The Eric Metaxas Show - #183 - Gad Saad

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, evolutionary behavioral scientist Gad Saad joins Eric to discuss his new book Suicidal Empathy: Dying To Be Kind. Saad explains why empathy is necessary but can become destructive when it is detached from reality, and how cultural relativism, postmodernism, open-border thinking, elite “luxury beliefs,” and civilizational self-doubt are weakening the West. He also explains why he remains both optimistic and deeply concerned about whether Western societies will act in time to reverse the trend.⭐ ORDER NOW:Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World📕: https://a.co/d/0ir3NlapTODAY'S SPONSORS:🪙 Grace Precious Metals: https://www.metaxasmetals.com/🛏️ MyPillow — Save BIG with code ERIC: https://www.mypillow.com/☀️ Honest, fast, and free Medicare plan guidance: https://askchapter.com/metaxas/0:00 Gad Saad Joins1:54 What Is Suicidal Empathy?3:24 Gad Saad’s Story And Academic Background9:23 When Empathy Becomes Dangerous15:06 Open Borders And Suicidal Empathy18:10 Is The West Committing Civilizational Suicide?20:22 Cultural Relativism And The Loss Of Judgment22:40 “Luxury Beliefs” And Elite Hypocrisy27:10 Can The West Still Save Itself?- - -LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/@ericmetaxas#EricMetaxas #TheEricMetaxasShow #News #PoliticsChapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan’s contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don’t directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

Hey there, folks. Welcome to the program. My guest today spells his name G-A-D. That's the first part. And then it's S-A-A-D. And I believe it's pronounced GADSOD. One thing I can tell you is he will know the right answer to that. That'll be my first question to him.

He has a new book out. I'm sure you've heard of it. It's called Suicidal Empathy. And he is my guest right now. Gad Saad, welcome. Great to be with you, Eric. Thank you for having me. Am I close enough?

Let me give you the actual Middle Eastern pronunciation, and then we can do the Angu-Sized version. So it's God. It's between Gad and God. God, it's a Hebrew name, one of the 12 tribes of Israel. And then Saad is a Ayan, which is a sound that typically Westerners can do.

It comes from the deep throat. So it's sad. But since most people can't pronounce it this way, you just extend the sad. You make it sad. But you realize we live in America. I do. So my name, my name in Greek would be pronounced erikos metaxas. So I'd be Mr. Metaxas.

But I'm not in Greece. So I don't say, you know, I'm flying to Athena. I say I'm flying to Athens. So my name is Eric Mataxis. So, okay, so the anglicized version of your name is gad sod. That's good. Good enough. Good enough.

Well, how do we pronounce the title of your book? Suicidal empathy, dying to be kind. Dying to be kind. This is such an important idea. I'm really thrilled finally to have you on to talk about it. So what was it that led you to write the book? Because we can talk about the thesis, and we will. But what led you to write the book?

Right. So it's really a two-step narrative. Human beings are both a thinking animal and a feeling animal. So in my earlier book, my 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind, I explained how parasitic ideas can hijack our cognitive. system, our thought processes. But in order for me to completely own your capacity to engage in critical thinking or lack thereof, I also have to hijack and parasitize your emotional system, and that's where suicidal empathy comes in. So it's really something that stemmed from having

spent so far 32 years as a professor, where I saw firsthand where all of these dreadful ideas were spawned, which is on university campuses, because it uniquely takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas. And so my goal was to demonstrate through these two books that once I can parasitize your thoughts and your emotions, I own you. So I want a little bit of your background, not just for me, but mainly for my audience that might not be familiar with you. Where did you grow up and how did you get to do what it is that you're now doing? Right. So I was born in Lebanon. We were part of the last dwindling, minuscule number of Jews that were, not Druze, not D-R-U-Z-E, Jews, J-E-W-S. To many people surprised, there are Jews in Arabic-speaking countries. There was once Iraqi Jews and Egyptian Jews and Algerian Jews and, you know, Lebanese Jews. Of course, most of these have magically discered. disappeared. And so my family and I were part of this last community. Much of my extended family

had already left Lebanon by the late 60s. But my parents were well entrenched within Lebanese society, so they refused to read the proverbial writing on the wall. And then finally in 1975, when the very bloody civil war broke out in Lebanon, it unfortunately became impossible to be Jewish in Lebanon. And so So we escaped having experienced some very difficult moments during that first year to Civil War. Then I moved to Montreal, Canada, pursued my education, and then ended up a professor in Canada. I studied in the United States for my MS and my PhD, but then I returned to Canada. What were your degrees in? So my undergraduate was in mathematics and computer science.

