00:01:53.460um so gad i wanted to start by asking you to share with our audience the premise of your book and
00:01:59.000what you mean by suicidal empathy i know that the book begins with the following quote um suicidal
00:02:04.600empathy is a tragic manifestation at the civilizational level of the well-known proverb
00:02:09.700the road to hell is paved with good intentions so what exactly god is suicidal empathy and could
00:02:15.320one make the argument that many of the people suffering from it have actually become evil
00:02:19.480given their lack of a moral compass right so to your second part absolutely emphatically yes
00:02:25.300but let me explain what empathy is versus suicidal empathy and i'll begin with an analogy
00:02:31.600cancer cells divide and healthy cells divide the only difference between the two is that the former
00:02:40.480have unchecked cell division they don't have a stopping mechanism for the division to stop now
00:02:47.540why is that related to the distinction between empathy and suicidal empathy? Well-modulated
00:02:52.780empathy is a perfectly rational virtue for humans to possess. We are a social species,
00:02:59.960therefore we interact with each other. For you and I, Laurie, to have a meaningful conversation,
00:03:04.280I need to put myself in your mind and vice versa. That's called cognitive empathy or theory of mind.
00:03:10.140So there is nothing wrong with well-calibrated empathy.
00:03:14.980Suicidal empathy, though, does something akin to what cancer cells do.
00:03:19.880It hyperfires in the wrong situations towards the wrong targets.
00:03:26.880Once that rational empathetic module is gained, it becomes suicidally, you know, faulty.
00:03:37.580Now, let me draw another very quick reference. Aristotle, several thousand years ago, explained through his golden mean the idea that too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good, and much of life is about finding that sweet spot, that golden mean.
00:03:53.940That exact principle applies to empathy versus suicidal empathy. No empathy renders me a psychopath. Too much empathy towards the wrong targets makes me suicidally empathetic.
00:04:07.580Thank you. It's such an interesting premise, and we're going to get into it in a lot of different contexts.
00:04:13.020But, you know, many of us in this space for a very long time have been speaking and writing about the decline of the West,
00:04:19.300where arguably many Western European countries may be past the point of no return and the U.S. may be on its way to joining them.
00:04:25.760You're the first person to recognize the role that hyper empathy can act as a deadly contagion, is the term that you used in your book,
00:04:33.720and that if not properly contained, it can destroy the West.
00:04:37.000How is suicidal empathy destroying the West?
00:04:58.340Look, there are many, many ways by which suicidal empathy manifests itself.
00:05:03.320and of course in the book i go through an endless number of cases whether it be in criminal justice
00:05:08.600whether it be with climate alarmism right let's stop producing children because otherwise we are
00:05:14.260raping mother earth well for a sexually reproducing species where there are two functions that you have
00:05:19.880to achieve first survive and then reproduce if you if suicidal empathy erases your survival instinct
00:05:27.540and if suicidal empathy tells you don't reproduce because you need to be empathetic to mother earth
00:05:31.860that's probably not a good civilizational outcome but let's discuss a few specific ones
00:05:37.740by far the one that is most existentially dangerous to the west is the open border
00:05:45.640immigration policies of the west and now let me hear link because you so kindly mentioned one of
00:05:52.220my other books parasitic mind with suicidal empathy those books are actually in a very
00:05:56.960meaningful way related to one another it's a it's a suicidal empathy is in a sense a sequel
00:06:03.200to parasitic mind in the parasitic mind i was looking at what happens when parasitic ideas
00:06:11.480hijack your cognitive system your thought processes but we are both a thinking and a
00:06:17.860feeling animal so in order for me to completely hijack your ability to navigate the world i also
00:06:23.600have to hijack your affective system, your emotional system, and that's where suicidal
00:06:28.860empathy comes in. And let me show you specifically how one leads to the other as related to open
00:06:34.320border policies. Cultural relativism is an idea pathogen that I discuss in Parasitic Minds. So
00:06:40.720cultural relativism, regrettably, was originally espoused by a Jewish anthropologist by the name
00:06:48.220of Franz Boas about 100 years ago, basically argues that you are in no position to ever make
00:06:55.000moral, ethical, legal, societal, cultural judgments about how an other society adopts its own values,
00:07:05.000its own behaviors. So if another culture wishes to cut off the clitorises of five-year-old girls,
00:07:09.960shut up, racist. If they wish to have honor killings, shut up, racist. If they wish to
00:07:14.020have child brides, shut up races. Well, if I internalize that parasitic idea called cultural
00:07:20.040relativism, it then renders me impotent to be able to make judgments in my immigration policy,
00:07:28.020because it's wrong for me to then argue that people in Waziristan and Afghanistan
00:07:33.340are less likely to assimilate than native Swedes or Danish people into the United States.
