Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Jordan Peterson, his second time on this, the Lex

00:00:06.000 | Friedman podcast.

00:00:08.500 | You have given a set of lectures on Nietzsche as part of the new Peterson Academy, and the

00:00:14.000 | lectures were powerful.

00:00:16.040 | There's some element of the contradictions, the tensions, the drama, the way you like

00:00:19.640 | lock in on an idea, but then are struggling with that idea, all of that, that feels like

00:00:24.960 | it's a Nietzschean.

00:00:25.960 | Yeah, well, he's a big influence on me stylistically, and like in terms of the way I approach writing,

00:00:33.920 | and also many of the people that were other influences of mine were very influenced by

00:00:40.000 | him.

00:00:41.000 | So I was blown away when I first came across his writings.

00:00:44.880 | They're so intellectually dense that I don't know if there's anything that approximates

00:00:54.200 | that.

00:00:55.200 | Dostoyevsky, maybe, although he's much more wordy, Nietzsche is very succinct, partly

00:00:59.240 | because he was so ill, because he would think all day, he couldn't spend a lot of time writing,

00:01:03.360 | and he condenses writings into very short, while this aphoristic style he had, and it's

00:01:08.560 | really something to strive for.

00:01:10.980 | And then he's also an exciting writer, like Dostoyevsky, and dynamic and romantic in that

00:01:18.320 | emotional way, and so it's really something.

00:01:21.360 | And I really enjoyed doing that, I did that lecture that you described, that lecture series

00:01:25.480 | is on the first half of Beyond Good and Evil, which is a stunning book, and that was really

00:01:31.240 | fun to take pieces of it and then to describe what they mean and how they've echoed across

00:01:36.840 | the decades since he wrote them, and yeah, it's been great.

00:01:40.880 | Taking each sentence seriously, and deconstructing it, and really struggling with it.

00:01:47.360 | I think underpinning that approach to writing requires deep respect for the person.

00:01:52.960 | I think if we approach writing with that kind of respect, you can take Orwell, you can take

00:01:57.720 | a lot of writers, and really dig in on singular sentences.

00:02:01.440 | Yeah, well those are the great writers, because the greatest writers, virtually everything

00:02:06.240 | they wrote is worth attending to.

00:02:09.120 | And I think Nietzsche is, in some ways, the ultimate exemplar of that, because often when

00:02:14.600 | I read a book, I'll mark one way or another, I often fold the corner of the page over to

00:02:20.100 | indicate something that I've found that's worth remembering, I couldn't do that with

00:02:24.680 | a book like Beyond Good and Evil, because every page ends up marked.

00:02:30.100 | And that's in marked contrast, so to speak, to many of the books I read now, where it's

00:02:36.280 | quite frequently now that I'll read a book, and there won't be an idea in it that I haven't

00:02:41.560 | come across before, and with a thinker like Nietzsche, that's just not the case at the

00:02:46.360 | sentence level, and I don't think there's anyone that I know of who did that to a greater

00:02:51.400 | extent than he did.

00:02:53.180 | So there's other people whose thought is of equivalent value.

00:02:56.880 | I've returned recently, and I'm going to do a course on the work of this Romanian historian

00:03:01.840 | of religions, Mircea Eliade, who's not nearly as well known as he should be, and whose work,

00:03:07.520 | by the way, is a real antidote to the post-modern, nihilistic, Marxist stream of literary interpretation

00:03:14.480 | that the universities as a whole have adopted.

00:03:17.760 | And Eliade is like that, too.

00:03:20.320 | I used this book called The Sacred and the Profane quite extensively in a book that I'm

00:03:25.680 | releasing in mid-November, We Who Wrestle with God, and it's of the same sort.

00:03:32.080 | It's endlessly analyzable.

00:03:34.400 | I mean, Eliade walked through the whole history of religious ideas, and he had the intellect

00:03:40.280 | that enabled him to do that, and everything he wrote is dream-like in its density.

00:03:46.400 | So every sentence or paragraph is evocative in an image-rich manner, and that also, what

00:03:56.720 | would you say, deepens and broadens the scope, and that's part of often what distinguishes

00:04:01.160 | writing that has a literary end from writing that's more merely technical.

00:04:05.080 | Like the literary writings have this imagistic and dream-like reference space around them,

00:04:11.340 | and it takes a long time to turn a complex image into something semantic.

00:04:18.240 | And so if your writing evokes deep imagery, it has a depth that can't be captured merely

00:04:25.580 | in words.

00:04:26.580 | One of the great romantic, poetic philosophers, Nietzsche is a very good example, Dostoevsky

00:04:30.980 | is a good example, so is Mircea Eliade, they have that quality.

00:04:34.740 | And it's a good way of thinking about it, you know, it's kind of interesting from the

00:04:38.460 | perspective of technical analysis of intelligence.

00:04:41.980 | There's a good book called The User Illusion, which is the best book on consciousness that

00:04:46.040 | I ever read.

00:04:47.320 | It explains the manner in which our communication is understandable in this manner.

00:04:52.100 | So imagine that when you're communicating something, you're trying to change the way

00:04:56.820 | that your target audience perceives and acts in the world.

00:05:00.820 | So that's an embodied issue.

00:05:03.140 | But you're using words, which obviously aren't equivalent to the actions themselves.

00:05:09.220 | You can imagine that the words are surrounded by a cloud of images that they evoke, and

00:05:16.100 | that the images can be translated into actions.

00:05:19.740 | And the greatest writing uses words in a manner that evokes images that profoundly affects

00:05:25.820 | perception and action.

00:05:27.660 | And that's the...

00:05:28.660 | So I would take the manner in which I act and behave, I would translate that into a

00:05:33.740 | set of images.

00:05:34.740 | My dreams do that for me, for example.

00:05:36.740 | Then I compress them into words, I toss you the words, you decompose them, decompress

00:05:42.420 | them into the images, and then into the actions, and that's what happens in a meaningful conversation.

00:05:48.680 | It's a very good way of understanding how we communicate linguistically.

00:05:51.940 | So if the words spring to the full visual complexity, then that can then transform itself

00:05:59.060 | into action.

00:06:00.060 | Yes, and change in perception.

00:06:01.940 | Change in perception, yeah.

00:06:02.940 | Well, those are both relevant, and it's an important thing to understand because the

00:06:07.620 | classic empiricists make the presumption, and it's an erroneous presumption, that perception

00:06:14.620 | is a value-free enterprise.

00:06:16.660 | And they assume that partly because they think of perception as something passive.

00:06:20.360 | You know, you just turn your head and you look at the world, and there it is.

00:06:22.800 | It's like, perception is not passive.

00:06:25.240 | There is no perception without action, ever, ever.

00:06:29.440 | And that's a weird thing to understand, because even when you're looking at something, like,

00:06:32.720 | your eyes are moving back and forth.

00:06:34.080 | If they ever stop moving for a tenth of a second, you stop being able to see.

00:06:38.200 | So your eyes are jiggling back and forth just to keep them active.

00:06:41.560 | And then there's involuntary movements of your eyes, and then there's voluntary movements

00:06:45.400 | of your eyes.

00:06:46.400 | And what you're doing with your eyes is very much like what a blind person would do if

00:06:50.040 | they were feeling out the contours of an object.

00:06:53.160 | You're sampling.

00:06:54.500 | And you're only sampling a small element of the space that's in front of you, and the

00:07:00.680 | element that you choose to sample is dependent on your aims and your goals, so it's value-saturated.

00:07:06.060 | And so, all your perceptions are action-predicated, and partly what you're doing when you're communicating

00:07:11.600 | is therefore not only changing people's actions, let's say, but you're also changing the strategy

00:07:18.040 | that they use to perceive.

00:07:20.060 | And so you change the way the world reveals itself for them.

00:07:23.160 | See, this is why it's such a profound experience to read a particularly deep thinker, because

00:07:28.700 | you could also think of your perceptions as the axioms of your thought.

00:07:32.360 | That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:07:33.720 | A perception is like a, what would you say, it's a thought that's so set in concrete that

00:07:39.160 | you now see it rather than conceptualize it.

00:07:42.120 | A really profound thinker changes the way you perceive the world.

00:07:45.900 | That's way deeper than just how you think about it or how you feel about it.

00:07:49.960 | What about not just profound thinkers, but thinkers that deliver a powerful idea?

00:07:55.760 | For example, utopian ideas of Marx, or utopian ideas, you could say dystopian ideas of Hitler.

00:08:04.140 | Those ideas are powerful and they can saturate all your perception with values and they focus

00:08:12.700 | you in a way where there's only a certain set of actions.

00:08:16.580 | Yeah, right, even a certain set of emotions as well.

00:08:20.060 | And it's intense and it's direct and they're so powerful that they completely alter the

00:08:24.860 | perception and the words spring to life.

00:08:27.180 | Yeah, it's like a form of possession.

00:08:29.520 | So there's two things you need to understand to make that clear.

00:08:33.800 | The first issue is that, as we suggested or implied, that perception is action predicated,

00:08:42.060 | but action is goal predicated, right?

00:08:43.860 | You act towards a goal.

00:08:45.780 | And these propagandistic thinkers that you described, they attempt to unify all possible

00:08:52.900 | goals into a coherent singularity.

00:08:56.180 | And there's advantages of that.

00:08:57.540 | There's the advantage of simplicity, for example, which is a major advantage.

00:09:01.660 | And there's also the advantage of motivation, right?

00:09:04.480 | So if you provide people with a simple manner of integrating all their actions, you decrease

00:09:10.940 | their anxiety and you increase their motivation.

00:09:12.780 | And that can be a good thing if the unifying idea that you put forward is valid.

00:09:17.780 | But it's the worst of all possible ideas if you put forward an invalid unifying idea.

00:09:23.600 | And then you might say, well, how do you distinguish between a valid unifying idea and an invalid

00:09:28.300 | unifying idea?

00:09:29.300 | And Nietzsche was very interested in that.

00:09:30.820 | And I don't think he got that exactly right.

00:09:33.220 | But the postmodernists, for example, especially the ones—and this is most of them with a

00:09:37.940 | neo-Marxist bent—their presumption is that the fundamental unifying idea is power.

00:09:43.540 | That everything's about compulsion and force, essentially.

00:09:46.320 | And that that's the only true unifying ethos of mankind, which is—I don't know if there's

00:09:53.140 | a worse idea than that.

00:09:54.660 | I mean, there are ideas that are potentially as dangerous.

00:09:59.500 | The nihilistic idea is pretty dangerous, although it's more of a disintegrating notion than

00:10:04.260 | a unifying idea.

00:10:05.760 | The hedonistic idea that you live for pleasure, for example, that's also very dangerous.

00:10:10.820 | But if you wanted to go for sheer pathology, the notion that—and this is Foucault in

00:10:15.220 | a nutshell, and Marx for that matter—that power rules everything, not only is that a

00:10:20.580 | terrible unifying idea, but it fully justifies your own use of power.

00:10:25.660 | And I don't mean the power Nietzsche talks about.

00:10:28.540 | His will to power was more his insistence that a human being is an expression of will

00:10:35.940 | rather than a mechanism of self-protection and security.

00:10:40.540 | He thought of the life force in human beings as something that strived not to protect itself,

00:10:45.460 | but to exhaust itself in being and becoming.

00:10:49.980 | It's like an upward-oriented motivational drive, even towards meaning.

00:10:54.480 | Now he called it the will to power, and that had some unfortunate consequences, at least

00:10:58.640 | that's how it's translated.

00:11:00.340 | But he didn't mean the power motivation that people like Foucault or Marx became so hung

00:11:05.300 | up on.

00:11:06.300 | So it's not power like you're trying to destroy the other.

00:11:09.260 | It's powerful flourishing of a human being, the creative force of a human being, in that

00:11:15.500 | way.

00:11:17.020 | And you should.

00:11:18.020 | You could imagine that you could segregate competence and ability.

00:11:23.500 | Imagine that you and I were going to work on a project.

00:11:26.280 | We could organize our project in relationship to the ambition that we wanted to attain,

00:11:32.140 | and we can organize an agreement so that you were committed to the project voluntarily,

00:11:36.760 | and so that I was committed to the project voluntarily.

00:11:39.540 | So that means that we would actually be united in our perceptions and our actions by the

00:11:45.100 | motivation of something approximating voluntary play.

00:11:48.580 | Now you could also imagine another situation where I said, here's our goal, and you better

00:11:53.740 | help me or I'm going to kill your family.

00:11:57.700 | Well the probability is that you would be quite motivated to undertake my bidding.

00:12:06.220 | And so then you might say, well that's how the world works, it's power and compulsion.

00:12:09.740 | But the truth of the matter is that you can force people to see things your way, let's

00:12:16.100 | say, but it's nowhere near as good a strategy, even practically, than the strategy that would

00:12:22.300 | be associated with something like voluntary joint agreement of pattern of movement strategy

00:12:29.900 | towards a goal.

00:12:30.900 | See, this is such an important thing to understand, because it helps you start to understand the

00:12:37.260 | distinction between a unifying force that's based on power and compulsion, and one that

00:12:42.940 | is much more in keeping, I would say, with the ethos that governs Western societies,

00:12:47.860 | free Western societies.

00:12:48.860 | There's really a qualitative difference, and it's not some morally relativistic illusion.

00:12:54.740 | So if we just look at the nuance of Nietzsche's thought, the idea he first introduced and

00:13:01.900 | thus spoke Zarathustra of the Übermensch, it's another one that's very easy to misinterpret

00:13:08.280 | because it sounds awfully a lot like it's about power.

00:13:13.220 | For example, in the 20th century it was misrepresented and co-opted by Hitler to advocate for the

00:13:20.260 | extermination of the inferior non-Aryan races.

00:13:24.540 | And the dominion of the superior Aryans, yeah.

00:13:27.140 | Well, and that was partly because Nietzsche's work also was misrepresented by his sister

00:13:31.940 | after his death.

00:13:33.940 | But I also think that there's a fundamental flaw in that Nietzschean conceptualization.

00:13:38.380 | So Nietzsche, of course, famously announced the death of God, but he did that in a manner

00:13:44.300 | that was accompanied by dire warnings, like Nietzsche said, because people tend to think

00:13:49.260 | of that as a triumphalist statement.

00:13:51.100 | But Nietzsche actually said that, he really said something like the unifying ethos under

00:13:58.980 | which we've organized ourselves psychologically and socially has now been fatally undermined

00:14:04.220 | by, well, by the rationalist proclivity, by the empiricist proclivity.

00:14:09.820 | There's a variety of reasons.

00:14:12.060 | Mostly it was conflict between the Enlightenment view, let's say, and the classic religious

00:14:15.380 | view, and that there will be dire consequences for that.

00:14:19.140 | And Nietzsche knew, like Dostoevsky knew, that, see, there's a proclivity for the human

00:14:25.380 | psyche and for human societies to move towards something approximating a unity, because the

00:14:30.460 | cost of disunity is high.

