Gad Saad

But for me to completely zombify you and hijack you, I also need to zombify your affective system.

That's where suicidal empathy comes in.

If I can hijack both your cognitive and emotional systems, you become a wood cricket, which we could talk about what that reference is if you want.

What's a wood cricket?

So the wood cricket is an insect that abhors water.

It wants nothing to do with water.

But when it is parasitized by a neuroparasite called the brain—hairworm— Well, I've seen this.

Right?

The hairworm needs the wood cricket to happily—

and merrily commit suicide by jumping into the water because that's the only way that the hair worm can complete its reproductive cycle.

So once the hair worm hijacks the wood cricket's ability to think and to invoke its survival instinct, it erases its survival instinct, then it is owned by the hair worm.

And so I use that principle to explain suicidal empathy.

It's amazing.

There's so many cases of that in nature.

Indeed.

Yeah.

And so the way that I originally had the epiphany to use the parasitological framework was

So parasitology is just a study of host-parasite interactions.

So a tapeworm is a parasite, but that parasitizes my intestinal tract.

But a subfield of parasitology is neuroparasitology.