00:07:39.740That feels wrong. That feels gauche. So there is a direct line between adopting these parasitic ideas and then becoming susceptible to succumbing to suicidal empathy.
00:07:50.040To your question as to whether it's feasible for us to get out of this or not, well, your point about the 1964 book is liberalism, by virtue of it, I mean, to put it in my framework, by virtue of the Democrats, the leftists, the hyper-liberal folks, the progressives, being the party of empathy, then by definition, that's going to render them more likely to be susceptible to suicidal empathy.
00:08:20.040Thank you, God. I also serve as the vice president and treasurer of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and I've been writing and speaking about the problems on our college campuses for decades.
00:08:29.540So I'd love to hear your take on the role that academia plays in the spread of this disease.
00:08:34.260And it's clear that many of our young minds have been indoctrinated to hate America, Israel, and the West more broadly.
00:08:40.360But where does suicidal empathy come into the brainwashing, and is there a way to deprogram these kids?
00:08:45.860Right. You know, I'm sure your experiences at Concordia played a role in your understanding of the problems at Western universities.
00:08:52.680So we'd love to hear maybe some personal examples that you have as well and perhaps explain what you mean when you discuss the feminization of academia.
00:08:59.300Right. So, look, every single parasitic idea that I discuss in the parasitic mind, which eventually leads to suicidal empathy, every single one stems from university campuses.
00:09:13.700because it as I sort of channel my inner Orwell who mentioned this many decades ago it uniquely
00:09:22.320takes intellectuals to come up with some of the most devastatingly imbecilic ideas. Now why is
00:09:28.880that? Is it because intellectuals are dumb? No it's because many intellectuals operate in an
00:09:34.120ecosystem that is perfectly decoupled from the autocorrective slap of reality right so I can sit
00:09:40.640up as a humanities professor in my tweed jacket and say that up is down, left is right, men are
00:09:46.160women, and then I'm hailed as a great thinker of lesbian dance theory, and I get promoted to
00:09:52.260becoming a tenured professor. I don't get punished for espousing nonsense. I go upward the more
00:09:58.340insane my ideas are, right? And so to your first question, every single bad idea that leads to
00:10:06.140suicidal empathy comes from academia. Now, in terms of personal anecdotes, well, in a sense,
00:10:12.800I started writing The Parasitic Mind the day that I became a professor, although not literally
00:10:19.080writing it, but writing it in my head, because my scientific work outside of my public commentary
00:10:26.360is in applying evolutionary psychology to study human behavior in general and consumer behavior
00:15:55.660but it parasitizes my intestinal tract. A neuroparasite is a parasite that gets to your
00:16:02.260nervous system, to you, in this case, your brain, altering your behavior in order to suit its
00:16:09.200reproductive interest, meaning it has literally hijacked you. Now, a wood cricket is an insect
00:16:16.380that abhors water. It wants nothing to do with water. But when it is parasitized by a brain worm
00:16:22.880called the hair worm. The hair worm needs the wood cricket to happily and merrily jump into water,
00:16:30.200commit suicide and suicidal empathy in order to adhere to the reproductive interests of the hair
00:16:38.400worm at the cost of its survival. So now you see why that neuroparistological framework is not only
00:16:46.080a powerful metaphor, but it is a literal, functional explanation for why I'm willing
00:16:52.340to give up my own survival imperative in order to adhere to a grander ideological commitment.