That was at McGill, which is, they call it the Harvard of the North, although I don't. I don't know if I want to... You don't want to have anything to do with Harvard. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. It's known for its plagiarism, chiefly, at this point. Yeah.

And Cambridge. So, anyways, so I did my BSC in mathematics computer science. Then I did an MBA also at Miguel with a mini-thesis and operations research, which is an applied mathematics field. You learn how to develop mathematical algorithms to solve optimizations to solve optimization. problems. And then I went to Cornell. I did my MS and PhD. My doctoral dissertation was in psychology of decision making. So what I was looking at were the cognitive strategies that people use in deciding when to stop acquiring additional information and commit to a choice. So for example,

if I'm choosing between two women to marry or two apartments to rent or two political candidates to vote for, I could acquire an innumerable amount of information on these people, on these choices, but I don't, right? At some point, I've seen enough to choose the Mazda or to marry. Actually, actually, you know that's not true entirely. There are some people who never choose. They, they can't. I mean, surely you've seen that phenomenon. Yeah, I mean, so that would be, I don't know if what you're referring to is decision paralysis. There are some people who, You're right, who are such utility maximizers that they actually need to acquire all of the available information before they commit to a choice. And even there, to your point, they might, you know,

delay and so on. But for most people, we wouldn't be able to carry on our daily tasks if we were to spend an infinite amount of time, you know, making every possible decision that comes our way. So we use instead what are called stopping strategies. In other words, I've now seen. seen enough information, I'm stopping acquiring additional information, and I'm buying this car or renting this house and so on. And so I looked at those stopping strategies. So that was my original training. But then once I became a professor, I wanted to marry two of my interests, evolutionary psychology, which is the application of the evolutionary lens to the study of the human mind. Why did the human mind evolve to be the way that it is? And I wanted to apply that

to study economic and consumer decision-making. And so I founded a new discipline, which I called evolutionary consumption, which is the application of biological principles to study our consumatory nature. I hope I haven't bored you to death. Unfortunately, well, fortunately, I should say, you have not, not at all.

Are you familiar with the work of Dennis Noble at Oxford University? Dennis Noble, no. Usually it would be hard to come up with an academic reference that I wouldn't know, but no, tell me about him. He's 89 years old. I just interviewed him for Socrates in the city.

And he, in 1966, I'm sorry, in 1960, he came up with the first mathematical model of the human heart. And in 1966, he sat on the, I'm not sure what it's called, you know, the dissertation board to oversee the dissertation of Richard Dawkins. I think something which perhaps now he regrets somewhat. But in any event, he's kind of come out against neo-Darwinism. He's not a person of faith, but it's absolutely fascinating conversation. And Dennis Noble is someone I think you'd be interested in. We'll put that conversation. There are many videos of him out.

You don't have to wait for mine. But in any case, when somebody mentions evolutionary biology, I'm curious. Okay, so this new book, suicidal empathy. I guess I'm probably confusing it with my friend Ali Beth Stuckey's book, Toxic Empathy. Toxic empathy. And I'm sure there's a relation there because suicidal, I think of it as toxic.

But what was the process that led you to be? I mean, first of all, describe, if you don't mind, what you mean by suicidal empathy. Yes, thank you for that question. So there are many psychiatric disorders that are due to a maladaptive misfiring of an otherwise adaptive process. And so let me explain what I mean by it. So take, for example, cancer cells. They multiply, as do regular healthy cells, except that the cancer cells, earlier we were talking about stopping strategies. They have lost the stopping mechanisms to stop replicating, right?

And so what started off as an adaptive process becomes deeply maladaptive when it misfires. Let's apply it to the psychological realm. And then I'll link it back to empathy. Take for example if you and I, Eric, were to finally meet. I think we did meet once in person. We met in the lobby of a hotel. You were kind of up to say hello. Was it an Austin?

