Can The West Be Saved? Lebanese Jewish author Dr. Gad Saad on Suicidal Empathy & Canada’s Fall

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Hello, my friends, and welcome to a special episode of Being Jewish, your home for deeply candid conversations on Jewish identity, culture, and current events

I'm your host, Jonah Platt, and I'm joined today by a newly arrived Jewish immigrant to America, who's enjoyed a storied career as a professor on evolutionary psychology and acclaimed author, most recently of The New York Times number one bestseller, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind

Originally from Lebanon, his family fled Jew hatred to the more liberal pastures of Montreal, from which he recently fled Jew hatred to the less liberal pastures of Mississippi

He's not just a Jew Jew, he's a Jew Jew Jew Jew

Ah

Please welcome Dr

Gad Saad

Thank you so much for, uh, having me, Jonah

So if you would, Dr

Saad, just start by breaking down your thesis

What is suicidal empathy? Right

So first let me explain what I'm not arguing, because most of the detractors who've s- started to attack me have completely misconstrued my position

Empathy is a wonderful virtue to possess

We are a social species

For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put myself in your mind, and vice versa

That's called cognitive empathy or theory of mind

So empathy definitely serves as a social lubricant

It helps us, you know, instantiate our human sociality

But like most things in life, too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good, and much of life is about finding that sweet spot

Aristotle had explained this to us more than a few millennia ago in his Nicomachean Ethics, where he talked about the golden mean

If a soldier is not at all courageous, if he's cowardly, that's bad

If he's too courageous so that he becomes a reckless martyr, he dies quickly, that's not good

And so I applied that principle to empathy

If I have no empathy or very little empathy, that's typically a trait of a psychopath

Right

But if I have too much empathy, if it hyper fires- In the wrong situations, in the, towards the wrong targets, I end up with suicidal empathy

And I'll cede the floor back to you, and I can offer some more explanations of what I mean by that in a second

Yeah, so that's great

That's a, a v- I think very clear, uh, hard to argue with, uh, certainly in those terms

So, if, if you would, I know you, you list several examples throu- throughout the book of sort of here's where the suicidal em- empathic goes, and here is where we should go, and, or rather, here's what's being sacrificed in the name of this suicidal empathy

So if you could lay out a couple of those comparisons you make, some of the key ones

So let me explain how I would exhibit suicidal empathy from an open border perspective

If I internalize the parasitic idea of cultural relativism, which basically argues that there are no human universals, everything has to be, uh, measured according to the idiosyncratic realities of that culture

So if some culture chooses to cut off the clitorises of five-year-old girls, shut up, racist

If some culture wishes to engage in child brides, shut up, racist

So if I internalize that parasitic idea, then downstream it renders me impotent to make a distinction between different immigrants, because then it is wrong and gauche of me to say that Ahmad, who has four wives and who likes to engage in honor killings, is any less likely to assimilate than Elon Musk

So the parasitic idea leads to suicidal empathy

That's why those two books, Parasitic Mind and Suicidal Empathy, are really a one-two punch to explain the abyss of infinite darkness that the West has committed to jumping off

Let's be reasonable

Let's say h- how many people, when you present them i- in, in the real world with those two options, should we allow your, your, you know, hypothetical Muhammad who just trained with Al Qaeda, should we let that person in, come on inside? I can't imagine most people, even the most liberal, are gonna go, "Yeah, bring him in

Everyone deserves it," right? Like, in practice, is that really something that we see? Well, the, your incredulity speaks to one of the phenomena that allows suicidal empathy to flourish, because it seems so outlandish that anyone would support this

Well, let's see if I could come up with, oh, say, 13 trillion examples that speak to your question

There is a guy called Justin Trudeau, who was a walking manifestation of every parasitic idea that I describe in the former book, in The Parasitic Mind, that did the following: Omar Khadr was a 15-year-old guy with his dad At an Al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan

He got caught in a firefight with American soldiers

Omar Khadr, as a 15-year-old, ended up killing a, a American soldier

He was sent to Guantanamo Bay, where he, I think, was levied a 40-year sentence

But then because he was a Canadian citizen, he filed some kind of lawsuit against the Canadian government

They brought him back to Canada from Guantanamo Bay, and Justin Trudeau gave him 10 points… I can't remember the exact number, 10

3 million or $10

5 million of taxpayer money

He took my book royalties and gave them to the innocent camp guy who only killed an American soldier because his rights had been denied when he was sitting in Guantanamo Bay Does that answer your question? Uh, um, was that money that Trudeau gave to him, was that like a court-mandated legal ruling, or that was from the beneficence of his heart? Uh, I think it's the former

So there was some mechanism by which the incredibly empathetic Canadian government decided that after all, he's just a child

I mean, he's just a 15-year-old child

Are we going to really allow the really m- like the real danger when you're Canadian are the mean Southern noisy neighbors called Americans

And so we will not tolerate that kind of cruelty that, such that you whisk a beautiful boy who's only 15 years old, who, okay, fine, sure, he was in Al-Qaeda camp and killed some American soldier, but we're not going to ruin his ability to flourish

I'll give you another example, but I can give you, as I said, I mean, literally, we could spend the next 18 hours doing this

Yeah

Justin Trudeau thought that it is a good idea when ISIS soldiers return to Canada, that we create a program for their noble reintegration into society

Give them a job, give them a purpose, make them feel part of the Canadian ethos and the Canadian team

That is certainly a much more valuable way to reintegrate these ISIS guys than to punish them in the way the cruel Americans would by making them disappear at Guantanamo Bay