00:16:59.800In this case, I am infinitely tolerant and kind. So what all of those Jews that you mentioned and
00:17:05.120many others, none perhaps greater than the completely degenerate, lobotomized Gabor Mate,
00:17:10.820who is a trauma expert who is you know a not only is he jewish but he is a holocaust survivor
00:17:17.220now let me just break this down a bit for you at the age of six months old he was passed off to a
00:17:23.360family to be protected six months old infants cannot build memories therefore they're not
00:17:29.980cognizant of anything that they experienced when they were six months old but yet he uses the
00:17:36.120imprimatur of being, I am Jewish, I Gabor Mate, and I am a Holocaust survivor. And I'm telling
00:17:43.300you that there is nothing worse than Israel. Not only are they the new Nazis, they actually
00:17:49.480outrank the Nazis that I myself am aware of. Well, if he is a Holocaust survivor, then I too
00:17:56.380am a Holocaust survivor. Because as I remind people, I was once in my dad's testicles in the
00:18:03.1801940s. Therefore, I too was technically existentially a Holocaust survivor. Now it
00:18:08.980sounds I'm being spicy and provocative, but it's because it demonstrates what happens to the minds
00:18:15.820of a parasitized Jew, right? But it takes Jews like myself who had to wear running shoes, good
00:18:21.720running shoes, and really run fast to outrun the ones who were going to behead us to then come to
00:18:28.740the West and say, maybe you need to be a bit less tolerant from your beautiful campus at Oberlin
00:18:34.520College, where you learned about Near East studies, and leave it for those who sampled from the buffets
00:18:39.760of society to tell you what the real deal is. So yes, there are explanations that I offer for these
00:18:45.260people. And I should mention to your audience, there is no one I despise more than the wood
00:18:51.340cricket Jew, because at least the ones who want to kill the Jews are committed to their cause.
00:18:56.660But when I say, oh, please take me, and oh, by the way, my children are upstairs, so please go rape them, look how tolerant I am, I really despise you.
00:19:10.220I want to tie Islamism into the conversation also because I think it serves as one, if not the most dangerous enemy of Western civilization.
00:19:18.160We've established that suicidal empathy leads to people doing things and taking positions that are anathema to their own survival, as you just pointed out.
00:19:24.480And I would suggest that inviting unvetted and untold numbers of Muslim immigrants into Western civilizations, as to which they have no interest in assimilating, is expediting the decline of the West.
00:19:35.840You pointed out, I'm going to quote you from your book, the West's suicidal empathy is an aphrodisiac to those stemming from cultures with a supremacist and domineering ethos.
00:19:46.300My first memory of Western suicidal empathy was when George W. Bush stated almost immediately after 9-11 that Islam is peace.
00:19:53.360And you've pointed out that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently proclaimed that Islamic and Canadian values are the same.
00:20:01.020Today, anyone who presents an honest critique of Islam's connections to terrorism is labeled an Islamophobe and forced to apologize or canceled.
00:20:09.740So chapter three of your book, I think you do a phenomenal job of discussing all of this.
00:20:13.660And I'm sure the audience would love to hear your thoughts on this, including your discussion of what I call stealth jihad in which Islamists recognize that they don't need weapons to conquer the West.
00:20:22.500yes another great question uh one forgive me you're the host one small correction if i may
00:20:29.820you use the word only once i've never heard of that word i don't know what it is you use the
00:20:34.400word islamism i don't know what where are the canons of islamism that are distinct from islam
00:20:39.940and i'm being facetious because i the point that i'm making is there is no such thing as islamism
00:20:45.560there is no such thing as radical islamism there is no such thing as self-radicalized militant
00:20:51.520jihadi islamism because if i put a bunch of qualifiers before the word islam and then i add
00:20:58.100the magical suffix ism then somehow i'm saying something that is different from islam there is
00:21:04.080no such thing the quicker people stop using that very kind and empathetic reflex the better that
00:21:12.460we will be now that doesn't mean that every muslim wishes to implement the doctrinal canonical
00:21:19.500imperatives of Islam. That's clear. I know more nice Muslims than most people in your audience
00:21:25.700will ever meet. But those two statements are perfectly consistent with each other.