00:14:33.100 | Fractionation of your goals, so that means you're less motivated to move forward than

00:14:37.460 | you might be, because there's many things competing for your attention.

00:14:40.740 | And also anxiety, because anxiety actually signals something like goal conflict.

00:14:45.900 | So there's an inescapable proclivity of value systems to unite.

00:14:50.740 | Now if you kill the thing that's uniting them, that's the death of God, they either

00:14:54.440 | fractionate and you get confusion, anxiety, and hopelessness, or you get social disunity,

00:15:01.940 | or and you get social disunity, or something else arises out of the abyss to constitute

00:15:10.380 | that unifying force.

00:15:12.460 | And Nietzsche said, specifically, that he believed that one of those manifestations

00:15:17.260 | would be that of communism.

00:15:20.700 | And that that would kill, he said this in Will to Power, that that would kill tens of

00:15:25.260 | millions of people in the upcoming 20th century.

00:15:28.820 | He could see that coming 50 years earlier, and Dostoevsky did the same thing in his book

00:15:33.860 | The Demons.

00:15:35.060 | So this is the thing that the areligious have to contend with.

00:15:38.220 | It's a real conundrum, because, I mean, you could dispute the idea that our value systems

00:15:44.620 | tend towards a unity, and society does as well, because otherwise we're disunified.

00:15:49.500 | But the cost of that disunity, as I said, is goal confusion, anxiety, and hopelessness.

00:15:54.580 | So it's like a real cost.

00:15:56.780 | So you could dispense with the notion of unity altogether, and the postmodernists did that

00:16:00.500 | to some degree.

00:16:01.660 | But they pulled off a sleight of hand too, where they replaced it by power.

00:16:05.500 | Now Nietzsche did, he's responsible for that to some degree, because Nietzsche said, with

00:16:11.220 | his conception of the overman, let's say, is that human beings would have to create

00:16:15.580 | their own values.

00:16:17.580 | Because the value structure that had descended from on high was now shunted aside.

00:16:23.380 | But there's a major problem with that, many major problems.

00:16:27.700 | The psychoanalysts were the first people who really figured this out after Nietzsche.

00:16:31.660 | Because imagine that we don't have a relationship with the transcendental anymore that orients

00:16:39.540 | us.

00:16:40.540 | Okay, now we have to turn to ourselves.

00:16:41.700 | Okay, now if we were a unity, a clear unity within ourselves, let's say, then we could

00:16:48.820 | turn to ourselves for that discovery.

00:16:51.080 | But if we're a fractionated plurality internally, then when we turn to ourselves, we turn to

00:16:57.140 | a fractionated plurality.

00:16:58.580 | Well that was Freud's observation, it's like, well how can you make your own values

00:17:02.180 | when you're not the master in your own house?

00:17:04.680 | Like you're a war of competing motivations, or maybe you're someone who's dominated

00:17:09.340 | by the will to force and compulsion.

00:17:12.860 | And so why do you think that you can rely on yourself as the source of values?

00:17:16.340 | And why do you think you're wise enough to consult with yourself to find out what those

00:17:20.620 | values are, or what they should be, say, in the course of a single life?

00:17:24.700 | I mean, you know, it's difficult to organize your own personal relationship, like one relationship,

00:17:31.000 | in the course of your life, let alone to try to imagine that out of whole cloth you could

00:17:35.820 | construct an ethos that would be psychologically and socially stabilizing, and last over the

00:17:40.940 | long run.

00:17:42.500 | And of course Marx, people like that, the people who reduce human motivation to a single

00:17:48.580 | axis, they had the intellectual hubris to imagine that they could do that.

00:17:53.180 | Postmodernists are a good example of that as well.

00:17:55.420 | Okay.

00:17:56.420 | But if we lay on the table, religion, communism, Nazism, they are all unifying ethos.

00:18:06.620 | They're unifying ideas, but they're also horribly dividing ideas.

00:18:10.620 | They both unify and divide.

00:18:12.420 | Religion has also divided people, because in the nuances of how the different peoples

00:18:21.660 | wrestle with God, they have come to different conclusions, and then they use those conclusions,

00:18:26.300 | and perhaps the people in power use those conclusions to then start wars, to start hatred,

00:18:31.780 | to divide.

00:18:32.780 | Yeah, well it's one of the key sub-themes in the Gospels, is the sub-theme of the Pharisees.

00:18:40.020 | And so the fundamental enemies of Christ in the Gospels are the Pharisees, and the scribes,

00:18:46.180 | and the lawyers.

00:18:47.280 | So what does that mean?

00:18:48.700 | The Pharisees are religious hypocrites.

00:18:51.660 | The scribes are academics who worship their own intellect.

00:18:55.620 | And the lawyers are the legal minds who use the law as a weapon.

00:19:00.220 | And so they're the enemy of the Redeemer.

00:19:04.060 | That's a sub-plot in the Gospel stories.

00:19:07.100 | And that actually all means something.

00:19:09.820 | The Pharisaic problem is that the best of all possible ideas can be used by the worst

00:19:16.620 | actors in the worst possible way.

00:19:18.900 | And maybe this is an existential conundrum, is that the most evil people use the best

00:19:23.780 | possible ideas to the worst possible ends.

00:19:26.740 | And then you have the conundrum of how do you separate out, let's say, the genuine religious

00:19:31.700 | people from those who use the religious enterprise only for their own machinations.

00:19:37.820 | We're seeing this happen online.

00:19:39.200 | Like one of the things that you're seeing happening online, I'm sure you've noticed

00:19:42.780 | this, especially on the right-wing psychopathic troll side of the distribution, is the weaponization

00:19:50.700 | of a certain form of Christian ideation.

00:19:53.500 | And that's often marked, at least online, by the presence of, what would you say, cliches

00:19:58.500 | like "Christ is King," which has a certain religious meaning but a completely different

00:20:02.940 | meaning in this sphere of emerging right-wing pathology.

00:20:07.860 | Right wing.

00:20:09.020 | The political dimension isn't the right dimension of analysis.

00:20:11.800 | But it's definitely the case that the best possible ideas can be used for the worst possible

00:20:16.220 | purposes.

00:20:17.440 | And that also brings up another specter, which is like, well, is there any reliable and valid

00:20:22.060 | way of distinguishing truly beneficial, unifying ideas from those that are pathological?

00:20:28.620 | And so, that's another thing that I tried to detail out in these lectures, but also

00:20:32.900 | in this new book.

00:20:33.900 | It's like, how do you tell the good actors from the bad actors at the most fundamental

00:20:38.380 | level of analysis?

00:20:39.380 | And good ideas from the bad ideas, and you lecture on truth that Nietzsche also struggled

00:20:44.160 | with.

00:20:45.160 | So, how do you know that communism is a bad idea, versus it's a good idea implemented

00:20:53.720 | by bad actors?

00:20:55.160 | Right, right.

00:20:56.520 | That's a more subtle variant of the religious problem, and that's what the communists say

00:21:00.420 | all the time.

00:21:01.420 | The modern-day communists.

00:21:02.420 | Like, real communism has never been tried.

00:21:05.040 | And you could say, I suppose, with some justification, you could say that real Christianity has never

00:21:10.840 | been tried, because we always fall short of the ideal mark.

00:21:15.340 | And so, I mean, my rejoinder to the communists is something like, every single time it's

00:21:22.340 | been implemented, wherever it's been implemented, regardless of the culture and the background

00:21:27.380 | of the people who've implemented it, it's had exactly the same catastrophic consequences.

00:21:32.300 | Like, I don't know how many examples you need of that, but I believe we've generated sufficient

00:21:38.860 | examples so that that case is basically resolved.

00:21:42.380 | Now, the general rejoinder to that is, it's really something like, well, if I was in charge

00:21:49.620 | of the communist enterprise, the utopia would have come about, right?

00:21:53.300 | But that's also a form of dangerous pretense.

00:21:56.140 | Part of the way—see, that problem is actually resolved to some degree in the notion of—in

00:22:02.500 | the developing notion of sacrifice that emerges in the Western canon over thousands and thousands

00:22:07.220 | of years.

00:22:08.220 | So, one of the suggestions, for example—and this is something exemplified in the passion

00:22:13.000 | story—is that you can tell the valid holder of an idea, because that holder will take

00:22:19.140 | the responsibility for the consequences of his idea onto himself.

00:22:24.580 | And that's why, for example, you see one way of conceptualizing Christ in the gospel story

00:22:30.300 | is as the ultimate sacrifice to God.

00:22:34.020 | So you might ask, well, what's the ultimate sacrifice?

00:22:36.420 | And there are variants of an answer to that.

00:22:39.580 | One form of ultimate sacrifice is the sacrifice of a child—the offering of a child—and

00:22:43.820 | the other is the offering of the self.

00:22:46.460 | And the story of Christ brings both of those together, because he's the son of God that's

00:22:51.260 | offered to God, and so it's an archetypal resolution of that tension between ultimate

00:22:57.620 | sacrifice.

00:22:59.620 | Ultimate because, once you're a parent, most parents would rather sacrifice themselves

00:23:06.060 | than their children, right?

00:23:07.700 | So you have something that becomes of even more value than yourself.

00:23:11.100 | But the sacrifice of self is also a very high-order level of sacrifice.

00:23:16.220 | Christ is an archetype of the pattern of being that's predicated on the decision to take,

00:23:21.820 | to offer everything up to the highest value, right?

00:23:25.060 | That pattern of self-sacrifice.

00:23:27.620 | And I think part of the reason that's valid is because the person who undertakes to do

00:23:33.020 | that pays the price themselves.

00:23:35.520 | It's not externalized.

00:23:36.520 | They're not trying to change anyone else, except maybe by example.

00:23:40.520 | It's your problem.

00:23:42.140 | Like Solzhenitsyn pointed that out, too, when he was struggling with the idea of good versus

00:23:47.460 | evil.

00:23:48.580 | And you see this in more sophisticated literature.

00:23:51.220 | You know, in really unsophisticated literature or drama, there's a good guy and a bad guy,

00:23:58.140 | and the good guy's all good, and the bad guy's all bad.

00:24:03.060 | And in more sophisticated literature, the good and bad are abstracted.

00:24:10.060 | You can think of them as spirits.

00:24:12.140 | And then those spirits possess all the characters in the complex drama to a greater or lesser

00:24:17.820 | degree.

00:24:18.820 | And that battle is fought out both socially and internally.

00:24:21.980 | In the high-order religious conceptualizations in the West, if they culminate, let's say,

00:24:28.580 | in the Christian story, the notion is that battle between good and evil is fundamentally

00:24:33.120 | played out as an internal drama.

00:24:35.300 | Yeah, so for a religious ethos, the battle between good and evil is fought within each

00:24:43.260 | individual human heart.

00:24:44.700 | Right.

00:24:45.700 | It's your moral duty to constrain evil within yourself.

00:24:48.640 | And while there's more to it than that, because there's also the insistence that if you do

00:24:55.140 | that, that makes you the most effective possible warrior, let's say, against evil itself in

00:25:02.020 | the social world, that you start with the battle that occurs within you, in the soul,

00:25:07.160 | let's say.

00:25:08.160 | The soul becomes the battleground between the forces of good and evil.

00:25:12.060 | There's an idea there too, which is if that battle is undertaken successfully, then it

00:25:18.120 | doesn't have to be played out in the social world as actual conflict.

00:25:23.120 | You can rectify the conflict internally without it having to be played out as fate, as Jung

00:25:27.700 | put it.

00:25:28.820 | So what would you say to Nietzsche, who called Christianity the slave morality?

00:25:34.400 | His critique of religion in that way was slave morality versus master morality, and then

00:25:38.980 | you put an ubermensch into that?

00:25:41.700 | See, I would say that the woke phenomenon is the manifestation of the slave morality

00:25:48.860 | that Nietzsche criticized, and that there are elements of Christianity that can be gerrymandered

00:25:58.140 | to support that mode of perception and conception.

00:26:04.180 | But I think he was wrong, and he was wrong in his essential criticism of Christianity

00:26:09.680 | in that regard.

00:26:10.680 | Now, it's complicated with Nietzsche, because Nietzsche never criticizes the gospel stories

00:26:17.100 | directly.

00:26:18.100 | What he basically criticizes is something like the pathologies of institutionalized

00:26:23.660 | religion.

00:26:24.660 | But most particularly of the, what would you say, of the sort of casually too nice

00:26:32.220 | Protestant form.

00:26:34.100 | You know, that's a thumbnail sketch and perhaps somewhat unfair, but given the alignment,

00:26:40.980 | let's say, of the more mainstream Protestant movements with the woke mob, I don't think

00:26:46.420 | it's an absurd criticism.

00:26:48.880 | It's something like the degeneration of Christianity into the notion that good and

00:26:54.060 | harmless are the same thing, or good and empathic are the same thing, which is simply not true,

00:27:00.740 | and far too simplified.

00:27:03.580 | And I also think Nietzsche was extremely wrong in his presumption that human beings should

00:27:08.060 | take it to themselves to construct their own values.

00:27:11.060 | I think he made a colossal error in that presumption.

00:27:13.820 | And that is the idea of the ubermensch, that the great individual, the best of us should

00:27:18.400 | create our own values.

00:27:20.540 | And I think the reason that he was wrong about that is that, so when God gives instructions

00:27:26.740 | to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he basically tells them that they can do anything

00:27:30.180 | they want in the walled garden.

00:27:32.500 | So that's the kind of balance between order and nature that makes up the human environment.

00:27:37.700 | Human beings have the freedom, vouchsafed to them by God, to do anything they want in

00:27:43.660 | the garden except to mess with the most fundamental rules.

00:27:47.500 | So God says to people, you're not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

00:27:52.420 | Which fundamentally means, there is an implicit moral order and you're to abide by it.

00:27:58.080 | Your freedom stops at the foundation.

00:28:01.340 | And you can think about that, or I'd be interested even in your ideas about this as an engineer,

00:28:06.220 | let's say, is that there is an ethos that's implicit in being itself.

00:28:13.780 | And your ethos has to be a reflection of that.

00:28:17.040 | And that isn't under your control.

00:28:18.840 | You can't gerrymander the foundation because your foundational beliefs have to put you

00:28:24.860 | in harmony, like musical harmony, with the actual structure of reality as such.

00:28:29.440 | So I can give you an example of that.

00:28:31.360 | So our goal, insofar as we're conducting ourselves properly, is to have the kind of interesting

00:28:37.660 | conversation that allows both of us to express ourselves in a manner that enables us to learn

00:28:44.620 | and grow, such that we can share that with everyone who's listening.

00:28:48.500 | And if our aim is true and upward, then that's what we're doing.

00:28:52.380 | Well, that means that we're going to have to match ourselves to a pattern of interaction.

00:28:59.540 | And that's marked for us emotionally, like you and I both know this.

00:29:03.100 | If we're doing this right, we're going to be interested in the conversation.

00:29:05.780 | We're not going to be looking at our watch.

00:29:07.540 | We're not going to be thinking about what we're aiming at.