So that's the second example, but tell me when you've had enough

Do you know what the result of that attempted reintegration campaign was? Well, one result is that Gad Saad and his family had to flee from Canada because of the number of death threats that I was receiving

I can't pinpoint which death threat comes from which ISIS guy, but I can tell you that the demographic realities in Montreal, Quebec were such that 30 years ago it was very safe and easy to be Jewish

30 years later, it wasn't quite as safe

So it's all part of the beautiful, kind, enlightened empathy of the Canadian ethos

How do you propose discerning sort of where the line is, where somebody is worth an attempted rehabilitation and, and a chance to become a, a participating citizen of the world versus no shot, not gonna risk it- Forget it

You blew it Maybe as related to these kinds of terrorists or anything, uh, or any kind of a- I think, I mean, in general, how do you hold space for the, the clear danger of suicidal empathy while also wanting to, you know, not create more terrorists or more hateful people and, and losing souls who might be reached? Right

It's a moral, philosophical, ethical, and legal question that has many… It's multifaceted

Yeah

But what I can tell you is that whatever positions that we're taking is not where the sweet spot is

So let me give you an example

Right

So when we're talking about criminality, I have … In one of the chapters, I talk about blank slate felons, and let me explain that term

So the blank slate premise in psychology is the idea that we are all born tabula rasa, meaning empty minds, with equal potentiality for anything, right? There's equal potentiality for me to be the next Michael Jordan or to be the next serial killer, and it is only the unique trajectory of the environment that I face that then makes me go in path, path A or path B

So there is no personal agency

There are no biological imperatives

There are no innate differences in potentiality across people according to the blank slate view of the human mind, right? Mm-hmm

And that's why I… That's one of the parasitic ideas that I discuss in my previous book

It's called social constructivism

Everything is due to a social construction

Now, let's suppose I am a A Black male in the United States, and now I'm speaking as someone who is suicidally empathetic

Well, if this Black male has already been punished existentially by being born into the terribly white supremacist society called United States, then he's already been existentially punished

So now you're going to double punish him by actually expecting that there is a cause-effect relationship between his actions and whether we put him away for life? Let's give this guy, this poor blank slate felon, another, a second chance

And by second chance, I mean 197th chance, because I can show you the stats of all of these guys when they are arrested that final time f- you know, and then sent away for life

They usually have 10, 15, 20, 86 previous very serious encounters with the law

So somewhere between you litter on the highway and we execute you, which would be very harsh, to g- granting you a 197th chance is the sweet spot

We tend to be much more towards the 197th

The show is called Being Jewish, after all

Let's bring suicidal empathy to the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist movement now

I think it's clear for most people sort of where the suicidal empathy lies in this area, and towards all sort of Western ideals more broadly, not just for, for Jewish folks

H- how do you reach the anti-Zionist who doesn't feel touched by this, who feels righteous, and feels applauded, and feels they're on the, quote, "right side of history"? Right

It, it, well, it's a, it's a very tough, uh, endeavor to achieve, because as I hinted in last week's Jewish American Summit, uh, meetings, there are certain s- psychological frailties in the architecture of the human mind that makes Jew hatred and anti-Zionism… Yes, people will try to argue, "No, no, no, it's, it's not against Jews, it's really just anti-Zionism

" It's just a new mutated version of, you know, the perennially existing Jew hatred

There are certain features of the architecture of the human mind that makes it almost impossible to eradicate Jew hatred

To put it in the context of suicidal empathy, remember when I defined what suicidal empathy is, I said it hyperactivates

It's the hyperactivation of the empathy module in the wrong circumstances towards the wrong targets

Yeah

Suicidal empathy is targeting your finite tank of empathy towards the wrong targets

So Hamas commits- a brutal day of orgiastic debauchery on October 7th, by October 8th, all of the suicidally empathetic folks are already setting up their empathy towards the poor Gazans

We- they haven't yet retaliated Israel, but it is very clear that the Jews are not deserving of empathy

And, and as you know, this is one of the ways that you rationalize the torture and erasure of a people because you turn them into less than, right? They, they truly are unworthy of your human empathy

Many of the worst suicidally empathetic people are Jewish people, right? And those, those are the ones that I call the wood cricket Jews

Is it, is it worth for us to repeat the explanation on, on this show? Yes, please

I use the neuroparasitological framework both in The Parasitic Mind and Suicidal Empathy, and I use it because it perfectly explains how a parasite can alter the behavior of its host to the complete erasure of the host to suit the reproductive interest of the parasite

So the wood cricket doesn't wanna do anything with water

It abhors water

But when it is parasitized by a hairworm, the hairworm needs the wood cricket to jump into water in order for it to complete its reproductive cycle

So it has literally hijacked the survival instinct of the wood cricket to suit its interest

So then I took that principle, and I argued that many, not just Jews, but s- since we're talking about Jewish issues, many Jews are wood cricket Jews

So when Tal Nitzan argues that the reason why Israeli soldiers don't rape Palestinian women is because they view them as, uh, not even worthy of being raped

So rather than concluding that they are moral, and hence they don't commit rape… That, that was her original goal, by the way, in her research

She wanted to show that there is rampant rape of Palestinian women

When that turned out to, to her great chagrin, to be not true, not a single ma- example was documented, well, then she said, "Well, aha, but that still proves that they are diabolical and evil because, look, men wanna rape women, and the fact that here…" I mean, this is her speaking, I'm guessing

"Uh, the fact that they're not even viewing them as worthy of rape, imagine how othering they are in terms of their mindset