00:21:29.700There are nice people that are Muslim or Jews and mean people that are Muslim or Jews. But Islam is
00:21:36.660a very specific set of codified ideas as enshrined in the Quran, the Hadith, the sayings and the
00:21:44.060deeds of Muhammad and the Sira, the biography of Muhammad. That content is very clear about whether
00:21:51.760Islam is congruent in its foundational tenets with Western values or not. And let me get to
00:21:59.860the punchline. You couldn't have come up with a set of doctrines that are any more incongruent
00:22:09.440with Western values. Like in other words, if I told you, here's your homework assignment,
00:22:13.920come up with a set of beliefs that are maximally incongruent with Western values,
00:22:19.620it would be called Islam. So it's a terrible tragedy because the Muslims are incredibly smart
00:22:28.740in their ability to understand what the weakness of the West is. That's why they have told us
00:22:34.280repeatedly to your point about what you're calling stealth jihad, is that we're going to conquer the
00:22:39.160west through three means we're going to conquer the west through the womb of our women right we
00:22:46.100breed 7.2 you're too lazy to even have enough sex to reproduce beyond the replacement rate it's just
00:22:55.080a matter of time inshallah when we will outbreed you number two we will conquer the west through
00:23:01.920hijra hijra is the arabic word arabic is my mother tongue so it's kind of tough for people
00:23:07.600say, but he doesn't understand. He doesn't know. His name is Joe Smith and so on, right? Hijra is
00:23:13.160the term for migration. Well, how great is it that when the West faces 9-11 and all the other
00:23:21.200terrorist attacks and George Bush then says, I will not tolerate any attacks on Islam. And I'm
00:23:27.620going to show you that I won't tolerate it by letting in 5 million people into my country,
00:23:31.620many of whom celebrated 9-11. That's probably not a good idea. And the third way we're going to
00:23:36.800conquer the West is by using your miserable freedoms against you. So but this is not I did
00:23:44.940some deep dive, sad investigative journalism to arrive at that. They have been standing on top
00:23:52.400of the mountain and screaming their plan for all of us to hear for decades. And we go, la la la,
00:23:59.280I don't want to hear it. Your grandchildren are going to pay a deep price for that.
00:24:02.640thank you god um there's a number of questions and we're gonna get to as many as we can um
00:24:09.740somebody asked is secular humanism particularly vulnerable to unmerited guilt
00:24:13.840unmerited guilt of which type existentially guilt guilt like i think in the context of
00:24:21.640suicidal empathy he's asking i mean i don't i don't think there is necessarily a uniquely
00:24:27.860direct link from secular humanism to feeling guilty or not, right? I mean, Catholicism is
00:24:34.640rooted in guilt, right? We are born sinners, and therefore, you know, we have to go to confession.
00:24:40.380So the road of experiencing existential guilt doesn't have to come with whether I am religious
00:24:46.600or not. Both groups of people can succumb to existential guilt. I think the main reason for
00:24:51.620our existential guilt, is because we have promulgated the idea that not only is the West
00:24:57.980not a great civilization, it's actually the most evil of all civilizations because we are transphobic,
00:25:04.740we are Islamophobic, we sit on stolen land, we are misogynistic. So how else can I solve that
00:25:12.080problem but then to commit civilizational seppuku, as I introduced the term. Seppuku is a term that
00:25:18.900captures how the Japanese used to engage in self-disembowelment when the samurai class would
00:25:24.500engage in a behavior that was shameful. While civilizational seppuku, I argue, you're using
00:25:29.720the blade of suicidal empathy to engage in the existential self-disembowelment of your society.
00:25:35.620But no, it is not unique to secular humanists. So I'm going to turn back to audience questions
00:25:41.500in a second, but I realized I also wanted you to talk about postmodernism because the sufferers,
00:25:46.680excuse me of suicidal empathy seem to make up their own truths and facts and reality and
00:25:51.660you there was an albert einstein quote in your book that um you included that uh quote two things
00:25:57.540are infinite the universe and human stupidity and i'm not yet completely sure about the universe
00:26:01.800i love that quote yes uh yeah go ahead forgive me for interrupting you uh post-modernism of
00:26:10.120all of the parasitic ideas that I cataloged in The Parasitic Mind, I argue is the granddaddy of
00:26:16.900all parasitic ideas, meaning that it is the apex parasitic idea. Why? Because it rejects the notion
00:26:25.660that there could be universal truths. It even rejects the notion that there is an epistemology
00:26:32.460of truth, right? For example, the scientific method is the epistemological tool that we use
00:26:38.900to adjudicate between competing scientific hypotheses. Well, we've replaced that now in
00:26:45.780academia through feminization with an epistemology of care. In other words, the central premise of a
00:26:54.600university is not to create new human knowledge and distribute that new human knowledge and
00:27:01.620intellectually enrich our students and so on. It is to be maximally caring. So for example,
00:27:07.420if I'm going to do a research program that does advance scientific and human knowledge,
00:27:15.480but in doing so, I end up hurting someone's feelings, then I should refrain from engaging
00:27:22.100in that research. And therefore, it becomes a type of forbidden knowledge, as I discussed in
00:27:26.520Suicide Empathy. So postmodernism is the worst of all parasitic ideas because everything is up for
00:27:32.360grabs. Up is down, men are women, slavery is freedom, war is peace. Who are you to tell me
00:27:37.400what truth is. So following with that, somebody asked, how can we use the progressives' own
00:27:43.500vocabulary to defeat them? If we don't use their language, they don't listen to us. Do you have
00:27:47.920any thoughts on that? I mean, I don't necessarily have a top of mind strategy of how to use
00:27:54.740language. I mean, the best language I have is this thing called truth. This is why I speak.
