Joe Rogan Experience: #2497 w/ Gad Saad (Transcript)

GAD SAAD: So the wood cricket is an insect that abhors water. It wants nothing to do with water. But when it is parasitized by a neuroparasite called the brain hairworm—

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I’ve seen this.

DR. GAD SAAD: Right? The hairworm needs the wood cricket to happily and merrily commit suicide by jumping into the water because that’s the only way that the hairworm can complete its reproductive cycle. So once the hairworm hijacks the wood cricket’s ability to think and to invoke its survival instinct, it erases its survival instinct, then it is owned by the hairworm. And so I use that principle to explain suicidal empathy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, we’ve actually shown videos of that. It’s very strange.

DR. GAD SAAD: It’s amazing.

JOE ROGAN: The cricket really commits suicide. It jumps in the water, drowns, and the worm wiggles out of its body.

DR. GAD SAAD: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s how it’s born.

DR. GAD SAAD: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: And there are so many cases of that in nature.

DR. GAD SAAD: Indeed.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Empathy: Too Little or Too Much

DR. GAD SAAD: And so the way that I originally had the epiphany to use the parasitological framework— so parasitology is just a study of host-parasite interactions. So a tapeworm is a parasite, but that parasitizes my intestinal tract. But a subfield of parasitology is neuroparasitology. Those are the parasites that need to go into your brain, altering your circuitry to suit their including ideas. And that’s how I came up with the parasitic ideas and the parasitic mind.

But in order to fully tell the story, I then had to say, but a lot of the mechanisms by which people seem to be completely hijacked in terms of their ability to think critically is really coming from an affective place. And so how can I explain that?

And so what I argue in the book, and then we can drill down to endless examples if you want. I’m not saying that empathy is a bad thing, because even though the book is just dropping, there’s already been maybe 10 articles that have been hit pieces against the book, which of course means people haven’t read it yet— where they say, “Here comes the dark Jew who is trying to promulgate the idea that empathy is a bad thing. He’s a neocon right-wing guy, an Elon guy, a Donald Trump guy.”

I’m not saying that empathy is bad. Empathy is actually a very important virtue to have. In order for you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put myself in your mind and vice versa. That’s called cognitive empathy, right? Theory of mind is something that typically autistic children fail on very early in life. That’s how you diagnose them as being autistic. So there’s nothing wrong with well-modulated empathy.

The problem with empathy, like most things in life, is if there’s too little or too much of it. Aristotle explained this to us thousands of years ago via his golden mean. If a soldier is not courageous enough, if he’s cowardly, it’s not good. If he’s too courageous, he becomes a reckless martyr. That’s not good. There’s a sweet spot in the middle. I argue empathy follows exactly that rule. Too little of it, you’re a psychopath. Too much of it, if it’s hyperactive, if it is invoked in the wrong situations, toward the wrong targets, you end up with suicidal empathy.

Violent Criminals and Misplaced Empathy

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I don’t even necessarily know if it’s empathy at that point. It completely becomes illogical and ideological. You just subscribe to whatever the ideology says and you ignore the reality. Like this man that pushed that guy in front of the train.

DR. GAD SAAD: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Like, this is a violent criminal and he had been arrested numerous times. I think more than a dozen.

DR. GAD SAAD: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And it was very clear there’s something very wrong with this person. He probably shouldn’t be just running free victimizing people. There was another one where someone pushed this old guy down a flight of stairs into the subway and killed him. Same situation, same kind of person, a person that had been in and out of jail.

Every one of these people starts off as a child. Every one of these people starts off as a baby, and I can only imagine what kind of household, what kind of environment they developed in. I can only imagine what kind of abuse they suffered. I can only imagine what happened to them. And that’s horrible. But once they reach adulthood and they start victimizing other people, we’ve got to do something as a society.

DR. GAD SAAD: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Now, I don’t know what the tools are to rehabilitate a person like that, but I know that they’re not being employed. There’s not a whole lot of evidence of there’s any successful program where they’re taking a person like that and doing something with them that completely changes their personality and the way they interact with humans and releases them out in the world and they become a much better person than they used to be.

The Blank Slate Fallacy

DR. GAD SAAD: So I call them, in the book I call them blank slate felons because if you remember the term blank slate, so in The Parasitic Mind I talk about social constructivism, everything is a social construction, it’s the tabula rasa premise, we’re born with empty minds, with no individual differences in our potentiality, and it’s only our unique life trajectories and our unique patterns of socialization that end up making us who we become, which in a small sense, that’s true. My life experience and yours is an indelible part of who we are as individuals, but there are individual differences. People are born with different proclivities eventually of committing crimes or of being NBA players or of being the next Einstein. It’s a very hopeful message though to start with the blank slate premise.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s just not accurate.

DR. GAD SAAD: Exactly. Because if you— you and I are both parents. I would love to subscribe to the idea that if only I knew the exact schedule of reinforcement of my— how to ensure that my child becomes the next Lionel Messi or the next Albert Einstein, he too can become that. That’s a lot more hopeful than thinking, “You know what, I don’t think my son has the morphological features that are ever going to make him to be the next NBA star. He’s too short. He doesn’t have the right athletic tools.”

And so it’s easy to understand why people can be parasitized by these ideas. “This person of color was born into a white supremacist society, so he’s already been victimized by society. And for you to now punish him by having him in the penal system, you’re doubly punishing him. So shouldn’t you give him a second chance?” And by second chance, we mean 186th chance. That’s part of suicidal empathy.

But suicidal empathy doesn’t even apply to only that. The victims of rape are themselves suicidally empathetic towards their rapist. Can I share some of those incredible stories?

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

Suicidal Empathy and Cultural Relativism

DR. GAD SAAD: So I start off in the book with an example from a Norwegian man who had been sodomized by a Somali migrant. Because the Norwegians are very kind and empathetic, they don’t believe in long sentences. He served maybe, I don’t know, 3 years or 4, like a pretty short sentence for a rape of another man. When he was being released, he was going to be deported. The victim of that rape had this huge existential angst and guilt because now that Ahmad was going to be released back to Mogadishu, he wouldn’t end up being able to maximally flourish like he should be.

Well, our emotional system did not evolve to be empathetic toward our rapist. That would be an example of someone who’s being suicidally empathetic.

Another great example— What happened in that case? In terms of whether he was deported or not? Yeah. I think, I don’t want to misspeak, but I think he was deported to the screams and lamentations of his victim.

There is a woman who was raped in Germany, and when the authorities were trying to find out more about who the perpetrators were, she lied to them and said that they were speaking in German even though they were speaking in Arabic and Farsi because if she had truly said what their language was, then those communities would have been marginalized. So there’s just an endless number of, like a litany of these examples and therefore suicidal empathy is really pervasive once you recognize the mechanisms.

JOE ROGAN: When you look at the root of that, how is it so common? Like what happens?

DR. GAD SAAD: That’s a great question. I think again it goes back to the one-two punch of parasitic mind in suicidal empathy. In order for the fertile grounds to be available for suicidal empathy to barge in, I first have to have certain ideas that are implanted in your brain. That sounds very abstract, so let me give you a concrete example.

Cultural relativism is a parasitic idea that I discuss in The Parasitic Mind. It basically says, “Who are you to judge the beliefs and the practices of another culture? Shut up, racist.” So there are honor killings, shut up. There are child brides, shut up. There are female genital mutilations, shut up. Don’t judge other cultures.

Well, if you internalize that parasitic idea that it is not appropriate to ever judge the cultural practices of another culture, then that renders you impotent when you’re making judgments about who should be let into your country, about whether you want an increase of people who hold those views or not. Therefore, that leads to the suicidally empathetic position that all immigrants are equally likely to assimilate within the American ethos or the Western ethos. So we started off with internalizing a parasitic idea called cultural relativism, and that lays the foundation for then the suicidal empathy of open borders.

Assimilation and Cultural Identity

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s no pressure at all to assimilate. You’re more than welcome— that’s one of the weird things— more than welcome to establish a Somali community in Minnesota where no one speaks English.

DR. GAD SAAD: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: It’s very odd. It’s very odd that people want to come here, but when they come here, they want to essentially turn it into a smaller version, at least their neighborhood, of where they came from.

DR. GAD SAAD: Right. And a lot of— I mean, if it were only that you don’t speak English, I mean, to me, that’s bad enough in that you’re not going to be part of the fabric of the greater society. But fair enough, that’s not an existential threat. But if you’re then going to be advocating for many of the cultural beliefs that are perfectly antithetical to the whole society, then we have a problem.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and a lot of the cultural beliefs that are illogical, they have to be based on something else, and generally that’s religion.

DR. GAD SAAD: Indeed. Yeah. And you and I have talked very often about Islam and so on. Some people, I think, I wonder what you think about this. Do you think more Americans are willing to have an honest and open conversation about this issue or are most still sort of the proverbial ostrich and they think it’s gauche to talk about religion?

Left vs. Right: The Fear of Being Labeled

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think it’s really divided in party lines. People on the right are more than willing to talk about it. There’s very few people on the right who are empathetic about some of the differences that these religions have and hold and some of the rules that they would like to apply, like Sharia law. Whereas there’s a lot of people on the left that are terrified of being called racist, terrified of being called Islamophobic or, fill in whatever phobia, transphobic, whatever it is. They’re just terrified. They’re terrified of being labeled.

And it’s interesting because that side of the political spectrum, the people on the left are the quickest to pull the trigger and accuse someone of being something, being racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever it is. They’re the quickest and the most vicious when it comes to attacking people based on them not going along with whatever narrative that’s been established, which is interesting because they’re the ones that also like to call people fascists.

But that is a form of fascism. If you look at fascism, it’s essentially— most people think of it as right-wing authoritarianism, but it is also, if you look at the definition of it, it’s also a complete adherence to whatever narrative is being promoted.

DR. GAD SAAD: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And you don’t think about that when it’s left-wing. Left-wing progressive fascism sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s a mindset. And the problem is you’re hiding this mindset in an ideology that you think is righteous. And this is, you could say the same thing about religion because this is also what people do with religion because it is the right thing. It’s the right thing to do. So throw the gay off the roof.

It’s really kind of fascinating. When you see “Queers for Palestine,” you’re like, hold on. It is a wonderful thing to empathize for the Palestinian people and to think that they shouldn’t be bombed into oblivion. And I’m with you 100%. But when you start supporting Hamas and saying, “We’re queers for Hamas” — and I’ve seen that, I’ve seen trans people for Hamas — it’s like, good Lord, what are you saying?

Queers for Palestine: A Case Study in Suicidal Empathy

DR. GAD SAAD: So I’ve got a whole verbatim transcript between a street interviewer, one of these guys that just take someone off the street and tape it. I think his name is—

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, so we just had a little technical glitch. So you were talking about one of those guys that interviews people in the streets.

DR. GAD SAAD: So he goes and intercepts this woman who’s at a Free Palestine rally. And he says, “Oh, you’re for Palestine?” She goes, “Yes.” He goes, “Well, what do you think about their positions on queer people?” She goes, “Well, I’m queer.” He goes, “Oh, you’re queer? So what do you think about what they would do to you?” She goes, “Well, they would kill me.” He goes, “But then you still support them?” She goes, “Yes.” He goes, “But it doesn’t bother you that you’re supporting a group that would kill you for the way that you are?” She goes, “No, the fact that they would kill me doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve my support.”

Well, that’s the wood cricket, right? I mean, there is no evolutionary mechanism that says I’m going to build an affiliation with a group that I know would kill me. She’s so kind. She’s so empathetic. She so transcends the earthly survival instincts that she has ascended to a higher plane of suicidal empathy. So it literally is straight out of what you said.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But in that situation, what they’re doing is they’re being motivated by what they see as a complete destruction of Gaza.

DR. GAD SAAD: Right.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s a different situation because if there was no attacks on Gaza and Gaza was its own autonomous or completely separate state and it wasn’t controlled by Israel and there was no conflict, I doubt they would have the same mindset. The mindset is coming out of watching the destruction of Gaza. And so then instead of saying, “Hey, we shouldn’t just be bombing this city into oblivion,” they go all the way and support the ideology of the authoritarian rulers of this area, which is kind of kooky.

DR. GAD SAAD: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s much like a religion. You can abandon all logic.

DR. GAD SAAD: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: As long as you adhere to it, and you have to, in fact, if you want to be accepted. And this is one of the things about the left — there’s never someone left enough. And when you think you’re left enough, they move the border, they move the boundary lines, the goalposts are like a mile further to the left. You’re like, “Oh God, I gotta support drag queens teaching kids now by themselves? No parental supervision? Twerking.” It just keeps getting nuttier and nuttier to where any protest of it is heresy. And that’s where it gets very strange and it behaves completely like a religion.

Cultural Theory of Mind

DR. GAD SAAD: Other examples of suicidal empathy. So I talk in the book about something I introduce as cultural theory of mind. Theory of mind is, as I discussed earlier, it’s at the individual level. For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to be in your mind and vice versa. Cultural theory of mind is the same principle, but it operates at the cultural level.

So if Culture A has a set of values that it adheres to, and if it presumes that those values are processed in exactly the same way by the other culture, and that’s a wrong presumption, I argue that that culture then lacks cultural theory of mind because it is assuming that its values transcend in exactly the same way to other cultures.

Now, why is that related to suicidal empathy? So if you take, for example, the values that we hold dear in the West — magnanimity, generosity, kindness, empathy — they’re interpreted in other societies as weakness, weakness, weakness, and weakness. And this is why — I don’t remember if I mentioned this to you before on the show or not — in Arabic, when people would speak to me, many years ago before — I mean, now they recognize me, so they’re not going to be as forthright in their positions. But 25 years ago, they would all tell me, “The West is a woman to be mounted.”

Well, the reason why they’re saying that— They would all tell you that? I mean, not all. But it was very common? But it was a saying that is often intimated.

JOE ROGAN: Was this when you were living in Lebanon?

DR. GAD SAAD: No, no, no, in Montreal. In Montreal.

JOE ROGAN: We should tell people just—

DR. GAD SAAD: My background?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, because it’s very pertinent. Sure.