" Well, that's a wood cricket Jew

That is someone who is so hell-bent on jumping into the suicidal empathy pool of self-loathing that she's willing to contort the findings in any way possible to arrive at the same conclusion that she wanted

It's why Anna Epstein, Jewish Anna Epstein at Boston University, was ripping down, a few days after October 7th, ripping down the photos of the babies that were kidnapped

How morally confused must you be that as a Jewish w- Had you been a Jewish woman at that Nova Festival, you would have not been calling Hamas to save you

You would have been begging that the IDF comes to save you from the gang rapes that you're gonna face, and then the bullet in the head

But she is so enlightened, she is so parasitized by suicidal empathy, that the best way to spend her morning or afternoon that day was to, with great disgust and derision, rip down the photos of those disgusting four-months-old Zionists

Suicidal empathy, I hate to say it, is also when the Jewish surgeons said, "Hey, Yahya Sinwar, our Hippocratic Oath supersedes our survival instinct

So we just found out that you're suffering from a brain tumor

Let's spend all of our effort curing you from that brain tumor

" Then he's eventually released from his life imprisonment sentence

And after he has been saved by the hands of Jewish physicians, he repays them

He, he, he looked for empathy in his gas tank, but he couldn't find any

He said, "Well, here is the way that I'm going to repay them from literally saving my life

How about I serve as the architect of October 7th?" One final example, it's the beautiful pe- peaceniks who live at the border of Gaza- Mm who through peace, through reggae music, and by themselves being Jewish and wearing the keffiyeh and doing the dance of John Lennon, they know that there is a nicer pathway forward

Well, then they ended up paying with a bullet in their head, despite the fact that they had spent 30 or 40 years working to create peace between the two communities

So empathy is beautiful, but it has to be tethered to this thing called reality

That's tough

That's harsh stuff

I mean, again, it, it, it… I guess it's, it's about that sweet spot, right? That, you know, obviously, especially you talk about those peaceniks on the border

At least from my point of view, it's not like they had the wrong goals or the wrong aims or the wrong approach

It- although it did Obviously end their lives, but it's hard to know, like, it- what, you know, how do you, how do you admonish those folks for having that sort of optimism and desiring to build bridges on a person-to-person level? Well, okay, so I was invited back to Lebanon many times with very, very high level delegation

"You'll be with the prime minister

You're a hero to Lebanon

We wanna correct the past

You'll be protected

" I entered it into my risk calculus and decided that it wasn't worth the risk

Let's take a less onerous example

Whenever I sit at the cafe working on my laptop on whatever, a paper or the next book that I'm working on, I'm always astounded when I see people head off to the bathroom, leaving their keys, their phone, and their laptop there

When they usually come back, I always say the same thing, "Well, we have two very different conceptions of human nature

You apparently think that most people are incredibly honest, that your phone will not be taken, whereas I tend to think that most people are degenerate, and I will never leave my phone and laptop

" So okay, maybe he's very much nicer than me because he thinks I don't wanna live life thinking that there are thieves in the world, and therefore, the way I'm willing to demonstrate that is by leaving my bank card, and car keys, and phone, and laptop in the open

I live in a different world where I believe that there are thieves

Even though most people are nice, I don't know what's tattooed on your head, therefore I take the precautionary principle

So the peaceniks should have been maybe more precautionary in not thinking that all of their goodwill will get them to live

Regrettably, they found out otherwise

It's a glass half full, glass half empty kind of thing

I'm just curious, a lot of your views are obviously end up being aligned with a lot of the American right

Or even in this conversation, described yourself socially as liberal

Where do you find yourself on the political spectrum? Where would you situate yourself? Right

That, that's a great question, and whenever I'm asked it- Then someone will write to me and say, "Oh, I, I was very disappointed in your answer

You were being evasive and coy

" I'm not at all, because I genuinely am a issue-by-issue guy

I can list you five issues where you would say, "Oh my God, he's a raging liberal

" Liberal not in the classical liberal sense, you know, very, very tolerant of what you do in your bedroom

I don't give a damn, okay? Right

Capital punishment, criminality, immigration, then I am about as right as can be

So it really depends

Now, if we take it in totality, and if you force me to say, "I, I just need to pigeonhole you somewhere, please-" Mm-hmm

"… well, then I'm going to be center right

" Because the totality of issues, if we just added them up and gave them a weight of importance, then I'm probably going to be a lot more on the right

So for example, I do believe that the best way to flourish at the individual level is through capitalism, not through parasitic socialism and communism, because one is more consistent with human nature

Well, does that make me more on the right? I guess so

Uh, I don't believe that a guy who was caught molesting children should be given second chances

If we find your DNA on two, three, four children, you've lost your chance at walking amongst us

I'm not gonna shed tears if we put a bullet in your head

Does that make me right-wing? I guess so

If you wanna dress as Linda and go to gay bars and have indiscriminate sex with other men, good for you, couldn't give a damn

That makes me very liberal

So, you know, it really depends on an issue-by-issue issue, uh, topic

It's too bad, uh, in this country we can't vote that way, as you sort of can in other countries

We got, you got A or you got B, and that's, that's all you got

And so if, if, if you force me into that dichotomy, then it wouldn't be surprising to most viewers to know that I would be voting a lot more Republican than Democrat

Makes sense

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Now, back to the show

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back for part two of my conversation with the visiting professor at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi, Dr