00:29:10.100 | We're just going to communicate.

00:29:11.300 | Now, the religious interpretation of that would be that we were doing something like

00:29:15.880 | making the redemptive logos manifest between us in dialogue.

00:29:20.420 | And that's something that can be shared.

00:29:22.740 | To do that, we have to align with that pattern.

00:29:25.420 | I can't decide that there's some arbitrary way that I'm going to play you.

00:29:29.100 | I mean, I could do that if I was a psychopathic manipulator, but to do that optimally, I'm

00:29:33.980 | not going to impose a certain mode of, a certain a priori aim, let's say, on our communication

00:29:41.940 | and manipulate you into that.

00:29:45.220 | So the constraints on my ethos reflect the actual structure of the world.

00:29:54.380 | And I can't, this is the communist presumption, it's like, we're going to burn everything

00:29:58.860 | down and we're going to start from scratch.

00:30:01.340 | We've got these axiomatic presumptions and we're going to put them into place and we're

00:30:05.420 | going to socialize people so they now think and live like communists from day one.

00:30:10.980 | And human beings are infinitely malleable.

00:30:13.360 | And we can use a rational set of presuppositions to decide what sort of beings they should

00:30:17.500 | be.

00:30:18.500 | The transhumanists are doing this too.

00:30:19.660 | It's like, no, there's a pattern of being that you have to fall into alignment with.

00:30:24.820 | And I think it's the pattern of being, by the way, that if you fall into alignment with,

00:30:30.240 | it gives you hope, it protects you from anxiety, and it gives you a sense of harmony with your

00:30:36.340 | surroundings and with other people.

00:30:37.880 | And none of that's arbitrary.

00:30:40.060 | But don't you think we both arrive to this conversation with rigid axioms?

00:30:44.720 | That we have, maybe we're blind to them, but in the same way that the Marxists came with

00:30:49.180 | very rigid axioms about the way the world is and the way it should be, aren't we coming

00:30:53.980 | to that?

00:30:54.980 | Well, we definitely come to the conversation with a hierarchy of foundational axioms,

00:30:58.820 | right?

00:30:59.820 | I would say the more sophisticated you are as a thinker, the deeper the level at which

00:31:04.740 | you're willing to play.

00:31:06.340 | So imagine first that you have presumptions of different depth, there's more predicated

00:31:11.780 | on the more fundamental axioms, and then that there's a space of play around those.

00:31:17.820 | And that space of play is going to depend on the sophistication of the player, obviously.

00:31:23.060 | But those who are capable of engaging in deeper conversations talk about more fundamental

00:31:29.380 | things with more play.

00:31:30.940 | Now we have to come to the conversation with a certain degree of structure because we wouldn't

00:31:35.700 | be able to understand each other or communicate if a lot of things weren't already assumed

00:31:41.860 | or taken for granted.

00:31:43.880 | How rigid is the hierarchy of axioms that religion provides?

00:31:47.420 | This is what I'm trying to understand.

00:31:50.040 | The rigidity of that hierarchy- It's as rigid as play.

00:31:53.420 | Well play is not rigid at all.

00:31:54.740 | No, no, no, no, no, no, it's got a rigidity- There's some constraints.

00:31:58.020 | It took me about 40 years to figure out the answer to that question.

00:32:01.260 | So I'm serious about that.

00:32:02.860 | So it wasn't a random answer.

00:32:05.860 | So play is very rigid in some ways.

00:32:09.220 | So if you and I go out to play basketball or chess, there are rules and you can't break

00:32:13.580 | the rules because then you're no longer in the game.

00:32:16.560 | But then there's a dynamism within those rules that's- Well with chess it's virtually infinite.

00:32:21.740 | I think, what is it?

00:32:22.740 | There's more patterns of potential games on a chess board than there are subatomic particles

00:32:27.200 | in the observable universe.

00:32:28.860 | Like it's an insane space.

00:32:31.020 | So it's not like there's not freedom within it.

00:32:33.600 | But it's a weird paradox in a way, isn't it?

00:32:37.000 | Because music is like this too, is that there are definitely rules.

00:32:42.040 | And so there are things- You can't throw a basketball onto a chess board and still be

00:32:46.500 | playing chess.

00:32:47.820 | But weirdly enough, if you adhere to the rules, the realm of freedom increases rather than

00:32:53.540 | decreasing.

00:32:54.660 | And I think you can make the same case for a playful conversation.

00:32:57.860 | It's like we're playing by certain rules and a lot of them are implicit.

00:33:01.540 | But that doesn't mean that- It might mean the reverse of constraint.

00:33:06.300 | You know, because in this seminar, for example, that I was referring to, the Exodus Seminar

00:33:11.400 | and then the Gospel Seminar, everybody in the seminar, there's about eight of us, played

00:33:15.620 | fair.

00:33:16.620 | Nobody used power.

00:33:18.100 | Nobody tried to prove they were right.

00:33:19.580 | They put forward their points, but they were like, "Here's a way of looking at that."

00:33:24.460 | "Assess it."

00:33:25.600 | And they were also doing it genuinely.

00:33:28.540 | It's like, "This is what I've concluded about, say, this story, and I'm going to make a case

00:33:33.780 | for it.

00:33:34.780 | But I'd like to hear what you have to say because maybe you can change it.

00:33:37.500 | You can extend it.

00:33:38.500 | You can find a flaw in it."

00:33:39.700 | And that's a conversation that has flow and that's engaging and that other people will

00:33:44.660 | listen to as well.

00:33:45.660 | And that's also- See, I think that one of the things that we can conclude now, and we

00:33:50.340 | can do this even from a neuroscientific basis, is that that sense of engaged meaning is a

00:33:56.180 | marker, not only for the emergence of harmony between you and your environment, but for

00:34:01.100 | the emergence of that harmony in a way that is developmentally rich, that moves you upward

00:34:07.100 | towards, what would you say, well, I think towards a more effective entropic state.

00:34:13.940 | That's actually the technical answer to that.

00:34:15.580 | But it makes you more than you are, and there's a directionality in that.

00:34:19.100 | - Well, I would like to sort of, the reason I like talking about communism, because it

00:34:23.500 | has clearly been shown as a set of ideas to be destructive to humanity, but I would like

00:34:31.540 | to understand from an engineering perspective, the characteristics of communism versus religion,

00:34:39.980 | where you could identify religious thought is going to lead to a better human being,

00:34:44.940 | a better society, and communist Marxist thought is not.

00:34:49.440 | Because there's ambiguity, there's room for play in communism and Marxism, because they

00:34:53.660 | kind of had a utopian sense of where everybody's headed, don't know how it's going to happen,

00:34:59.080 | maybe revolution is required, but after the revolution is done, we'll figure it out.

00:35:04.020 | And there's an underlying assumption that maybe human beings are good, and they'll figure

00:35:08.260 | it out once you remove the oppressor.

00:35:11.820 | All these ideas kind of, until you put them into practice, they can be quite convincing

00:35:17.980 | if you're in the 19th century.

00:35:19.940 | If I was reading, which is kind of fascinating, the 19th century produced such powerful ideas,

00:35:26.860 | Marx and Nietzsche.

00:35:27.860 | - Oh, fascism too, for that matter.

00:35:30.340 | - Fascism.

00:35:31.340 | So, you know, if I was sitting there, especially if I'm feeling shitty about myself, a lot

00:35:37.580 | of these ideas are pretty powerful, as a way to plug the nihilist hole.

00:35:41.940 | - Yeah, right, absolutely, well, and some of them may actually have an appropriate scope

00:35:45.900 | of application.

00:35:46.900 | Like, it could be that some of the foundational axioms of communism, socialism/communism,

00:35:53.100 | are actually functional in a sufficiently small social group, maybe a tribal group even.

00:35:58.860 | Like, I also have a, I'm not sure this is correct, but I have a suspicion that the pervasive

00:36:04.980 | attractiveness of some of the radical left ideas that we're talking about are pervasive

00:36:10.980 | precisely because they are functional within, say, families, but also within the small tribal

00:36:17.180 | groups that people might have originally evolved into.

00:36:19.860 | And that once we become civilized, so we produce societies that are united, even among people

00:36:27.100 | who don't know one another, different principles have to apply as a consequence of scale.

00:36:31.860 | So that's partly an engineering response, but I think there's a deeper way of going

00:36:36.900 | after the communist problem.

00:36:38.900 | So I think part of the communist, the problem, fundamental problem with the communist axioms

00:36:44.420 | is the notion that the world of complex social interactions can be simplified sufficiently

00:36:51.500 | so that centralized planning authorities can deal with it.

00:36:54.620 | And I think the best way to think about the free exchange rejoinder to that presumption

00:36:59.580 | is, no, the sum total of human interactions in a large civilization are so immense that

00:37:05.680 | you need a distributed network of cognition in order to compute the proper way forward.

00:37:10.780 | And so what you do is you give each actor their domain of individual choice so that

00:37:16.140 | they can maximize their own movement forward and you allow the aggregate direction to emerge

00:37:20.660 | from that rather than trying to impose it from the top down, which I think is computationally

00:37:25.620 | impossible.

00:37:27.160 | So that might be one engineering reason why the communist solution doesn't work.

00:37:31.220 | Like I read in Solzhenitsyn, for example, that the central Soviet authorities often

00:37:36.120 | had to make 200 pricing decisions a day.

00:37:41.200 | Now if you've ever started a business or created a product and had to wrestle with

00:37:47.140 | the problem of pricing, you'd become aware of just how intractable that is.

00:37:51.620 | Like how do you calculate worth?

00:37:54.140 | Well, there's the central existential problem of life.

00:37:57.460 | How do you calculate worth?

00:37:59.440 | It's not something like a central authority can sit down and just manage.

00:38:02.980 | And there is a lot of inputs that go into a pricing decision and the free market answer

00:38:09.580 | to that is something like, well, if you get the price right, people will buy it and you'll

00:38:14.140 | survive.

00:38:15.140 | This is a fascinating way to describe how ideas fail.

00:38:17.820 | So communism perhaps fails because, just like what people believe, the earth is flat.

00:38:23.180 | When you look outside, it looks flat, but you can't see beyond the horizon, I guess.

00:38:30.100 | In the same way with communism, communism seems like a great idea in my family, in my

00:38:35.000 | people I love, but it doesn't scale.

00:38:37.580 | And it doesn't iterate.

00:38:38.580 | It doesn't iterate.

00:38:39.580 | And that's a form of scaling, too.

00:38:40.980 | Right.

00:38:41.980 | Well, I mean, whatever ways it breaks down, it doesn't scale.

00:38:45.340 | And you're saying religious thought is a thing that might scale.

00:38:49.260 | I would say religious thought is the record of those ideas that have, in fact, scaled.

00:38:54.060 | Right.

00:38:55.060 | And iterated.

00:38:56.060 | And iterated.

00:38:57.060 | Does religious thought iterate?

00:38:58.060 | So, I mean, there's a fundamental conservative aspect to religious thought, tradition.

00:39:04.580 | Yeah.

00:39:05.580 | This is why, like Mircea Eliade, for example, who I referred to earlier, one of the things

00:39:10.260 | Eliade did, and very effectively, and people like Joseph Campbell, who in some ways were

00:39:14.300 | popularizers of Eliade's ideas and Carl Jung's, what they really did was devote themselves

00:39:21.140 | to an analysis of those ideas that scaled and iterated across the largest possible spans

00:39:26.900 | of time.

00:39:27.900 | And so, Eliade and Jung, Eric Neumann, and Campbell, they were looking at patterns of

00:39:33.940 | narrative that were common across religious traditions that had spanned millennia.

00:39:38.720 | And found many patterns.

00:39:39.820 | The hero's myth, for example, is one of those patterns.

00:39:42.260 | And I think the evidence that it has its reflection in human neurophysiology and neuropsychology

00:39:47.620 | is incontrovertible.

00:39:49.140 | And so, these foundational narratives, they last.

00:39:53.300 | They're common across multiple religious traditions.

00:39:56.220 | They unite.

00:39:57.420 | They work psychologically.

00:39:58.780 | But they also reflect the underlying neurophysiological architecture.

00:40:01.940 | So, I can give you an example of that.

00:40:04.180 | So, the hero myth is really a quest myth.

00:40:07.360 | And a quest myth is really a story of exploration and expansion of adaptation.

00:40:12.020 | Right?

00:40:13.020 | So, Bilbo the Hobbit, he's kind of an ordinary everyman.

00:40:16.840 | He lives in a very constrained and orderly and secure world.

00:40:21.300 | And then the quest call comes and he goes out and he expands his personality and develops

00:40:25.780 | his wisdom.

00:40:26.780 | And that's reflected in human neuropsychological architecture at a very low level.

00:40:31.800 | Way below cognition.

00:40:32.800 | So, one of the most fundamental elements of the mammalian brain, and even in lower animal

00:40:38.500 | forms, is the hypothalamus.

00:40:40.160 | It's sort of the root of primary motivation.

00:40:42.680 | So, it governs lust and it regulates your breathing and it regulates your hunger and

00:40:49.380 | it regulates your thirst and it regulates your temperature.

00:40:51.880 | Like really low-level biological necessities are regulated by the hypothalamus.

00:40:56.960 | When you get hungry, it's the hypothalamus.

00:40:59.520 | When you're activated in a defensively aggressive manner, that's the hypothalamus.

00:41:04.640 | Half the hypothalamus is the origin of the dopaminergic tracts.

00:41:08.320 | And they subsume exploration.

00:41:10.680 | And so, you could think of the human motivational reality as a domain that's governed by axiomatic

00:41:17.960 | motivational states - love, sex, defensive aggression, hunger - and another domain that's

00:41:23.320 | governed by exploration.

00:41:25.160 | And the rule would be something like, "When your basic motivational states are sated,

00:41:30.880 | explore."

00:41:33.540 | And that's not cognitive.

00:41:34.840 | Like I said, this is deep, deep brain architecture.

00:41:37.960 | It's extraordinarily ancient.

00:41:40.080 | And the exploration story is something like, "Go out into the unknown and take the risks

00:41:45.640 | because the information that you discover and the skills you develop will be worthwhile

00:41:52.920 | even in sating the basic motivational drives."

00:41:55.520 | And then you want to learn to do that in an iterative manner so it sustains across time.

00:42:00.680 | And you want to do it in a way that unites you with other people.

00:42:03.540 | And there's a pattern to that.

00:42:04.620 | And I do think that's the pattern that we strive to encapsulate in our deep religious

00:42:09.840 | narratives.

00:42:10.840 | And I think that in many ways we've done that successfully.

00:42:13.520 | What is the belief in God?

00:42:17.480 | How does that fit in?

00:42:18.480 | What does it mean to believe in God?

00:42:20.480 | Okay, so in one of the stories that I cover in We Who Wrestle With God, which I've only

00:42:26.240 | recently begun to take apart, say, in the last two years, is the story of Abraham.

00:42:31.080 | It's a very cool story.