Gad Saad’s Family Background: Surviving Lebanon’s Civil War

DR. GAD SAAD: So I was born in 1964 in Lebanon. My family were part of the last remaining minuscule community of Lebanese Jews. Historically, there was always a small but pretty vibrant Jewish community. Most of the Jews had left prior to the start of the civil war, which happened in ’75. I was 11. Because they had already read the writing on the wall. So most of my extended family, my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents had left to various places, most of them to Israel, but some of them to Montreal, Canada. That’s why we ended up going to Montreal ourselves.

But my parents had refused to leave because they were very well entrenched within Lebanese society. They had nice business and so on. My older sibling, I have 3 other siblings, one is 14 years older, one is 12 years older and one is 10 years older. The one who’s 10 years older is the Olympian judoka that competed in the Montreal Olympics in 1976. So they already had left Lebanon prior to the start of the civil war because they had started facing some Jew hatred difficulties, even in intolerant progressive Lebanon.

Unfortunately for me, being the last, 10 years younger than everybody else, I was still a kid. We got caught up once the civil war broke out. Some really bad things happened during that first year, but then we were able, thank God, to escape to Montreal. But then my parents kept returning to Lebanon because they still had business interests. So they would go back to Lebanon from 1975 to 1980.

Kidnapped by Abu Nidal’s Group

DR. GAD SAAD: On one of their return trips to Lebanon, they were kidnapped by Abu Nidal’s group, Fatah, and some really bad things happened during their captivity, very much like the stuff that you hear about on October 7th. But luckily, they weren’t killed. They were able to be freed. I mean, they weren’t freed through a commando operation. They were freed through the connections that my parents had.

My mother’s best friend was a Syrian woman, a Syrian Muslim woman, who was the personal dresser of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar, the one who was recently deposed. And so through him, my siblings reached out to this woman. Her name was Ehsan. I think she’s passed away now. She got the father involved, he reached out to Yasser Arafat, who was the head of the PLO back then.

As I understand the story, Yasser Arafat said, “Well, I don’t even know whether they’re with one of our groups. Let me make some calls.” But at the time, there was sort of a battle between Yasser Arafat and Abu Nidal. And he said, “If it’s the Abu Nidal gang that took him, good luck.” And it was the Abu Nidal group. But I’m guessing there was some money that was exchanged. My parents were freed.

When my father returned, he had a temporary facial paralysis akin to when you have a really severe stroke and your face is completely disfigured and asymmetric. Guillain-Barré? Is that what it’s called? Yeah. But it got resolved. And so for about, I don’t know how long it was, maybe a month or two, his face was completely asymmetric, probably due to the things that happened to him.

The Confession Letter

DR. GAD SAAD: Actually, some of the stuff I may have briefly mentioned on this show, but here’s a part that I’m almost certain I didn’t mention. At one point, the militia group was trying to get my parents to sign a confession letter that they are Israeli spies, which if you met my parents, you would know that that’s not a very likely reality. Because it turns out that if they signed that, then they could legally execute them.

And the guy who had started this whole thing was the owner of the building where my dad owned the store. And if they could now get rid of them, the store would— so it wasn’t even like a religious thing. It was for one of the seven deadly sins of greed, at least as I understand it.

And so at one point, they had separated my parents and they were trying to put a lot of pressure on each of them to sign this thing. And they go to my mother and say, “Admit that you are a spy, whatever, Israeli agent.” And she is like, “Are you crazy? Just go ask my husband.” And they kind of mockingly say, “Oh, well, your husband has gone to join his God,” meaning that they have already killed him.

So then my mother is in her little cell and they are doing bad things to them. And she hears my dad late at night in some other part of wherever they were keeping him. He had a very whooping kind of cough, like a cough as if— actually, I have a similar cough. I used to be asthmatic, so I have this very deep and loud cough. And so she was hearing that cough, but she wasn’t sure if she’s just hallucinating this in her thoughts or whether it was real. Well, it turned out that they hadn’t killed him, but they were just trying to lean in on her. And so that’s the background that I come from. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So you are very tuned in to what could possibly go wrong.

All Religions Are Not the Same

DR. GAD SAAD: Unfortunately, yes. And this is why, many times when I’ve come on the show, I’ve talked about some of those difficulties, that all religions are not indistinguishable from each other. Religions have certain features that might be transferable from one religion to the other, right? But there are many elements that are very specific to a given religion.

If you’re an extremist Jain, then you really take your— using this, the sweeping thing. When they walk, they use a broom so that they inadvertently don’t step on an ant and kill it. So an “extremist” Jain, someone who really takes his religion seriously, is someone who’s going to be extremist in his pacifism. Right? Now that religion has very, very different edicts about how to conduct yourself, even when you’re walking on a sidewalk, than maybe will an Abrahamic faith, whether it be Judaism or Christianity or Islam.

So the idea that ultimately all religions are simply preaching the same indistinguishable thing in slightly different ways is simply not true. But it feels good to think that, right? It’s empathetic for us to think that. We should never speak amongst mixed company about politics and religion. So therefore, if I start saying something that might be pejorative of another religion, that feels icky, that feels gauche, right?

And that’s why, by the way, earlier you mentioned that when we were talking about this, when I asked you, “Are Americans more likely now to talk openly about Islam?” you said, “Well, the Democrats are more terrified to do so than the Republicans.” But even the Republicans are to some extent suicidally empathetic, because if you watch even the ones who very forcefully criticize Islam as being incongruent with American values, they’ll always use linguistic coverage to protect Islam. So it’s “Islamism,” it’s “radical Islam,” it’s “radical.” Would you agree with that?

No. No? Not at all. So political Islam and Islamism is an indelible inherent feature of Islam. Much of Islam is Islamism. So if you do a content analysis of all of the canonical texts of Islam, which are the Quran, the Hadith, the deeds and the sayings of Muhammad, and the Sira, which is the biography of Muhammad, you could do a quantitative analysis of how often is it preaching brotherly love, how often is it really concerned about the infidels.

Islam as a Proselytizing Religion

DR. GAD SAAD: So Islam in its nature is political. Why? There are many reasons why, but let me just give you one, and then if you want to drill down, we can do so. Islam is a fully proselytizing religion, meaning that it is incumbent in an ideal world to turn the entire world into the one true faith. It is a peaceful religion if by peaceful it means the following: eventually the entire globe, every millimeter of the globe will be united under the unifying flag of Allah.

Now, let’s take for example Judaism, and it’s not because I’m Jewish, but it’s just to compare. Judaism is precisely the opposite. It is an anti-proselytizing religion. You’re not allowed to proselytize. As a matter of fact, if you proselytize, let’s say I try to convince you, Joe, “You know, why don’t you join the tribe?” And you say, “You know what, I think I’d like to.” It’s a grind. It’s a grind, exactly. It’s a long haul.

JOE ROGAN: My uncle did it. Well, there you go.

DR. GAD SAAD: Thank you. So it is literally in the canons of Judaism to try to dissuade the prospective convert from coming into the fold, because the idea is to have a costly signal of your commitment, your religious piety to want to join the group. So it is a grind, it’s very hard.

In Islam, you just have to say the one proclamation, the Shahada, one sentence and you are in. Now try to get out — there are apostasy laws against you getting out. So the circuitry of Islam is one that is expansionist. That’s why you have 2 billion Muslims. One out of every 4 human beings is Muslim, and it only took 1,400 years for that.

So from a marketing perspective, as someone who studies consumer behavior, Islam is a brilliant marketing religion. It has found a way to get a lot of customers and adherents. Judaism sucks at marketing because the entire circuitry of Judaism is meant to keep it very, very small. And so which one is likely to lead to greater problems? The one that is meant to ensure that all of us become Muslim, or the one that says even if your uncle wants to become Jewish, we’re going to put the barriers so high that nobody will ever become Jewish. So we still have only 15 million Jews, roughly, in the world, almost the same as we had before the Holocaust. So Judaism sucks as a marketing religion, Islam incredibly successful.

Jewish Influence and U.S. Foreign Policy

JOE ROGAN: In this country, the concern with Judaism is the support of the Israeli military. Right. That’s the concern. The concern is the amount of influence that it has on the United States government, how we got into the Iran War, why we give them so much influence over our military, over our decision-making, over our politicians. I mean, AIPAC famously promotes and supports a tremendous amount of politicians in the United States. That’s the big fear, is that there’s an inordinate amount of influence that Israel has over foreign policy, our decisions, and even our political structure in the country. Right.

DR. GAD SAAD: Several ways to tackle this. Say the Iran War, take Israel out of it. Do you think that there are multiple countries that would share in the recognition that probably an Iranian regime that has an eschatology that basically says the end of times requires that there is sort of death to everybody before the final Imam comes back — would it be a good idea for the Brits or the Romanians or the French or some of the other, the Gulf countries — would they be happy if Iran had a nuclear weapon?

So to frame the issue of the U.S. is attacking or is involved in the attack on the Iranians as, you know, the United States doesn’t have personal agency, they’re all wood crickets that are being puppeteered by this incredibly powerful lobby called Israel — that simply doesn’t pass the smell test. Of course, Israel has shared interests with the United States, as most allies would, where they both agree that probably an Iranian regime that has nuclear weapons would not be a good thing for world peace.

And so because these two countries have maybe greater testicular fortitude than the NATO countries, it seems as though the Israelis are puppeteering the Americans. But do you really think that Donald Trump is sitting and saying, “You know, had I not been such a weak guy with no personal agency, I wouldn’t have fallen sway to the incredibly influential Zionist lobby?”

The Iran War and Netanyahu’s Motives

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s not just incredibly influential. It’s the amount of financial support they gave his candidacy. And again, all the different politicians that are beholden to Israel. That’s the concern that a lot of people on the right and on the left have here in America. So most people in America do not support this war. A large percentage of people think it was a bad idea. What are your thoughts?

I don’t think it’s a good idea. Why? Well, because first of all, it doesn’t seem to have a clear resolution, right? It’s like, we went over there because we were told that they were very close to developing a nuclear weapon. But if you’ve paid attention to what Netanyahu has said over the last few decades, it’s always been, “They’re a year away, they’re 2 months away,” whatever it is. I mean, he’s been doing this forever, ever since he spoke at the UN and had that giant cartoon bomb. Remember the— like f*ing Looney Tunes bomb. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When he spoke of the percentage of enrichment of uranium. He’s wanted this for a long time.

There’s also a deep concern that he is only in office because of the war and he has corruption charges in Israel, and that in order for him to stay in power and for him to avoid going to trial, he has to continue war.

The Iran Question: Responsibility, Regime Change, and the Ethics of Intervention

DR. GAD SAAD: Can I comment on that? Sure. Yeah. Let’s suppose you go to see your physician and your physician says, “Hey, Joe, God forbid, it looks like your blood sugar is very high and I’m going to classify you as now, never mind pre-diabetic, I think you’re diabetic. And if we don’t manage your sugar levels, there will come a day where I can tell you exactly what’s going to happen. We’re going to have to amputate your extremities. You’re probably going to lose your eyesight, you’re probably going to have sexual dysfunction, and you’re probably going to have some cardiovascular incident.”

That doesn’t happen on day 2 of you having been diagnosed with diabetes. Like, there is a trajectory, and at some point, there’ll be a tipping point where until then, none of the diabetes complications happened.

Now, why am I saying all this? Because I can’t comment as to whether he’s been lying all the times when he said there’s 2 more years left or 1 more year or 6 more months. But surely we can grant the American government enough leeway to presume that if they thought that at this point it’s the right time and it is now intolerable for them to go another day with the current reality, that they probably had some intelligence that suggests that they are close.

So I can’t comment whether Netanyahu was pulling our eyes, but surely it can’t be that the Israelis are so manipulative in their puppeteering that they’ve pulled the wool over the American eyes and really there’s no danger that the Iranians were posing and we’ve convinced the Americans to go to war. Do you think that it is that?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I wouldn’t say there’s no danger, right? So here’s one thing that we do know. They had said that their missiles could only reach a certain distance. That proved to not be true because of the Diego García missile launch. Right. So they have missiles that are capable of reaching Europe, and that was not something they had said before. We know that they have enriched their uranium beyond what they need for nuclear power and that they’re within striking distance of developing a nuclear weapon. Right.

But wasn’t it true that they had put— see, this is hard. It’s hard to know as me, as a person sitting in a podcast studio in Texas, exactly what their ruling had been, but that they had only done this in order to avoid the possibility of them being attacked, that they would get close to a nuclear weapon so at least it would deter some potential attacks on them and that they were doing this out of self-interest.

There’s a large group of American politicians that did not want this war, that did not think it was warranted to attack Iran at this point. Can I?

Deontological vs. Consequentialist Ethics in Geopolitics

DR. GAD SAAD: Yeah. Okay. So I think I’ve mentioned on the show before these distinctions between deontological ethics, absolute statements — it is never okay to lie — versus consequentialist ethics. It’s okay to lie if it is meant to spare someone’s hurt feelings, right? So if your wife says, “Do I look fat in those jeans?” You put on your consequentialist hat and you say, “You’ve never looked more beautiful,” because maybe she’s put on a bit of weight, but you don’t want to hurt her feelings, so you lie. And for most of us, we go through life in most instances putting on a consequentialist hat. Okay?

And I’m going to link it now to our discussion. To have, for example, a deontological principle that says that I am always an isolationist — do you understand what I mean by here deontological? Meaning that it doesn’t matter what the environment is out there. I, as America, will never interfere in wars over there. That can’t be an optimal strategy. Right?

So for example, if you were a deontological pacifist, you say, “Under no circumstances do I believe that violence is the solution.” Well, what would usually happen to a society if it adhered to deontological pacifism? They’d be attacked. They’d be eradicated, right? So it can’t be that for some of these geopolitical issues, there is a rule that in its nature is deontological.

So many of the Americans that are anti this war are very, very staunchly steeped in sort of a libertarian/deontological isolationist perspective. Now, in many cases, I would completely agree with that position in that it’s not the Americans’ position to have to go and be the policeman of everywhere in the world.

But let’s contrast it, say, with when World War II was about to happen, the appeasement strategy of Chamberlain, right? This guy with the little mustache says, “Don’t worry about it. I absolutely have no design to do anything bad.” “You swear, Adolf? It’s all good?” “Yeah, yeah, don’t worry.” “Promise you really don’t, even though you’re moving all of your stuff, you’re a good guy, right? I can trust you.” “Yeah, yeah, of course you can.”

So appeasement only works if the other person is someone that can be fully trustworthy. It is almost incontestable that if the Iranian regime in its current form could ever cause great damage to everybody, not only Israel, right? I mean, the Gulf countries are not exactly putting up barriers against this war because they also are the enemies of the Iranians.