I actually don't remember. All these hotel lobbies, you know. Look the same. seemed the same to me somehow. Yeah, I'm sure it was not Austin. Okay, maybe. I'm sure it was not Austin. Let's suppose I were to meet you at a party,

and I noticed that prior to coming to shake my hand, you had been coughing incessantly into your hand. Well, then I'm going to code that, head off to the bathroom, hopefully when you're not noticing, wash my hands because I don't want to catch Eric's cold. Now, that was an adaptive process in that I scanned the environment

for potential environmental threats. Once the warning flag went up, I tended to it, and then it went down, and then I go on with my day. Now, imagine the misfiring of this adaptive process, which is called OCD. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, specifically germ contamination fears,

will keep the person. I washed my hands once, and then I moved on with my day. The OCD person is stuck in an infinite loop where they're washing their hands for eight hours a day because they can't extricate themselves, from that ritual. Well, I argue exactly the same mechanism occurs with empathy. We know from, I know your other initiative is called Socrates in the city, I'm going to reference another ancient

Greek. Aristotle explained to us in Nicomacian ethics about the golden mean, too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good, and much of life is about finding that sweet spot. Well, if you have no empathy or little empathy, you could potentially be a psychopath. If you have too much empathy, it's misfiring, it's hyper-firing towards the wrong targets and the wrong situations, you end up with suicidal empathy. So it's simply not true that empathy is a linear relationship. More is always better. It's an inverted you.

And that's how I came up with suicidal empathy. When we look at the headlines coming out of Iran and Israel right now, the fog of war is real. It's hard to know whom to trust. That same feeling of confusion often hits home when you're trying to navigate Medicare. There are so many bad actors in this space looking to capitalize on confusion rather than provide clarity. That's exactly why I am proud to partner with Chapter. Chapter acts as a trusted advocate, helping you cut through the noise to understand your Medicare options. Unlike most agents who only show you a few plans, Chapter looks at every plan nationwide. They're completely unbiased and focus on what's best for you, not the insurance

companies. If you're turning 65 or just have questions about your current coverage, give them a call at 571-421-1253. That's 571-421-1253. It's free, it's quick, and it's the kind of honest guidance we need more of today. Call chapter and get the peace of mind you need. that yes yeah at some point uh i mean the jesus says that you know we're to do unto others as we would have others do uh unto us so clearly you have to have some healthy sense of ego that you care about yourself and if you care about yourself in a healthy way you can care about others in a healthy way but if you don't care about yourself at all you only care about others obviously there's something sick going on or if you care about yourself too much so we don't talk about that

very much so thanks for bringing that up this idea of a good golden mean. I believe that idea was picked up by the brothers Grimm in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears or whoever wrote Goldilocks and the Three Bears. But it's, it is something that we don't talk about a lot because we tend to think of virtues. My friend John Zmirak has written about this, but that we tend to think of virtues as things that wouldn't it be great if you were just all about, you know, X or Y or Z? And you think, well, no, at some point it can, it can work against itself. So empathy, toxic empathy or suicidal empathy, that seems to be what we're dealing with. And I guess this is why you wrote your book, because you've seen it in the culture. So talk about

that, where you've seen examples of this in the culture. So you basically laid out the exact structure of the book, which is I first explained what, you know, well-modulated empathy is. And by the way, what I just said demonstrates the fact that I'm not against empathy, period, right? Empathy is actually a evolutionarily selected trait. We are a social species, and we use empathy as a social lubricant for you and I to be able to have a meaningful conversation, Eric. I need to put myself in your mind, vice versa. That's called theory of mind. So there is nothing wrong with well-calibrated empathy.

So I begin the book. I explain empathy. I then explain the framework for suicidal empathy. And then the rest of the book is an answer to your question, which is, what are some examples of suicidal empathy? Well, of course, we could cover a whole bunch of them, but let's begin with the one that I think is the most existentially egregious, this idea that we should be empathetic to all people from anywhere

in any situation that wish to come and be part of the West in general and the United States in particular. I mean, that's a very nice thing. It's beautiful kumbaya. It's a piece through reggae music, but it is not tethered to reality, right? All immigrants are not equally likely to assimilate within the ethos of the Western tradition.