Gad Saad

To quote my favorite TV show, you, sir, are a mouthful Welcome to America

Oh, I, you don't know how happy I am

Yeah

I- I've always said that I am very much, uh, American in spirit

To now have the legal papers to prove it, I'm, I'm delighted

When you say that American in spirit, what does that mean to you? True freedom

Uh, having the, the dignity to be able to defend yourself if someone threatens you

In Canada, it turns out that if I'm threatened in person while walking with my son, uh, the cops gave me the very pragmatic solution of, "Just call 911 if Ahmad is about to decapitate you

" The cops said, "Just call the cops"? Just, yeah, call the cops- … and then we'll come

Oh

'Cause I had asked them, given my unique situation- Right … is there a pathway for me to be able to have some permit to carry some weapon? Hmm

And they said no

So I can't carry pepper spray

I can't carry a knife

I can't carry a gun because I don't have the dignity to protect myself

It is centralized with some higher overlord

You can't carry pepper spray in Canada? I can't carry anything

Wow

Nothing

I didn't know that

Yeah

That's extreme

It seems from what we hear that m- Montreal has sort of been the epicenter and, and where it seems to be the worst, at least from, from what we hear

It is because… And, and there's a very simple explanation

The Quebec government is uniquely worried about its linguist- linguistic identity, right? It's the French heritage

Right

So their biggest existential threat is the mean English language that's going to eat them up

Okay

Here's a great idea

Why don't we let in hundreds of thousands of French-speaking Muslims to Canada, because then if the decapitations happen, they will say at first bonjour to you- before the decapitation

So that really is no problem because it was done in French, and therefore they've maintained their identity

And so what, what you've ended up with is this astounding impetus of immigrants that come from historically very Jew-hostile societies

And so it was only a matter of time where it would become very difficult for someone with my mouth to be able to go to campus and, you know, live out my life

What needs to happen differently here in America so that we don't eventually become Canada? The greatest existential threat to the West is open door immigration

Because what makes a society is not that you have the beautiful Pacific Coast or you've got the Rocky Mountains, it's the unique ethos of the American values that define the society

If you bring in millions of people that don't share those values, give it enough time, and inshallah, we will change those values

And so what needs to happen is for Americans to recognize that all immigrants are not equally likely to assimilate

The reason why most Americans or Westerners in general don't feel comfortable hearing those words is because it feels gauche, it feels intolerant, it feels bigoted

But that's silly, right? I mean, Fido the cat- The house cat is called a feline

The wild lion is also called a feline

The fact that they're both called feline doesn't mean that I'm equally likely to cuddle up with both of them

So Elon Musk is an immigrant

Ahmad, who spent a summer in Waziristan with Al-Qaeda, is also an immigrant

That doesn't mean they're equally likely to contribute

Once you recognize that, then maybe you'll have a more sane immigration policy, and we can turn the ship around

To translate, practically speaking, you think step one should be a focus on immigration policy and trying to focus, you know, as voters, as common people, focus our politicians in that direction

Absolutely

I mean, there are many, many other manifestations- Sure … of suicidal empathy, but none is as big as that

So take, for example, Dearborn, right? Yeah

When I was standing on top of the hill while nobody would listen, screaming in Canada, but also about the US, people said, "Come on, there is no such thing

" Well, today they say, "Oops, I guess Dearborn has fallen

Oh, oops, I guess Paterson, New Jersey, has, has fallen

" But it's still okay because United States is so big

Oops, looks like we have a little Mogadishu in Minneapolis now

So given enough time, you have to have the imagination to e- extrapolate into a distant future

Are you going to fall to Sharia law tomorrow morning? No

But given enough time, 50 years, 100 years, 200 years, you will live in a very different society, or your, your children and mine, or grandchildren, will live in a very s- different society than the one that we live in today

So what you just pointed on is sort of a psychological issue, and I think a lot harder to flip that switch of getting people

We don't naturally live 50 years in the future

Exactly

We have a very hard time connecting that logic to us

It feels totally separate, and that will never have anything to do with us

What can we do to help people get there? Is it just about voices like yours shouting from the mountain? Like, what else is there? Well, it is that

By the way, your point is a very good one, because our inability to do distal calculations applies both forward-looking but also pa- backward-looking

Right

So for example, I apply evolutionary psychology to study human behavior

Many people don't feel comfortable with evolutionary psychology because their first reaction is, "Well, how could you understand why the human mind would have evolved in such a distal past in the way that you're claiming that it's evolved?" So we live in what Richard Dawkins called middle world, meaning that our brains have evolved to process information in the present now, not in a distant future or distant past, at the scale of here rather than at the nano scale or at the cosmological scale

So your point is actually an excellent one

The architecture of the human mind does not equip us well to be able to process that information

Yeah

That's why guys like me end up being heard by a lot of people, because hopefully I slap you out of your stupor

Yeah

We see that so much in the issues we see around the Jewish community today with, "Hey, we've- we've seen this before, you know

This history is repeating itself

" And people can recognize it in a, in a disconnected academic sense of those people were bad

But they can't connect it when they're perpetuating the exact same behaviors now

It- it feels different

It don- they don't see the connection

Yeah, and- and actually, to that point, one of the other frailties of the human mind is the inability to see the monster until it bites you in the behind

Right

Until then, the monster doesn't exist

So there are many very high-profile Jewish people whom I know reasonably well, who are fans of my work, who kept ignoring all my warnings

But then when it hit their favorite alma mater, when their son could not go to- on campus because he was Jewish, that's when they woke up and realized, oh, diabetes does exist