So it’s undoubtable that, of course, the Americans have the Israelis in their ear pushing for their self-interest, but that’s also called the reality of every nation on Earth. Every, every entity fights for its own interests. But that doesn’t mean that the Americans are so lacking in personal agency, are so gullible, are so easy to puppeteer, that there must be this Zionist lobby that otherwise is pushing us into an unnecessary war. Maybe another 3 years, maybe another 5 years, maybe another 10 years, it would have resulted in a disaster.

So if you are a universalist and you want the Iranian people to maximally flourish, forget about Israel. Don’t even mention the word Israel. Do you not want these 90 million people called Iranians who have a deeply rich historical heritage to flourish? I’ve had many graduate students who are Iranians in my classes and so on. They’re some of the most modern, secular, outward-looking Westerners that have been choked for 47 years by a really nasty regime. So maybe we could celebrate that if all this goes well, 90 million people are going to be freed. And I could say that statement without ever invoking Israel. What do you think of that?

The United States’ Role in Iran’s Islamic Revolution

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think the reason why they’re in the situation they’re in in the first place is because of the United States. It’s because the United States and the British Petroleum Company. It’s because they were trying to nationalize oil.

DR. GAD SAAD: That’s what happened in the first place. You mean the Islamic Revolution?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. This is how it started in the first place. They realized that the British Petroleum Company was making a ton of money and they wanted to nationalize oil and we got rid of them and they installed this Islamic regime. And look, there’s a lot of consequences for that down the road. Obviously, the worst side of it was what happened to the Iranian people.

When you look at the photos and the videos of Tehran from like the 1950s, the 1960s, I mean, my God, it looks like a Western society. Women wearing skirts and everyone looks — it looks very modern and Western. And then it became this fundamentalist religious country that it is right now, this Islamic country that it is right now. They’re under a regime that murders protesters. They famously murdered some high-level wrestlers. There was an Olympic gold medalist of the United States. The UFC tried to get involved and try to keep him from getting murdered. Yeah, they do horrible things. There’s no doubt about it. It’s a terrible regime.

But there’s a really good argument that that terrible regime is in place because of the CIA and because of the United States government, because of the British Petroleum Company, because we intervened. And we’ve done that in the past. We did that with Libya, right? This is the reason why Muammar Gaddafi was out.

You know, we had Russell Crowe, who’s a brilliant guy, on the podcast was explaining the history of Libya and how great it was for Libyan people when Muammar Gaddafi was in power, that if anybody wanted to get an education anywhere, they had some certain skills or talent in some certain area, they would fully pay for their education overseas. They gave everyone a house. Everyone who lived there had a home. I mean, people were educated. And he was trying to set up something akin to the United States, but the United States of Africa. And they were like, “We can’t have any of that.” And so they got rid of him and Libya became a failed state.

Like, we have monkeyed in other countries for our own interest for a long time and with horrible consequences for the people in those countries. And I think Iran is an excellent example of that.

DR. GAD SAAD: So how much of the Islamic regime coming into power in 1975, if you have 100 points that you want to allocate to either it’s the US that causes it versus there’s an Islamic regime with its theology that is really nasty, how would you allocate the points in terms of the cause of that reality? That’s a good question.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a question that would be answered by historians rather than me, but I think there’s no doubt that we played a major factor in that.

Allocating Blame: Causal Networks and the Butterfly Effect

DR. GAD SAAD: Don’t you agree with that? I mean, yes and no. So let me explain why I say yes and no. When you have a complicated geopolitical system, you can always look — you remember the old butterfly effect, right? There’s a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, and then how that reverberates into a cyclone somewhere else, right?

JOE ROGAN: It’s kind of bullshit, though.

DR. GAD SAAD: No, but I mean, the principle of —

JOE ROGAN: It’s great if you don’t understand how the weather works.

DR. GAD SAAD: Fair enough. But the idea that there are causal networks is such that in this complicated web of causal networks, you can always find a particular entity that you can try to link back all of the causes to that entity.

JOE ROGAN: But the overthrow of a foreign government and supporting an ayatollah to take their place, it’s a pretty big factor.

DR. GAD SAAD: But so that’s why I asked you to allocate the 100 points.

JOE ROGAN: I wouldn’t be the guy to answer that.

DR. GAD SAAD: I’m going to answer off the top of my head. Please. And it’s completely speculative. So the numbers I’m going to say are not — let’s ascribe 10 out of the 100 points to whatever power the U.S. wields in that region to have allowed that regime to come in. But that regime carries the other 90 points of the 100 because they are the ones who for the next 47 years implement the reality that the common Persian is going to experience.

Everything in the world can ultimately be linked back to oxygen, to the United States, to the military complex, to the Zionist lobby, because in some very facile way, all of those entities are connected in a meaningful way in this causal network. But is using Occam’s razor — does it really make sense to blame, for example — people say ISIS is really due to whatever, Israel. I mean, in some facile way, you could draw the causal link of how there was a vacuum that was created by the US when they de-Baathized Iraq that allowed an extreme. So do we blame ISIS on American policy or the Zionist lobby, or does ISIS itself have any personal agency in terms of what it then does for the next 10 years that it’s in power? Do you see what I’m saying?

I do. So this is the old story. I’m going to butcher it, but I quote it in The Parasitic Mind. For the man who has a hammer, he only sees the world as being made up of the nails, right? So this is when you’re presuming that there is greater explanatory power to a particular cause than there really is.

Look, I’ll give you an example. Let’s suppose that the night before an eventual dictator that was going to become a dictator, his parents felt particularly amorous that night. And what made them amorous to then eventually conceive that guy who became a dictator who killed 3 million people is that they played Barry White music because Barry White music is baby-making music. So it is in a very silly way, absolutely true, that had Barry White not been such a great singer with a deep voice that makes the ladies drop the panties, then those two parents of the eventual dictator would not have had sex that night.

JOE ROGAN: I will stop you right there because I don’t think there’s sex that’s ever been had because only of Barry White. I think people have been having sex since the beginning of time. I don’t believe it. It’s wonderful music. I don’t think it causes sex.

DR. GAD SAAD: Do not criticize Barry White.

JOE ROGAN: I’m not criticizing. I just said it’s great music. Yeah. I don’t believe it. I think people have been getting it on from the beginning of time, and they probably would have done the exact same thing that night if it was Barry White or Barry Manilow.

DR. GAD SAAD: I don’t think it matters. So let’s not put Barry White. There was some facilitating mechanism that rendered them amorous on that particular night. Whatever that mechanism is, it is absolutely true that we can lay the blame, some blame of that dictator eventually killing 3 million people. He would have never been born had they not had sex exactly at that moment.

U.S. Foreign Policy, ISIS, and the Question of Responsibility

JOE ROGAN: I think that’s a bit of a stretch. I think it’s a bit of a stretch when you actively work to overthrow a democratically elected government. So this now we’re talking about what, when they— Well, not even democratically elected government because Libya wasn’t a democratically elected government, right? Like, not really. Like, let’s be honest, right? Like, Putin’s not really a democratically elected president of Russia, but you know what I mean? But we 100% funded the rebels, 100%, to kill Gaddafi, right? That’s— it’s our responsibility why Libya fell.

DR. GAD SAAD: Okay, but if— okay, true, that position, 100%. Gaddafi, the way you made him out to be, was— I mean, he was Robin Hood, right? Gaddafi was not—

JOE ROGAN: No, no, no, no, no. Good for the people in many ways, pretty nasty guy in other ways. There is no egalitarian, beautiful leader out there. They’ve never existed because the cold, hard reality of running enormous groups of people that are in conflict with other groups of people is you’re going to have to crack some eggs. You’re going to have to do some terrible things.

DR. GAD SAAD: Especially in those regions of the world where if you don’t have an incredibly strong-armed guy, then religion comes in and it becomes the strong guy. You have it in Egypt. You have it with Saddam Hussein. So, with Hafez al-Assad and then his son. So, those guys are, if you’re a universalist who wishes for individual liberties and freedoms to flourish for everybody around the world, then you’re probably not supporting these guys. Right.

JOE ROGAN: Well, okay, we can use Saddam Hussein as an example. Sure. Look at what happened there. I mean, it became a complete and total disaster, resulted in the death of at least a million innocent people. Yes. And didn’t do anything positive in terms of turning that into a beautiful Western-style democracy.

DR. GAD SAAD: Yeah. But by the way, that last sentence, I would argue that that’s because of the Americans’ lack of cultural theory of mind, because they presume that the desire to have democracy around the world is exactly what everybody wants. Therefore they are culturally blind to the fact that other places around the world may not share our own affinity for democracy.

JOE ROGAN: Well, not just that, but culturally ignorant to the fact that there are Sunni and Shia Muslims and they were going to fight with each other.

DR. GAD SAAD: Right. Yeah. Now, but you— okay, so the Americans come in, they create a bad set of ecosystems that permits for ISIS to flourish. At what point would you, in your causal link of explanations shift from the catalyst of the Americans having done something that allowed ISIS to flourish to then saying, starting at time T, my causal weaponry is going to be targeting ISIS moving forward?

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s a good question because like, why did ISIS flourish in the first place? Was it because of the removal of Saddam Hussein? Was it because of the overthrowing of the country? I mean, wasn’t that— It was. Yeah. So if that didn’t take place, what would Iran and Iraq look like right now? Right.

ISIS, Personal Agency, and the Limits of Blaming American Foreign Policy

DR. GAD SAAD: But, so think about all of the people that have suffered horrifyingly as a result of ISIS. If you are an individual that’s walking around who is the recipient of that brutality, what would make more sense if you’re engaging in statistical inferencing? Would it be to say, “You know, the guy that’s about to string me up because I looked at a girl wrong and he is going to cut off my penis and my arms because I touched a girl, I really can’t blame ISIS because really it is American foreign policy that intervened in Iraq.” That is not how people navigate through their—

JOE ROGAN: How did you get to that? Meaning? The guy getting his penis chopped off and his arms chopped off, how did you get there?

DR. GAD SAAD: You know how under Sharia law they are very strict rules about that govern the dynamics between men and women, right? So I was just being hyperbolic, but let’s say whatever the punishment, you stole a loaf of bread under Sharia law, we cut off your hand, right?

So let’s say you’re a 12-year-old kid who just stole a loaf of bread from the souk and the ISIS commanders have caught you and they’re about to institute Sharia law by cutting off your hand because you’re a thief. Would it be natural for you or your parents, the parents of the 12-year-old who are crying because they’re about to see the hand of their child cut off, would they say, “I really can’t be upset at ISIS and their brutality because ultimately ISIS only came in because of the geopolitical intervention of the United States.” Do you think that that would be a reasonable—

JOE ROGAN: The whole idea sucks. I think the complete imprisonment of any group of people under a totalitarian regime is terrible. But that’s its full stop. The question is, how were they funded? How did they get into the position that they got into in the first place? How did they rise to power? But nothing can happen— But how much of it is because of our meddling that they rose to power in the first place?

DR. GAD SAAD: So let’s suppose we hadn’t meddled. So we meddled, we meaning the United States, let’s say. We, and I’m glad that I’m now including myself with we.

JOE ROGAN: We, almost, you’re getting there.

DR. GAD SAAD: So we meddled because whatever calculus, some of it was incorrect, maybe there was no weapons of mass destruction. I mean, Saddam Hussein was a horrifying guy. I think if you ask me to rank all of them, maybe in terms of pure evil, he might have been the biggest of all the thugs, right? And his sons are even worse maybe, right? Horrifying. You’ve heard of all the stories that they were doing. Oh my God. —complete serial killers. Exactly. Yeah.

Okay. So now if I am a typical Iraqi who is going about my business, I really would like to not live under Saddam Hussein’s thumb. And I probably don’t want to live under ISIS’ thumb. In an ideal world, I could live with complete dignity and liberty and so on. The Americans, with all of their miscalculations, maybe naively thought that we’ll come in and then kumbaya, we will create a new democracy in Iraq. They completely miscalculated.

But the root cause of the daily evil that the Iraqis go through cannot be put on the broad shoulders of the Americans because then that removes the personal agency of the actors in their daily lives that are causing them all the pain. But there is a reflex and dare I say, forgive me, a suicidally empathetic reflex that renders you somehow progressively sophisticated if you always turn all of the world’s ills on your own society.

JOE ROGAN: I agree with you and what you’re saying, but the reason why we were there was not because we wanted to help people. The whole reason why they came up with this fake weapons of mass destruction narrative is because they wanted to control the oil.

DR. GAD SAAD: I really can’t speak to that. You could be right.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, 100% I’m right. Yeah. We’re not doing that to help people. We didn’t go to Iraq to help people. It didn’t even make sense that we were in there. They weren’t involved in 9/11.

DR. GAD SAAD: The whole idea was nuts. Okay, so let me—

JOE ROGAN: I think the whole weapons of mass destruction narrative was complete bullshit that was cooked up to give an excuse to go over there and take over Iraq.

DR. GAD SAAD: Like, willfully so. It’s not they made an error. They knew it was—

JOE ROGAN: I mean, I think there’s a lot of evidence to that. There’s no evidence that they had weapons of mass destruction as described by everybody to give the motivation for us to support the war.

America’s Role in the World: Power, Self-Interest, and Restraint

DR. GAD SAAD: Okay, so let me, maybe as the distinguished professor of the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom, I hope University of Mississippi will be happy that I’m defending the United States as a Canadian, not yet American, but inshallah soon. Is it not true that the default reality of every unit, whether it be an individual, a grouping, a country, will typically, all other things equal, try to pursue policies that are in its best interest, right? So when Trump says America first, MAGA, and all this, that’s what he’s appealing to, yes?

So does the US ever do things that might be less than savory because they’re pursuing their selfish interests? 100%, and we can come up, right? But that makes them a country made up of these things called human beings. In other words, no society has ever been created that is made up of these utopian machines that as they navigate the world, they look to the other for their, unless they are suicidally empowered, sympathetic.

So the US is made up of real human beings endowed with real brains whereby they might say, hey, maybe if we take their oil and concoct a strategy— now, is that good or bad? We can debate it. But in the grand buffet of societies that have ever held power, does the US— and never mind the power asymmetry that the US has vis-à-vis everybody else, is it the most restrained society ever?

