Gad Saad

Gad Saad's new book is Suicidal Empathy, and the episode opens with it. Rogan calls the title "The quote that we use all the time." The cover shows a lamb carrying a sign that reads "free the wolves." Saad says he wanted the cover "to be as evocative as the concept," and he sums the idea up as "Dying to be kind."

Before the framework is laid out, the two disagree about where the label applies. The first example is never described in the recorded exchange. One speaker rejects it as a case of the phenomenon: "I don't think that that suicidal empathy at all. I think that's signaling," meaning a show of support for a man's success and his endeavor. The other replies "Fair enough." A second example, which Saad says Dave Rubin shared with him that day, involves a felon of color who had just been released and "ended up pushing." The transcript does not complete that description. According to the account, a woman he had previously been entangled with did not want to press charges because she did not want another Black man to be in prison.

Saad also shares personal news. For the past year he has been a visiting scholar at the University of Mississippi, after taking a two-year leave from his school in Montreal. During the leave he needed only a TN visa. Now that the family is moving, he applied for an EB-1A visa, one of the "Extraordinary" visas that lead to a green card, and it was approved. He describes it as a possible fast track toward citizenship, saying his "inner spirit is American."

Saad presents the new book as a companion to his earlier book, The Parasitic Mind. His starting point is that humans are "a thinking and a feeling animal," with both a cognitive and an affective system. He uses advertising to show the split. Selling a mutual fund means appealing to reason, as in "Here are the seven reasons why you should buy my mutual fund." Selling perfume means bypassing reason: you don't cite Harvard research on the science of smell, you show "a pretty girl on a horse with beautiful hair" next to a brand name.

In this framing, The Parasitic Mind described how "parasitic ideas" hijack the cognitive system and destroy the capacity to think rationally. Suicidal empathy is the second half: "for me to completely zombify you and hijack you, I also need to zombify your affective system." Saad argues that much of what looks like a failure of critical thinking "is really coming from an affective place."

His central metaphor comes from parasitology, the study of host-parasite interactions. A tapeworm parasitizes the gut. Neuroparasites are a subfield: they enter the brain and alter its circuitry to suit their own interests. The wood cricket normally avoids water. When infected by the brain hairworm, it jumps into water and drowns, because that is the only way the hairworm can complete its reproductive cycle. Rogan says the show has aired videos of this and describes the worm wriggling out of the cricket's body. Saad's point is that once the parasite "erases its survival instinct," the host "is owned by the hairworm." He applies that principle to people. When Rogan adds "Including ideas," Saad confirms that this was the origin of the parasitic-ideas concept.

Saad stresses that the thesis is not that empathy is bad. He says the book has already drawn "maybe 10 articles that have been hit pieces," even though it is only now coming out, which to him means the critics haven't read it. He paraphrases them as casting him as a right-wing figure, "an Elon guy, a Donald Trump guy," trying to "promulgate the idea that empathy is a bad thing."

I'm not saying that empathy is bad. Empathy is actually a very important virtue to have.

He cites cognitive empathy as an example of its value. Two people can't have a meaningful conversation unless each can model the other's mind. He links this theory-of-mind ability to autism, saying it is something autistic children typically fail on very early in life and that this is how they are diagnosed. In his view, the problem is only with too little or too much empathy, not with well-modulated empathy.

His model is Aristotle's golden mean. A soldier with too little courage is a coward. One with too much becomes a "reckless martyr." Saad argues that empathy follows exactly the same rule.

Too little of it. You're a psychopath. Too much of it, if it's hyperactive, if it is invoked in the wrong situations toward the wrong targets, you end up with suicidal empathy.

Rogan questions the label itself: "I don't even necessarily know if it's empathy at that point. It completely becomes illogical and ideological." In his view, people adopt whatever the ideology says and ignore reality. His example is the man who pushed someone in front of a train. Rogan describes him as a violent criminal arrested numerous times, "I think more than a dozen." He also mentions a separate case in which someone pushed an old man down a flight of subway stairs and killed him, saying it was the same kind of person, someone who had been in and out of jail.