Diabetes doesn't exist until I get diabetes

Right

Then it exists

Well, and the reason is very simple

It's because it's a sc- it's scary to think about these things

So I'd rather bury my head in the sand, as in the proverbial ostrich, even though the ostrich doesn't actually do that

Go la, la, la, I don't wanna hear it

Yeah

And then hopefully the problem will go away

It's not gonna go away

We got issues, man

We got issues

With your many books, you, you speak publicly, you have your own show, The Sad Truth- Is there a specific audience you're trying to reach, or are you just trying to share your knowledge on what you think is important? And are you reaching that audience if there is one that you're trying to get to? Yeah, fantastic question

I don't strategize a priori

You know, my voice resonates is that I'm very authentic

Yeah

I open the laptop, I just saw something by Anne Hathaway, she pissed me off, so I rail on her

Yeah

There was no conscious pragmatic strategizing

But to your second point, I'm much more thrilled when I receive fan letters from the trucker, from the corrections officer, from the military man, because ultimately they are the ones who are going to affect the change

It's not the smarmy, highfalutin Stanford professor that I'm trying to reach

I mean, it's very nice if he writes me a letter too and says, "I, I love your work," but I care a lot more about reaching the, the common person

I'll tell you a very quick story

Please

I was, I was in Oxford, Mississippi a few days ago, and we were doing some bureaucratic thing

And so a gentleman with a pickup truck, kind of classic ol- you know, Oxford, Mississippi guy, hears me speaking with a slightly different accent

"Where are you from?" "Oh, we're from Canada

" "Well, what are you doing here?" "Oh, I'm a professor at Ole Miss

" "What's your name?" So I go, "Gad

" He goes, "Gad what?" I said, "Gad Saad

" So he pauses, he goes- "V Gad Saad?" I go, "Yes?" I'm swear, I'm not saying this to br- He literally starts crying

Wow

He was a veteran, a military man

He says, "Can I hug you?" And he gives me a big hug and says, "Thank God for your work

W- so many of, of us here love you

" That's the guy I'm trying to reach, not the smarmy professor who crosses his legs like Justin Trudeau

Are you trying to reach, you know, the every man because that's where your heart is? Practically speaking, it's the, perhaps, like, the smarmy person who at least if they come to your way of thinking might influence others

You know- Sure … the truck driver's not gonna influence anybody except his own- Yes … small community

So it's a, it's a two-prong approach

I fight within the university ecosystem

That's where I've spent 33 years of my life

So I am, I, I am cognizant of the fact that I have to change the ideas that are being proliferated within the university ecosystem

But in terms of the mass that I can reach, I want to be able to get the average person to feel empowered that when their son or daughter comes home from, from school, and they just found out that men too can menstruate, and men too can bear children, they'll be armed with courage if nothing else, to say, "W- wait a minute

Excuse me, Professor, what do you mean men can menstruate? Can you explain that to me using simple words so I can follow?" And so I want to embolden as many people as possible

That's why, by the way, I use different communication modalities

I can be as fancy and professorial as I need to be, but I also can be a joker, a satirist, a comedian

And again, it's not done with any pragmatic strategizing

I recognize that to reach different people, you have to wear different hats

Mm

All right, so let's get to the, the Cornell story, the juju- Ah, yes … juju story

I'll let you tell it

Okay, great

Not enough people ask me about that story, so thank you

It's a story that I mention in Suicide of Empathy

So first semester at Cornell, I connected with a Lebanese guy, just because I'm Lebanese

Yeah

And he actually, if he ever watches this, thank you for helping me put together all of those IKEA furniture- … Karim, because I'm useless and very non-handy, so thank you

Shout out, Karim

Good job

Thank you, Karim

So through him, I ended up meeting a whole bunch of other Lebanese guys

We ended up becoming friends, and we'd play always pick-up soccer together

One of those, uh, guys one day asked me to go out for a coffee, just one-on-one

Said, "Yeah, sure, let's get together

" So we go out

The first thing he asks me, he sort of paused and says, "You know, Gad, you're, you're a really smart, sharp guy

" I said, "Well, thank you

" He said, "So how come you haven't yet converted to the one true faith?" I said, "If this is what the point of this coffee get-together is, it's not going to go well

" So then he kinda pauses and then thinks, and he goes "You know, Dad, I really like you

" I said, "Well, why do you say that with a bit of hesitancy? Oh, I know

Is it because I'm Jewish?" He goes, "No, no, but I mean, you're not a Jew Jew

" I said, "No, no, I'm a Jew Jew Jew Jew

" Now, what he meant here is that you're not a Jew like the stereotype that I have coming straight out of the womb of what a Jew should be

A Jew should be shifty, should be, he certainly shouldn't be able to play soccer better, better than all of us

He certainly shouldn't be able to speak fluent Arabic and be a cool guy, and, and that I can actually develop positive feelings for, towards him

So therefore, he removes my identity as a Jew

I'm a Jew Jew, but not really Jew

Right

So that became known as the famous Jew Jew Jew Jew story

Yeah, I love that

What does that tell you about the way Jewish identity is, A, sort of being lived by a largely sort of non-religious Jewish community where people don't really necessarily know how to identify them or what those markers are, and how a Jewish person is perceived by those on the outside? Well, the, the only way to get through the second part of your question is to have people view the other, in this case the Jew, as an equal human being

Having grown up in the Middle East, the stories of how everything within the DNA fabric of Middle Eastern society revolves around the hatred of the Jew is simply astounding

And this is in the context of Lebanon, which used to be the pluralistic, tolerant- Right … cosmopolitan country in the Middle East