Yes, it's true that Elon Musk is an immigrant. Yes, it's true that God Saad is an immigrant. But the fact that we are called immigrants doesn't mean that Muhammad and Ahmed, who just came back from a summer camp in Waziristan, with al-Qaeda, because they're also called immigrants, means that we're all equally likely to flourish and contribute positively to our society.

This is like arguing, by the way. I mean, it's an extraordinary categorization error. This is like arguing because Fido, the cat is a feline, and the wild lion in Namibia is a feline, since they're both called feline, I'm equally likely to cuddle up with both of them because clearly they're as dangerous as one another, because they're both called felines.

And so that would be a manifestation of the most egregious form of suicidal empathy. Please, everybody come in and hopefully things will sort out. They won't. It's fascinating to me because it makes me think of Tom Holland's book, Dominion, where at the end, I think it's the last chapter,

he talks about how wokeism is, he doesn't say it, but basically is a Christian heresy. In other words, it's a particular kind of error that would arise from Christianity. It is not, in fact, Christian, but it's a Christian heresy. And that's what we're talking about, to some extent, here that everyone should be kind. Everyone should be able to care about your neighbor or care about the stranger.

You know, these are biblical ideas. They're not central to every culture, but these are biblical ideas. and yet somehow, if you don't take them in context and take the rest of what the scripture says in recommending how we live our lives, it becomes hyper-trophied and actually sick, which you were mentioning earlier. And so I guess the question is, why do we think this has happened at this point in Western culture? Is this just a general sign of decline and decline? softness, like the late stages of the Roman Empire,

where you become so comfortable that you're kind of looking for trouble almost, you're looking for something else to do, extra credit. Yes, I mean, a bit of everything that you said and a bit more. So Arnold Toynbee, the famed British historian, wrote a 12-volume set on why civilizations fail. And the sort of summarizing maximum of that 12-volume, which, by the way, I quote right off the bat at the start of societal empathy

is he says, civilizations die not by murder, but by suicide. Yeah. Right? And now what I am explaining in my book is the specific form of civilizational suicide that we chose, right?

There are many ways by which you could commit suicide. You could hang yourself, you could pull a bullet in your head, you can slit your wrists. There are many ways to achieve the same goal. We've decided to commit what I call civilizational sepuku. Sepuku is the Japanese ritual, which is in a culture of honor and shame.

If you lose face, that's worse than dying. And so the only way that you can redeem yourself, and the only trajectory towards, you know, redemption and penance is to take the blade and commit sepuku, which is a form of self-disembowlment. While we are committing civilizational sepuku via pathological empathy. Now, why is it happening?

But wait, what is the difference between Sepuku and Harakiri? I'm not sure. I mean, I know that Haratiri is also a form of ritualistic suicide. Maybe it's the means. How does Harakiri work? Is it also through a blade? I thought so. I've always thought of, I've always heard it described as committing Harakiri, not Sapuku.

But in any event, neither of us wants to do either of those things. continue. Right. Thank you. But now I'm very curious as soon as we're going to finish, I'm going to go find out what how it's the difference from Sepuku. Yeah. And not to your, to the most important part of your question, which is why now, what's happening now. Right. And this is where what I mentioned earlier about the one-two narrative of parasitic mind and suicidal empathy are needed to fully explain the current zeitgeist. Let me give you a specific example. Cultural relativism is a parasitic idea that I critique very forcefully in the parasitic mind. Cultural relativism basically argues that who are you to be judging the beliefs, the practices, the attitudes of another culture,

right? Don't be a cultural imperialist and hence it's culturally relativistic. Now, if that's the case, then when I show you a culture where they cut off the clitoris of five-year-old girls, as happens in some cultures, shut up racist. Don't you dare condemn them. you have no moral authority to do so. Well, if I internalize that quote moral precept of cultural relativism, then it renders me impotent to the open border policies issue because I can no longer say I don't want people who hold those beliefs and practices to come into my nations. So first I need to internalize cultural relativism, the parasitic idea of cultural relativism. And that allows me to swim in the infinity pool of suicidal empathy.