If the United States today said, “We need more beaches. All the Caribbeans are becoming the 51st state,” could anybody do anything about that? No. Yet they don’t. So I think it would be good, certainly for Americans and me as an honorary American, to say, does America do sometimes things that are less than perfect in a utopian world? 100% yes, you’re right. I concede that. Does it wield its power in the most gentle ways compared to what it could do and compared to what other societies, if they had that power, would do? I think that America does pretty well. No? Am I too rosy about my views of America?

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s an interesting question because China doesn’t meddle in other countries the way we do, and they have a similar military might. Not quite commensurate. But pretty similar. Like you don’t see them invading other countries and doing the type of things that we do. I know they threatened Taiwan, but they believe that Taiwan is a part, they call it Chinese Taipei, right?

DR. GAD SAAD: So I am going to use here some Arabic words, which I will try to explain in English, but maybe to your Arabic listeners they will appreciate it. The Chinese have greater wahane and nesnase. They are duplicitous in the way they do that stuff, right? They caress you this way while they take— right? So yes, they are using a different modality to wield their power compared to the brash rah-rah-rah Americans, but let’s not sort of romanticize what the Chinese could do, right?

China’s Tactics: Infiltration, Deception, and Domestic Brutality

JOE ROGAN: Well, they’re taking advantage of the openness of American society. They’ve infiltrated universities, they’ve infiltrated a lot of tech sectors. They’ve sold American military a bunch of cell phone towers that are surrounding military bases that may or may not be transmitting data. We’ve had to kick Huawei out of the country because it turns out that a lot of their equipment could be used for spying. Yeah. Like they buy farmland all around military bases. They’re doing a lot of things to take advantage of our silliness.

That’s because we should have better laws to prevent what’s essentially not our friends from doing that. I mean, you can call them an enemy nation or whatever you want to call them, but we shouldn’t be allowing a foreign nation that we are in conflict with to control land around military bases. That’s just stupid.

But that’s because of our capitalist society. I mean, you can’t even— you can’t own a business in China. You can’t go over there and buy stuff. Like, you can’t do it. You can be in business with them, and then you know what they do? They just kick you out and take over it, right? Change the name of it and take over all the IP, and you’re gone. Bye-bye. And there’s not a f*ing thing you could do about it because they don’t have an open society like we do.

DR. GAD SAAD: Well, and think about— I mean, if we’re doing the ledger of sort of cruelty and evil, we could talk about how the US versus China wields power around the world. But how about internally, domestically? We had a guy called Mao Zedong that was kind of pretty brutal, that if we do the history of China in terms of how many millions of people were killed by that regime versus anything that’s happened in the US— has the US been perfect in the past 250 years? Absolutely not.

JOE ROGAN: No, there’s never been a perfect regime. Exactly. So there’s no perfect regimes. And you know, look at what they did just with their one-child policy. There you go. I mean, there’s a lot wrong with the way China does things, you know, but so to me, once I—

Defending Israel and the United States: A Question of Values

DR. GAD SAAD: Maybe that’s why University of Mississippi was keen on having me come. I look at the United States as someone who— thank you for your earlier question about sort of where do you come from, Gad, tell us your story. Some of the biggest defenders of the United States are typically, it might sound paradoxical, but if you think about it, it’s not, are usually immigrants who have sampled from a wide variety of buffets of societies out there. Therefore, we know that the anomaly called the United States is truly an anomaly.

Whereas the American wakes up in his life and he thinks that the liberties and freedoms that you have in the United States are just the default value. That’s just the way it is. It isn’t. That’s what makes the United States great.

So for me, by the way, and that also explains why people think, for example, that I defend Israel because I’m Jewish. There is an element to that. I mean, most of my family’s in Israel, but it’s really, I defend Israel because many of its values are congruent with those that we hold dear in the United States. So given the region of the Middle East, if I’m going to send my daughter or yours to some university to study, I would much rather for her to be in a society in Tel Aviv or Haifa than I would in many of the other places.

So it’s in that sense that I’m pro-Israel. So if you ask me to allocate 100 points to how much of my support of Israel is due to the fact that many of its foundational values are similar to those of the United States versus the fact that I’m Jewish and Israel is a Jewish state, I would say 80/20, former for the latter, meaning that I am defending the civilizational values of Israel in a very, very difficult and belligerent neighborhood.

Does Israel always do things perfectly? No. Do they have politicians that are corrupt? Yes. Have pedophiles who did bad things here tried to go there and have aliyah, meaning get residency there and run away from the— yes, but it could also be the case that a bank robber or pedophile goes back to Thailand if there are no extradition mechanisms to bring them back to the United States.

So my position of defending the United States or Israel or whomever else really stems from some foundational values of liberty and freedom. There is no conceivable place in the world where given the neighborhood that Israel exists in, one would conceivably defend any of those other societies instead of Israel if the metrics that you care about are personal liberties and freedoms. We could then debate specific policies and you’d be completely in your right to say, I don’t like when the Israeli government does this.

But, well, let me ask you, and forgive me for asking you a personal question. If let’s say your daughter today said, “Dad, I’d like to go and study one year abroad and it’s going to be somewhere in the Middle East.” You, Joe Rogan, how likely would you be to support her going in the Middle East to a university other than in Israel?

JOE ROGAN: That’s interesting. When you say the Middle East, you mean like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates? Because I think it’s pretty safe there.

Islam, Modernity, and the Gulf States

DR. GAD SAAD: Okay, so you’re right. That’s true. And by the way, I’m loving the openness that many of these countries are exhibiting. And I’ll tell you a quick personal story and then I’d love to hear you.

I was approached by Al Arabiya. Al Arabiya is the premier news network from— they’re Saudi, but they were actually located in Dubai. And Riz Khan, who was the anchor that was flying from Dubai to interview me in Montreal for Al Arabiya, he used to be the main anchor, I think, at BBC Global or CNN Global. I said to Riz, “Are we going to be talking about things like Islam and these kinds of—” He goes, “Yeah, yeah, feel free to talk about whatever you want.” I said, “Well, I’m not worried so much about me, but you’re going to have to go back to that region. Are you comfortable? I mean, I will be very professorial and proper, but I will say some difficult truths.” He goes, “Say whatever you want.”

That aired, it was a 2-hour conversation where we talked about all sorts of things, but we talked about Islam, and then he said, they loved you. About a month or 2 later, another show contacted me and I went also on Al Arabiya, and then they even wanted to offer me a show. Now, the Saudi group is offering the Lebanese Jew who’s often been critical of some of the tenets of Islam. So I’m very optimistic about that.

So I agree with you that if your daughter wanted to perhaps go to some places in the Gulf countries, you’d probably condone it and support it. But that would make it too easy. So let me choose which country she goes.

JOE ROGAN: That would be too easy, but that is the Middle East and they are Islamic countries.

DR. GAD SAAD: Well, because those countries are having a revival of modernity.

JOE ROGAN: Well, maybe that’s what we should talk about, because is that possible with Islam, that they could have a revival of modernity across the entire country? Like, imagine if Iraq, Iran, all these countries were run like Saudi Arabia or run like the United Arab Emirates. You would have a much more peaceful environment, wouldn’t you?

DR. GAD SAAD: So I’m going to be now very optimistic. There is a package of cultural richness in the Middle East like no other. And I come from the region, Arabic is my mother tongue. The spirit of generosity, the spirit of loyalty when you are in the group, the hospitality is like no other. Actually, I recently was telling some folks in Mississippi that the Mississippians remind me as though they were honorary Lebanese because they’re so— it’s that southern hospitality, really like over the top wanting to make you feel good.

So there are elements of the Middle East that have such a fabric of richness that if we can mine that and quell all of the tribalism associated with religions, I think it could be one of the most fertile and rich places in the world.

Now, it depends what we do with Islam. If Islam is something that you practice privately as part of a long historical narrative. So for example, I’m Jewish, I’m very wedded to my Jewish identity, but I don’t take many of the edicts of Judaism seriously in the practice. I don’t light the candle at 4:21 for Shabbat because if 4:22, God would be upset at me. But if I went to the rabbi, he’d say, “It has to be at 4:21.” So I pick and choose. Cafeteria Jew. I pick and choose the parts that I wish to.

JOE ROGAN: Cafeteria Jews, I like that.

DR. GAD SAAD: I don’t practice some soft version of Judaism that allows for the eating of pork and shrimps. I simply say, I’m a glutton that likes to eat well, and shrimps and some pork tastes really good, so I’m just going to ignore those parts. I think if Islam could allow for that cafeteria, which by the way, many Muslims do now. I have friends that are Muslims that do that. Hundreds of millions of Muslims want to cause zero harm to Jews.

JOE ROGAN: So the problem is radical Islamism, like we were talking about before.

There Is No “Radical Islam” — There Is Only Islam

DR. GAD SAAD: It’s not radical. It’s just Islam, and I choose to ignore the parts that I don’t like. You’re putting an appellation on Islam that is unnecessary. Islam is made up of many tenets. It’s not radical Islam. There is no book called radical Islam. There’s only Islam. I mean, Erdoğan said there is no moderate Islam. There’s just Islam. So is he an Islamophobe?

So there is a bunch of tenets. There’s the one that says kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, take a break, continue killing. F* that. I’m going to ignore it because I’m a good person, right? Because there are mean Jews and nice Jews. Mean Muslims, nice Muslims.

JOE ROGAN: So many of— Westernization of it.

DR. GAD SAAD: So if there is a way to maintain the Islamic heritage, there’s Islamic architecture, there’s Islamic poetry, there’s Islamic philosophy. There was a period under Islamic rule where many of the ancient texts from Greek philosophy were safeguarded by Islam. So it’s not as though that entire civilization is void of incredibly rich things. But there are unfortunately elements of the religion that are not congruent with Western values.

If there is a way for us from this side of our mouth to honor Islamic architecture and poetry, and from this side of our mouth, forget the parts that says kill, kill, kill everyone, then I think you could have wonderful flourishing.

JOE ROGAN: For it to evolve then. Yeah, I see what you’re saying. There’s a really good argument that the reason why ISIS and these various radical organizations exist is because of the United States meddling in all these countries for decades and decades.

I don’t know if you ever saw it, but Glenn Greenwald was on Bill Maher’s show. And Glenn, he’s a very brilliant guy, and he had a very balanced take on it and he was arguing with Bill Maher versus why they behave the way they do and making the argument that a lot of it was because of the United States intervening in their countries, that we’ve been over there and meddling in their countries and being— meddling in their policies and their government for so long that this is the reason why these things happen in the first place.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. We might do a good thing to play it because it was kind of interesting to watch Bill Maher kind of push back against it, but Glenn Greenwald is very well read and really understands the history of this region.

DR. GAD SAAD: I’m not a huge Glenn Greenwald fan. Many of the positions he’s taken I’ve really liked. He does seem to have a bit of the self-flagellation reflex when it comes to it all comes down to something that the US has done that’s evil. Or something that Israel has done is evil. So to our earlier conversation, there are features that ISIS believes in, that they believe in independently of anything that the US could have ever done or will ever do.

JOE ROGAN: But if they were flourishing and we hadn’t intervened in their country, do you think it’s possible that the rest of the Middle East could be in a similar— and not to say that Saudi Arabia is perfect, right? The Jamal Khashoggi thing is horrific. I mean, just that alone. This is a big criticism for a lot of the American comedians that went over there and participated in the Riyadh Comedy Festival. It’s like, do you not know what this regime did to an American journalist? But is it possible that these countries could have evolved in a very similar way and become— if it weren’t for us?

Islam’s 1,400-Year History and the Limits of Blame

DR. GAD SAAD: No.

JOE ROGAN: No? You don’t think so?

DR. GAD SAAD: Islam has existed for 1,400 years, right?

JOE ROGAN: So why do these countries, why does the United Arab Emirates, why do they have a much more open society?

DR. GAD SAAD: Now, I mean, there are all sorts of reasons. Maybe the rulers, I can’t speak for them.

JOE ROGAN: It is a lot of the rulers. They’re much more progressive.

DR. GAD SAAD: Exactly. So they’ve taken a pill of pragmatism that says that we could still maintain our unique identity while turning open arms to the West. And it takes courageous leaders to say, this is how we can have these two things coexist. I could still be fully steeped in my Muslim identity, but I’m not going to look at the other as a dirty kuffar, right? The dirty non-Muslim. And so good for them. That’s great.

But over the 1,400 years, the US is going to celebrate the 250 years soon, right? Islam has existed for 1,400 years. So we could very easily, temporarily, just go back 250 years prior and remove anything that could be due to the US. Is that true? I mean, empirically. Sure. And if we want to remove Israel from the story, we just have to go to 1948. And so that’s 70-something years. And then anything that Islam would have done prior to 1948 could not be blamed on the Zionist entity.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, for sure. We could go back to the beginning of the United States where the United States was being attacked.

DR. GAD SAAD: By the Muslim— is that what you’re talking about? Yes. Exactly. Yes, Thomas Jefferson. Exactly. Yes. So my point is— tell everybody that story. I don’t know it too well, but Thomas Jefferson, I think, was being belligerent to some incursions of Muslim piracy or something like that, right?

JOE ROGAN: Where they said that it was their right to do so because we were infidels.

DR. GAD SAAD: Exactly right. I mean, Winston Churchill has some really savory quotes about what he thought about his interactions with Islam. And now he’s British, he’s got nothing to do with the United States. This was well before the existence of the Zionist entity. It is part of the playbook to try to always blame some other agent other than our canons for why we’re doing what we’re doing, right?

JOE ROGAN: I think that’s why this is a good conversation, right? This is very nuanced. We’re kind of laying out both sides of it.

The House of War: Islam’s Expansionist Ideology

DR. GAD SAAD: That’s why I love coming on the show whenever you have me on. So if you crack a— I don’t mean you, but anybody who’s listening to this— crack a book to say, okay, let me look at the number of military conquests where Islam was the offensive party, right? Not we were the, for example, people say, oh, the Crusades. Well, the Crusades were a retaliation to hundreds of years of Islamic aggression. It didn’t come out of nowhere, but there’s always what I call the amnesia of causality. People always forget what was the original starting point.

