Gad Saad: Suicidal Empathy Started in Colleges and Is Ruining the West + Spencer Pratt DESTROYS Toxic Femininity

**Adam Carolla** (0:00)
Well, in this episode, Gad Saad joins me. Always a great conversation. The News with Elisha Krauss, and we got all that right after this.

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KRAUS and now Adam Carolla.

**Adam Carolla** (1:38)
Yeah, get it on got to get it on a choice, but to get it on mandate, get it on. And today, one of my favorites, God's sad is back on or maybe it's Gad Saad sad. Screw it up every time.
Gad Saad, Suicidal Empathy, Dying to Be Kind is the name of the book. You guys have all heard about it. And Gad is a visiting professor at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at Ole Miss, amongst other things, and just an important thinker. So it's good to see you again, my friend.

**Gad Saad** (2:18)
Oh, so good to be with you, Adam. Thank you for having me again.

**Adam Carolla** (2:22)
I was, I sort of follow things like you follow things and I try to make heads or tails of them. And we're really living in a period where the left is saying people like us, why so cruel? Why are you being so cruel all the time? And I'm like, you understand we're not being cruel because we're cruel people. We just have having your kid not eat candy for breakfast just because your kid starts crying and you're scrambling them an egg doesn't make you a cruel parent. It makes you a good parent.

**Gad Saad** (2:57)
Indeed. So let me to speak to exactly to that point. Let me explain why all the detractors that are saying that people like you and I are trying to usher a world of darkness where empathy ceases to exist.
I'm certainly doing no such thing.
Empathy is a very important virtue to have, right? For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put myself in your mind and you need to do the same thing vice versa. That's called cognitive empathy or theory of mind. But like Aristotle explained to us several thousand years ago, Adam, all good things in moderation. Too little empathy or no empathy makes me a psychopath. But too much empathy, if it hyperfires in the wrong situations towards the wrong targets, you end up with suicidal empathy. So like many things in life, it's about how well calibrated the phenomenon is. Cancer cells divide and healthy cells divide. They both divide except that cancer cells don't have a stopping mechanism. They hyperfires. The same mechanism applies with suicidal empathy.

**Adam Carolla** (4:06)
Yeah, I would say to Dr. Drew all the time when we're trying to explain things, I would just say all roads lead to narcissism. And I believe a lot of this is narcissism. It is basically saying these guys are cruel and by implication, since I'm the one pointing it out, I'm not.
So it's really a narcissistic endeavor. It doesn't feel like a narcissistic endeavor because people mistake narcissism with Donald Trump. They go, he says he's gonna build the biggest and the best ballroom ever made. They think of narcissism as bragging, telling high school football stories, or in your case, soccer football from back in the day. But there's another deeper form of narcissism, which is, I'm going to save everybody because you can't. Like, hey, young black person, I understand because I'm a middle-aged white woman and you need me to fix your life for you. And me calling everyone cruel thus makes me a better person.

**Gad Saad** (5:14)
Exactly. So in Chapter 1 of Suicidal Empathy, I actually used the explanation of narcissism to in part explain Suicidal Empathy, right? A narcissist, nazisus, we say in French, if I pronounce it the French way, died looking at his beautiful reflection because he was enamored with his physical beauty. What the suicidally empathetic person is doing is they're stroking their luxuriant hair in the mirror of moral preening. Look how good I am. I'm not like that degenerate Gad Saad who doesn't want open border policies. So it is exactly what you're saying. It's a form of vanity, malignant vanity and narcissism that drives such people. It's grotesque.