00:42:32.860 | And it's also related, by the way, to your question about what makes communism wrong.

00:42:37.620 | And Dostoevsky knew this.

00:42:39.400 | Not precisely the Abraham story, but the same reason.

00:42:43.400 | In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky made a very telling observation.

00:42:47.680 | So he speaks in the voice of a cynical, nihilistic, and bitter bureaucrat who's been a failure.

00:42:53.280 | Who's talking cynically about the nature of human beings.

00:42:56.440 | But also very accurately.

00:42:57.440 | And one of the things he points out, with regards to modern utopianism, is that human

00:43:02.640 | beings are very strange creatures.

00:43:04.420 | And that if you gave them what the socialist utopians want to give them, so let's say all

00:43:10.120 | your needs are taken care of.

00:43:12.560 | All your material needs are taken care of, and even indefinitely.

00:43:15.680 | Dostoevsky's claim was, you don't understand human beings very well, because if you put

00:43:19.720 | them in an environment that was that comfortable, they would purposefully go insane just to

00:43:24.920 | break it into bits, just so something interesting would happen.

00:43:28.400 | Right.

00:43:29.400 | And he says it's the human proclivity to curse and complain.

00:43:33.600 | He says this in quite a cynic and caustic manner, but he's pointing to something deep.

00:43:37.880 | Which is that we're not built for comfort and security.

00:43:41.040 | We're not infants.

00:43:42.360 | We're not after satiation.

00:43:45.000 | So then you might ask, well what the hell are we after then?

00:43:48.040 | That's what the Abraham story addresses.

00:43:50.200 | And Abraham is the first true individual in the biblical narrative.

00:43:55.160 | So you can think about his story as the archetypal story of the developing individual.

00:44:00.200 | So you said, well what's God?

00:44:02.200 | Well in the Abraham story, God is characterized in a lot of different ways in the classic

00:44:06.580 | religious texts.

00:44:07.900 | Like the Bible is actually a compilation of different characterizations of the divine.

00:44:13.480 | With the insistence that they reflect an underlying unity.

00:44:17.080 | In the story of Abraham, the divine is the call to adventure.

00:44:21.960 | So Abraham has the socialist utopia at hand.

00:44:26.660 | He's from a wealthy family, and he has everything he needs.

00:44:30.040 | And he actually doesn't do anything until he's in his seventies.

00:44:33.280 | Now, hypothetically people in those times lived much longer.

00:44:36.860 | But a voice comes to Abraham and it tells him something very specific.

00:44:41.000 | It says, "Leave your zone of comfort.

00:44:45.560 | Leave your parents.

00:44:46.560 | Leave your tent.

00:44:47.560 | Leave your community.

00:44:48.560 | Leave your tribe.

00:44:49.560 | Leave your land.

00:44:50.560 | Go out into the world."

00:44:52.400 | And Abraham thinks, well why?

00:44:54.400 | I've got naked slave girls peeling grapes and feeding them to me.

00:44:59.280 | It's like, what do I need an adventure for?

00:45:01.820 | And God tells him, and this is the covenant, by the way.

00:45:05.080 | Part of the covenant that the God of the Israelites makes with his people.

00:45:09.280 | It's very, very specific.

00:45:10.840 | It's very brilliant.

00:45:11.920 | He says, "If you follow the voice of adventure, you'll become a blessing to yourself."

00:45:18.720 | So that's a good deal because people generally live at odds with themselves.

00:45:22.880 | And he says, God says, "That's not all.

00:45:26.360 | You'll become a blessing to yourself in a way that furthers your reputation among people

00:45:32.560 | and validly so that you'll accomplish things that were real and people will know it and

00:45:37.040 | you'll be held high in their esteem and that will be valid."

00:45:41.080 | So that's a pretty good deal because social people would like to be regarded as of utility

00:45:47.880 | and worth by others.

00:45:49.080 | And so that's a good deal.

00:45:50.760 | And God says, "That's not all.

00:45:53.920 | You'll establish something of lasting permanent and deep value."

00:45:57.040 | That's why Abraham becomes the father of nations.

00:46:00.280 | And finally he caps it off and he says, "There's a better element even to it.

00:46:05.560 | There's a capstone.

00:46:07.160 | You'll do all three of those things in a way that's maximally beneficial to everyone else."

00:46:11.400 | And so the divinity in the Abrahamic story is making a claim.

00:46:14.800 | He says, "First of all, there's a drive that you should attend to.

00:46:19.980 | So the spirit of adventure that calls you out of your zone of comfort.

00:46:23.800 | Now if you attend to that and you make the sacrifices necessary to follow that path,

00:46:29.360 | then the following benefits will accrue to you.

00:46:31.640 | Your life will be a blessing.

00:46:33.680 | Everyone will hold you in high esteem.

00:46:35.800 | You'll establish something of permanent value and you'll do it in a way that's maximally

00:46:39.200 | beneficial to everyone else."

00:46:40.960 | And so think about what this means biologically or from an engineering standpoint.

00:46:45.800 | It means that the instinct to develop that characterizes outward-moving children, let's

00:46:50.600 | say, or adults, is the same instinct that allows for psychological stability, that allows

00:46:57.280 | for movement upward in the social hierarchy, that establishes something iterable, and that

00:47:02.720 | does that in a manner that allows everyone else to partake in the same process.

00:47:06.840 | Well, you know, that's a good deal.

00:47:09.780 | And I can't see how it cannot be true because the alternative hypothesis would be that the

00:47:15.240 | spirit that moves you beyond yourself to develop, the spirit of a curious child, let's say,

00:47:20.960 | what is that antithetical to?

00:47:22.920 | Your own esteem?

00:47:23.920 | Is that antithetical to other people's best interest?

00:47:27.340 | Is it not the thing that increases the probability that you'll do something permanent?

00:47:32.520 | That's a stupid theory.

00:47:33.800 | So God is a call to adventure with some constraints.

00:47:38.440 | A call to true adventure.

00:47:40.120 | To true adventure.

00:47:41.120 | True adventure.

00:47:42.120 | Yeah, and then that's a good observation because that begs the question, what constitutes the

00:47:47.880 | most true adventure?

00:47:49.760 | Well that's not fully fleshed out until, at least from the Christian perspective, let's

00:47:53.840 | say, that's not fully fleshed out until the Gospels.

00:47:57.800 | Because the passion of Christ is the, you could say, this is the perfectly reasonable

00:48:02.920 | way of looking at it, the passion of Christ is the truest adventure of Abraham.

00:48:07.680 | That's a terrible thing, eh?

00:48:09.000 | Because the passion story is a catastrophic tragedy, although it obviously has its redemptive

00:48:15.800 | elements.

00:48:16.800 | But one of the things that's implied there is that there's no distinction between the

00:48:22.400 | true adventure of life and taking on the pathway of maximal responsibility and burden.

00:48:27.540 | And I can't see how that cannot be true.

00:48:29.880 | Because the counter-hypothesis is, well Lex, the best thing for you to do in your life

00:48:35.480 | is to shrink from all challenge and hide.

00:48:39.800 | To remain infantile, to remain secure, not to ever push yourself beyond your limits,

00:48:44.280 | not to take any risks.

00:48:45.960 | Well no one thinks that's true.

00:48:48.200 | So basically the maximally worthwhile adventure could possibly be highly correlated with the

00:48:54.760 | hardest possible available adventure.

00:48:58.780 | The hardest possible available adventure voluntarily undertaken.

00:49:03.140 | Does it have to be voluntary?

00:49:04.480 | Absolutely!

00:49:05.480 | How do you define voluntarily?

00:49:06.940 | Well here's an example of that.

00:49:10.740 | That's a good question, too.

00:49:12.780 | When Christ is, the night before the crucifixion, which in principle he knows is coming, he

00:49:17.500 | asks God to relieve him of his burden.

00:49:21.660 | And understandably so.

00:49:22.660 | I mean that's the scene famously in which he's sweating, literally sweating blood.

00:49:27.520 | Because he knows what's coming.

00:49:29.020 | And the Romans designed crucifixion to be the most agonizing, humiliating, and disgusting

00:49:36.660 | possible death.

00:49:38.260 | So there is every reason to be apprehensive about that.

00:49:41.580 | And you might say, well could you undertake that voluntarily as an adventure?

00:49:45.300 | And the answer to that is something like, well what's your relationship with death?

00:49:51.260 | That's a problem you have to solve.

00:49:52.920 | And you could fight it, and you could be bitter about it, and there's reasons for that.

00:49:57.780 | Especially if it's painful and degrading.

00:50:00.900 | But the alternative is something like, well that's what's fleshed out in religious imagery

00:50:07.100 | always.

00:50:08.100 | It's very difficult to cast into words.

00:50:09.700 | It's like, no, you welcome the struggle.

00:50:14.540 | That's why I called the book "We Who Wrestle With God".

00:50:17.540 | You welcome the struggle.

00:50:18.940 | But Lex, I don't see how you can come to terms with life without construing it something

00:50:24.980 | like, construing it as something like, bring it on.

00:50:29.760 | Welcome the struggle.

00:50:31.020 | And I can't see that there's a limit to that.

00:50:32.820 | It's like, well I welcome the struggle until it gets difficult.

00:50:37.260 | So there's not a bell curve, like the struggle in moderation.

00:50:41.660 | Basically you have to welcome whatever, as hard as it gets.

00:50:46.300 | And the crucifixion in that way is a symbol of that.

00:50:49.780 | Well, it's worse than that in some ways.

00:50:52.420 | Because the crucifixion exemplifies the worst possible death.

00:50:57.900 | But that isn't the only element of the struggle.

00:51:00.460 | Because mythologically, classically, after Christ's death he harrows hell.

00:51:06.380 | And what that means as far as I can tell, psychologically, is that you're not only required,

00:51:11.740 | let's say, to take on the full existential burden of life and to welcome it, regardless

00:51:16.500 | of what it is, and to maintain your upward aim despite all temptations to the contrary.

00:51:23.060 | But you also have to confront the root of malevolence itself.

00:51:26.820 | So it's not merely tragedy.

00:51:28.340 | And I think the malevolence is actually worse.

00:51:30.780 | And the reason I think that is because I know the literature on post-traumatic stress disorder.

00:51:35.660 | And most people who encounter, let's say, a challenge that's so brutal that it fragments

00:51:41.420 | them, it isn't mere suffering that does that to people.

00:51:45.680 | It's an encounter with malevolence that does that to people.

00:51:48.260 | Their own sometimes, often, by the way, a soldier will go out into a battlefield and

00:51:53.020 | find out that there's a part of him that really enjoys the mayhem.

00:51:57.940 | And that conceptualization doesn't fit in well with everything he thinks he knows about

00:52:02.180 | himself and humanity.

00:52:04.260 | And after that contact with that dark part of himself, he never recovers.

00:52:10.460 | That happens to people.

00:52:12.280 | And it happens to people who encounter bad actors in the world, too.

00:52:15.140 | If you're a naive person and the right narcissistic psychopath comes your way, you are in mortal

00:52:21.340 | trouble because you might die.

00:52:22.980 | But that's not where the trouble ends.

00:52:26.060 | If there's a young man in their 20s listening to this, how do they escape the pull of Dostoyevsky's

00:52:33.780 | Notes from Underground?

00:52:34.780 | With the eyes open to the world, how do they select the adventure?

00:52:39.460 | So there's other characterizations of the divine, say, in the Old Testament story.

00:52:44.860 | So one pattern of characterization that I think is really relevant to that question

00:52:49.340 | is the conception of God as calling and conscience.

00:52:53.780 | Okay, so what does it mean?

00:52:56.140 | It's a description of the manner in which your destiny announces itself to you.

00:53:01.860 | And I'm using that terminology, and it's distinguishable, say, from Nietzsche's notion that you create

00:53:08.060 | your own values.

00:53:09.060 | It's like, part of the way you can tell that that's wrong is that you can't voluntarily

00:53:14.460 | gerrymander your own interests, right?

00:53:18.020 | Like you find some things interesting, and that seems natural and autonomous, and other

00:53:23.740 | things you don't find interesting, and you can't really force yourself to be interested

00:53:27.900 | in them.

00:53:28.900 | Now, so what is the domain of interest that makes itself manifest to you?

00:53:33.900 | Well, it's like an autonomous spirit.

00:53:35.660 | It's like certain things in your field of perception are illuminated to you.

00:53:39.860 | You think, "Oh, that's interesting.

00:53:42.020 | That's compelling.

00:53:43.020 | That's gripping."

00:53:44.020 | Rudolf Otto, who studied the phenomenology of religious experience, described that as

00:53:51.780 | numinous.

00:53:52.780 | The thing grips you because you're compelled by it, and maybe it's also somewhat anxiety-provoking.

00:53:57.340 | It's the same reaction that a cat has to a dog when the cat's hair stands on end.

00:54:02.380 | That's an awe response.

00:54:03.900 | And so there's going to be things in your phenomenological field that pull you forward,

00:54:09.620 | compel you.

00:54:10.620 | That's like the voice of positive emotion and enthusiasm.

00:54:14.100 | Things draw you into the world.

00:54:15.340 | It might be love.

00:54:16.340 | It might be aesthetic interest.

00:54:18.100 | It might be friendship.

00:54:19.620 | It might be social status.

00:54:21.980 | It might be duty and industriousness.

00:54:27.500 | There's various domains of interest that shine for people.

00:54:32.100 | That's sort of on the positive side.

00:54:34.060 | God is calling.

00:54:35.880 | That would be akin to the spirit of adventure for Abraham.

00:54:39.660 | But there's also God is conscience, and this is a useful thing to know too.

00:54:45.020 | Certain things bother you.

00:54:48.820 | They take root within you, and they turn your thoughts towards certain issues.

00:54:54.280 | Like there are things you're interested in that you've pursued your whole life.

00:54:57.460 | There are things I'm interested in that I felt as a moral compulsion.

00:55:01.900 | And so you could think, and I think the way you can think about it technically is that

00:55:06.660 | something pulls you forward so that you move ahead and you develop.

00:55:11.780 | And then another voice, this is a voice of negative emotion, says, "While you're moving

00:55:16.180 | forward, stay on this narrow pathway."

00:55:19.620 | And it'll mark deviations, and it marks deviations with shame and guilt and anxiety, regret.

00:55:26.780 | And that actually has a voice.

00:55:28.460 | Don't do that.

00:55:29.460 | Well, why not?

00:55:30.460 | While you're wandering off the straight and narrow path.

00:55:32.580 | So the divine marks the pathway forward and reveals it, but then puts up the constraints

00:55:37.700 | of conscience.

00:55:38.900 | And the divine in the Old Testament is portrayed, not least, as the dynamic between calling

00:55:45.520 | and conscience.

00:55:46.940 | What do you do with the negative emotions?

00:55:48.660 | You didn't mention envy.

00:55:49.660 | There's some really dark ones that can really pull you into some bad places.

00:55:54.060 | Envy, fear.

00:55:55.380 | Yeah, envy's a really bad one.