And even there, the stories that I experienced in my childhood are incredible

The, to your first part about sort of being Jewish, either as a religious Jew or not, I'm not particularly religious, but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who presents themselves m- with greater pride in terms of being Jewish

So I think you can, there are many pathways by which you can be proud and advertise your Jewish identity

Some choose to wear it fill in, as Yossi does, and that's fantastic

Mm-hmm

Others choose to put their lives on the line to fight for Jewish causes

So it all leads to be proud of who you are

Let's go back to what you just said about, you know, the environment that you grew up in in Lebanon

Even briefly, help people understand, like, that you're not being hyperbolic in, in how immersive that atmosphere of Jew hatred is and, and, you know, where it's coming from

'Cause I think, you know, either we hear that and think it's a, a caricature, or we hear it and we don't believe it, and we go, "Oh, y- you know, that's, maybe that's in that one school, or maybe that's that one family

" So h- help paint- Right … the real picture

Sure

So I'm five years old, it's 1970

I've not turned six yet

Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was the President of Egypt, he was a pan-Arabist, meaning he was trying to unify all the Arabs into one monolithic voice

So he was very, very, very much of a populist, revered and loved by many people in the Arab world, passes away of natural causes

As so often happens in the Middle East, people take to the street and start doing these protests and lamentations

As they're coming down with all of this fervor- Down my street in Beirut, Lebanon, which is by the Jewish, uh, quarters, I'm hearing, "Death to Jews

Death to Jews

" I'm five years old, and so I kind of… I'm trying to look

So I turn to my mother, I say, "Why are they saying death to Jews?" She goes, "Don't, don't put your head out

Stay inside

" And so that was my first, you know, uh, memory that I'm cognizant of where I said, "Why are they screaming death to me? Like, what, what have I done?" So that was number one

Number two, I'm about eight years old

Uh, this is before the civil war

The civil war started when I had turned 10

So this is about two years before the start of civil war

The teachers ask everybody in the classroom to stand up and say what you wanna be when you grow up

I wanna be a soccer player

I wanna be a policeman

I wanna be a nurse

I wanna be a doctor

One kid gets up, who clearly knows that I'm Jewish, whom I've been going to school with for several years, says, "When I grow up, I wanna be a Jew killer

" And to everybody's raucous laughter and, uh, clapping

They didn't take him and expel him, it was just like, "Oh, good boy

" Yeah

So that's story number two

Story number three, my brother David, who's 10 years older than me, he's the, the brother who actually has lived in Southern California for many years, was Lebanese judo champion for many years in a row

Wow

And at one point he was visited, this is around 1973, so about two years before the Civil War

He was visited by some men who explained to him that it was time for him to retire, because it's kind of embarrassing for a Jew to be winning all of these athletic competitions

It doesn't look good for us

So they told him, you know, there might be otherwise an unfortunate accident that happens to you

So he understood the, the writing on the wall

He ended up leaving to pursue his judo career and his studies in Paris, France

France has a very big, uh, tradition in judo

So we, we emigrated at the end of 1975 to Canada

It turned out coincidentally that the Summer Olympics were happening in Montreal in 1976

My brother ended up representing Lebanon as a judoka in the 1976 Montreal Olympics

So the same guy who suffered from the terminal illness of being Jewish in 1973, and had to flee Lebanon to continue his career, we can overlook his being Jewish as long as he then carries the Lebanese flag

So those are three, but I can give you another 3,000

Sure

These are the types of realities that you faced in the most cosmopolitan and modern of Arab societies

Right

You went on Joe Rogan's podcast, uh, somewhat recently, and you said it, it became impossible for you to be a high-profile Jewish professor who supports Israel

Which part of that was harder? The, the Jewish professor part or the supports Israel part? Uh, I mean both, but certainly the one that instigates the greatest immediate visceral animus is to support the genocidal Zionist regime and so on

And so it was very hard because outside the campus, outside literally the building where I was, there'd be a, a thousand guys with keffiyehs and so on

E- everybody recognizes me, so I, I literally can't go to campus

And so the last semester that I taught at my university, and then I took a leave

I took, I had a sabbatical, then I took a two-year leave, and now I, I've left, I resigned

Mm

That last semester that I taught was the semester of October 7th

My wife, who's not, uh, she's not an Amazonian woman that looks like a big bodyguard

She's a beautiful- little feminine woman was so worried about something happening to me, she would come on campus with me and walk behind me to make sure that nobody could come from behind me to knife me

Now, imagine that I'm saying this in the 21st century in Canada

Wow

So that gives you a sense of how things can change very quickly

There's that, this sense, you know, that if it's happening to Jews, it's gonna happen to you

We've al- long talked about Jews as sort of this canary in the coal mine, th- this indicator that society is going down

As you said earlier, that light doesn't click on for people until it happens to them

Yeah

So the warning often falls on deaf ears

H- how do we tap in upstream to start baking in some pattern recognition so we don't wait until the tragedy happens and, and we can get ahead of it, or, or are we doomed, and it's gonna take some sort of- Yeah … tragedy to wake people up? So I've got good news, I've got bad news

Yeah

Okay? The good news is that there, there are a set of auto-corrective interventions that the West can implement that will right the ship

Tell us

Yes

Well, we spoke about one already

Yeah

Change your immigration policies

Right

Deport people who hold beliefs that are antithetical to the foundational principles that we're founded on, right? Uh, you don't have the right under freedom of religion to scream at your house of worship, "Death to Jews" all day long because that's in your religion