Under Islam, as I said, the primary canonical requirement of Islam is to render the entire world Islamic. Now again, that doesn’t mean that every Muslim believes this. That doesn’t mean that every Muslim leader believes this, but we’re talking about what’s in the canons of the religion. It is a violently expansionist ideology. I mean, nothing could be clearer. I’ve explained this previously on the show, but if you allow me, I’ll explain it again.

Islam has dual logic. Everything in Islam is broken down into two camps. There is Dar al-Harb and Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam and the House of War. Any country that is not yet under Islamic dominion is classified as under the House of War. That’s literally the words. Now, any country that has ever become under Islamic dominion ever, and then Islam loses, canonically, it must revert back to Islam.

So Al-Andalusia, right? Andalusia in current Spain was at one point controlled by the Moors, right? Muslims. Therefore, when now you hear a lot of these Islamic extremist guys saying, “Inshallah, we will get back al-Andalusia.” It’s because once it became ours, it must always belong to us. The same argument applies for Israel. Even though Israel has thousands of years of lineage of the Jews to that land as the indigenous rulers, owners of that land, the fact that then Islam took over that region means it belongs to Muslims. Now, we may tolerate the Jews to live there, but there can’t be a Jewish state there canonically in the religion.

So those are just facts. You could study the history of Islam to count. There are currently, well, if you include the Palestinian territories, in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the OIC, there are 56 or 57 countries that are part of that bloc that are Islamic. Each of those countries once upon a time started with 0% Islam, right? I mean, it wasn’t magical. So Indonesia was not Islamic once, right? Libya was not, right? Many of those countries were Christians, by the way, right? Egypt was Coptic Christian. Syria was tons of Christians. Lebanon, within my lifetime, I was born in a Christian-majority country. Today, within my lifetime and yours, it has completely flipped to Muslim majority.

So wherever Islam goes, sometimes it might take 5 years to flip it, sometimes it might take 500 years, but as the Taliban explained to us, the American soldiers have watches, we have all the time in the world. So it’s a long project. So when Islam comes into the United States, it’s not as though suddenly the United States of America is going to become under Sharia law tomorrow morning. But if you have the imagination to extrapolate in 200, 300 years, if you were to repeat Dearborn and Paterson, New Jersey, and Minneapolis into 20 more cities, 50 more cities, 100 more cities, would you be living in the same United States? And if not, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

The Trojan Horse Concern and Demographic Realities

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s what people are— some people are very fearful of what’s going on in New York City with Mom Donny. Yes, sir. They think it’s a Trojan horse, and that under the guise of progressivism and democratic socialism, that you’re going to open up the door. And eventually you’re going to have call to prayer in the middle of Times Square every day.

DR. GAD SAAD: Exactly. Well, listen, I’m wearing right now a Star of David. Be careful. Exactly. As soon as I’m in New York and I go to one of those— I mean, I don’t as much anymore because my stomach is a bit more sensitive as I get older. But let’s say one of those street vendors, I right away put away my Star of David because I’d love to have my shawarma without— I would spit in it. The fact that I now even think of that and that that’s a reflex that I have today, that’s not a reflex I had 15 years ago. What changed? Well, what changed are the demographic realities that causes that there’s a greater number of people that are triggered by the Star of David. Demography is indeed destiny.

So you and I could fully agree that most Muslims are perfectly lovely. I mean, I am the first one to say this because I come from that culture. No Muslim has ever killed me. No Muslim has ever raped me. But I do know that I have spoken to many Muslims before I was known and they knew who I was, who say things about the Jews that would make Hitler and Himmler go, “Look guys, we also hate the Jews, but I think this is too much Jew hatred even by our standards.”

So there is an endemic feature of Islamic societies that renders the Jew as the ultimate shaitan, the ultimate devil. He’s demonic, right? It’s everywhere. It dictates every interaction.

The Zionist Shark Conspiracy

I’ll just give you a couple of examples. In Sharm el-Sheikh, which is a Red Sea resort area in Egypt, and Jamie is welcome to fact-check me if he wants. I think in 2010, there was a spat of shark attacks on tourists in Sharm el-Sheikh. Do you remember after the investigation by the Egyptian authorities what they concluded?

JOE ROGAN: No. Want to take a guess?

DR. GAD SAAD: No. It was that there is very, very clear evidence that those sharks were Zionist trained because— What? Yes, sir. The way that you can harm the Egyptian economy, certainly in that region, is to render the tourism activity lesser if you have many attacks. And so I’m not saying every Egyptian thought this, but this was coming from the authorities saying that there’s really very clear evidence that those sharks were Jewish assholes, okay?

JOE ROGAN: Well, hold on a second. Wasn’t there some evidence that there was like illegal dumping of carcasses? Of animal carcasses offshore.

DR. GAD SAAD: As specific to that incident?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I think that had something to do with the shark activity. Israeli conspiracy theory. The attack sparked conspiracy theories of possible Israeli involvement. Egyptian television broadcast claims from South Sinai government Mohammed Abdul Fadil Shousha that Israeli divers captured a shark with a GPS unit planted on its back, allegedly by Mossad, describing the theory as sad. Professor Muhammad Hanafi of Suez Canal University pointed out that GPS devices are used by marine biologists to track sharks, not control them remotely. Okay, but wasn’t there something to do—

DR. GAD SAAD: Yeah, that’s what the last sentence speaks to, what you said.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, ultimately thought the dumping of sheep carcasses— there it is— during the Islamic festival of— how do you say that? How do you say the festival? —on the 16th of November was most likely explanation. That makes sense. That’s why there was so much shark activity.

DR. GAD SAAD: But the fact that somebody somewhere said, I think this got Jewish signature all over it.

JOE ROGAN: But there’s people in the United States that think the world’s flat. I mean, there’s not— that doesn’t mean it makes sense.

Why the Jews? Market-Dominant Minorities and the Psychology of Antisemitism

DR. GAD SAAD: The capacity to be parasitized is hardly restricted to Muslim minds. Everybody has the capacity to believe stupidity. So I agree, but there is something, there is a unique feature of the Muslim mind that tends to find causality in all maladies in the Jew. And by the way, I have a theory if I can share it with you here. This is not just Islamic Jew hatred. Why is it that so many societies end up turning their animus towards the Jew. Can I share it with you?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Why do you think that is?

DR. GAD SAAD: So here I’m going to use some of my psychological background. In psychology, there’s something called the self-serving bias. The self-serving bias is how we attribute causality to the wins and losses in our lives. So most of us will attribute successes internally. “I did well on the exam because I’m smart and I studied hard.” And we will attribute failures externally. “I did poorly on the exam because Professor Saad is an asshole,” right? And you can understand why we would have evolved that rosy prism. Life is tough. It’s an ego defensive strategy. I do well because of me. I do poorly because of the cruel world out there.

Now, imagine if we could find the culprit, a universal culprit, a culprit for all of our individual and collective failures. And it’s the Jew. But why is it the Jew? Why isn’t it the Armenian? Why isn’t it the whatever?

Here I’m going to use a term from Amy Chua. Do you know Amy Chua? No. I thought that she might have been on your show. Amy Chua is actually the mentor of J.D. Vance. She was his professor of law at Yale. She’s written several popular books, including the book on how to raise children as a tiger mom. Have you heard the tiger mom book? Sure. This kind of tough parental Asian excellence and so on.

So Amy Chua introduced the term— I mean, the concept is not hers, but the term is hers— market dominant minorities, meaning when you have a small minuscule group of people in any cultural ecosystem that are boxing well above their weight class. Now, in many cases, you’ll have, for example, Lebanese, non-Jews, Lebanese who are the business owners all over West Africa. So they are fitting that market dominant minority. They’re a small minority, but they carry all the business. So it’s not as though it’s only the Jew that’s the only market dominant minority.

Wherever you have market-dominant minorities, you have animus towards that group because the greater group, many of whom are not being successful, look at that group with animus, with envy. The Jews, wherever they are, are always by definition, short of Israel, are always a minuscule group that is always boxing well above their weight class.

Why is that? There are several reasons. I think predominantly it’s really a punishing culture of excellence. And if you want, I can share a story from my own personal background. I don’t know if I’ve ever shared it on this show.

So I did my undergraduate in mathematics and computer science, pretty serious stuff. Then I did an MBA, both at top universities. Then I was going on to pursue my MS, Master of Science, and PhD. One of the places that I had been accepted for my PhD was at UC Irvine. I ended up going to Cornell. At the time, my brother, the judo player, was living in Newport Beach, and he was keen to try to convince me after my MBA to work with him and put on hold going on for my PhD.

When my mother found out of his design to try to convince me not to pursue my PhD, when I returned to Montreal to their house, she says, “Can I speak to you in this room?” And I’m thinking, oh, am I in trouble? She goes, “I want to talk to you.” “What’s up, Mom?” She goes, “I’m hearing that you’re thinking of maybe putting your studies on hold.” I said, “Well, no.” She goes, “Well, I just— before you say anything, do you want people to know you as somebody who dropped out of school?”

Now, that’s a very powerful story because in my mother’s eyes, having an MBA and then taking a break before I pursue a PhD was something that would bring shame to the family as someone who had dropped out of school. Now, do you think that if a group of people have internalized that level of excellence, are they likely to be successful or not? If another group of people thinks that getting good grades is acting white, is that a recipe for success or not, right? So cultural values matter.

For whatever reason, whatever is in the water of the Jewish home, they tend to excel. So now wherever they are, they’re doing really well. Well, “I wanted to be an actor and play in the Avengers, and I didn’t get the part. Who controls Hollywood? The Jews. I wanted to get a small business loan, and I didn’t get it because my numbers weren’t quite correct. Who controls the banks? It’s the Jews.” So it becomes very easy to attribute or ascribe all of my individual and collective failures on this minuscule group of people for all of my failings.

Thomas Sowell, whom I know you appreciate, yes? Gave arguably the greatest one-word answer that I’ve ever heard. At one point he was appearing on some show. This is not too long ago, maybe 20 years ago. He’s now 95 and I think it’s a travesty that he hasn’t won the Presidential Freedom Medal. I pray that President Trump gives it to him before he passes away because he’s deserving of it.

He was asked once, “Professor Sowell, what do you think it will take for people to stop hating the Jews?” And he gave a one-word answer. Do you want to take a guess what it is?

JOE ROGAN: No.

DR. GAD SAAD: Fail. How did Thomas Sowell get this? Because he’s brilliant. If the Jews were suddenly no longer succeeding in ways that are anomalous to their per capita numbers, then maybe they wouldn’t be as hated.

The Asian Exception

JOE ROGAN: Okay, let me give you an argument against that. Please. Asians. Asians in this culture, in this society, also box way above their weight. Extremely disciplined family environment, pushed incredibly hard to succeed, but don’t get nearly the kind of hate that Jewish people do.

The Jewish Lobby, Political Influence, and University Funding

DR. GAD SAAD: So you’re right, in the United States that’s the case, but in some of the ecosystems in the Far East where they are a minority, I think it’s the— I don’t know if it’s the Malays, I can’t remember the exact grouping. You have almost the exact same animus for that group that succeeds a lot. And actually Thomas Sowell has done those analyses.

So in other words, the point is, what I’m describing is not singularly relevant for the Jew, but it is universally relevant for the Jew because there is no other grouping of people that is as successful in as many places and yet minuscule in all those places. So the Armenians also get that treatment in some ecosystems. The Lebanese get that treatment. Indians get that treatment in some ecosystems. So it is not a unique feature of only animus towards the Jews, but the fact that in so many societies you turn to the Jew to blame your problems, I think stems from that.

JOE ROGAN: Don’t you think you could also make that exact same argument that those same people that are small in number but hyper-motivated and hyper-successful would also be much better at influencing policy in the country that they live in?

DR. GAD SAAD: Hence meaning that they’re more likely to get the ears— Yes. The lobby?

JOE ROGAN: Not just the ears, but donate money, fund campaigns, get the ear of the president, donate money towards his campaign, fund him.

DR. GAD SAAD: I suspect that the answer is you’re right, yes.

JOE ROGAN: Most people would say that. That is absolutely the case.

DR. GAD SAAD: But also we could say that if we look at the philanthropy, Jewish philanthropy compared to all other philanthropy, we’d probably score very highly if not number one. What kind of philanthropy are we talking about? Art philanthropy, hospital philanthropy, literary philanthropy for the art, right?

So in other words, look, my family, we moved to Montreal from Lebanon. We moved to Montreal for two reasons. Well, three reasons. Number one, Montreal is also French, and Lebanon— France— Lebanon used to be a French protectorate, so you already spoke French in Lebanon in addition to Arabic. So that was one. Number two, the immigration policy for war refugees was maybe easier to navigate. Canada was a more welcoming country than, say, maybe United States. But number three, is that my mother’s sister had already emigrated to Montreal with her husband, and that husband became the director general of the Jewish General Hospital of Montreal, which is the biggest hospital in Montreal. It’s the Jewish General, right?

So in other words, it is undoubtedly true, probably, I don’t have the empirical evidence, that probably the Jewish lobby does its job really well and effectively, but let’s look at all of the other things that they also do well. They contribute, and so for example—

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s wonderful, but that doesn’t take away from the influence that it has on our policies. On our political candidates. Like, for instance, one of the reasons why Mamdani won in New York City is because when they had the mayoral debate, he was the only one that said he’s not immediately going to go to Israel. And a lot of people were shocked by that. They were like, why is everyone saying they’re going to go to Israel when they win as the mayor in New York City? It didn’t make any sense. And people were kind of just confused by it.

New York City’s a mess. It’s got a lot of problems. And this one guy said, “I think I can serve Jewish Americans better by staying here in New York City. And I’m not going to go to Israel.” And everybody was like, “Thank God someone said that.” Because all the other candidates, it seemed, at least to me as an outsider, were being heavily influenced by the Jewish lobby.

DR. GAD SAAD: Maybe. I really don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Why else would they do that? They’re not saying I’m going to go to England. They’re not saying I’m going to go to France. They’re saying I’m going to go to Israel.

DR. GAD SAAD: Right. I mean, is it surprising that if you have a group of people who have been historically persecuted the way that they have— By the way, I don’t think that—

JOE ROGAN: But it’s running for mayor of New York City. And they’re saying, “I’m going to go to Israel.”

DR. GAD SAAD: I think it’s totally wrong. If there is a conflict between the best interests of the country that you reside in versus Israel, you should always side with the former.