So first, I soften your mind with those parasitic ideas, and that results in suicidal empathy. And it's interesting. I mean, the way I've thought of this is that when it's part of it, I guess you can describe it as losing cultural confidence, this idea that what we have is valuable, beautiful, worth fighting for, worth fighting to preserve. When you lose that, And it kind of tips over into guilt of whatever it is that you have. Obviously, then you're open to everything. Because, you know, who am I to say who should live here or who should live here? But obviously, if somebody conducts their life in that way, their personal life,

you'd say something's wrong with that person. That woman keeps her front door open. Criminals are coming and going. Doesn't she understand that, you know, you need to lock your door at a certain time or don't you? it's interesting how we all could see that in our own lives personally, usually, I should say, but culturally, maybe part of the reason for this is that culturally, we don't have to pay a price. Right, right. It happens to someone else.

Someone else is murdered by the illegal immigrant. Well, and that's exactly what Rob Henderson refers to as luxury beliefs, right? It's that I can, I can, as I say, I'd like to, I can show. my luxuriant hair in the mirror of moral preening while saying what a good, beautiful, moral person I am, while I'm protected by the high walls of the gated community where I live. And then from this side of my mouth, I could say, hashtag refugees welcome, right? Richard Gere can say all those things, but he doesn't bring in any of those immigrants, illegal immigrants, into his house, but it feels good to say it. So you're exactly right.

But to your point about the difference between individual level versus collective, if you are self-loathing at the individual level and then you go see as therapist, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do because we expect that if you are bathing in self-loathing ethos, that's not a good thing. But somehow progressives have convinced us that if we are orgeistically self-loathing at the civilization, level, that's what allows us to enter the Cool Kids Club at the Manhattan parties. So it's bad to be self-loathing as an individual, but it's very progressive and enlightened to be self-loving at the civilizational level. Well, you alluded to it when we began our conversation, but the idea, some ideas are so ridiculous that only intellectuals can hold them, right? And I don't know who said that, but this is a theme that you see.

Orwell. Was it Orwell? You see this over and over again. Of course, Paul Johnson wrote his famous book, intellectuals. William F. Buckley said that he would prefer to be governed by the first 300 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard College. You see this over and over again that elites are out of touch. Somehow, they're not forced to deal with reality. They're cushioned or they're insulated from reality because, for many reasons.

but somehow they're the ones that do much of the talking for the rest of us. And this is a consistent problem. And so I guess the question is, how do we deal with that? And the way you deal with that is by talking about it and writing books about it. And I guess I do something similar. But it does seem to be at the heart of the problem that we're governed by elites who are generally out of touch. I mean, when you think of Europe, most of the bureaucrats in the EU are single and childless. So how can they possibly understand what family life is like or what marriage is like

or what it's like to raise a family, to pay bills, to have a job? They're out of touch with that. So there's a tremendous disconnect, I would say, that that needs addressing. That's at the heart of everything. Indeed. And I'll build on what you just said about sort of the detachment from reality that typically exists within the ivory tower. So if you look at the spread and prevalence of parasitic ideas. And for our audience today, let me just kind of mention a few other examples of parasitic ideas.

So I mentioned earlier cultural relativism. Well, postmodernism would be the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas. It is the one that all others suffer. There are no objective truth, up is down, left is right, men are women, and so on. So that's what gives me the ability to then espouse all sorts of other gibberish.

But in any case, if you look at the business school and the engineering school, While they too can be parasitized, they're parasitized to lesser degree because by definition they're applied disciplines that are wedded to reality. Therefore, the autocorrective slap of reality will quickly fix my stupidity because I can't build a economic model using postmodernist queer mathematics. Similarly, I can't build a bridge using lesbian dance theory physics. But if I am in humanities and in much of the social sciences, not only can I espouse insane ideas, I will be promoted by being granted tenure for espousing those ridiculous positions. So of course, that is certainly

a fundamental structural part of the problem. Do you have hope for culture in general? I don't think you'd be writing your books and talking about these things if you didn't have some hope. But what is your sense of where we are in the West, in American culture. I assume you're in the United States at this point. Yeah. So yeah. So it's a great question and I'm going to give you an answer that appears as though I'm trying to equivocate or be coy, but I'm not. So I'm both very optimistic and very pessimistic. And let me explain why. Let's suppose you went to see your physician and God forbid he or she said you have pancreatic cancer and there's absolutely no intervention strategy. You've got four weeks to live, get your life

in order. Well, then there's absolutely. no intervention, I might as well pack it in. Now, we're not there. So this is now the optimistic part, the positive part. There is a set of auto-corrective interventions that the West can implement to completely write the ship. So that's the good news. Now, here comes the really bad news, Eric.

