Dr. David Eagleman

Whereas if James Bond, you know, gets grazed by a bully, if you're like, oh, poor guy.

It's weird how much we can dial this around where we simply don't care when bad things happen to other people.

Right, because was that woman your protagonist or your antagonist?

And just like in the movies, we have a completely different empathic response based on that.

Yeah, that's right.

I don't know the answer to that, except that people clearly are wired differently on that in terms of whether they think it's a zero-sum game or there's infinite resources.

Do we see it in animals?

Yes, actually.

There are experiments on capuchin monkeys where the monkey does something and then gets a piece of banana.

And then the other monkey does something in the neighboring cage and gets a piece of banana.

And so they're doing this.

But then the other monkey doing it gets a grape, which is a big treat for the monkey.

And the first monkey goes nuts and is shaking the bar.

He's so angry that the other monkey got a better reward.

There's this sense of fairness that's actually quite deep in our evolution about what's unfair and so on.

But I want to come back to this issue about rewarding people versus punishing.

To my mind, the reason I care so much about this issue of harm happening to people and when we don't care is because of when we look at what happens around the world.

I'm not even talking right now.

Let's just take the 20th century.

We constantly see people murdering their neighbors for all kinds of reasons, for religious reasons, for atheist, communist, you know, secular reasons.