JOE ROGAN: Understandably. I agree. But I think that the reason why they were saying that is they were being influenced by the people that were funding their campaigns. And I think the people in New York City recognized that and said, “Hey, there’s something where they’re not looking out for our best interests. They’re looking out for the best interests of the people that are funding them. And those people have the best interests of Israel in mind above the interests of the United States.”

So, and this is the same sentiment that people have for why we invaded Iran and why we funded Israel, why they’re bombing Gaza, the same sort of thing. And I would say from October 7th on, first of all, immediately afterwards, tremendous support for Israel. I mean, it was a horrific attack, but the response, I think, has created a lot of anti-Israel sentiment in the United States.

DR. GAD SAAD: Yes. Do you think that other lobby groups that very feverishly lobby for their self-interests would receive the same animus as the pro-Israel lobby? So for example, they’re not connected to a specific country.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the problem. This one group is connected to a specific country. Okay. So let’s do specific country.

Foreign Influence on American Universities

DR. GAD SAAD: I’ve been a professor for 32 years. So I care about the ideas, the bad ideas that flourish within university’s ecosystem, hence Parasitic Minds, Suicidal Empathy. Right. If you do a histogram of all of the nations that contribute to try to alter the types of ideas that are promulgated on American campuses, which lobby or which country scores way higher than anything you could ever hope for from Israel?

JOE ROGAN: That’s a very good question. And I think that’s a different thing because I think what you’re talking about is influencing American education systems and that you could say China and Russia. Yeah. They both have—

DR. GAD SAAD: How about the Qataris? Sure.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, they all— there’s a lot of people from other countries specifically influencing our education system and doing it within their best interest by donating a lot of money, by funding programs, by having a lot of foreign exchange students. So that’s— There’s a big impact by other countries for sure, but they’re not representing another country. Like, no one’s saying, “I want to win New York City and then go to Beijing.” Right.

DR. GAD SAAD: Anybody who does that in the way you just said it, in my view, is violating its most basic tenets.

JOE ROGAN: Well, the crazy thing is they all did it. They all did it except Mamdani. Cuomo did it. They all did it. Right. They all said, “I’m going to Israel.”

DR. GAD SAAD: So I can’t speak to that. I really can’t.

JOE ROGAN: But do you understand why people, especially post-October 7th, have this negative sentiment? Because of the destruction of Gaza.

DR. GAD SAAD: Any lobby group vociferously fights for its self-interest. The tobacco lobby spends all their time convincing doctors— this I’m talking 40 years ago— that there is no evidence that smoking is bad for your health.

JOE ROGAN: Pharmaceutical drug companies, OxyContin and Oxycodone.

DR. GAD SAAD: Exactly. So the reflex for a group that has its own interests to promulgate are going to do exactly that. That’s why they’re called a lobby group. Right. So if from this side of our mouth, we care about the fact that there is a Zionist lobby, it cannot be that from this side of our mouth, we don’t care about the fact that there are Islamic-based funding to all of the American universities that have parasitized your daughters and mine in ways that should be problematic because it’s your daughter.

JOE ROGAN: Please explain how they’ve done that.

DR. GAD SAAD: So any Near East studies program, also known as political science program, also known as government program. So at Harvard, you call it the Department of Government, right? So all those schools will then produce kids. All those kids are called John Smith and Jethro Roscoe, but yet they are on the front line after October 7th wearing their keffiyeh, stopping Jews from going to class. And that happened at UCLA and at Wellesley and at everywhere and at Concordia University, my university.

What caused that to happen? It’s because there is one particular viewpoint that becomes the norm on university campuses when it comes to these geopolitical realities. So by the same way that I can be frustrated if Mario Cuomo is concerned about going to Israel when he is running for mayor of New York, I should also be very concerned that all of these Islamic countries are having a free for all with all of our children’s things. But yet I don’t see many people concerned about that.

It is that double standard that then makes you go, “Hmm, why are you, who lives in Iowa, why are you so concerned about it?” Maybe there are really valid reasons for you to be concerned about the pro-Israel lobby. And let’s have a conversation about that. But then are you honest enough to have a similar discussion about other ways by which we tilt our policies and our children’s brains? Probably not.

JOE ROGAN: Could you explain how this is done? Like, what do you think is happening in the universities where they’re tilting people towards a pro-Palestinian perspective?

DR. GAD SAAD: Well, several ways. One, if it’s directly through funding, you fund the $30 million whatever, you’re probably not going to have faculty members who are going to be incredibly vociferous in their anti-Islamic rhetoric if you have that.

I’ll give you an example. When I was potentially going to come— maybe they don’t want me to hear this, but so be it. One of the places that I was being recruited at was potentially University of Austin, right? And I came close. I mean, they were going to make me an offer. The University of Austin doesn’t have a tenure system. They have a constitution. It’s a different kind of system.

Of course, what allowed me to not be canceled— I would have been canceled 30 years ago for all the things that I say and all the things that I write— is that I was protected by tenure. And so I was very concerned about whether the fact that they don’t have tenure, what happens if tomorrow, right? And I remember having a conversation, I won’t mention his name, but you can probably guess who it could be, where I said, “What happens under your constitution if tomorrow you get a $30 million donation from Mohammed Balthalith Tilal? And he says, ‘You know that little Jewish professor who’s going on Joe Rogan and talking about bad things about Islam, that has to stop.'” His answer was— the gentleman that I was, my interlocutor was— “Well, we’re on the same team. I fully support what you’re saying.” Well, you support what I’m saying until money talks, right? I can pick you a number, a donation number where you’re no longer supporting with equal alacrity my criticism of Islam. Maybe it’s $100 million, maybe it’s $200 million, but then—

JOE ROGAN: Well, just given the people that I know that are the founders of the University of Austin, I don’t know if that’s likely.

DR. GAD SAAD: You mean there is no reservation price?

JOE ROGAN: It doesn’t seem like they would be willing to go against the idea of Israel.

DR. GAD SAAD: Well, maybe.

JOE ROGAN: Does that make sense to you though?

DR. GAD SAAD: I mean, it does, but it wasn’t sufficiently reassuring.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I can understand. I mean, if I was offered tenure or no tenure, tenure is the way to go.

DR. GAD SAAD: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: It’s the only way you could have real intellectual freedom.

Tenure, Free Speech, and the University of Mississippi

DR. GAD SAAD: Well, and by the way, to that point, so when I now got this beautiful position at University of Mississippi, I don’t have tenure there. I don’t really care that much, but they put a clause in the contract that says that my rights to say, speak, and write whatever I want will be protected with the same staunchness that the First Amendment offers me and that tenure would offer me. So even though I’m not officially there a tenured professor at this stage of my career, I don’t care. But they enshrined it.

So to our earlier point, I think there is a way whereby I could put a load of money in front of you and say, “So how much do you now support freedom of speech for Gad Saad?” And I’m saying, maybe you’re right that the University of Austin guys would never buckle to that. But Harvard government department did buckle.

Columbia University under Edward Said— do you know who that is, Edward Said?

JOE ROGAN: No.

DR. GAD SAAD: Edward Said was a kind of very pro-Palestinian guy who was kind of a big shot in their political science department. All of his teachings at Columbia University were rather skewed in terms of being anti-Israel. And so the students that come out are going to be a product of what we taught them. It’s not surprising that they’re all wearing keffiyehs.

The Roots of Anti-Israel Sentiment

JOE ROGAN: And you think that this is directly because of funding and not because of what they’ve seen, the horrors of what’s happened in Gaza? Right. Well, because I think that’s what’s turned most people that have no affiliation with any university, because it’s not all university students that are reacting the way they’re reacting. They’re reacting because of what you could see when you see Gaza. Right. I mean, it’s obliterated.

DR. GAD SAAD: It’s true. But we can go back to a time before October 7th, and I can point you, the difficulties that I faced at Concordia at not being able to walk around on campus freely also held true before October 7th. So we know that we could eliminate the retaliation.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, in that case. Right?

DR. GAD SAAD: So that goes to our earlier point. We can blame ISIS for the US, but then I could take you to a time where the US didn’t exist. Which is called 1776. Who you going to blame now? You can blame things in the Middle East on Israel, but I could take you to 1948 when it’s not that. So it’s a very facile reflex to always find that culprit.

The reality is that any lobby group is by definition of the word lobby is going to espouse positions that are in their self-interest. I understand that. It doesn’t surprise me that the pro-Israel lobby does that as do the Qataris, as do the Romanians. The Romanians, as do the Haitians. Everybody does it for various dynamical reasons. Yes, the Israelis are probably more in the ears of the things. Is that because they’re demonic? No, because they have more power. Is that weird?

JOE ROGAN: Well, let me ask you this. Sure. Do you agree that anti-Israel sentiment has ramped up since the response to October 7th?

DR. GAD SAAD: Absolutely. You may not like what I’m about to say, I think most of the anti-Israel sentiments, ultimately, if you scratch enough the onion and peel enough the stuff, is rooted in Jew hatred. Really? I do.

JOE ROGAN: Really? So you don’t think that it’s a direct response to people seeing what happened in Gaza? No, because— You don’t think that has an impact on it?

DR. GAD SAAD: I’ve lived in the world before October 7th, and the world that I lived in and the Jew hatred that I faced. Right? I don’t have Joe Rogan’s platform size, but certainly by the standards of most people, I have a huge platform. The massive, the orgiastic, the Himmler-level Jew hatred that I have faced certainly precedes by countless years the October 7th. So then how would we explain why I’m called a parasite, a pedophile, a child killer, a rat, a vermin. I mean, why am I called those things? I had nothing to do with the Israeli war.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, but this is anecdotal, right? I mean, what we’re talking about is the general sentiment in the United States has changed pretty radically since the response of October 7th. I’ve experienced it. I’ve experienced it with people that I know, experienced it online, people that never talked about Israel, never had anything bad to say about Jewish people, and now are just furious when they see what’s happening in Gaza. And now what they see what’s happening in southern Lebanon. Where their Christian villages are being bombed.

DR. GAD SAAD: Were those people also mad at what happened to the 600,000 Syrians who were killed?

JOE ROGAN: Which event is this?

DR. GAD SAAD: In the Lebanese and the Syrian civil war, about 600,000 Syrians were killed.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. I don’t know if they knew about that, but I think this is kind of a case of whataboutism, right? And I just, we could go to that and we could talk about that and maybe that should be publicized more. But what I’m talking about is the people that I’ve encountered in the United States that really generally didn’t have an opinion about Israel at all, have had a very negative opinion about Israel because of the response to October 7th and because of what they’ve done to Gaza.

The Whataboutism Debate

DR. GAD SAAD: So let me address the whataboutism. Okay. By the way, I’m loving today’s conversation has a different timbre to it, but it’s keeping us sharp. I like it. So thank you. Thank you for keeping me on my toes.

Let’s suppose that I had a rule in my head that says I only get incredibly irate and animated if an MMA fighter commits a crime. But when I see the exact same crime committed by anybody other than an MMA fighter, I don’t have the reflex to be upset. Would it be whataboutism for you to say, how come you got upset when the MMA fighter did this, but when the non-MMA— that wouldn’t be whataboutism, because what you would be saying is, I want cognitive consistency from you, Gad, that if you’re upset that an MMA fighter commits a crime, you’ll be as upset when a non-MMA fighter commits the exact same crime.

JOE ROGAN: Could you illuminate me on this Syrian thing? Yeah, so when this, when the, but I’m only vaguely aware of what happened.

DR. GAD SAAD: So there was a civil war that was started in Syria, I think in 2011, where the various Islamist groups were trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. And as a result of that dynamic, innumerable people, Muslim on Muslim, were completely ravaged to the tune of about 600,000. Okay. So let’s put that here. So let’s not call that whataboutism because you could easily say, I am angry whenever.

JOE ROGAN: But it is whataboutism because we were specifically talking about Jew hatred in this country being ramped up post-October 7th. I mean, it is whataboutism because we could address that. Yes. Yes. But this is one particular thing, one particular moment in history that has caused this extreme reaction, this anti-Israel sentiment.

DR. GAD SAAD: The guy in Iowa who has never heard of the Middle East, but got rightly upset at what he saw in Gaza. Why wasn’t that guy, if he is an honest purveyor in his moral calculus of any innocents being killed? I’m asking you, I pose that question to you. When he sees the thousands and thousands of Yemenis that were killed, the children that were eradicated, much more than the tune of whatever happened in Gaza, every single individual, let me go on record.

JOE ROGAN: This is, you talking about the drone bombing in Yemen? What are you talking about?

DR. GAD SAAD: There are many, many different ways by which Yemenis have died as a result of the conflicts in Yemen. There are a huge number of people that were killed in the fight between Sudan and the South Sudanese. I mean, really in the many hundreds of thousands, right?

So if I am just an Iowa guy, my moral calculus operates according to the following rule. Whenever I see innocent people being killed, it drives me crazy. I am outraged. Therefore, if that’s the rule by which I navigate through the world, I will look at the October 7th victims and say, those Jews didn’t deserve this. I’m pissed. I will look at the Gazans that were killed who were innocent, and I’d say, those Gazans did not deserve this. So far so good? Yeah. We agree? Okay.

I will look at the Syrians and say, that is not right. I will look at the Ukrainians that were being butchered endlessly by Putin and say, that’s pissing me off, and on and on. Right. But if it would appear that my calculus is abiding by the “no Jews, no news” mechanism, then I have a right to say, how come you’re focused only on when it seems that the mean Israelis are killing the beautifully peaceful Palestinians, and your moral outrage never gets invoked across all of the panoply of much greater disasters around the world.

The Disparity in Military Power

JOE ROGAN: Why is that? Well, I think initially in October 7th, people were very outraged at the attack on the Israelis. They were horrified at what happened. The videos that we saw were terrible. Videos of people cheering in the streets when they were bringing the Israeli captive. But then the difference between the capability of the Palestinians in Gaza versus the Israeli army, which is one of the most ferocious and capable armies in the world, and the devastation that they did to Gaza, the city, just the city alone where you see apartment buildings, hospital, everything just blown to smithereens. There’s a complete difference in power. What you’re talking about in Syria, I’m assuming this is a civil war between similarly armed people killing each other.

DR. GAD SAAD: Well, that’s the government versus militia, but sure.

JOE ROGAN: Right, but similarly armed people. You’re not seeing that with Gaza and Israel. With Israel, you’re seeing United States-funded Israeli military, which is insanely capable, destroying an entire city. Fair enough.

