# How Empathy Is Destroying Western Civilization (with Gad Saad)

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/reasonably-happy-with-paul-ollinger-635912/how-empathy-is-destroying-western-civilization-with-gad-saad.md
Podcast: [Reasonably Happy with Paul Ollinger](https://stenobird.com/podcast/reasonably-happy-with-paul-ollinger-635912)
Published: 2026-07-23T13:07:00+00:00
Episode link: https://words.paulollinger.com/p/how-empathy-is-destroying-western
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/206571636/2d7c90fdfb81ca9c8e76f3fb3097dbbc.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/reasonably-happy-with-paul-ollinger-635912/episodes/how-empathy-is-destroying-western-civilization-with-gad-saad
Duration seconds: 4226

## Resource

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 Follow Gad Instagram: @doctorgadsaad X: @GadSaad Follow Me Instagram: @paul_ollinger X: @Paul_Ollinger Get full access to Reasonably Happy at words.paulollinger.com/subscribe

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