00:55:57.500 | Pride and envy are among the worst.

00:55:58.700 | Those are the sins of Cain, by the way, in the story of Cain and Abel.

00:56:02.860 | Because Cain fails because his sacrifices are insufficient.

00:56:06.600 | He doesn't offer his best.

00:56:08.480 | And so he's rejected, and that makes him bitter and unhappy.

00:56:12.900 | And he goes to complain to God, and God says to him two things.

00:56:16.540 | He said, if God tells him, "If your sacrifices were appropriate, you'd be accepted."

00:56:21.260 | It's a brutal thing.

00:56:22.420 | It's a brutal rejoinder.

00:56:24.060 | And he also says, "You can't blame your misery on your failure.

00:56:29.400 | You could learn from your failure.

00:56:31.780 | When you failed, you invited in the spirit of envy and resentment, and you allowed it

00:56:35.300 | to possess you.

00:56:36.300 | And that's why you're miserable."

00:56:37.900 | And so Cain is embittered by that response, and that's when he kills Abel.

00:56:43.000 | And so you might say, well, how do you fortify yourself against that pathway of resentment?

00:56:48.100 | And part of classic religious practice is aimed to do that precisely.

00:56:54.780 | What's the antithesis of envy?

00:56:56.460 | Gratitude.

00:56:57.460 | That's something you can practice.

00:56:59.620 | Right?

00:57:00.620 | And I mean literally practice.

00:57:02.380 | I think envy is one of the biggest enemies for a young person, because basically you're

00:57:07.900 | starting from nowhere.

00:57:10.740 | Life is hard.

00:57:11.740 | You've achieved nothing.

00:57:14.180 | And you're striving, and you're failing constantly.

00:57:17.980 | And you see other people whom you think aren't having the same problem.

00:57:21.420 | Yeah.

00:57:22.420 | And they succeeded.

00:57:23.420 | And they could be your neighbor.

00:57:24.420 | They could be succeeding by a little bit, or somebody on the internet succeeding by

00:57:27.560 | a lot.

00:57:28.560 | And I think that that can really pull a person down.

00:57:31.960 | That kind of envy can really destroy a person.

00:57:34.500 | Yeah, yeah, definitely.

00:57:35.780 | Well, the gratitude element would be something like, well, yeah, you don't know anything,

00:57:40.900 | and you're at the bottom, but you're not 80.

00:57:45.740 | You know, one of the best predictors of wealth in the United States is age.

00:57:52.900 | So then you might say, well, who's got it better?

00:57:56.420 | The old rich guy or the young poor guy?

00:57:59.180 | And I would say most old rich guys would trade their wealth for youth.

00:58:03.800 | So it's not exactly clear at all at any stage who's got the upper hand, who's got the advantage.

00:58:09.000 | And you know, you could say, well, I've got all these burdens in front of me because I'm

00:58:11.960 | young, and oh my God.

00:58:13.360 | Or you could say, every dragon has its treasure.

00:58:18.280 | And that's actually a pattern of perception.

00:58:21.560 | You know, I'm not saying that people don't have their challenges.

00:58:24.360 | They certainly do.

00:58:25.880 | But discriminating between a challenge and an opportunity is very, very difficult.

00:58:32.060 | And learning to see a challenge as an opportunity, that's the beginning of wisdom.

00:58:37.140 | It's interesting.

00:58:38.140 | I don't know how it works.

00:58:39.460 | Maybe you can elucidate.

00:58:41.340 | But when you have enemy towards somebody, if you just celebrate them, so gratitude,

00:58:48.820 | but actually as opposed to sort of ignoring and being grateful for the things you have,

00:58:54.020 | like literally celebrate that person, it transforms, it like, it lights the way.

00:58:59.860 | I don't know why that is exactly.

00:59:01.620 | The only reason you're envious is because you see someone who has something that you

00:59:05.940 | want.

00:59:06.940 | Okay.

00:59:07.940 | So let's think, let's think about it.

00:59:09.940 | Well, first of all, the fact that they have it means that in principle, you could get

00:59:15.540 | it.

00:59:16.540 | At least someone has.

00:59:17.780 | So that's a pretty good deal.

00:59:19.820 | And then you might say, well, the fact that I'm envious of that person means that I actually

00:59:23.820 | want something.

00:59:25.300 | And then you might think, well, what am I envious of?

00:59:26.980 | I'm envious of their attractiveness to women.

00:59:29.540 | It's like, okay, well, now you know something about yourself.

00:59:33.440 | You know, that one true motivation that's making itself manifest to you is that you

00:59:38.300 | wish that you would be the sort of person who is attractive to women.

00:59:41.580 | Now, of course, that's an extremely common longing among men period, but particularly

00:59:46.540 | among young men, it's like, well, what makes you so sure you couldn't have that?

00:59:52.140 | Well, how about, here's an answer.

00:59:54.300 | You don't have enough faith in yourself.

00:59:57.020 | And maybe you don't have enough faith in, well, I would say the divine.

01:00:00.340 | You don't believe that the world is characterized by enough potentiality so that even miserable

01:00:05.380 | you has a crack at the brass ring.

01:00:09.620 | And like, I talked about this actually practically in one of my previous books, because I wrote

01:00:13.960 | a chapter called Compare Yourself to Who You Are and Not to Someone Else at the Present

01:00:19.060 | Time.

01:00:20.060 | Well, why?

01:00:21.060 | Well, your best benchmark for tomorrow is you today.

01:00:25.060 | And you might not be able to have what someone else has on the particular axis you're comparing

01:00:30.740 | yourself with them on, but you could make an incremental improvement over your current

01:00:35.580 | state regardless of the direction that you're aiming.

01:00:39.060 | And it is the case, and this is a law, the return on incremental improvement is exponential

01:00:46.500 | or geometric and not linear.

01:00:48.600 | So even if you start, this is why the hero is always born in a lowly place, mythologically,

01:00:54.420 | right?

01:00:55.420 | Christ who redeems the world is born in a manger with the animals to poverty-stricken

01:00:59.220 | parents in the middle of a God-forsaken desert in a nondescript time and place, isolated.

01:01:06.780 | Well, why?

01:01:08.380 | Well, because everyone young struggles with their insufficiency, but that doesn't mean

01:01:14.340 | that great things can't make themselves manifest.

01:01:17.180 | And part of the insistence in the biblical text, for example, is that it's incumbent

01:01:22.740 | on you to have the courage, to have faith in yourself and in the spirit of reality,

01:01:30.020 | the essence of reality, regardless of how you construe the evidence at hand.

01:01:35.700 | Right.

01:01:36.700 | Look at me.

01:01:37.700 | I'm so useless.

01:01:38.700 | I don't know anything.

01:01:39.700 | I don't have anything.

01:01:40.700 | It's hopeless.

01:01:41.700 | I don't have it within me.

01:01:43.100 | The world couldn't offer me that possibility.

01:01:45.620 | Well, what the hell do you know about that?

01:01:48.700 | This is what Job figures out in the midst of his suffering in the book of Job, because

01:01:52.140 | Job is tortured terribly by God, who makes a bet with Satan himself to bring him down.

01:01:59.700 | And Job's decision in the face of his intense suffering is, "I'm not going to lose faith

01:02:05.060 | in my essential goodness, and I'm not going to lose faith in the essential goodness of

01:02:09.820 | being itself, regardless of how terrible the face it's showing to me at the moment happens

01:02:15.320 | to be."

01:02:16.580 | And I think, "Okay, what do you make of that claim?

01:02:21.380 | Well, let's look at it practically.

01:02:23.480 | You're being tortured by the arbitrariness of life.

01:02:27.260 | That's horrible.

01:02:28.260 | Now you lose faith in yourself, and you become cynical about being.

01:02:32.900 | So are you infinitely worse off instantly?"

01:02:38.100 | And then you might say, "Well, yeah, but it's really asking a lot of people that they maintain

01:02:41.660 | faith even in their darkest hours."

01:02:45.220 | And it's like, yeah, that might be asking everything from people.

01:02:50.140 | But then you also might ask, and this is a very strange question, is, "If you were brought

01:02:56.840 | into being by something that was essentially good, wouldn't that thing that brought you

01:03:02.940 | into being demand that you make the best in yourself manifest?

01:03:07.460 | And wouldn't it be precisely when you most need that that you'd be desperate enough to

01:03:14.740 | risk what it would take to let it emerge?"

01:03:17.700 | So you kind of make it seem that reason could be the thing that takes you out of a place

01:03:23.340 | of darkness, finding that calling through reason.

01:03:28.020 | I think it's also possible when reason fails you to just take the leap, navigate not by

01:03:34.780 | reason but by finding the thing that scares you, the risk, to take the risk, take the

01:03:40.740 | leap, and then figure it out while you're in the air.

01:03:44.020 | Yeah, well, I think that's always part of a heroic adventure, you know, is that ability

01:03:49.940 | to cut the Gordian Knot.

01:03:51.500 | But you could also ask from an engineering perspective, "Okay, what are the axioms that

01:03:55.440 | make a decision like that possible?"

01:03:57.800 | And the answer would be something like, "I'm going to make the presumption that if I move

01:04:01.260 | forward in good faith, whatever happens to me will be the best thing that could possibly

01:04:05.820 | happen, no matter what it is."

01:04:08.420 | And I think that's actually how you make an alliance with truth.

01:04:12.100 | And I also think that truth is an adventure.

01:04:14.540 | And the way you make an alliance with truth is by assuming that whatever happens to you,

01:04:22.780 | if you're living in truth, is the best thing that could happen, even if you can't see that

01:04:28.580 | at any given moment.

01:04:29.580 | Because otherwise, you'd say that truth would be just the handmaiden of advantage.

01:04:33.540 | "Well, I'm going to say something truthful, and I pay a price."

01:04:38.500 | "Well, that means I shouldn't have said it."

01:04:40.820 | Possibly.

01:04:42.980 | But that's not the only possible standard of evaluation.

01:04:46.380 | Because what you're doing is you're making the outcome your deity.

01:04:49.100 | Right?

01:04:50.100 | Well, I'd just reverse that and say, "No, no.

01:04:53.140 | Truth is the deity.

01:04:55.020 | The outcome is variable."

01:04:56.460 | But that doesn't eradicate the initial axiom.

01:04:59.580 | Where's the constant?

01:05:02.180 | What's the constant?

01:05:03.180 | It may be when you said Abraham was being fed by naked ladies.

01:05:10.620 | That's an interpolation, obviously, but would it have been out of keeping for the times?

01:05:14.660 | But it does make me think, sort of in stark contrast to Nietzsche's own life, that perhaps

01:05:21.540 | getting laid early on in life is a useful starter.

01:05:26.820 | Step one, get laid, and then go for adventure.

01:05:29.340 | There's some basic recommendation, satiation of basic desires.

01:05:32.140 | I think it's perfectly reasonable to bring the sexual element in, because it's a powerful

01:05:36.500 | motivating force, and it has to be integrated.

01:05:38.820 | I don't think it's adventure.

01:05:40.340 | It's romantic adventure.

01:05:41.700 | Right, right.

01:05:42.820 | But the lack of basic interaction, sexual interaction, I feel like is the engine that

01:05:51.140 | drives towards that cynicism of the incel in Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground."

01:05:57.540 | There's very little doubt about that.

01:05:58.820 | We know perfectly well anthropologically that the most unstable social situation you can

01:06:03.700 | generate is young men with no access to women.

01:06:07.420 | That's not good, and they'll do anything, anything to reverse that situation.

01:06:13.980 | So that's very dangerous.

01:06:15.300 | But then I would also say there's every suggestion that the pathway of adventure itself is the

01:06:23.300 | best pathway to romantic attractiveness.

01:06:26.260 | We know this in some ways in a very blunt manner.

01:06:29.460 | The Google boys, the engineers, who are too, what would you say, naively oriented towards

01:06:35.580 | empirical truth to note when they're being politically incorrect, they wrote a great

01:06:39.280 | book called "A Billion Wicked Thoughts," which I really like.

01:06:41.780 | It's a very good book, and it's engineers as psychologists.

01:06:47.280 | And so they'll say all sorts of things that no one with any sense would ever say that

01:06:50.280 | happen to be true.

01:06:51.900 | And they studied the pattern of pornographic fantasy, and women like pornographic stories,

01:06:56.620 | not images.

01:06:58.100 | So women's use of pornography is literary.

01:07:01.800 | Who are the main protagonists in female pornographic fantasy?

01:07:06.660 | Pirates, werewolves, vampires, surgeons, billionaires, Tony Stark, you know?

01:07:13.900 | And so the basic pornographic narrative is "Beauty and the Beast," those five categories.

01:07:20.060 | Sexual aggressive male, tameable by the right relationship, hot erotic attraction.

01:07:26.660 | And so I would say to the young men who, and I have many times, to the young men who are

01:07:31.200 | locked in isolation, it's first of all, join the bloody club, because the default value

01:07:37.140 | of a 15-year-old male on the mating market is zero.

01:07:40.960 | And there's reason for that.

01:07:42.480 | You know, and zero is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much.

01:07:46.740 | And the reason for that is, well, what the hell do you know?

01:07:49.300 | Like you're not good for anything, yet you have potential, and maybe plenty.

01:07:53.500 | And hopefully that'll be made manifest.

01:07:55.760 | But you shouldn't be all upset, because you're the same loser as everyone else your age has

01:08:00.460 | always been since the beginning of time.

01:08:03.260 | But then you might ask, "Well, what should I do about it?"

01:08:05.060 | The answer is, get yourself together, you know?

01:08:08.060 | Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

01:08:10.220 | Take on some adventure.

01:08:11.780 | Find your calling.

01:08:12.780 | Abide by your conscience.

01:08:14.320 | Put yourself together, and you'll become attractive.

01:08:17.460 | Look, we know this is true.

01:08:20.900 | The correlation between male sexual opportunity and relative masculine status is about 0.6.

01:08:33.080 | That's higher than the correlation between intelligence and academic achievement.

01:08:37.540 | I don't think that there's a larger correlation between two independent phenomena in the entire

01:08:42.660 | social science and health literature than the correlation between relative male social

01:08:47.720 | status and reproductive success.

01:08:50.220 | It's by far the most fundamental determinant.

01:08:52.580 | Well, what's the cause and effect there?

01:08:54.380 | It's a loop.

01:08:55.380 | Men are motivated to attain social status because it confers upon them reproductive

01:08:59.100 | success.

01:09:00.100 | And that's not only cognitively, but biologically.

01:09:02.660 | I'll give you an example of this.

01:09:04.140 | There's a documentary I watch from time to time, which I think is the most brilliant

01:09:07.460 | documentary I've ever seen.

01:09:08.740 | It's called Crumb.

01:09:10.380 | And it's the story of this underground cartoonist, Robert Crumb, who was in high school, was

01:09:16.620 | in the category of males, for whom a date was not only not likely, but unimaginable.

01:09:25.500 | So he was at the bottom of the bottom rung.

