Gad Saad: When Empathy Becomes Dangerous
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2026
⏱️ 90 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Gad Saad returns to discuss his new book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, a provocative argument that empathy is not a moral trump card. Empathy can illuminate suffering, but it can also distort judgment when it is treated as an unquestionable virtue, applied selectively, or insulated from consequences.
Saad's central claim is that many Western institutions have learned to treat compassion as a substitute for judgment. In practice, he argues, this can mean extending sympathy toward the wrong targets (for example, criminals over victims), excusing destructive behavior, rewarding ideological conformity over truth, or denying uncomfortable facts in the name of kindness. The result is a moral framework that feels humane in the moment but can produce outcomes that are unfair, irrational, or even dangerous.
The conversation covers cultural relativism, islamism, suicide cults, kamikaze pilots, immigration and foreign aid, forbidden knowledge, and why some ideas spread and take hold while others fade away.
Gad Saad is a professor and an evolutionary behavioral scientist. He has authored numerous scientific papers and pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. In addition to his scientific work, he often writes and speaks about idea pathogens that are destroying logic, science, reason, and common sense. He is the host of The Saad Truth podcast. His new book is Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Let me define what suicidal empathy is, because then it speaks to that calculus of who is more deserving of the empathy, the woman with the nine-inch penis or the woman with a vagina, right? |
| 0:12.0 | So suicidal empathy really has three parts to it. |
| 0:15.4 | There is the hyper-firing of empathy. |
| 0:18.5 | It's hyperactive. |
| 0:20.2 | There is the invoking activation of empathy in the wrong |
| 0:24.3 | situations toward the wrong targets. It's really all these three things that makes the perfect |
| 0:30.4 | cocktail of suicide empathies. The West has decided that not only it doesn't want to be, |
| 0:35.5 | quote, Islamophobic, and I say quote Islamophobic, because |
| 0:38.5 | there's no such thing as Islamophobia. It's perfectly rational to be deeply concerned about |
| 0:43.2 | some of the central tenets of Islam if you're a Westerner, but the West has decided they want |
| 0:47.7 | to be orgeastically Islamophilic, loving of Islam, right? Demography is destiny, right? |
| 0:54.1 | America is America not because it has |
| 0:57.1 | the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean, or it has the Rockies, or it has the Everglades. America is an |
| 1:03.3 | idea that is internalized by a people come together. If you bring people that do not literally |
| 1:10.5 | share this within every fiber of their DNA, they're not going to assimilate. |
| 1:20.4 | All right, everybody, it's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of The Michael Shermer Show. Hey, you're not going to believe who we have today. My returning champion, |
| 1:28.0 | Gadsad is here with his new book. All right, but I got to give him a proper introduction. You all know |
| 1:32.7 | who he is already, but he's one of the best known public intellectuals fighting the tyranny of political |
| 1:37.8 | correctness. He is formally, not the first to announce on this podcast world, because I heard you on |
| 1:43.7 | Rogan, |
| 1:49.2 | but formerly a professor of marketing at the John Moulson School of Business and Concordia University, |
| 1:55.8 | where he once held the research chair in evolutionary behavioral sciences and Darwinian consumption, |
... |
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