00:28:00.400I could be as professorial if not a lot more professorial than most other professors
00:28:07.360maybe all of them but I can also be very spicy and direct and frontal because I'm so exasperated
00:28:16.080by all of the untruths and the lies that there is no better way than to speak plainly and truthfully
00:28:23.520and this is why by the way I use things like satire why I use sarcasm why I use humor it
00:28:30.300may or may not surprise you, Lori, to know that of all the people that, you know, approach me in
00:28:34.660the streets, probably the number one thing I often get is I was watching one of your videos and I
00:28:40.620couldn't stop laughing for 10 minutes. Now, is it because I didn't really want to become a professor
00:28:46.740and I wanted to be a standup comic and that's why I use humor? No, it's because I will use
00:28:51.920all communication modalities that I consider to be relevant to get my message across. So in that
00:28:59.400sense, I'm answering the question, which is use all possible tools to defend and protect the truth
00:29:06.120from all the nonsense. And it's sort of similar vein. Somebody asked, can the word Islamophobia
00:29:12.240be linked to suicidal empathy because it propagandizes the fear of Islam as illogical?
00:29:17.760Exactly. And that's why the Muslim activists were brilliant in understanding the weaknesses,
00:29:26.160as the Achilles heel of the West, right? By the way, that reflex of using language to
00:29:32.960advance your cause comes from postmodernism. It actually comes from a variant of postmodernism
00:29:41.560called deconstructionism. Jacques Derrida would be the sort of the pioneer of that
00:29:47.220quote field. It basically says that language creates reality, right? There is no objective
00:29:54.180reality out there that is outside that which we name. And that's why it becomes very important
00:30:00.480for the progressives to play all those linguistic games, because then I can shift your
00:30:05.900understanding of the world based on what I label the world.
00:30:11.000Do you know if there are any examples of suicidal empathy in the laws of the Torah?
00:30:15.820i don't that's what a great question yeah i mean uh i'm thinking of sort of the opposite
00:30:25.680of suicidal empathy take your insolent children to the gates of the city and stone them to death
00:30:31.500that seems to be maybe on the other side of suicidal empathy your child is insolent they die
00:30:37.440i mean i can think of things that relate to suicidal empathy not so much in the torah but
00:30:45.200in the new testament right because and i guess you might right turn the other cheek love your
00:30:50.920enemy and so on and i i referenced that very briefly in suicidal empathy do you have any
00:30:56.960readily available examples that you might want to share with me it was a question from one of
00:31:01.660our listeners i yeah no i'm sorry i i personally do not have that familiarity
00:31:06.920yeah i can't think of a readily example in the torah of suicidal empathy maybe that's a good
00:31:14.380thing yeah um so there's there's somebody that is coming back to the islam islamism islam um and
00:31:22.560asking you know whether questioning whether there are nice muslims because aren't they sort of the
00:31:27.840trojan horse of global jihad you know claiming to be moderates and reformers and um not actually
00:31:33.020being so and and that real moderate muslims are are probably more like ayan hersi ali who has
00:31:39.940converted thoughts on this on that right look uh i don't necessarily pay attention to needing to
00:31:50.400light the shabbat candle at 421 because chabad has said that it's 421 based on that metric then
00:31:58.560i'm not a very practicing jew uh i don't necessarily not eat shrimp soup because there
00:32:05.540is a kosher law against shrimps, then by that measure, I'm not practicing Judaism. But you'd
00:32:11.520be hard-pressed to find someone who lives their Jewish heritage and has many death threats for
00:32:17.040being Jewish, right? So why am I saying this example? Because you could be wedded to your
00:32:22.340Jewish heritage or your Islamic heritage or your Christian heritage without necessarily
00:32:27.980adhering to all of the canons of that faith, correct? So I don't practice a gentle form of
00:32:35.420Judaism where we do eat shrimps. I just ignore the parts that I don't wish to pay attention to,
00:32:43.480and that in no way negates the fact that I belong to a nearly 6,000-year heritage of peoples. And
00:32:51.660in that sense, I'm very much wedded to my Jewish heritage. So I think the exact same thing could
00:32:57.560apply to someone who comes from an Islamic background. They grew up in a culture. They
00:33:02.080were born in Bahrain or they were born in Morocco. They don't know what's in the Quran. They don't
00:33:07.460care what are the imperatives that say that the entire world has to be Islamized under the flag
00:33:14.420of Allah. They just want to live their lives and they happen to be born into a Muslim. So in that
00:33:19.120sense, they're good people, lovely people who don't wish anybody harm. And so it's in that sense that
00:33:24.780I say we have to grant some sort of place for those people to be able to exist, right?