01:09:29.400 | And almost all the reactions he got from females wasn't just, "No."

01:09:34.920 | It was like, "Are you out of your mind?"

01:09:38.300 | With that contempt.

01:09:40.260 | And then he became successful.

01:09:41.860 | And so the documentary is super interesting because it tracks the utter pathology of his

01:09:46.620 | sexual fantasies, because he was bitter and resentful.

01:09:49.740 | And if you want to understand the psychology of serial sexual killers and the like, and

01:09:56.820 | you watch Crumb, you'll find out a lot more about that than anybody with any sense would

01:10:00.720 | want to know.

01:10:01.720 | But then he makes this transition, and partly because he does take the heroic adventure

01:10:05.700 | path.

01:10:06.700 | He actually has a family and children, and he's actually a pretty functional person,

01:10:11.880 | as opposed to his brothers, one of whom commits suicide, and one of whom is literally a repeat

01:10:16.460 | sexual offender.

01:10:17.900 | It's a brutal documentary.

01:10:19.580 | But what he did in his adolescence, after being rejected, was he found what he was interested

01:10:26.100 | in.

01:10:27.100 | He was a very good artist.

01:10:28.100 | He was very interested in music.

01:10:29.100 | And he started to pursue those sort of single-mindedly, and he became successful.

01:10:33.060 | And as soon as he became successful, and the documentary tracks this beautifully, he's

01:10:36.960 | immediately attractive to women.

01:10:39.620 | And then you might ask, too, even if you're cynical, it's like, "Why do I have to perform

01:10:44.280 | for women?"

01:10:45.520 | And the answer to that is something like, "Why the hell should they have anything to

01:10:48.200 | do with you if you're useless?

01:10:50.080 | They're going to have infants.

01:10:51.160 | They don't need another one."

01:10:52.880 | Right?

01:10:53.880 | Partly the reason that women are hypergamous, unless they want males who are of higher status

01:10:58.020 | than they are, is because they're trying to redress the reproductive burden.

01:11:02.200 | And it's substantial.

01:11:03.200 | I mean, the female of any species is the sex that devotes more to the reproductive function.

01:11:10.000 | That's a more fundamental definition than chromosomal differentiation.

01:11:15.040 | And that's taken to its ultimate extreme with humans.

01:11:17.600 | And so of course women are going to want someone around that's useful, because the cost of

01:11:22.680 | sex for them is an 18-year-old period of dependency with an infant.

01:11:29.080 | So I think the adventure comes first.

01:11:32.640 | Heroic adventure comes first.

01:11:34.160 | Well, it's complex, because the other problem, let's say, with the crumb boys, is that their

01:11:38.040 | mother was extremely pathological, and they didn't get a lot of genuine feminine nurturance

01:11:42.780 | and affection.

01:11:43.780 | Oh, of course.

01:11:44.780 | So the family and society are not going to help you most of the time with a heroic adventure,

01:11:49.840 | right?

01:11:50.840 | They're going to be a barrier versus a catalyst.

01:11:53.120 | In good families, they're both, because they put up constraints on your behavior.

01:11:57.760 | But I've interviewed a lot of successful people about their calling, let's say, because I

01:12:04.240 | do that with all my podcast guests.

01:12:07.160 | How did the path that you took to success make itself manifest?

01:12:12.360 | The pattern is very typical.

01:12:15.000 | Almost all the people that I've interviewed had a mother and a father.

01:12:19.160 | Now, it's not invariant, but I'd say it's there 99% of the time.

01:12:23.760 | It's really high.

01:12:25.160 | And both of the parents, or at least one of them, but often both, were very encouraging

01:12:30.560 | of the person's interests and pathway to development.

01:12:35.000 | That's fascinating.

01:12:36.000 | I've heard you analyze it that way before, and I had a reaction to that idea, because

01:12:41.040 | you focus on the positive of the parents.

01:12:43.440 | I feel like it was the ... Maybe I see biographies differently, but it feels like the struggle

01:12:49.720 | within the family was the catalyst for greatness in a lot of biographies.

01:12:55.920 | Maybe I'm misinterpreting it, but I just ...

01:12:57.520 | No, no, no.

01:12:58.520 | I don't think you ... I think that that's a reflection, maybe, correct me if I'm wrong,

01:13:03.040 | I think that's a reflection of that dynamic between positive and negative emotion.

01:13:07.140 | Like my son, for example, who's doing just fine, he's firing on all cylinders, as far

01:13:12.560 | as I'm concerned.

01:13:13.560 | He has a nice family.

01:13:14.560 | He gets along with his wife.

01:13:15.560 | He's a really good musician.

01:13:16.560 | He's got a company.

01:13:17.560 | He's running well.

01:13:19.520 | He's a delight to be around.

01:13:21.880 | He was a relatively disagreeable infant.

01:13:25.700 | He was tough-minded, and he didn't take no for an answer.

01:13:32.360 | There was some tussle in regulating his behavior.

01:13:35.800 | He spent a lot of time when he was two, sitting on the steps, trying to get his act together.

01:13:40.400 | That was the constraint, but that wasn't something that was ... It's an opposition to him away,

01:13:48.540 | because it was in opposition to the immediate manifestation of his hedonistic desires, but

01:13:54.160 | it was also an impetus to further development.

01:13:56.520 | The rule for me, when he was on the stairs, was as soon as you're willing to be a civilized

01:14:01.680 | human being, you can get off the stairs.

01:14:04.280 | You might think, "Well, that's nothing but arbitrary, superego, patriarchal, oppressive

01:14:09.240 | constraint."

01:14:10.240 | Or you could say, "Well, no.

01:14:11.240 | What I'm actually doing is facilitating his cortical maturation, because when a child

01:14:15.560 | misbehaves, it's usually because they're under the domination of some primordial emotional

01:14:20.400 | or motivational impulse.

01:14:22.480 | They're angry, they're overenthusiastic, they're upset, they're selfish, like it's narrow self-centeredness

01:14:31.280 | expressed in a immature manner."

01:14:33.440 | But see, okay, tell me if I'm wrong, but it feels like the engine of greatness, at least

01:14:40.360 | on the male side of things, has often been trying to prove the father wrong, or trying

01:14:46.920 | to gain the acceptance of the father.

01:14:49.400 | So that tension, where the parent is not encouraging, like you mentioned, but is basically saying,

01:14:56.160 | "No, you won't be able to do this."

01:14:58.760 | Okay, so my observation as a psychologist has been that it's very, very difficult for

01:15:04.640 | someone to get their act together, unless they have at least one figure in their life

01:15:09.160 | that's encouraging and shows them the pathway forward.

01:15:13.940 | So you can have a lot of adversity in your life, and if you have one person around who's

01:15:18.440 | a good model, and you're neurologically intact, you can latch onto that model.

01:15:22.400 | Now, you can also find that model in books, and people do that sometimes.

01:15:27.400 | Like I've interviewed people who had pretty fragmented childhoods, who turned to books

01:15:32.120 | and found the pattern that guided them in, let's say, the adventures of the heroes of

01:15:38.000 | the past, because that's a good way of thinking about it.

01:15:40.400 | And I read a book called Angela's Ashes, that was written by an Irish author, Frank McCourt,

01:15:46.400 | it's a fantastic book, beautiful book.

01:15:48.960 | And his father was an alcoholic of gargantuan proportions, an Irish drinker who drank every

01:15:56.560 | scent that came into the family, and many of whose children died in poverty.

01:16:01.840 | And what Frank did, it's a testament to the human spirit, is he sort of divided his father

01:16:07.900 | conceptually into two elements.

01:16:09.600 | There was sober morning father, who was encouraging and with whom he had a relationship, and then

01:16:15.400 | there was drunk and useless later afternoon and evening father, and he rejected the negative,

01:16:23.600 | and he amplified his relationship with the positive.

01:16:27.280 | Now he had other things going for him, but he did a very good job of discriminating.

01:16:35.680 | And I mean, partly the question that you're raising is, to what degree is it useful to

01:16:41.640 | have a beneficial adversary?

01:16:43.440 | Yeah, and I mean, struggle-free progress is not possible.

01:16:49.060 | And I think there are situations under which where, you know, you might be motivated to

01:16:54.500 | prove someone in your immediate circle wrong, but then that also implies that at some level,

01:17:02.780 | for some reason, you actually care about their judgment, you know, you just didn't write

01:17:07.540 | them off completely.

01:17:08.540 | Well, I mean, that's why I say there's an archetype of a young man trying to gain the

01:17:13.760 | approval of his father.

01:17:17.260 | And I think that repeats itself in a bunch of biographies that I've read.

01:17:22.900 | I don't know, there must have been an engine somewhere that they found of approval of encouragement.

01:17:29.680 | Maybe in books, maybe in the mother, or maybe the role of the parents is flipped.

01:17:34.400 | Well, my father was hard to please, very.

01:17:38.080 | Did you ever succeed?

01:17:39.640 | Yes, but it wasn't easy, ever.

01:17:42.840 | When was the moment when you succeeded?

01:17:45.800 | Late, pretty late, like 40, maybe later.

01:17:51.800 | Was it gradual or a definitive moment when a shift happened?

01:17:57.520 | My father was always willing to approve of the things I did that were good, although

01:18:04.920 | he was not effusive by any stretch of the imagination and the standards were very high.

01:18:10.400 | Now, I was probably fortunate for me, you know, and it does bear on the question you're

01:18:16.480 | asking is like, if you want someone to motivate you optimally, God, it's complicated because

01:18:23.720 | there has to be a temperamental dance between the two people.

01:18:27.120 | Like what you really want is for someone to apply the highest possible standards to you

01:18:34.240 | that you're capable of reaching, right?

01:18:37.480 | And that's a vicious dance because you have to have a relationship with your child to

01:18:44.800 | do that properly.

01:18:45.800 | You know, because if you want to be optimally motivating as a father, you keep your children

01:18:50.200 | on the edge.

01:18:51.200 | Like you might not reward something in your child that you would think would be good in

01:18:57.120 | someone else because you think they could do better.

01:19:00.480 | And so my father was pretty clear about the idea that he always expected me to do better.

01:19:05.860 | And was that troublesome?

01:19:07.880 | It was like, I felt often when I was young that there was no pleasing him.

01:19:14.400 | But I also knew that that wasn't, I knew that that wasn't right.

01:19:17.800 | See, I actually knew that wasn't right.

01:19:20.920 | Because I could remember, especially I think when I was very young, that I did things that

01:19:27.400 | he was pleased about.

01:19:28.520 | I knew that was possible.

01:19:29.840 | So it wasn't unpredictable and arbitrary, it was just difficult.

01:19:36.400 | It sounds like he's hit a pretty good optimal, but it's for each individual human that optimal

01:19:42.920 | differs.

01:19:43.920 | Well, that's why you have to have a relationship with your children.

01:19:47.080 | You have to know them.

01:19:49.000 | And well, with yourself too.

01:19:51.480 | And with your wife.

01:19:54.440 | You can't hit that optimal.

01:19:57.120 | That optimal is probably love.

01:20:00.740 | Because love isn't just acceptance.

01:20:03.000 | Love is acceptance and encouragement.

01:20:05.480 | And it's not just that either.

01:20:06.800 | It's also, no, don't do that.

01:20:09.060 | That's beneath you.

01:20:11.120 | You're capable of more.

01:20:12.600 | How harsh should that be?

01:20:13.840 | It's like, that's a really hard question.

01:20:16.440 | You know, like if you really love someone, you're not going to put up with their stupidity.

01:20:20.280 | Don't do that.

01:20:21.280 | You know, one of the rules I had with my little kids was, don't do anything that makes you

01:20:25.840 | look like an idiot in public.

01:20:27.480 | Why?

01:20:28.480 | Because I don't want you disgracing yourself.

01:20:30.820 | Why not?

01:20:31.820 | Because I like you.

01:20:32.820 | I think you're great.

01:20:34.440 | And you're not going to act like a bloody fool in public so that people get the wrong

01:20:37.640 | idea about you.

01:20:39.120 | No.

01:20:40.120 | What about inside a relationship?

01:20:42.600 | A successful relationship, how much challenge, how much peace?

01:20:49.480 | Is a successful relationship one that is easy or one that is challenging?

01:20:57.500 | I would say to some degree that depends on your temperament.

01:21:00.320 | My wife is quite a provocative person.

01:21:04.460 | And there are times when I, I suppose, do I wish that, there are times when I casually

01:21:11.220 | wish that she was easier to get along with, but as soon as I think about it, I don't,

01:21:15.440 | I don't think that.

01:21:16.640 | Yeah.

01:21:17.640 | Cause I've, I've always liked her.

01:21:18.640 | We were friends ever since we were little kids and she's, she plays rough.

01:21:22.760 | And I like that as it turns out.

01:21:25.200 | Now that doesn't mean it isn't a pain from time to time, but you know, and that is going

01:21:29.960 | to be a temperamental issue to some degree and, and an issue of negotiation, like she

01:21:36.000 | plays rough, but fair and the fair part has been establishing that's been part of our

01:21:41.960 | ongoing negotiation.

01:21:44.300 | And part of it is in the play, you get to find out about yourself or what your temperament

01:21:48.440 | is.

01:21:49.440 | Cause I don't think that that's clear until it's tested.

01:21:52.680 | Oh, definitely not.

01:21:54.360 | Definitely not.

01:21:55.360 | You find out all sorts of things about yourself in a relationship.

01:21:58.120 | That's for sure.

01:21:59.120 | Well, and partly the reason that there is provocativeness, especially from women in relationship to men

01:22:03.900 | is they want to test them out.

01:22:05.760 | It's like, can you hold your temper when someone's bothering you?

01:22:08.440 | Well, why would a woman want to know that?

01:22:10.440 | Well, maybe she doesn't want you to snap and hurt her kids.

01:22:16.160 | And so how is she going to find that out?

01:22:18.360 | Ask you?

01:22:19.360 | Well, you're going to say, well, I'd never do that.

01:22:21.040 | It's like never a let's find out if it's never.

01:22:26.280 | So we don't know how people test each other out in relationships, but, or why exactly,

01:22:31.400 | but it's intense and necessary.

01:22:34.380 | What's your, and what's in general should a man's relationship with temper be?

01:22:39.420 | You should have one and you should be able to regulate it.

01:22:43.120 | Like that's part of that attractiveness of the monstrous that characterizes women's fantasies.

01:22:48.580 | Right?

01:22:49.580 | Because, and Nietzsche pointed this out too, go back to Nietzsche, you know, Nietzsche,

01:22:53.660 | one of Nietzsche's claims was that most of what passes for morality is nothing but cowardice.

01:22:58.620 | You know, I'd never cheat on my wife.

01:23:00.620 | It's like, uh, is there anybody asking you to, that you actually find attractive?

01:23:06.500 | Or are there dozens of people asking you to, that you find attractive?

01:23:09.900 | It's like, well, I would never cheat.

01:23:12.420 | It's like, no, you just don't have the opportunity.