Rogan acknowledges that such people start as babies and may have grown up with abuse, which he calls horrible. Once they reach adulthood and victimize others, though, "we've got to do something as a society." He hedges on solutions: "I don't know what the tools are to rehabilitate a person like that," though he is sure they aren't being used. He adds that there isn't much evidence of a program that can fundamentally change such a person's personality before release. That is his assertion; he cites no specific study.

Saad calls these offenders "blank slate felons" in the book. The term connects to the social constructivism he criticized in The Parasitic Mind: the tabula rasa premise that people are born with empty minds and no individual differences in potential, so that only life experience and socialization shape them. He grants that this is partly true, since life experience is "an indelible part of who we are." But he maintains that people are born with different proclivities, whether toward crime, playing in the NBA, or becoming "the next Einstein."

The conversation acknowledges why the premise appeals: it is "a very hopeful message," but "it's just not accurate." Saad uses a parent's view to explain the pull. It is more comforting to believe that the right schedule of reinforcement could turn a child into the next Lionel Messi or Albert Einstein than to accept that a son is too short and lacks the athletic tools for the NBA.

Saad then lays out the reasoning he sees in leniency toward repeat offenders. Someone born into what this view calls a white supremacist society has already been victimized, so prison would punish him twice, and he deserves a second chance. Saad's sardonic reply: "And by second chance, we mean 186 chance."

Saad argues that the phenomenon extends to crime victims. His opening example in the book is a Norwegian man who was sodomized by a Somali migrant. Saad attributes the short sentence to Norwegians not believing in long sentences, and he is unsure of its length: "maybe, I don't know, three years or four." When the perpetrator was due to be released and deported, the victim reportedly felt "existential angst and guilt" that the man, sent back to Mogadishu, would not be able to "maximally flourish." Saad's verdict: "our emotional system did not evolve to be empathetic toward our rapist."

Rogan asks what happened. Saad qualifies his answer: "I think, I don't want to misspeak, but I think he was deported," adding "to the screams and lamentations of his victim." A second case involves a woman raped in Germany. According to Saad, she told the authorities her attackers spoke German, although they spoke Arabic and Farsi, because naming the real languages would have marginalized those communities. Saad calls such cases a "litany" and argues that suicidal empathy is "really pervasive once you recognize the mechanism."

Rogan asks where this comes from. Saad describes a "one-two punch": parasitic ideas first prepare "the fertile grounds" in which suicidal empathy can take hold. His example is cultural relativism, which he sums up as "who are you to judge the beliefs and the practices of another culture?" In his account, it silences criticism of honor killings, child brides and female genital mutilation.

He argues that once someone believes it is never appropriate to judge another culture's practices, that person is "impotent" when deciding who should be let into the country and whether to admit more people who hold those views. This leads to what he calls the suicidally empathetic position that all immigrants are equally likely to assimilate into the American or Western ethos, and ultimately to open borders.

Rogan says there is no pressure to assimilate, citing a Somali community in Minnesota "where no one speaks English." He finds it odd that people come to the country and then turn their neighborhood into a smaller version of the place they left. Saad separates two issues. Not speaking English is bad because it keeps people out of the wider social fabric, "but that's not an existential threat." Advocating cultural beliefs that are "perfectly antithetical" to the wider society is, in his words, where "we have a problem."

Rogan says that illogical cultural beliefs are generally rooted in religion, and Saad agrees. Saad then asks whether Americans are now more willing to talk openly about Islam or still act like the proverbial ostrich. Rogan says it splits along party lines. People on the right are willing to discuss it, and few of them are sympathetic to rules such as Sharia law. Many on the left, he says, are "terrified" of being called racist, Islamophobic or transphobic.

Rogan goes further. He argues that the left is quickest and most vicious in accusing people of racism, sexism or homophobia when they reject an established narrative, while also calling others fascists. Most people think of fascism as right-wing authoritarianism, he says, but it also means "a complete adherence to whatever narrative is being promoted." He grants that "left-wing progressive fascism sounds like an oxymoron" but calls it "a mindset" that is hidden inside an ideology its holders believe is righteous. He draws the same parallel to religion, where conviction that something is right can justify extreme acts, giving the example "throw the gay off the roof."