00:33:31.200They're just good people who would invite me over for a hummus sandwich and they would
00:33:38.720But to the person who asked that question, there is the issue of why so many non-militant
00:33:49.460Muslims are not actively fighting against the stuff in their religion that is problematic,
00:33:58.340right? So you may have 2 billion Muslims of which only 10% are insanely violent. That makes 200
00:34:05.920million people. We're left with 1.8 billion people. How many of those are being complicit
00:34:11.940in the goal of the 200 million? Regrettably, the number is quite high. So I think we need to
00:34:17.960offer some sort of goodness to many people who just wish to live their lives. That's why I always
00:34:23.820try to remind people that, of course, there are nice Muslim neighbors who don't wish you ill.
00:34:28.140But again, I focus on Islam. If I am a fully practicing Muslim, could I truly coexist within
00:34:36.340Western values? And the answer is emphatic no. So the last question, somebody asked,
00:34:42.780what do you suggest we do to fight the suicidal empathy? So I think this is a good opening,
00:34:46.660maybe for you to touch on your final chapter to the book on inoculation?
00:34:50.700Yes. So exactly to what you just said in the last chapter, in chapter eight, I offer a vaccine
00:34:58.000against suicidal empathy. And I offer very, very specific prescriptions. So let me give you one or
00:35:05.320two of these, but then I'll give a broader sort of 30,000 foot answer. So for example, many people
00:35:11.720are intoxicated by the prospect of the immediate effect of the dopamine, the empathy-based dopamine
00:35:20.940hit. So the illegal refugee knocks on the door, and I can do two things at that point. I could let
00:35:27.540in six million of them, and I will immediately be drowning in the dopamine because I am stroking
00:35:35.500my luxuriant hair in the mirror of moral preening and going, look what a good person I am. I just
00:35:41.280let in 400,000 Ahmads into my society. I'm better than those people who would have judged them.
00:35:47.040So I got that dopamine hit. But in doing so, I'm stuck in what I call the myopia of first order
00:35:54.380effects, meaning there is a second order effect and a third order effect. If your society becomes
00:36:00.880majority Islamic, then we will have a different reality than the one that your children grew up
00:36:07.140in. So don't succumb to the empathy-based dopamine hit. Recognize that life is not a first-order
00:36:15.080world, but has a domino effect. So that would be, and I list many others. For example, I talk about
00:36:21.000the false equality bias. Men and women are equal under the law. They're not equal in their
00:36:27.140proclivities. Religions might be equally protected by the First Amendment, although I think they
00:36:32.840shouldn't be. That doesn't mean that they are equally likely to assimilate within the Western
00:36:37.840tradition. So don't confuse equality under the law as being indistinguishable, right? Men and women
00:36:44.480are distinguishable from each other, but they should be treated equally under the law. But
00:36:48.780again, the suicidally empathetic make that categorization error. But the bigger picture is
00:36:54.960even something as wonderful and virtuous as empathy could become cancerous. The cell division
00:37:04.940that causes your deep scab to get healed, right? Cell division is good. It's only good
00:37:12.620as long as there is a stopping point to that goodness. Melanoma, since we're talking about
00:37:20.420skin results in the bad version of skin cell division. So we didn't say cell division is good
00:37:31.140ad infinitum. We said cell division up to a point. Empathy is great up to a point, and it has to be
00:37:41.220strategically meted out in a way that is consistent with evolutionary rational calculus.
00:37:48.420It makes perfect evolutionary sense for every single person who will ever listen to this chat to be more willing to jump in front of a bus to save their biological children than random children in Rwanda.
00:38:03.960That doesn't make you callous or sinister or evil.
00:38:07.780It makes you a creature that is endowed with an evolutionary calculus.
00:38:12.860So empathy good, suicidal empathy will bring the end of us.
00:38:18.420God, I wish we could keep you for longer, but unfortunately, we do have to end this.
00:38:24.020But we'll bring you back some time with your next book.