DR. GAD SAAD: It’s very tough. The images are very tough. There’s no question.

JOE ROGAN: But the reality of the numbers is very tough too, because we don’t even know how many people are dead.

DR. GAD SAAD: We could talk about the numbers if you want in a second, but let me ask you this. If October 7th hadn’t happened, I’m not being flippant. I’m not playing games. I’m really honestly asking you. If October 7th had not happened, how many of the innocent Palestinians that tragically perished would have perished?

JOE ROGAN: That’s a good question. Probably it would have never happened. There probably would have been a bombing of Gaza. You know, we could get really dark here because there’s a lot of people that believe that it was allowed to happen so that they could have an excuse to attack Gaza.

DR. GAD SAAD: But that goes to our earlier point about how it gets—

JOE ROGAN: It gets goofy. And I’m not the person to comment on that because I don’t really know. But there was stand-down orders. So we know that some of, at least some of the army was told to stand down.

The Mossad’s Account of October 7th

DR. GAD SAAD: Well, I actually had the former director of the Mossad on my show. And his name is Yossi Cohen. And I was like, Yossi, what the f*? How does— Right, how did it happen? And the best of my understanding, in terms of what I’ve told, is that, you know, sh happens and someone falls asleep, metaphorically speaking, right? And so it was a gigantic, but anyways, if you, not you, but if someone is of the conspiratorial mindset, there’s nothing that I could share. But speaking literally to the former Mossad, the former director of Mossad, he said it was a catastrophic failure of where everybody is kind of asleep. But my point is this. Right, but let me stop you there.

JOE ROGAN: Please. If I was the former head of Mossad, the last thing I would tell you is that, well, we allowed it to happen because we’ve been wanting to blow up Gaza for a long time and take it over and turn it into a big resort. You would never say that, right? Right. And we also know that on record, Netanyahu has said that they fund Hamas so they can control the size of the flame because they don’t want the democratically elected people to take over and turn Palestine into a state.

DR. GAD SAAD: So you don’t think there’s something— Isn’t that true? Well, Israel left, if I’m getting my history right, they left Gaza in 2005, right? Is that the right number? Am I getting that right? So from 2005 till 2023, or maybe 2007, so someone will correct me in the comments section, for many, many years, Israel left. Left, and there was no problem in the region, right? Is that true? I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: You would know better than me.

DR. GAD SAAD: Well, there was no problem. Okay. Then there was a catalyst. An event happened. Now we can debate whether it was proportionate, whether it could have been adjudicated differently. We can discuss all that. And all that, you can discuss it without ever worrying about being called antisemitic. It’s totally within the fair bounds of having those conversations. Right.

But what is true is that if Israel wanted to eradicate Palestinians, it would take them a lot less time than when you and I have been talking on the show, by orders of magnitude. It would take 15 seconds, but they didn’t do that, right? They don’t do that. As a matter of fact, John—

JOE ROGAN: But they kind of have in Gaza. Gaza is done. There’s almost nothing left of it.

DR. GAD SAAD: So the numbers that I’m hearing—

JOE ROGAN: You’ve seen videos of it, right? You’ve seen what it looks like when they fly overhead. We could show some videos. Sure. So, okay. The most recent videos, they show the drone videos of flying over Gaza. It looks like a nuclear bomb hit it. It just, they did it slowly. They did it over years, just consistent, constant bombing. And there’s almost nothing left of it. Right? And there’s also been this crazy talk of putting resorts there, you know, and Trump said, yeah, we say that we’re going to turn it into the— what did he say? Something of the— some, you know, like Monte Carlo, Monaco, something crazy, right?

The Israel-Palestine Conflict: History, Proportionality, and the Path Forward

DR. GAD SAAD: Again, it’s totally fair to discuss what constitutes proportional thing and so on, but I take a broader view, which is Israel exists and you have two choices. You can keep creating generations of your people whose entire daily animation in terms of their objectives is to eradicate that place, or you could recognize that every single millimeter on earth has at some point been owned by someone else. Is that not true? I mean, it’s— is the definition of history not the accounting ledgering of who owned what when?

Now, in every other conflict that has ever existed throughout all of human history, there is a winner of that conflict and a loser, and people move on. Okay, just, just hear me out. I lived in Lebanon. I grew up in Lebanon. We had to leave. Under imminent threat of execution. It’s very unfortunate. We lost everything. We moved on. We made a life for ourselves. Our home was stolen by Palestinian people. I never held any animus towards Palestinians. I moved on with my life. One day I was interesting enough to have the privilege of appearing on Joe Rogan’s show. My daily animation is not to go and kill people for things that were done to us.

And very few people have had things happen to them as what happened to us, right? Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. It didn’t create an endless litany of Jewish terrorists throughout the world trying to get back. So in every part of the world, we are now in Texas, that land was owned by someone else before the United States came along. We are sitting, quote, on stolen land. In Canada, we are sitting on stolen land. It’s called history. Most people are able to move on and say, hey, the dice went this way or that way. Let’s hold hands and let’s build a better future.

You can’t do that if canonically the Jewish state should not exist, right? Doesn’t Hamas say in their charter, every Jew that is anywhere, we will find him and get him? So did that make sense that they would be the leaders of that region? Wouldn’t it have been much better for them to train their kids to becoming neuroscientists and podcasters and classicists and physicians, but that’s not what they chose to do repeatedly for nearly 80 years. The minute that that clicks and they say, you know what, you have this part, we have this part, let’s shake hand and let’s be one family, the problem will go away.

So I agree with you, the images are very jarring. Suffering, right? I’m also a very empathetic, loving guy, but I also know the reality, which is I’ve never heard Jews saying, “Let’s kill all Muslims.” I always hear the opposite. Jews are an existential affront to Islam. Muhammad on his deathbed said, “Promise me that you will rid Arabia of Christians, but really the Jews.” So how could you have a coexistence between two people when one people wants to eradicate the other?

So did Israel overreact? I’ll leave future historians to decide that. What do you think? I think that given what they were trying to achieve, they did the best that could possibly be. So as you know—

JOE ROGAN: The best they could possibly be would be eliminate the entire city? No. And turn it into rubble?

DR. GAD SAAD: There’s been about 70,000 dead. Is that the right number? We don’t even know. I mean, that’s the number that I’ve seen.

JOE ROGAN: What’s the accounting?

DR. GAD SAAD: Who’s to know how many people died in the war? Well, many of those numbers are coming from Hamas. That’s true too.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. But if you just look at the destruction, the buildings that have been leveled, the sheer volume of destruction.

DR. GAD SAAD: There were two cities called Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Okay. They were fully nice. What about Israel? Japan. But they didn’t send a bomb to Pakistan.

JOE ROGAN: We didn’t have to do that either. And we could— you could say that that was a horrific thing because Japan was about to surrender. Well, and we were like, let’s practice. Let’s see how these things work. Again, that’s the least— Let’s show you that we have nuclear bombs.

DR. GAD SAAD: That’s the least generous interpretation of that.

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s a pretty accurate demonstration. I think I’ve heard something else.

DR. GAD SAAD: Well, what have you heard? I’ve heard that they did the calculus. And by the way, it could be a very cold, callous calculus, but what I’ve heard is that there is a very clear pro-con thing where if we do this, this many people would die. If we go on in the war and it takes that much more before they surrender, there’ll be this many dead. Drop those bombs. It’s possible. Yeah. It’s possible.

JOE ROGAN: So do you think that if Israel didn’t kill 70,000 people and completely destroy Gaza that more than 70,000 people would have died during the same time period?

DR. GAD SAAD: No, I’m not applying that same calculus of Japan. What I’m saying is images of destruction are very vivid to our brain, right? They should be, don’t you think? But that doesn’t mean that that’s the information that I use to establish what is morally righteous. What else can we use other than information? We can use what is the existential calculus that animates each society. One society says, “We’ll even help you build a better society. Just please don’t spend all your time screaming about eradicating every last one of us.” The other society says, “Yeah, I don’t think so. If we’re ever strong enough to kill all— unfortunately, we were only strong enough to kill 1,200 of you,” and boy, that was orgiastically pleasing. But if tomorrow, God willing, hey, maybe the Iranians have nuclear bombs, we can eradicate all you assholes. My God, the world would be different.

Civilian Casualties and the Question of Proportionality

JOE ROGAN: So this is Hamas saying that, right? And the people that live in Palestine that were killed, these 70,000-plus people, how many of them do you think were Hamas?

DR. GAD SAAD: Well, the numbers that I hear is that it was 1-to-1 ratio, which apparently is a pretty good ratio.

JOE ROGAN: And where are those numbers coming from?

DR. GAD SAAD: I mean, you want me to give you the reference? I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, no. I mean, is it coming from Israel? Is it coming from Hamas? Is it coming from Palestine?

DR. GAD SAAD: So the one I’m going to use is from John Spencer. Do you know who that is? No. John Spencer is a war, urban war researcher. I think he’s at West Point. He’s a professor of urban warfare. He’s come on my show. And based on whatever analysis that he’s done, he’s not Jewish. He’s not uniquely pro-Zionist. He’s saying, and again, I cede to whomever knows better about this than I do, I don’t know all the details. He said that the ratio of civilian to fighters killed in the Gaza War is better than most other comparable situations.

JOE ROGAN: So Hamas had 35,000— I think it’s 1 to 1. So Hamas had 35,000 militants in Gaza?

DR. GAD SAAD: If the 1 to 1 number is right and 70, that’s what it would be.

JOE ROGAN: And so all those buildings needed to be destroyed because at least 1 out of 1 was— So let me ask you this.

DR. GAD SAAD: I think it’s totally reasonable that you’d be upset that all these people died innocently. Well, I think most people that see it would be upset, right? Fair enough. What, give me the specific details of how you would go about getting your hostages back, given the reality. So give me a way.

JOE ROGAN: How many hostages did they get back?

DR. GAD SAAD: In terms of alive or dead? Yeah. I don’t know the exact numbers, but is it something in the order of like 30, 40 alive and all the other ones were dead? Does that sound right? Is that the right number? I don’t know. Whatever it is, it could be 50, it could be 100, it could be 200. So I am representative of Israel. I need to get those people out. Let’s suppose that Hamas had said, here are all the people that we have kidnapped and we are returning them to you and putting down our arms. Would Israel have caused the destruction that they did? I don’t know. But what do you think?

JOE ROGAN: Probably not. Right. If they did that.

DR. GAD SAAD: So nothing happens in a vacuum, right? It’s not, there isn’t something.

JOE ROGAN: But does that — just because they wouldn’t have done that, does it justify what they did? What does it say here? Final release. Total returns. 168 hostages were returned alive, including 8 rescued by the IDF. The bodies of 85 hostages were repatriated after they were killed during their captivity. U.S. deal broker that landed a ceasefire and a swap for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. So they swapped some of them.

Sinwar, the Brain Tumor, and the Limits of Compassion

DR. GAD SAAD: Well, let me actually speak about the swap issue. I discussed this in Suicidal Empathy. Sinwar, who was the architect of October 7th, do you know his background, his story? No. Sinwar was an ardent militant whose entire life has been animated with eradicating Jews, not Israel, all Jews from the world. Because there’s a hadith that says in Islam, the world will not stop until every Jew that is hiding behind the tree is found and killed. And they refer to that hadith from Islam, not radical Islam, Islam. Right.

He was taken in one of those sweeps of Palestinian militants to prison, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, a deadly terminal brain tumor. The Israelis, the mean Israelis who are killing everybody, because the Hippocratic oath in their view supersedes any other calculus, the Israeli neurosurgeon doesn’t say, “F* this guy, he’s killed tons of my fellow co-religionists, screw him, let him die.” They operate on him and they save his life, right?

So let me ask you this, Joe. If you and I, let’s put ourselves in the mind of, right? I was saved by the hands of the Jewish Israeli neurosurgeon. Otherwise I would have died. Then he was let go in one of those swaps. Would that have not bought you sufficient existential empathy to say, probably I shouldn’t then spend the rest of my life being the architect and repay the largesse of the Israeli neurosurgeon by doing October 7th? Yet it didn’t buy him that empathy, right?

JOE ROGAN: So he was swapped in an earlier deal.

DR. GAD SAAD: He was swapped in an earlier deal. Just, Jamie could look it up. You could do Sinwar, S-I-N-W-A-R. He was one of the guys who you saw him in one of those rubbles and a drone comes in and he’s covered in rubble and then they take him out, right?

Well, if you and I, if I could put myself in your mind, if we had been ardent haters of a group and then that group had shown us tremendous compassion and generosity by literally saving our lives, that might have shut off my hatred to that group. For example, Brigitte Gabriel, the Lebanese Christian woman who grew up in the Lebanese Civil War like I did, had always been taught as a Lebanese Christian that the Israelis are terrible and evil, they are the problem for the whole region. But then she escaped to Israel, was welcomed in Israel, she completely flipped because she saw that they were nice human beings that treated her well and then her brainwashing was no longer there. Well, if I’ve literally taken a brain tumor out of your brain, in that brain of yours, could I have not bought a bit of existential empathy for the Jews? It didn’t. What do you think of that?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think that person was probably deeply radicalized to whatever their ideology was, and that wasn’t enough. Like, saving them wasn’t enough. It gave them — it was probably Allah giving them another opportunity to kill more Jews.

DR. GAD SAAD: Exactly. So don’t you think that—

JOE ROGAN: But that’s just one person and one person saved them. I don’t think it necessarily changes the relationship between Israel and Palestine, particularly because Palestine was denied statehood. It’s not a country on its own, can’t do things that other countries can do.

DR. GAD SAAD: Do you know what Bill Clinton, who’s not a Republican, Shimon Peres said regarding Palestinian statehood? What? He said, I’m paraphrasing him, I killed myself, bent myself backwards to give them almost everything that they wanted. This is sort of the Oslo Accords. And Yasser Arafat was not interested in a two-state solution.

If You Were Head of Israel, How Would You Handle It?

JOE ROGAN: Let me ask you this. If you were the head of Israel, how would you handle it?

DR. GAD SAAD: You mean moving forward? Yeah. In my utopia, it would be to try to catch the brainwashing that happens straight out of the womb, where the type of animus that is shared regarding the Jews is so outlandish that it would make Hitler and Himmler squirm in unease. If you can get rid of that brainwashing, you will learn to see the other as an equal human being.

