy and obviously suicide. Why is that?
- [59:21]
B
So I'll give you. I mean, I could answer it in A general way. But I'll give you a specific concrete example because people remember more sort of vivid stories. Let's suppose I go online to rail against the eradication of Christians in the Middle east or the eradication literally right now as we're talking of Nigerian Christians right now. You would think that a Christian who sees a high profile Jewish person going out on a limb protecting Christians, that Christian person would come along and say, thank you Dr. Saad, for your support of the Christian communities. No, what I will get is look at this Jew who is trying to pit the Christians and Muslims against each other so that the Jewish puppeteer can sit back. That is where my pessimism comes from. If I can't get you when I am going out on a limb getting death threats because I'm defending a population that's not even mine. And that leads you to conclude that really it's not Boko Haram that are the ones that you should hate. It is Gad Saad who is complaining about Boko Haram. It's hard to be optimistic, Marinda.
- [60:49]
A
And is that the ultimate mind virus is antisemitism. It seems to be hard to eradicate and keeps on coming, coming back.
- [61:01]
B
It is because look, any form of bigotry is terrible. So I don't want to imply that the Jews hold a monopoly over them being the targets, but it is the most, you know, lasting hatred that we've ever seen. And I, I know we're about to end, but maybe I could offer a psychological explanation for why it exists. There are all sorts of theological reasons. I mean, Christian doctrines have reasons why you should hate the Jews. Of course, Islam has reasons why you should hate the Jews. There are all sorts of reasons. But I think it extends beyond theology. It actually caters to a very basic psychological need. So in psychology there's something called the self serving bias. The self serving bias is a way by which we attribute successes and failures in our daily lives. So most people attribute successes internally. I did well on the exam because I'm a very smart person and they attribute failures externally. I did very poorly on the exam because Professor Saad is an asshole Jewish professor. Okay? Right. So. And that is an ego defensive strategy because it helps us live our lives with our ego protected. Right. Now imagine if I can offer you the ultimate external cause for all of your failures, both at the individual and at the collective level. Your wife cheated on you with the really hot neighbor. Well, it's probably because she consumed pornography that that idea went in her head. Who created pornography? It's of course the Jews. Now of course the. None of these are factual things, but there is a means by which I could attribute everything. By the way, in Sharm El Sheikh, which is a resort area in Egypt, several years ago, there were several shark attacks on tourists in Sharm El Sheikh. The Egyptian government came out and said that those sharks were Jewish sharks.
- [63:10]
A
They didn't.
- [63:11]
B
You could look it up. Just, just do a search after. Okay, so shark attacks are due to the Jews. So now the, the final question that you might ask. Okay, but why should it be the Jews that are the external culprits for all of our failings? Well, because here you have a unique mechanism. Amy Chua, the professor from Yale, talked about Tiger Mom. Tiger mom. Thank you. Talked about in one of her other books about minor dominated. I can't remember the term meaning when you have a very small minority in a culture that then has, that is shooting above its weight class when it comes to their influence. You might see it amongst the Chinese and some of the Southeast Asian countries. You see it with Armenians and some societies, you see it with some Lebanese and African societies. But no group of people has consistently outperformed the majority in every society that they go to. So it's a minuscule minority that is consistently leading in everything. Well, guess what? That makes me very unhappy. And so I bet the reason why I haven't gotten what the banking promotion, the Hollywood job must be due to the Jews. So it becomes a very satisfying psychological need that I scratch by blaming it on the Jews.
- [64:41]
A
Is there a solution?
- [64:43]
B
I'm not sure that there is a vaccine that we could give to eradicate bigotry from the human heart. I think it's regrettably, it's an indelible part of the human experience, but we could certainly fight against narratives. So when you have a. UCL University College London, a recent instructor who was talking about the Jewish libel, you know, the blood libel in a class in 2025, then maybe there should be consequences against that. Professor, Notwithstanding that I am a free speech absolutist. That doesn't give you the right in a classroom to say that, you know, Jews, drink your blood and make matzo ball soup out of it. And so we just have to keep fighting. We just, we have to keep going into the public arena and tackling these dreadful ideas.
- [65:30]
A
Well, Gad Said, I think that the, the Jewish sharks is probably the, the funniest way of combating that because it's so absurd. I love talking to you and I wish that I could talk to you for longer. Thank you so much for giving us your time.
- [65:45]
B
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure.
- [65:47]
A
Thank you so much for watching. I'm Miranda Divine. We'll be back with more soon. And let us know what you thought of this week's episode by leaving a comment below. And make sure you hit the like and subscribe button so you don't miss any future episodes of Pod Force One.