Gad Saad in Iceland

In 2025, Gunnlaugur Jónsson organized Gad Saad’s first visit to Iceland, a scholar whose work sits at the intersection of evolutionary psychology, consumer behavior, and cultural analysis. Unlike many public figures who comment on culture from the outside, Saad approaches contemporary social phenomena from within an academic framework, applying evolutionary theory to questions of meaning, identity, and institutional behavior. His visit extended the trajectory established by earlier events, introducing a different intellectual temperament: analytical, data-driven, and deliberately unsentimental.

The Icelandic audience responded with sustained interest to this approach. Saad’s lectures emphasized explanatory depth over moral signaling, tracing contemporary cultural dynamics back to biological constraints, evolutionary incentives, and cognitive biases. For a public accustomed to literary abstraction and philosophical speculation, this perspective offered a complementary mode of understanding—one grounded in empirical research yet willing to address controversial topics directly. The event indicated that Icelandic audiences are not only open to difficult ideas, but capable of engaging with frameworks that challenge prevailing intellectual fashions.

From an organizational standpoint, the 2025 event reflected a continued maturation of experience. The logistics of hosting an internationally known academic speaker were by then well established, allowing greater focus on curatorial choices, framing, and audience experience. Rather than positioning the event as provocation or spectacle, it was presented as a serious intellectual encounter, designed to reward sustained attention and critical engagement. The result was a setting in which disagreement could coexist with rigor, and curiosity with discipline.

Paradigm incorporates this experience as an additional point of reference. The Gad Saad event reinforced the observation that demand for intellectually demanding public conversations is not limited to a single genre, personality, or cultural moment. It also helped clarify Paradigm’s emerging identity: not as a platform for ideological alignment, but as an infrastructure for ideas prepared to make their assumptions, methods, and limits visible. In this sense, the 2025 visit functioned not as an endpoint, but as a calibration that helped define the range, seriousness, and ambition of what Paradigm intends to host going forward.