JOE ROGAN: Could I interject there? Please. Do you think that the bombing of Gaza and the destruction that’s so clearly visible to everyone would actually stop that? Do you think that the bombing of Gaza would maybe make more people radicalized, that would make more people want to attack Israel, that would give them—

Israel, Open Society, and the Demographics of Antisemitism

DR. GAD SAAD: 100%. You’re right that you are creating a new generation of terrorists, but again, it’s— you’re choosing to decide where to place the causal point. Gaza existed fully peacefully for 20-plus years without anybody dying. The day that they decided to do what they did resulted in a retaliation which we can discuss whether it’s good or not enough or too much, that is true. At the root of the problem is an open society that allows for the expression of all religions.

When I was in Israel 2 months ago, I was all over Israel. I gave a talk in Tel Aviv and I gave a talk in Jerusalem. I spoke more Arabic in Jerusalem than I did English or Hebrew or anything else.

JOE ROGAN: To your point, I think Israel is only 73% Jewish. Exactly. Look that up, please.

DR. GAD SAAD: I thought it was maybe 80%, but your number would even prove my point even better.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I think— I might be wrong, but it’s not 100%, that’s for sure. And there are Arab and Muslim communities in Israel that are tolerated. Tolerated versus having a Jewish community in Palestine.

DR. GAD SAAD: Not tolerated, fully embraced. So I can show you the valedictorians.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s see. Jewish population’s the largest in the world.

DR. GAD SAAD: 78, see, I said 80.

JOE ROGAN: 73. What? 73% of the population is Jewish, including, look, right there. Oh, right, right, right. Israel Bureau of Statistics, so I was right. 73% of the population is Jewish, 5,003,000 people living in the West Bank beyond Israel’s self-defined borders. Recent updates of December 2025 show total population at 10,148,000 with Jews and others at 7,758,000.

Muslim Representation Within Israel

DR. GAD SAAD: Right. So let’s do a few analyses. Many, many valedictorians of universities graduate, they’re Muslim. Some of them are in hijab. That’s happening in Israel. You go to medical school, the valedictorian that’s chosen is a woman in hijab. Does that seem like it’s animus? In the Knesset, in the parliament of Israel, there are tons of Muslims that serve, right?

As I was walking around all over Jerusalem, everybody that I was interacting with was in Arabic. They were fully Israelis who were Muslim, right? I have tons of pictures with all of them. Some of them recognize me. There was no animus. Why? Because they’ve internalized the reality that I am part of a country that is made up of— it’s a Jewish-majority country, but it’s a place where everybody has equal rights, right? There are people who serve in the highest judiciary that are Muslim. Is there an Islamic country where the opposite could be said?

JOE ROGAN: No, I don’t think so. Yeah. It’s also interesting when you look at the statistics, the polling statistics of people that support the war with Iran in Israel versus the United States, and it’s way more people support the war. And obviously, I live in America and I’m immune to the effects of being surrounded by people that hate me and want to blow me up. I could only imagine what that’s like for the national psyche of living in a place like Israel, being surrounded by—

DR. GAD SAAD: Paradoxically though, forgive me for interrupting you, Israelis score as one of the highest on the happiness scales. So in a sense it goes against what you’re saying. And I think I’ve got an explanation, tell me what you think of it. When I am spending my entire existence, to your point, possibly being eradicated tomorrow, I don’t have the luxury to debate what constitutes male or female. It creates a laser focus about what’s important in my life.

The Israeli Mindset: Living in the Moment

JOE ROGAN: My kickboxing coach, my old kickboxing coach Shuki, he’s from Israel, and I went over his house once for dinner and it was crazy. They’re dancing and playing bongo drums. And I was, obviously I’m American. I’m saying to him, I go, “Why are you guys so happy?” I was like trying to figure it out. I go, “Is this just uniquely you?” He goes, “It’s in Israel. Everybody’s happy because you know you could die any day. So just party, party, party. Have a good time.” And so you go there. That was his mentality. And I never forgot that because I remember thinking that like, man, and he went back to Israel. He’s there right now. Have you been to Israel? No.

DR. GAD SAAD: Okay, you know what I suggest?

JOE ROGAN: Doesn’t seem like a good time to go. Seems like it’s a little dangerous.

DR. GAD SAAD: I mean, in that sense, yes, but go there and live, live out the vibe. Look, it’s an incredibly gay-tolerant place, right? Tel Aviv, short of San Francisco, New York, Montreal, it’s one of the most queer-friendly places. It’s very bohemian. It’s, you know, reggae music playing. Israelis are— in French you say bon vivant, good livers.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s also— Israeli society doesn’t universally support the war either.

DR. GAD SAAD: Exactly. But that speaks to the fact that there is a multiplicity of realities. It’s an open society, right? I mean, there are Muslim guys who will go in front of the Knesset and will say things that would never be tolerated in any other society. So is Israeli society perfect? No. But is it the beast and the monster and the demon that you see as a caricature? I mean, nothing could be further from the truth.

JOE ROGAN: But do you think that perhaps the more right-wing authoritarian aspect of the Israeli government is a problem in how Israel’s perceived in the rest of the world?

DR. GAD SAAD: And this over-response in Gaza, the way they’re bombing southern Lebanon, that this is feeding into this— Look, there have been governments in Israel covering the whole gamut of political orientations. And while, to your point, I think there is greater animus towards Israel today than maybe in the past, I’ve always known there to be Israeli animus in many places.

For example, at my own university, which I will be leaving shortly, Concordia, has been colloquially referred to as Gaza University for 25-plus years. Benjamin Netanyahu in 2002 was not able to speak there. They shut him down and they canceled him. And this is when he was then a private citizen. Now this is in 2002.

JOE ROGAN: So why did they say they were shutting him down?

DR. GAD SAAD: Well, because it’s the Zionist entity and the same talking points, right? You just change what is the culprit. So now we say it’s the devastating images of Gaza, but 20 years ago it would have been another story.

JOE ROGAN: So the reality— But that’s that university. I don’t necessarily think that was universally thought of in terms of like, if you went to all the other different schools.

DR. GAD SAAD: No, you’re absolutely right.

The Pew Survey: Antisemitism in the Middle East

DR. GAD SAAD: But now that I think comes from two sources. The first source was when I told you earlier that the brainwashing that’s going on American campuses where Jethro is now also wearing the keffiyeh. But also, the demographic realities of the West in general, including the United States, are such that we’ve let in people from those societies at a much greater number than in the past, right?

So, you know the Pew survey, General Pew, P-E-W, right? So there’s a nonpartisan survey company that, if anything, tends to lean more towards progressive. They did a survey, a global survey of animus towards Jews, not Israel, Jews. This was, I think, 2010. And they had a whole bunch of Islamic countries that were polled.

Now, let’s suppose I told you that we polled people in Indonesia or in Libya or in Jordan and 10% expressed very serious Jew hatred, that would be an arresting number. You’d be like, wow, 1 out of 10 hates the Jews. That’s a lot. Do you know what the average numbers were? Just pick a number. In which countries? So in many, but I’m talking now mainly the Middle Eastern countries. So not Indonesia or Malaysia, which also were not loving the Jews, but were not nearly as hostile towards the Jews. I’m talking Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, those kinds of countries, what was the average number? And Jamie can pull it up.

JOE ROGAN: And when the question was asked, how was it phrased?

DR. GAD SAAD: I don’t remember the exact words.

JOE ROGAN: But it was like, do you hate Jews?

DR. GAD SAAD: Not do you hate Jews, but do you hold favorable or disfavorable? It’s enough that there’s animus, but I don’t think the word hate was used.

JOE ROGAN: And is it Israel or is it Jews?

DR. GAD SAAD: No, Jews. Just Jews in general. Guess what the percentage was? Just give me a number.

JOE ROGAN: 70%.

DR. GAD SAAD: It’s 95 and up. Whoa. Right? So if we sampled 1,000 people from Syria—

JOE ROGAN: And it’s hate? They hate Jews?

DR. GAD SAAD: What’s the term? I don’t remember because it’s a thousand.

JOE ROGAN: Negative opinion?

DR. GAD SAAD: Negative opinion, disfavorable, dislike, whatever it is. It’s a measure of your either proclivity, affinity, or disdain for the Jew, whatever the wording is. If you get 95, 97, 98% of polled people saying that they don’t like the Jews, and now you let into your country, your host country, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of those people, do you think that Jew hatred is going to go up or go down?

Quebec’s Immigration Policy and Its Consequences

DR. GAD SAAD: So in Quebec, for example, as I may have mentioned previously on this show, Quebec had a very open policy towards Islamic immigration. And the reason that in Quebec it was so is because the most important sense of personhood in Quebec is that you maintain your linguistic identity. We are French. We don’t want to be subsumed by the mean English language. Yes? So therefore, since many of the immigrants coming from Islamic countries were also Francophone, in their infinite wisdom, the Quebec government said, “Hey, you know, here’s a great idea.”

There was a 1997 civil war between the Algerian government and hardcore extremist Muslims. The latter lost, so they were fleeing from getting killed by the Algerian government. Why don’t you open the borders for them to Quebec. The decapitations will happen only when they say bonjour to you. So given that they will address you in French before they behead you, don’t worry about it, let them all in. I’m obviously being facetious, but the point is that hundreds of thousands of Islamic immigrants came to Quebec. I started seeing the changes, a lot more women in hijabs, a lot more dangerous to go to campus, a lot more requirements for accommodations, prayer rooms, public prayer.

JOE ROGAN: When you say dangerous, in what way? Specifically to me? Dangerous going to campus, in what way?

Death Threats and Personal Security

DR. GAD SAAD: Well, I’m somewhat of a known entity who doesn’t mince words, and so I started getting a lot of death threats. The first set of death threats I got were in 2017, where for that semester I had to follow a protocol to walk on campus with security. They would lock the door so that the students could leave but not come back in. So I had to check in with the security. That lasted for about a semester. And I mean, literally, I would lecture and then I would be ushered out. My wife would be waiting for me and I would sort of let out a deep breath, like a sigh, that thank God I survived another week.

JOE ROGAN: Did you ever experience like people trying to get at you?

DR. GAD SAAD: So all of those threats were online that necessitated, but then we had to file with Concordia, a Montreal police report, so on. In 2022, I had an in-person threat. So a guy came up to me, I was walking with my then— so 2022, so 4 years ago, he must have been 9. I was walking with my 9-year-old, 10-year-old son. And this guy looks at me, he goes, “Are you Gad Saad?” I said, “Yes.” Then he kind of composes himself to kind of deal with the hatred he feels, and he goes, “I’m not going to do anything to you out of respect for your son today.” And so then the detectives got the footage of that, because it was outside of the building.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I remember you telling me about this.

DR. GAD SAAD: And then, by the way, they didn’t want to show me a lineup of things of possible things because it would be racist to do so. So the process of a police lineup, which is the most fundamental mechanism of identifying a perpetrator, was viewed as racist because the guy who levied the death threat to me was Black. I think he was maybe Somali. He looked Somali.

So I took a 2-year leave from Concordia University and I’m now leaving in large part because it became difficult for me, if not impossible, to be a high-profile Jewish professor who supports the right of Israel to exist.

JOE ROGAN: What do you think happens in the future to Concordia and just to Montreal in general with this influx of people?

The Slow Death of Western Liberties

DR. GAD SAAD: It’s a slow death. It’ll take— you have to have the imagination to extrapolate into a distant future. So if you today go to your friend who’s got that steakhouse on that street. I don’t know if you want to mention it in Montreal, right? Would you walk around and think that it’s all Islamic? Of course not. But it’s a drip, drip, drip. It changes, right?

So for example, until very recently, the Quebec government was fully tolerating the public prayers, Islamic public prayers all over the place. Until recently? And now they passed a law banning it. Well, why did you need to wait till then?

JOE ROGAN: Why didn’t you listen to me when I was standing on top of the mountain screaming into the void saying, “This is what’s going to transpire.” But do you understand that you have more of an understanding of these things, more knowledge about these things, and to these people that are trying to get elected and that are dealing with their constituents, that this is a politically dangerous thing to bring up? I get it.

DR. GAD SAAD: I get it, but then you’re engaging in suicidal empathy because—

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also they’re just, they have their own personal interests.

Trump, Bold Leadership, and the Playbook of Demographic Change

DR. GAD SAAD: They’re pragmatic, I get it. But the reason why I love, I mean, and I’m going to get threats for this, the reason why I appreciate Trump is precisely because he implements things that most politicians wouldn’t have the testicular fortitude to do. But that’s what you want in a great leader, right? Most people come in, do their time, parasitize the system, and then leave having accomplished nothing.

The reason why Donald Trump has had not one, not two, but three assassination attempts, that is a testament to the fact that he is a danger to the status quo. Why? Because he does things. Whether you agree with him or not, he’s bold, he’s fearless, he doesn’t give a s*. To your point, most politicians would rather go la la la, I don’t want to hear until it’s too late.

The playbook is very clear. Depending on the number of Muslims in a society, you can exactly predict the level of conflict. And that statement that I just said holds true, notwithstanding the fact that most Muslims are perfectly lovely. Both those statements are both veridical.

So when you are 0 to 2%, you’re just the quiet, exotic minority. When you’re 3 to 5%, you become a lot more engaged politically. When you become 6 to 10%, you start creating Sharia no-go zones. “We don’t want your dogs here. This is not tolerated in our zone.” Look at Britain. Look at France.

So in the same way that I can predict the trajectory of diabetes, and no, I’m not saying that Muslims are, I’m drawing an analogy. Inertia. Explaining a trajectory. So if you wish to protect the liberties that make the United States so uniquely wonderful in the full range of societies that have ever existed, recognize that all religions are not equally likely to be congruent with the American experience. If you do, you’ll survive. If you won’t, your future descendants will rue the day you were born.

Closing Remarks

JOE ROGAN: All right, should we end on that?

DR. GAD SAAD: Love being with you. Love being with you too. It was a great conversation, very lively.

JOE ROGAN: Thank you, sir. Suicide on Empathy is available now. Did you read the audiobook?

DR. GAD SAAD: I did, yes. And I constantly said that Joe Rogan would beat the s* out of me if I didn’t do it.

JOE ROGAN: I would not do that, but I would berate you slightly. But I’m happy. I’m happy that you did that. Thank you. Always good to see you, brother. All right, bye everybody.

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