We'll start really easy. I scrambled all those words up. What do you mean by suicidal empathy?

So as you correctly said, empathy is an evolutionarily selected trait. So this is not an attack on empathy. We are a social species.

For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put myself in your mind and vice versa. That's called theory of mind, which is part of cognitive empathy. But like Aristotle explained to us several thousand years ago,

too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good, and much of life is about

finding that sweet spot. The same applies to empathy. Too little empathy. You could be a

psychopath. Too much empathy. If it's hyperactive, if it is invoked in the wrong situations, and if it faces the inappropriate targets, caring more about Guatemalan illegal immigrants than caring about American vets who might have lost their limbs fighting for the

freedoms of the United States, then you have that cocktail of suicidal empathy.

And was there a specific moment, a specific story that made you say, I need to write this book?

Not a single story, so I've been a professor now for 32 years, and I hate to say this, but pretty much every

single devastatingly bad idea that ultimately led to suicidal empathy was spawned regrettably

on university campuses because it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas, especially because as Thomas

Soll also explained, when you have disciplines that are fully decoupled from the autocorrective

mechanisms of reality, you can stand up, pontificate about nonsense, and reality doesn't

sort of slap you back to out of your stupor. And this is, by the way, why some fields, the business school, the engineering school,

are less likely to be parasitized by suicidal empathy,

because you can't build a bridge using lesbian dance theory.

You can't develop an economic model using queer indigenous ancestral knowledge.

And because of that, there are some disciplines that are inherently more likely to have this

kind of nonsense.

So for me, it's been a long journey ending up in this book, just seeing the departure from

reason. Well, so right, being a professor, seeing this on college campuses, and we're going to talk

about suicidal empathy a little bit more as we get into this, but when you're confronted

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