He separates empathy for Palestinians from support for Hamas. Empathizing with Palestinians and believing they "shouldn't be bombed into oblivion" is something he endorses "100%." Groups like "queers for Palestine" crossing into support for Hamas strike him as contradictory, and he says he has seen "trans people for Hamas."

After a brief technical interruption, Saad recounts a street interview that he says the book reproduces as a verbatim transcript. The interviewer's name is not given in the conversation. At what Saad takes to be a Free Palestine rally, a woman says she supports Palestine and that she is queer. Asked what they would do to her, she answers that they would kill her. She still supports them, and when asked whether that bothers her, she says it does not.

the fact that they would kill me doesn't mean that they don't deserve my support

For Saad, this is the wood cricket made literal: "there is no evolutionary mechanism that says, I'm going to build an affiliation with a group that I know would kill me." He sarcastically says she has "ascended to a higher plane of suicidal empathy" by transcending her survival instincts. Rogan agrees that the case is "straight out of what you said."

The argument in this part of the interview rests mainly on anecdotes: subway and train attacks, the Norwegian and German rape cases, a released felon, and one street interview. Names, dates and sources are not given on air. The speakers flag their own uncertainty several times, including Rogan's "I think more than a dozen" arrests, Saad's "three years or four" sentence, and his hedged "I think he was deported." Part of the Rubin example is cut off in the transcript. The claim that rehabilitation programs don't work is offered without evidence. The speakers also don't fully agree on the core concept. Rogan dismisses one example as "signaling," and he questions whether some cases are empathy at all rather than ideology, while Saad frames them as hijacked emotion.

The excerpt opens partway through an exchange. The transcript has no speaker labels, but this section appears to be the host speaking. He argues that some people's views are a reaction to what they see as "a complete destruction of Gaza." In his account, if Gaza were an autonomous, separate state with no conflict and no Israeli control, these people would probably not think the same way. Their mindset, he says, "is coming out of watching the destruction of Gaza." What he objects to is the next step. Instead of opposing the bombing, they "go all the way" and support the ideology of the area's authoritarian rulers, which he calls "kind of kooky."

He then compares this to religious belief, saying "it's much like a religion" because "you can abandon all logic as long as you adhere to" it. He extends the point to the left in general. As he puts it, no one is ever "left enough," the goalposts keep moving, and eventually "any protest of it is heresy." His example is drag performers with children and no parental supervision. He presents it as his own exasperated illustration and offers no further evidence.

And that's where it gets very strange and it behaves completely like a religion.

Saad links the discussion back to his idea of "suicidal empathy" by introducing a concept from his book, "cultural theory of mind." Ordinary theory of mind works between individuals: for two people to have a meaningful conversation, each needs to model what the other is thinking. Saad applies the same principle to whole cultures. If one culture assumes its values are "processed in exactly the same way by the other culture," and that assumption is wrong, he says the culture lacks cultural theory of mind.

His link to suicidal empathy is that the West's prized virtues, which he lists as magnanimity, generosity, kindness and empathy, are read elsewhere as weakness. The only evidence he gives is personal and anecdotal. He says that about 25 years ago in Montreal, Arabic speakers would use a saying that likened the West to a woman to be mounted. When the host asks whether everyone said this, Saad narrows the claim: "not all, but it was a saying that is often, you know, intimated." He adds that people are less candid with him now because they recognize him.

as weakness, weakness, weakness, and weakness.

The host asks Saad to explain his background because it is "very pertinent." Saad was born in Lebanon in 1964 into what he calls the "last remaining minuscule community of Lebanese Jews." He says most Lebanese Jews had left before the civil war began in 1975, when he was 11. Most of his extended family went to Israel, and some went to Montreal, which is why his own family later ended up there. His parents stayed because they were well established in Lebanese society and had a business.