You don't get that freedom, right? That- that's an incitement to violence, right? Mm-hmm

So there's gotta be a click in people's minds that just because an ideology cloaks itself under the robe of a religion doesn't make it an untouchable for all t- eternity, right? You have to be able to kind of put on the big boy pants and recognize that

The Jains are called a religion

Well, the Jains are such pacifists that when they walk on the sidewalk, they have a broom that they use, lest they might inadvertently step on an ant

That's how pacifist the Jains are

Well, Islam is not quite as pacifist, and so recognizing that all religions are not equally likely to coexist within a pluralistic society is certainly a start

But let me go back to the positive, uh, the good news and bad news

Yeah

So the good news is if you go to see your physician, and he or she says, "You've got this rare cancer, and you've got four weeks to live

Get your life in order," then that is the worst of possible news

There is no intervention

We're not there yet

There are intervention strategies

Here is the bad news

You ready? Yeah

I see zero evidence that the West is, has the testicular fortitude to implement one millimeter of what is necessary

So what's the point of me having the cure for your cancer if then your answer is, "Well, I don't have cancer, and anyways, cancer is a Zionist plot-" and it doesn't affect me, and there is no such thing as cancer"? Well, then you're gonna die

Yeah

So that's the problem with the West

I fear that by the time the West wakes up- It, it may not be too late for us to completely lose the society, but the intervention will come in a much more violent form than it would have had, had we intervened 20 years ago

Oh, all right

Pretty cheery stuff, huh? Yeah, I know, it's amazing

All right, so you're now newly arrived in America

What do you hope your America chapter looks like for you? Well, to continue meeting fantastic people, to continue having an influence in the battle of ideas, uh, to give my children and wife an opportunity to flourish under the freedoms that are afforded in the United States that unfortunately we don't have in Canada

Many people think that I, I have this deep animus towards Canada

Not at all, right? I'm forever grateful to Canada

They're the ones who said welcome when we were trying to flee a very difficult situation

Yeah

And for that, I'll be eternally grateful

But that doesn't mean, if I'm an honest person, that I'm not going to tell you, "But here are the things that Canada is doing wrong

" So this socialist ethos that now is really seeping into the, into the United States, in Quebec, we've had that for 50 years

In Quebec, it's simply unfair that some people make more money than other people, so they're, so the empathetic government is going to come take away from the rich people so that then we can create income equalization across everybody and we can all hold hands and sing Kumbaya

I don't support that, right? Because I am the guy that you go and suck off all the money from in order to implement your empathetic equal society

I prefer to be in a place like Mississippi, where… Do you know what the tax rate in Mississippi is? I do not

4%

That's the income tax rate? That's the income tax rate, and they're trying to take it down to zero so that they can compete with other, uh, southern states like Tennessee, like Florida, like Texas

So I go from a place where on the aggregate you're taking 60, 70% of my income, and I can go to another place where you only take 4%

It doesn't take a fancy psychologist to tell us where I wanna be

To be fair, isn't Mississippi also the poorest state in the, in the United States? Uh, I mean, historically, yes- it has some bad metrics, but recently, for example, it shot up in the educational rankings

I think it's now number four

Whoa

I'm curious, what have you come to Mississippi to teach? You know, what, uh, and, and are you involved beyond your professorship with any other organizations or movements or, or sort of grander scaled-up projects to espouse your, your teachings to the world? Oh, thank you so much for that question

Uh, so I'm at the, as you mentioned, it, it is a mouthful, I'm at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom

And so in terms of my teaching duties, I'm taking the content from The Parasitic Mind and Suicidal Empathy and teaching a course on how sort of the mind vaccine to inoculate you against many of the principles that then erode American freedoms

So that's sort of my pedagogic responsibility

But to your point, there is a greater mission, and that is to try to take the template- That stems from the DOIC, that's the acronym for the center

That stems from the DOIC, and allow it to sprout on many other university campuses, right? Now, as it turns out, most of these types of centers that are trying to retake, uh, the edifices of reason from the lunatics, which regrettably is where m- most of all of these ideas were spawned on university campuses, all of these centers, f- and we can, we can speculate what are the reasons for that, are really universities in the South

So, you know, University of Florida has the Hamilton Center

University of Tennessee at Knoxville has … I can't remember what the name of the center, but a similar center

At University of Mississippi, Declaration of Independence Center

So there is something unique in the water in the American South that is that has them a lot more tethered to the foundational principles of American freedom and liberties

And so my goal, given the, or m- one of my responsibilities, is to really use my platform

I mean, most professors don't have the reach that I do

And so to be able to come on your show and then l- you know, later go on another top show and spread those ideas, get people to be aware of what we're doing at Ole Miss, i- is one of the fundamental responsibilities that I have at Ole Miss

You mentioned, you know, s- there's something in the water in the South

It seems like the, the ideal destination we should be hoping to arrive at, at least as an, as Americans, is being able to hold the complicated history of America and the, and the places where we have erred in the past, and there are many, and hold that alongside what's great about America and what's great about it today, and remains great, and where we can still improve

And it seems like our problem is when it's too much of the former or too much of the latter, which seems to be the theme of today's conversation

Great spot

There it goes

In the happiness book, I had a whole chapter on the inverted U curve

Inverted U means too little is not good, too much is not good, and the, the, the inflection point, the top point, is somewhere in the middle

And what I demonstrate in, in that chapter is that it applies across a bewildering number of phenomena

At the cellular level, at the neuronal level, at the individual level, at the economic level, ecological level

