How Good Intentions Are Destroying Civilization | Gad Saad
The Rubin Report
Emma Dog Productions
4.6 • 14.2K Ratings
🗓️ 6 June 2026
⏱️ 50 minutes
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Summary
Dave Rubin of "The Rubin Report" talks to Gad Saad about his new book Suicidal Empathy and how empathy, when detached from reason and critical thinking, can be manipulated to advance destructive ideas; why social media, emotional appeals, and ideological activism often bypass logic and exploit human psychology; the connection between The Parasitic Mind and Suicidal Empathy as explanations for how both cognition and emotions can be hijacked; the psychology of persuasion, evolutionary biology, academia, and why many institutions increasingly reward feelings over facts; how Elon Musk helped popularize the concept of suicidal empathy in the broader culture; why he believes America remains more resilient than Canada and the United Kingdom due to the First Amendment, Second Amendment, and a stronger culture of individual liberty; how mass immigration, multiculturalism, anti-meritocratic policies, and the "red-green alliance" between progressives and Islamists are transforming Western societies; threats to free speech, Western values, and national identity; his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, their debate over Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and the history of the Middle East; why Saad believes Rogan has been influenced by voices in the podcast world that are increasingly critical of Israel; the rise of the "woke right," online political tribalism, and misinformation; and why he fears Canada and Britain are accelerating toward cultural and political decline, and much more.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There is a feature of suicidal empathy. Of course, it's very much related to narcissism. |
| 0:05.4 | The fact that the downstream effect of this orgiastic narcissism is that my society will go to hell, |
| 0:11.4 | that's fine. Academia should be about the epistemology of truth. Once the universities |
| 0:16.4 | became feminized, then what took over in many cases is what's called the epistemology of care. |
| 0:23.7 | And that's what results, by the way, in something called forbidden knowledge, right? |
| 0:27.2 | Forbidden knowledge is the idea that if some research is going to end up hurting someone, |
| 0:33.9 | you shouldn't be publishing those results because those people might stand the possibility |
| 0:38.5 | of being marginalized. Using the nomenclature of, you know, stage one, stage two, stage three, |
| 0:44.2 | stage four that you would use for the metastasis of cancer. Canada is in the very, very |
| 0:49.8 | rarefied world of stage five, of suicidal empathy. Britain is stage five. United States is stage |
| 0:56.5 | two, but galloping quickly to try to make up ground. And I'm not being hyperbolic. It will be the |
| 1:03.0 | end of Western civilization because the architecture of the human mind is such that it avoids |
| 1:08.3 | this stuff until the monster literally bites you in the ass. If we really lose |
| 1:13.4 | this, we will all be living in communist countries and never able to say what we think and all |
| 1:20.1 | of the horrible things that we think. Joining me today is not only the most all-time returning |
| 1:35.8 | guests in the history of the Rubin Report, but now number one. |
| 1:40.9 | Best-selling New York Times author, my friend, and author of the new book, Suicidal Empathy, |
| 1:48.0 | Dying to be kind, Dr. Gad said, Gad. How is that for an intro? Which one of those means more to you? |
| 1:55.0 | Most ever returning Rubin Report guest or number one New York Times? |
| 2:01.0 | That's a tough one. That's a tough one. |
| 2:02.5 | That's a tough one. |
| 2:03.6 | Can I be honest and say the New York Times only because I could imagine how painful it was |
... |
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