Hi, everybody. This is Gat Saad in Suicidal Empathy, which yesterday was a month away from its release,

so please head off and pre-order your copy, ASAP, if you haven't done so already.

So in Suicidal Empathy, I draw a link between France Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

Some of you may remember that story.

You probably read it in high school.

I certainly did and then sort of filed it in the back of my memory.

And then as I was working on suicidal empathy,

some of you might remember that I often talk about human wood crickets,

right? Because the wood cricket, when it is parasitized by the hairworm, jumps into water

committing suicide because the hairworm needs that to happen in order for it to complete its reproductive cycle.

And so when I see some, you know, Jewish person being all rah-rah for Gaza and so on, then I call them a wood cricket Jew.

And so there I drew the link. I said, well, you know, more than a hundred years ago,

France Kafka's famous story is of a man who wakes up one day,

and he's basically turned into this sort of vermin, this insect,

hence the metamorphosis.

And I said, well, a hundred years later,

we also have a metamorphosis from human beings that should be endowed with reason who suddenly become wood crickets.

So that was the link that had sort of brought Kafka back into my mind.

And so I was reading this book.

Let me just bring it out here for you a second.

I was reading this book, which I just finished.

It's by the director of the Bodleian libraries at Oxford.

...