01:23:14.700 | Now I don't, I'm not saying that everyone's in that position, you know, that they would

01:23:17.620 | cheat even if they had the opportunity, because that's not true.

01:23:20.260 | But, and it's the same with regards to, oh, I'm a peaceful man.

01:23:25.260 | It's like, no, you're not.

01:23:26.260 | You're just a weak coward.

01:23:27.900 | You wouldn't dare have it, to have a confrontation, physical or metaphysical.

01:23:32.480 | And you're passing it off as morality because you don't want to come to terms with the fact

01:23:35.660 | of your own weakness and cowardice.

01:23:38.540 | And part of the, that, what I would say is twisted pseudo-Christian morality that Nietzsche

01:23:44.500 | was criticizing was exactly of that sort, and it tied into resentment and envy.

01:23:49.140 | And he tied that in explicitly, said that failure in life, masked by the morality that's

01:23:57.280 | nothing but weak cowardice, turns to the resentment that undermines and destroys everything, and

01:24:03.540 | that does that purposefully.

01:24:04.540 | Yeah.

01:24:05.540 | I think he was criticizing if under the facade of niceness, there's an ocean of resentment.

01:24:10.660 | Yeah, that's for sure.

01:24:13.580 | That's for sure.

01:24:14.580 | That's also the danger of being too forthcoming with people.

01:24:18.420 | See, this is another thing, let's say, about my wife, who's not particularly agreeable.

01:24:21.940 | It's like, she's not particularly agreeable, but she's not resentful.

01:24:26.620 | And that's because she doesn't give things away that she isn't willing to.

01:24:30.960 | And if you're agreeable and nice and you're conflict avoidant, you'll push yourself too

01:24:35.180 | far to please the other person.

01:24:37.460 | And then that makes you bitter and resentful.

01:24:39.580 | So that's not helpful.

01:24:40.580 | Do you think you'll be in trouble for saying this on a podcast later?

01:24:44.500 | No, no, we know each other pretty well.

01:24:47.820 | And like I said, it's not, it's a trait that I find admirable.

01:24:52.040 | It's provocative and challenging.

01:24:55.580 | And it seems to work.

01:24:56.700 | Well, we've been together 50 years, so...

01:25:00.020 | Quick pause, bathroom break.

01:25:02.180 | If we can descend from the realm of ideas down to history and reality, I would say the

01:25:10.340 | time between World War I and World War II was one of history's biggest testing of ideas.

01:25:19.860 | And really the most dramatic kinds of ideas that helped us understand the nature of good

01:25:27.980 | and evil.

01:25:28.980 | I just want to ask you sort of a question about good and evil.

01:25:35.020 | Churchill, in many ways, was not a good man.

01:25:40.980 | Stalin, as you've documented extensively, was a horrible man.

01:25:46.860 | But you can make the case that both were necessary for stopping an even worse human being in

01:25:54.860 | Hitler.

01:25:56.300 | So to what degree do you need monsters to fight monsters?

01:26:03.140 | Do you need bad men to be able to fight off greater evils?

01:26:12.500 | It's everything in its proper place is the answer to that.

01:26:16.380 | You know, we might think that our life would be easier without fear, let's say.

01:26:20.540 | We might say that our life would be easier without anger or pain.

01:26:24.140 | But the truth of the matter is, is that those things are beneficial, even though they can

01:26:28.860 | cause great suffering, but they have to be in their proper place.

01:26:32.340 | And that capacity that could in one context be a terrible force for evil, can in the proper

01:26:37.700 | context be the most potent force for good.

01:26:41.500 | A good man has to be formidable.

01:26:44.180 | And partly what that means, as far as I can tell, is that you have to be able to say no.

01:26:50.300 | And no means...

01:26:52.020 | I thought a lot about no, working as a clinician, because I did a lot of strategic counseling

01:26:57.860 | with my clients in a lot of extremely difficult situations.

01:27:00.940 | And I learned to take apart what no meant.

01:27:04.020 | And also when dealing with my own children, because I used no sparingly, because it's

01:27:08.820 | a powerful weapon, let's say.

01:27:11.100 | But I meant it.

01:27:12.260 | And with my kids, what it meant was, if you continue that pattern of behavior, something

01:27:16.500 | you do not like will happen to you with 100% certainty.

01:27:21.140 | And when that's the case, and you're willing to implement it, you don't have to do it very

01:27:27.020 | often.

01:27:28.020 | With regards to monstrosity, it's like, weak men aren't good.

01:27:33.740 | They're just weak.

01:27:34.740 | That's Nietzsche's observation.

01:27:35.820 | That's partly, again, why he was tempted to place the will to power, let's say.

01:27:42.060 | And to deal with that notion in a manner that, when it was tied with the revaluation of all

01:27:47.540 | values, was counterproductive.

01:27:50.540 | Counterproductive in the final analysis.

01:27:51.540 | It's not like there wasn't something to what he was driving at.

01:27:58.180 | Formidable men are admirable.

01:28:00.080 | And you know, don't mess with them.

01:28:02.300 | Douglas Murray's a good example of that.

01:28:05.380 | He's, you know, he's a rather slight guy, but he's got a spine of steel.

01:28:10.380 | And there's no more than a bit of what's a monstrous in him.

01:28:13.780 | And Jocko Willink is like that, and Joe Rogan is like that, and you're like that.

01:28:17.900 | But there's a different level.

01:28:19.180 | I mean, if you look, to me, Churchill might represent the thing you're talking about.

01:28:26.020 | But World War II, Hitler would not be stopped without Stalin.

01:28:31.740 | Well I wonder, yes, yes.

01:28:34.280 | And if I may insert into this picture of complexity, Hitler would have not stopped until he enslaved

01:28:42.060 | and exterminated the entirety of the Slavic people.

01:28:45.720 | The Jewish people, the Slavic people, the gypsies, everybody who is non-Aryan.

01:28:50.320 | But then Stalin in the mass rape of German women by the Red Army as they marched towards

01:28:56.980 | Berlin is a kind of manifestation, the full monstrosity that a person can be.

01:29:02.940 | You can easily be in this situation.

01:29:05.540 | You can easily and unfortunately find yourself in a situation where all you have in front

01:29:10.100 | of you are a variety of bad options.

01:29:12.460 | You know, that's partly why, if you have any sense, you try to conduct yourself very carefully

01:29:17.380 | in life, because you don't want to be in a position where you've made so many mistakes

01:29:22.480 | that all the options left to you are terrible.

01:29:25.760 | And so you said, well, was it necessary to ally with Stalin?

01:29:30.060 | It's like, well, it's very difficult to second guess the trajectory of something as complex

01:29:35.860 | as World War II.

01:29:36.940 | But we could say casually, at least as Westerners have in general, that that alliance was necessary.

01:29:42.780 | Now, I think the mistake that the West made in the aftermath of World War II was in not

01:29:49.780 | dealing as forthrightly with the catastrophes of communism as an ideology, as we did with

01:29:54.800 | fascism.

01:29:56.200 | And that's especially true of the intellectuals in the universities.

01:29:59.220 | I mean, it was very common when I was teaching both at Harvard and at the University of Toronto

01:30:04.940 | for the students in my personality class, where we studied Solzhenitsyn, who's actually

01:30:09.860 | an existential psychologist in many ways, and a deep one, none of them knew anything

01:30:14.720 | about the Soviet atrocities.

01:30:17.860 | None of them knew anything about what happened in Ukraine and the death of six million productive

01:30:21.700 | people.

01:30:22.700 | They had no idea that the communists killed tens of millions of people in the aftermath

01:30:28.440 | of the Russian Revolution.

01:30:30.100 | They know even less about Mao and the Great Leap Forward.

01:30:33.260 | Yeah, right.

01:30:34.260 | Right.

01:30:35.260 | Which some estimates are a hundred million people.

01:30:36.800 | Now, you know, when your error bars are in the tens of millions, well, that's a real

01:30:42.500 | indication of a cataclysm.

01:30:44.020 | And nobody knows how many people died from direct oppression or indirect in the Soviet

01:30:47.940 | Union.

01:30:48.940 | 20 million, it seems like a reasonable estimate.

01:30:52.020 | Solzhenitsyn's upper bound was higher than that.

01:30:54.300 | And how do you measure the intellectual output that was suppressed and killed off, the number

01:31:02.980 | of intellectuals, artists and writers that were put into the gulags?

01:31:06.360 | Well, and productive farmers, for that matter, and anyone who was willing to tell the truth.

01:31:10.400 | Right, absolutely.

01:31:11.840 | So, yeah, catastrophic.

01:31:14.480 | And so I think the West's failure wasn't so much allying with Stalin.

01:31:19.480 | I mean, it was Douglas MacArthur who wanted to continue.

01:31:23.320 | He thought we should just take the Soviets out after the Second World War.

01:31:27.240 | And they removed them from any position of authority where such a thing might be made

01:31:33.040 | possible.

01:31:34.240 | And people were tired.

01:31:36.560 | But was MacArthur wrong?

01:31:38.800 | Well, he certainly wasn't wrong in his insistence that Stalin was as big a monster as Hitler

01:31:45.600 | or bigger.

01:31:48.040 | So the valorization of the leftist proclivity, the radical leftist proclivity, is the sin

01:31:54.720 | of the West, I think more intensely than allying with Stalin.

01:32:00.120 | Tricky nuanced topic, but if we look at the modern day and the threat of communism, Marxism

01:32:05.520 | in the United States, to me, it's disrespectful to the atrocities of the 20th century to call

01:32:14.160 | somebody like Kamala Harris a communist.

01:32:18.800 | But I see the sort of escalation of the extremeness of language being used.

01:32:24.760 | When you call somebody like Donald Trump a fascist, then it makes total sense to then

01:32:28.960 | use similar extreme terminology for somebody like Kamala Harris.

01:32:33.360 | But maybe I could ask your evaluation.

01:32:36.320 | If you look at the political landscape today, somebody like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris—

01:32:40.720 | Well, the first thing I would say is that I think that viewing the political landscape

01:32:45.120 | of today as a political landscape is actually wrong.

01:32:49.000 | I think it's not the right frame of reference.

01:32:52.160 | Because what I see happening are a very small percentage of dark tetrad personality types,

01:33:00.000 | so Machiavellian, manipulative, narcissistic, wanting undeserved attention, psychopathic,

01:33:07.960 | that makes them predatory parasites, and sadistic, because that goes along with the other three.

01:33:14.040 | That's about, in the serious manifestation, that's probably 3-5% of the population.

01:33:21.160 | And they're generally kept under pretty decent control by civilized people and stable social

01:33:28.480 | interactions.

01:33:29.480 | But I think that their machinations are disinhibited by cost-free social media communication.

01:33:39.520 | So they gain disproportionate influence.

01:33:41.560 | Now these people want undeserved recognition and social status and everything that goes

01:33:47.000 | along with it, and they don't care how they get it.

01:33:50.920 | Because when I say they want that, I mean that's all they want.

01:33:56.440 | So in the realm of social media, you mentioned, yes, but are you also suggesting that they're

01:34:02.760 | over-represented in the realm of politics, politicians, and so on?

01:34:06.240 | They're over-represented in the realm of fractious political discourse, because they can use

01:34:11.880 | ideas.

01:34:12.880 | First of all, they can use, let's say, the benevolent ideas of the right and the benevolent

01:34:17.840 | ideas of the left, either one, and switch back and forth, for that matter, as a camouflage

01:34:23.960 | for what they're actually up to.

01:34:26.200 | So how do you, you've interviewed a lot of people, and you have a really powerful mind,

01:34:29.800 | you have a good read on people.

01:34:31.920 | So how do you know when you're sitting across from a psychopath?

01:34:34.040 | I wouldn't say that I do know.

01:34:35.840 | In normal social circumstances, we have evolved mechanisms to keep people like that under

01:34:40.160 | control.

01:34:41.160 | Let's say that you and I have a series of interactions, and you screw me over once.

01:34:45.600 | I'm not going to forget that.

01:34:46.880 | Now I might not write you off because of the one time, but if it happens three times, it's

01:34:51.840 | like, we're not going to play together anymore.

01:34:53.760 | And in normal times, most of our social networks are connected and interacting.

01:35:01.760 | So if you rip me off three times, and I noted that, I'm going to tell everybody I know,

01:35:09.200 | and they're going to tell everybody they know, and soon everyone will know, and that's the

01:35:13.360 | end of your tricks.

01:35:15.080 | But that assumes that we know who you are, and we're in continual communication.

01:35:18.240 | Well, all of that's gone online.

01:35:21.320 | So anonymity does that, and so does the amplification of emotional intensity by the social media

01:35:34.200 | platforms and their algorithms.

01:35:35.740 | I think what we're doing—this is happening on Twitter continually—is we're giving the

01:35:41.720 | 5% of psychopaths a radically disproportionate voice.

01:35:45.960 | And what they're doing is, there's a bunch of them on the left, and they're all, "We're

01:35:49.280 | so compassionate," and there's a bunch of them on the right, and at the moment, they're

01:35:52.840 | all, "We're so Christian and free-speech-oriented."

01:35:55.400 | It's like, no, you're not.

01:35:56.640 | You're a narcissistic psychopath, and that's your camouflage.

01:36:00.440 | And you hide behind your anonymity, and you use fractious and divisive language to attract

01:36:08.080 | fools and to elevate your social status and your clout.

01:36:13.480 | And not only that, to gain, what would you say, satisfaction for your sadistic impulses.

01:36:18.920 | See, the problem is, it's hard to tell who's the psychopath and who is a heterodox truth-seeker.

01:36:29.240 | Yeah, well, if you were charitable about Tucker Carlson's recent interview, you'd say that

01:36:34.840 | was exactly the conundrum he faced.

01:36:37.400 | And it is hard.

01:36:38.400 | Like, I've thought about, for example, interviewing Andrew Tate.

01:36:42.060 | And I thought, "I don't think so."

01:36:43.800 | And then I thought, "Why?"

01:36:45.560 | I figured, "It's not obvious to me at all that he wouldn't charm me."

01:36:50.980 | So I knew this guy, Robert Hare.

01:36:53.480 | Robert Hare was the world's foremost authority on psychopathy.

01:36:58.460 | He established the field of clinical analysis of psychopathic behavior.

01:37:04.160 | And Hare was a pretty agreeable guy, so he would give people the benefit of the doubt.

01:37:08.400 | And he interviewed hundreds of serious psychopaths, like imprisoned violent offenders.

01:37:13.520 | And he told me, in one of our conversations, that every time he sat down with a violent

01:37:19.640 | offender psychopath, and he had a measure for psychopathy that was a clinical checklist,

01:37:24.760 | so he could identify the psychopaths from just the, say, run-of-the-mill criminals.

01:37:30.760 | Every time he sat down with them, they pulled the wool over his eyes, and he videotaped

01:37:35.560 | the interviews.

01:37:36.560 | And it wasn't until later, when he was reviewing the videos, that he could see what they were

01:37:40.080 | doing.