I see zero evidence, not one millimeter of evidence. I see zero evidence that the West is willing to implement any of those different. difficult auto corrective procedures. Now, you might say, oh, but you know, Trump did so. Yes, but Trump is a four-year mechanism, right? Trump will leave, and unless someone else comes along who's willing to do the same things, we will sort of reverse all of the, you know, advantage, advances that he made. So I'm very worried because I see the level to which these parasitic ideas leading to suicidal empathy have taken a foothold of everybody. I'll give you an example. My physiotherapist in Montreal, I had some knee problems. I went to see her. She's a very kind,

progressive, liberal, white Canadian woman. She asked me about my book. I gave her a quick synopsis. She said, well, give me an example of suicidal empathy. I gave her an example of open borders. she just couldn't believe that someone could have such a dark, callous heart, such as myself, to actually say that every single person who would wish to come to Canada would not be granted that opportunity. How does that human being exist in the real world, right? Thomas Sowell explained to us, life is about trade-offs, right? There are no optimal solutions. If you do a bit more of this, you lose a bit of that. So yes, in an infinite world,

we could all sing kumbaya and hold hands, but that's not how the real world works. So I'm optimistic in that there is a solution. I'm pessimistic and that I don't think we'll implement it. Well, you say you don't think we'll implement it, but to some extent we are implementing it. In other words, you're right, of course, that Trump's term will end,

but it seems to me that a lot of people have woken up, that we have a deeper bench than we used to, that there are people awake to these issues. And I would say that anyone who runs for president on the GOP side in 2028 has to be awake to these issues, has to understand, as I hope the candidates do, as I think they do, that America is hungry to reverse some of the madness

that we've seen in these decades. Okay. And again, I don't want to reign on the optimism parade, and I agree with you that more people are awakening for various reasons, including because of the efforts that we do and so on. I got a few words for you, Mamdani. I've got Abdul Sayyad in Michigan,

who might become the next senator from Michigan. I've got a municipal judge that was just appointed in central Mississippi speaking in Arabic and Yemeni, fully covered, only the first. face showing in red Mississippi. I've got foot baths in the Dallas airport. So yes, I think enough people are waking up, but maybe not quickly enough. And the Pac-Man monster is coming for you. Well, that's the question. And I certainly don't think we should be really overly optimistic. In other words, it seems to me that we have, I keep saying this because everywhere I go,

I'm talking about my book on the American Revolution. And I say that it's similar. You're in a war. and when you're in a war, you know that if you don't keep fighting, you will certainly lose. If you keep fighting, you might win. So you have to keep fighting and you have to understand what's at stake and everything's at stake. I keep saying we're in an existential crisis, that America is in an existential crisis. The West is in an existential crisis. I think that these examples that you cite, Mamdani in New York, I live in New York, they are horrifying, but I think that they're healthy in the sense that.

that they're waking some people up. You need to see, some people need to see lunatic communism in their face before they understand that, oh, it's bad. My mother grew up in East Germany and my father grew up in Greece as the communists tried to take over. I was raised to know communism is evil. I don't have any doubt about that. But all the kids I went to school with, they don't even know, you know, well, well, who's to say?