So of all possible universal laws in nature, I argue that there's probably none that is more explanatory of as many phenomena as the inverted U

By the way, since we're on a Jewish themed podcast

Maimonides also referenced the inverted U

He called it, I think, the middle way

And Aristotle recognized it

In Buddhist philosophy, you h- you also have it

Maimonides also explained it

So to your point, there's somewhere between being orgiastically self-loathing as a society and being so unequivocally proud that, so much so that you never admit to your historical wrongdoings, where the sweet spot is

In the little time we've got left, we're gonna talk briefly about a book that you've been mentioning throughout already, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense

But if you wanna hear that part of our conversation, you need to be part of my insider community, the Kehillah

You're gonna get access to exclusive weekly content, merchandise for Kehillah only, free tickets to my live events, and online office hours, personal FaceTime with me and other members of the community, and a whole lot more

So after this episode, please head to beingjewishpodcast

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Now here comes a transition

Now we're gonna end the episode, as I like to do, with a quick little lightning round

Lighten things up a little bit, keep it simple

Beirut or Montreal? Montreal

Montreal or Mississippi? Mississippi

Favorite Jewish holiday? Kippur

How come? It just seems, as is true canonically, that there is a direct line to, to God

It's a moment of reflection, and what could be better than to have all of the bad odor of people's mouths blowing into your face while you're at the synagogue? That's beautiful, isn't it? If you could have any Jewish figure from history over for Shabbat dinner, who would it be? Oh, I love that question

Probably Maimonides, and the reason for that… I mean, there are several reasons, but I'll give the most important reason

My favorite historical figure that I would wanna invite is Leonardo da Vinci

Mm

And the reason why I would invite Leonardo da Vinci is because he's a true polymath

He's both a sculptor, and an artist, and an anatomist, and an engineer, and a futurist

There is no end to h- to where he'll go to pursue his intellectual and artistic endeavors

Well, Maimonides was a physician to the sultan, was a philosopher, was a rabbi, so there is no end to where he will go to contribute positively to society

So for me, Maimonides is the guy I'm s- I'm having a tete-a- tete-a-tete with

I love that answer

Are there any Saad family Jewish traditions that you guys enjoy? Oh, the… Another great question

Well, we really do try to adhere to the as much as we can be together, we will try to be together

So I'll give you a s- so for example, last week when I had the pleasure of meeting you in person at the Jewish American Summit, I didn't bring my family with me just because it was such a short stay

Mm-hmm

But from very, very young, when the kids were, I mean, literally f- two, three, four, I made it a goal, quest- To always try to bring them to these functions, so much so that today they're, they're now teenagers, they say that we learn more in terms of our personal development coming to these events with you than we do, you know, in a whole semester in high school, whatever

And so I think this kind of unbreakable unit that we present to the world as the Sads is something that I hold very dear, and whenever I break it by traveling alone, I always feel bad because I say, "Oh, they could have met Jonah Platt

They didn't get a chance to meet him

" So I would say that that's probably the, the main Sad ritual that we do

Who is one of your teachers? Well, uh, academically or j- personal life? In, in life right now, who i- who is a voice that you look to to inform your thinking? So I'm gonna give one now, and I'm gonna give one who no longer is with us

I'll start with the latter

Uh, I'll show you here a little … This is the Darwin wall

Mm

So it's kind of difficult to be an evolutionary behavioral scientist without having great reverence for Charles Darwin

With that beautiful, elegant explanation, he explains how every single biological species has evolved on earth, flora and fauna

So it's kinda hard not to, uh, be shaped by his work

So that would be past

Current, the guy that I most admire, because of my public commentary, would be undoubtedly Thomas Sowell, who is still alive

Thomas Sowell was slapping the wokesters, we didn't, we didn't call them wokesters in the '60s, when I wasn't even born

He- you could go and check clips of him, you know, taking on, you know, some radical feminist, whatever, very calmly, with reason, with empirical findings, right, and so on

And so I love the way he carries himself

He's incredibly dignified

Amazing

We'll definitely check him out

What is one attribute, the one attribute that humanity is most in need of today? The West is a unique experiment in the buffet of societies that has ever existed

There is a tremendous number of things that the West should be proud of

And I- when I say the West, it, it even is more so for America, because America does not suffer from suicidal empathy as much as the rest of the West does, because it does have First Amendment, Second Amendment, and other inoculation mechanisms

And I would wish that people would be proud of what they were born into

The reason why, in many cases, it takes immigrants such as myself, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to be some of the most vociferous defenders of the Western tradition is because unlike you, y- you're born into these freedoms, and therefore you assume that they are the default value

It's the same in Bosnia, and it's the same in Mali, and it's the same in Lebanon

No, it isn't

Throughout history, this is a very, very small bleep of an anomaly, and therefore don't take it for granted

Be proud of you, what you have, and fight for those liberties and hence activate your inner honey badger

Fantastic

And the last question that I ask of all my guests: challah, rip or slice? Oh, uh, no, let's go with the Neanderthal rip

Delicious

All right, Dr

Saad, thank you so much for speaking with me not once, but twice

It's been a real pleasure, and wishing you all the best in your new home

Likewise, thank you

And some of your questions were truly unique, and that's a big compliment because I've spoken to every imaginable person, so to be surprised by a novel question, you're doing a good job

I really appreciate that

Thank you so much

Cheers

His newest book is Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, out now wherever books are sold

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All right, that's it for me

I'll see y'all right back here for the next empathetic episode of Being Jewish with me, Jonah Platt