In this episode of Reasonably Happy, I sit down with Dr. Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist, longtime professor, and author of the New York Times bestseller Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind. Gad lays out why empathy, when it hyper-fires at the wrong targets, becomes a form of civilizational self-disembowelment. We cover open-border immigration, cultural relativism, the UK grooming gang scandal, DEI and the anti-meritocracy push, his move to Ole Miss, and what a real prescription for the West actually looks like.

Timestamps

00:00:00 Trailer

00:01:28 Intro

00:01:40 From marketing professor to cultural critic

00:03:20 Born Jewish in Lebanon during the civil war

00:05:03 Defining suicidal empathy

00:08:29 Civilizations die by suicide, not murder

00:13:47 How open-border immigration became the flagship case

00:14:29 Cultural relativism and the parasitic mind

00:22:12 UK grooming gangs and the fear of Islamophobia

00:28:13 One-way tolerance and the parasite analogy

00:34:10 Anti-meritocracy, DEI and attribution bias

00:40:16 The career cost of speaking honestly in academia

00:43:34 Why he chose Ole Miss over the Ivy League

00:49:09 Hope through the Southern freedom centers

00:52:10 The prescription: an inverted U-curve for empathy

00:57:36 Outro

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