You know, they haven't had an experience with the nightmare of it or with the nightmare of any particular evil. I think that things like Mamdani and all these other things serve a purpose. They're waking people up. Now, whether they wake enough people up in time, that's the question. But I do think that to some extent, it's healthy to see the fruit of our malfeasance, of our ignorance, of our inaction, really, which is what it's been. I mean, over decades, many Americans, and I can only speak for Americans, but have really

been inactive, have just been drifting along while these things happen. And the price of that is you allow these weeds to grow. And so at some point, hopefully, you see that. So that's, that's briefly my take on where we are. I love your optimism. And as the old expression says, from your lips to God's ear. So hopefully more people will wake up. More people will, I mean, I don't know if you, you know this call to action that's become famous now from chapter eight of the parasitic mind, I ask, I implore people to activate their inner honey badger. And the reason why I chose that animal is because the honey badger has literally been ranked as the most fierce animal of all animals in the animal kingdom. It's the size of a small dog, but when it walks in the,

in the African savannah and they are, you know, six, seven adult lions that pass by, they go to the other side of the street and say, sorry, boss, we didn't mean to disturb you. Now, how could he pull that off because he walks very tall because he stands his ground. And so when I implore people to activate their inner honey badger, I'm not saying, I'm not imploring them to be violent, but I'm saying, look, if somebody says something in the classroom that is insane, challenge them politely. If you're a friend that the pub says something, the ludicrous, challenge them politely. Don't diffuse the responsibility on a few of us. Yes, we've got broad shoulders, but not broad enough to safe civilization. Everybody's welcome, join the battle. You know, you are thinking,

song, Gad, you really are, because this is, I mean, I've actually called out pastors in America that if they had been speaking out instead of pretending that it's not their job to get political, which is a lie, theologically, nonsense. But if they had been speaking out, it's my thesis that my friend Charlie Kirk would not have been murdered because he was taking all the heat or most of the heat. And I just think that's the way it is. So I agree with you. And I've written a book on Nazi Germany about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It's the same situation. If people had spoken up, they would have been able to push back against the Nazis, but not enough people were willing to do it. More many people were selfish and cowardly. And that's, you know, that's the human condition.

So the question always is, are there enough of us or can can some of us exhort enough of the rest of us to stand and to activate their inner honey badger, as you put it? That really, that really is the question. And because I keep talking about my book in the American Revolution, I think of it then. It was by no means a war that ought to have been won by the Americans. I mean, when you really study it, when you look at it, you realize that they did not have the cards, to quote President Trump. They didn't have the cards, but they had a zeal. They had a fire. And I would say they had God on their side. They were doing something that was really a beautiful idea that was God's idea. And they were aware of it. And when you have that, you approach things differently. So that's why we have to have

have to have, you know, cultural confidence. We have to know what it is that we believe. We have to know that certain things are worth actually believing and fighting for. And you, you obviously do. And so it's a joy to speak with you. How long has your book been out? You said since I think May 12th, so almost three months. And does the fact that the book has been selling so well give you, that has to give you some some hope that people are tuned in. It really does. And actually what really gave me a great sense of satisfaction,

and I don't mean this in sort of a vindictive, gleeful way, but when the New York Times, you know, it was an instant number one bestseller on the New York Times and then it stayed on it for 10 weeks, what that made me, you know, believe is that, as you know, the New York Times bestseller list is not just based on, the raw numbers, there's an editorial sort of discretion.

So the fact that they weren't willing in any way to fudge it and said, look, this book is going to be number one and it's on it and that's what it is, that gave me great hope. Because if I can bring, I mean, it's easy for me to chat with Eric because he's already, I'm preaching to the converted. But if I can get to the other folks and try to convince them and have a forum to do so, then I'm feeling pretty good about things. Right. Well, you don't realize when you bring up the New York Times. I mean, my book has been on the list for nine weeks as of today. And it started at number two. But when you look at the book scan numbers, the number one book, which was the memoir of Dr. Jill Biden, that book sold 25% less than my book. So they are aggressively, quote, unquote, curating the list, which is, which is a nice way of talking about putting your thumb on the, scale. And so you're quite right. So you have to make it too big to rig. You have to sell so many

books that even the leftist lunatic New York Times is forced to concede, that the reality is too much for them to obfuscate. So congratulations to you, Gad. And I think that, I hope the book continues to do well. Suicidal Empathy. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Such a joy to talk to you. Thank you. Today's show is brought to you by Grace, Pressure. metals. In an industry that can be confusing, Grace believes in doing business differently with Christian values, transparent pricing, and a focus on straightforward gold and silver bullion, not high markup collectible coins. They even publish their spreads directly on their website so you can see the numbers before speaking with anyone. Learn whether physical precious metals may fit

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