Gad Saad Audiobooks

Suicidal Empathy and The Parasitic Mind: evolutionary psychology aimed at the culture wars

1 audiobook reviewed

Who is Gad Saad?

Provocation is part of the method with Gad Saad. Born in Lebanon on 13 October 1964, he arrived in Montreal as a boy after his Jewish family fled the Lebanese civil war, and he has taught marketing at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business ever since completing his doctorate.

His academic contribution is genuine and specific: he was among the first to apply evolutionary psychology to consumer behaviour, arguing that our buying, mating and status signalling all run on much older machinery than economists allow. That work produced The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption and The Consuming Instinct.

The wider public knows him from a second career as a combative public intellectual. He blogged for Psychology Today, hosts the podcast The Saad Truth, and in The Parasitic Mind he set out his case against what he sees as ideologically driven thinking in universities. Admirers call him fearless, critics call him reductive, and he seems entirely comfortable with both.

Gad Saad in audiobooks

Our shelves carry Suicidal Empathy, published in 2026 and subtitled Dying to Be Kind in its print edition. Across roughly eight and a half hours he argues that compassion, once untethered from judgement, can turn self destructive at the level of whole societies. It went straight to the top of the American bestseller lists.

He narrates it himself, which is the right call for this material. The delivery carries the cadence of the lecture theatre and the podcast studio, and the arguments land harder in his own accent and timing than they would in a hired reading.

Expect to disagree at least once, possibly loudly. That is rather the point. Listeners who value ideas they can argue with should find plenty here, and the recording is there for you below.