01:37:41.080 | But in person, their tricks were more sophisticated than his detection ability.

01:37:47.080 | Well, okay, this is fascinating, because, again, you're a great interviewer.

01:37:50.840 | I would love it if you interviewed somebody like Putin.

01:37:54.000 | So this idea that you are a fool in the face of psychopathy just doesn't jive with me.

01:38:00.200 | I'm an agreeable guy.

01:38:01.760 | That's the problem.

01:38:02.760 | You give people the benefit of the doubt, right, right.

01:38:04.400 | But that's good, because the way you reveal psychopathy is by being agreeable.

01:38:10.680 | Not weak, but seeking with empathy to understand the other person.

01:38:16.960 | And in the details, in the little nuanced ways that they struggle with questions, the

01:38:25.320 | psychopathy is revealed.

01:38:26.320 | Yeah.

01:38:27.320 | So from a...

01:38:28.320 | We're kind of...

01:38:29.320 | Just to separate the two things.

01:38:30.320 | You know, over-representation of psychopathy online, with anonymity, that's a serious fascinating

01:38:36.160 | problem.

01:38:37.160 | But in the interview, one-on-one, I don't know if the job of a human being in conversation

01:38:43.280 | is to not talk to psychopaths, but to talk...

01:38:47.480 | I mean, like, how would you interview Hitler?

01:38:49.640 | Well, you know, I've had very difficult clinical interviews with people in my clinical practice.

01:38:55.360 | So how do you approach that?

01:38:57.680 | Well, I really probably approach that the way I approach most conversations.

01:39:01.880 | And it's something like, I'm going to assume that you're playing a straight game, but I'm

01:39:07.900 | going to watch.

01:39:09.160 | And if you throw in the odd crooked maneuver in, then I'll note it.

01:39:14.320 | And after you do it three times, I'll think, okay, I see.

01:39:18.720 | I thought we were playing one game, but we're actually playing another one.

01:39:21.960 | And if I'm smart enough to pick that up, that usually works out quite successfully for me.

01:39:27.520 | But I'm not always smart enough to pick that up.

01:39:30.040 | But see, here's the nice thing, there's a one-on-one conversation that's not recorded,

01:39:34.580 | is different than one that's listened by a lot of people.

01:39:37.760 | Because I would venture, I trust the intelligence of the viewer and the listener to detect even

01:39:43.240 | better than you.

01:39:44.600 | Yes.

01:39:45.600 | And I think that's true, by the way.

01:39:46.840 | To detect the psychopathy.

01:39:47.840 | Yeah.

01:39:48.840 | I've had the odd interview with people that I wasn't happy with having organized.

01:39:54.560 | Because I felt that I had brought their ideas to a wider audience than might've been appropriate.

01:40:02.080 | But my conclusion and the conclusion of my producers and the people I talked to was that

01:40:07.180 | we could run the interview, the discussion and let the audience sort it out.

01:40:11.960 | And I would say they do.

01:40:14.200 | So I think as a general rule of thumb, that's true.

01:40:17.080 | And I also think that the long form interviews are particularly good at that because it's

01:40:22.040 | not that easy to maintain a manipulative stance, especially if you're empty for like two and

01:40:29.700 | a half hours.

01:40:30.700 | Yes.

01:40:31.700 | So you get tired, you get irritable, you show that you lose the track, you're going to start

01:40:35.840 | leaking out your mistakes.

01:40:38.200 | And so...

01:40:39.200 | And that actually is the case for all the world leaders, I would say.

01:40:44.240 | One hour is too short.

01:40:46.920 | Something happens at like two hour plus mark where you start to leak.

01:40:51.080 | And I trust in the intelligence of the listener to sort of detect that.

01:40:55.920 | Yeah.

01:40:56.920 | And it might be the intelligence of the distributed crowd.

01:40:59.760 | And I mean, that is what I've seen with the YouTube interviews is that it's hard to fool

01:41:05.480 | people as such over a protracted period of time.

01:41:09.520 | And I guess it's partly because everybody brings a different, slightly different set

01:41:14.720 | of falsehood detectors to the table.

01:41:17.520 | And if you aggregate that, it's pretty damn accurate.

01:41:20.600 | But of course, it's complicated because ideas of Nazi ideology spread in the 20s.

01:41:28.000 | There was a real battle between Marxism and Nazism.

01:41:30.480 | Oh yeah.

01:41:31.480 | And I believe there's some attempts at censorship of Nazi ideology.

01:41:36.660 | Censorship very often does the opposite.

01:41:39.180 | It gives the fringe ideologies power if they're being censored, because that's an indication

01:41:48.000 | that the man in power doesn't want the truth to be heard, this kind of idea.

01:41:54.340 | And that just puts fuel to the fire.

01:41:56.740 | It also motivates the paranoid types, because one of the reasons that paranoia spirals out

01:42:03.000 | of control is because paranoid people almost inevitably end up being persecuted.

01:42:08.700 | Because they're so touchy and so suspicious that people start to walk on eggshells around

01:42:14.960 | them as if there are things going on behind the scenes.

01:42:17.420 | And so then they get more distrustful and more paranoid, and eventually they start misbehaving

01:42:22.100 | so badly that they are actually persecuted, often by legal authorities, and it's down

01:42:27.220 | the rabbit hole they go.

01:42:29.120 | And so Musk is betting on that to some degree.

01:42:32.100 | He believes that free expression on Twitter X will sort itself out and be of net benefit.

01:42:41.580 | And I follow a lot of really bad accounts on X, because I like to keep an eye on the

01:42:48.020 | pathology of the left, let's say, and the pathology of the right, thinking at least

01:42:52.460 | in my clinical way that I'm watching the psychopaths dance around and try to do their subversion.

01:42:57.700 | And it's an ugly place to inhabit, that's for sure.

01:43:00.480 | But it's also the case that a very tiny minority of seriously bad actors can have a disproportionate

01:43:07.260 | influence.

01:43:08.260 | And one of the things I've always hoped for for social media channels is that they separate

01:43:13.460 | the anonymous accounts from the verified accounts.

01:43:16.620 | They should just be in different categories.

01:43:18.820 | People who will say what they think and take the hits to their reputation.

01:43:25.380 | Anonymous types, if you want to see what the anonymous types say, you can see it, but don't

01:43:28.740 | be confusing them with actual people, because they're not the same.

01:43:32.160 | We know that people behave more badly when they're anonymous.

01:43:36.060 | That's a very well-established psychological finding.

01:43:38.220 | Well, and I think the danger to our culture is substantive.

01:43:41.740 | I think the reason that everything, perhaps, the reason that everything started to go sideways

01:43:46.540 | pretty seriously around 2015 is because we invented these new modes of communication.

01:43:52.400 | We have no idea how to police them.

01:43:54.140 | And so the psychopathic manipulators, they have free reign.

01:43:58.900 | About 30% of the Internet is pornography.

01:44:02.020 | A huge amount of Internet traffic is outright criminal.

01:44:05.460 | And there's a penumbra around that that's, you know, psychopathic, narcissistic, troublemaking

01:44:10.220 | trolls.

01:44:11.460 | And that might constitute the bulk of the interactions online.

01:44:14.820 | And it's partly because people can't be held responsible.

01:44:17.280 | So the free riders have free reign.

01:44:19.980 | It's a fascinating technical challenge of how to make our society resilient to the psychopaths

01:44:26.460 | on the left and the right.

01:44:28.300 | It might be the fundamental problem of the age, given the amplification of communication

01:44:33.420 | by our social networks.

01:44:36.180 | And so to generalize across psychopaths, you could also think about bots, which behave

01:44:42.620 | similar to psychopaths in their certainty and not caring.

01:44:46.780 | They're maximizing some function.

01:44:48.220 | They're not caring about anything else.

01:44:49.580 | Yeah.

01:44:50.580 | Yeah.

01:44:51.580 | Short-term attention, even worse.

01:44:52.580 | Yeah.

01:44:53.580 | Because you might, you know, that's another problem, eh?

01:44:55.100 | Like if the algorithms are maximizing for the grip of short-term attention, they're

01:45:00.660 | acting like immature agents of attention, right?

01:45:03.740 | And so then imagine the worst case scenario is negative emotion garners more attention.

01:45:10.500 | And short-term gratification garners more attention.

01:45:13.820 | So then you're maximizing for the grip of short-term attention by negative emotion.

01:45:19.260 | I mean, that's not going to be a principle.

01:45:22.660 | If we were talking earlier about, you know, unsustainable unifying axioms.

01:45:28.380 | That's definitely, that's definitely one of them.

01:45:32.220 | Maximize for the spread of negative attention, negative emotion that garner short-term attention.

01:45:37.420 | Jesus.

01:45:38.420 | Brutal.

01:45:39.420 | I just, I tend to not think there's that many psychopaths.

01:45:45.500 | So maybe to push back a little bit, it feels like there's a small number of psychopaths.

01:45:50.660 | Three to 5% is the estimate worldwide.

01:45:54.740 | In terms of humans.

01:45:55.740 | Yeah.

01:45:56.740 | Sure.

01:45:57.740 | But in terms of the pattern of stuff we see online, my hope is that a lot of people on

01:46:01.420 | the extreme left and extreme right, or just the trolls in general, are just young people

01:46:07.740 | kind of going through the similar stuff that we've been talking about, trying on the cynicism

01:46:13.260 | and the resentment.

01:46:15.180 | There is, there's a drug aspect to it.

01:46:17.540 | There's a pull to that.

01:46:20.700 | To talk shit about somebody, to take somebody down.

01:46:23.660 | I mean, there is some pleasure in that.

01:46:27.020 | There's a dark pull towards that.

01:46:30.200 | And I think...

01:46:31.200 | That's the sadistic pull.

01:46:32.200 | And I think a lot of people, I mean, you see, when you say sadistic, it makes it sound like

01:46:35.900 | some kind of, it's a pathology.

01:46:37.700 | It's pleasure in the suffering of others.

01:46:39.740 | Right.

01:46:40.740 | And I just think that all of us have the capacity for that.

01:46:45.460 | All humans have the capacity for that.

01:46:47.420 | Some more than others, but everyone to some degree.

01:46:49.580 | And when you're young, you don't understand the full implications of that on your own

01:46:54.460 | self.

01:46:55.460 | Yeah.

01:46:56.460 | So if you participate in taking other people down, that's going to have a cost on your

01:46:59.900 | own development as a human being.

01:47:02.060 | Definitely.

01:47:03.060 | Like it's going to take you towards a Dostoevsky's notes from underground, in the basement, cynical,

01:47:07.340 | all that kind of stuff.

01:47:08.340 | Alone.

01:47:09.340 | Yeah.

01:47:10.340 | And I think a lot of young people try it out.

01:47:11.340 | The reason is you get older and older, you realize that there's a huge cost to that so

01:47:15.220 | you don't do it.

01:47:16.220 | But there's young people that...

01:47:17.220 | So I would like to sort of believe and hope that a large number of people who are trolls

01:47:22.260 | are just trying out the derision.

01:47:24.460 | No doubt.

01:47:25.460 | And then so they can be saved.

01:47:29.060 | They can be helped.

01:47:30.060 | They can be shown that there's more growth, there's more flourishing to celebrating other

01:47:36.660 | people.

01:47:37.660 | And criticizing ideas, but not in the way of derision, LOL, but by formulating your

01:47:43.660 | own self in the world, by formulating your ideas in a strong, powerful way, and also

01:47:49.300 | removing the cloak of anonymity and just standing behind your ideas and carrying the responsibility

01:47:54.980 | of those ideas.

01:47:55.980 | Yeah.

01:47:56.980 | I think all of that is right.

01:47:57.980 | I think the idea that that's more likely to occur among young people, that's clear.

01:48:02.380 | People as they mature, get more agreeable and conscientious.

01:48:05.160 | We actually know that what you said is true technically.

01:48:08.540 | It's definitely the case that there is an innate tilt towards pleasure in that sort

01:48:12.600 | of behavior, and it is associated to some degree with dominant striving.

01:48:17.540 | And I do think it's true, as you pointed out, that many of the people who are toying with

01:48:21.900 | that pattern can be socialized out of it.

01:48:25.860 | In fact, maybe most people.

01:48:29.000 | Even the repeat criminal types tend to desist in their late 20s.

01:48:34.180 | So imagine that 1% of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes.

01:48:39.300 | So imagine that that 1% are the people that you're really concerned with.

01:48:43.340 | They often have stable patterns of offending that emerged very young, like even in infancy,

01:48:52.340 | and continued through adolescence and into adulthood.

01:48:56.660 | If you keep them in prison until they're in the middle of their late 20s, most of them

01:49:01.940 | stop.

01:49:02.940 | And maybe the easiest way to understand that might just be delayed maturation.

01:49:08.980 | So are most people salvageable?

01:49:12.780 | Yes, definitely.

01:49:15.100 | Is everyone salvageable?

01:49:16.740 | Well, at some point it becomes, first of all, they have to want to be salvaged.

01:49:21.700 | That's a problem.

01:49:22.700 | But then it also becomes something like, well, how much resources are you going to devote

01:49:27.780 | to that?

01:49:29.580 | Like the farther down the rabbit hole you've gone, the more energy it takes to haul you

01:49:34.340 | up.

01:49:35.340 | So there comes a point where the probability that you'll be able to get enough resources

01:49:39.580 | devoted to you to rescue you from the pit of hell that you've dug is zero.

01:49:44.740 | And that's a very sad thing.

01:49:46.060 | And it's very hard to be around someone who's in that situation, very, very hard.

01:49:50.580 | And it seems that it's more likely that the leaders of movements are going to be psychopaths

01:49:56.460 | and the followers of movements are going to be the people that we're mentioning that have

01:50:01.620 | kind of lost themselves to the ideology of the movement.

01:50:05.580 | Well, we know that what you said is true, even historically, to a large degree, because

01:50:11.540 | Germany was successfully denazified.

01:50:14.900 | And it's not like everybody who participated in every element of the Nazi movement was

01:50:19.420 | brought to justice, not in the least.

01:50:22.240 | The same thing happened in Japan.

01:50:24.500 | So to some degree, the same thing happened in South Africa, right?

01:50:30.340 | And so, and it's the case, for example, also in the stories that we were referring to earlier,

01:50:36.620 | the biblical stories, the patriarchs of the Bible, most of them are pretty bad people

01:50:41.080 | when they first start out.

01:50:42.420 | Like Jacob's a really good, Jacob is the one who becomes Israel.

01:50:46.020 | He's a major player in the biblical narrative.

01:50:49.420 | And he's a pretty bad actor when he first starts out.

01:50:52.260 | He's a mama's boy.

01:50:54.220 | He's a liar.

01:50:56.740 | He steals from his own brother, and in a major way, he deceives his father.

01:51:01.140 | He's a coward, you know, and yet he turns his life around.

01:51:05.500 | So be careful the leaders you idolize and worship.

01:51:11.260 | But then it's not always clear to know who is the good and who's the evil.

01:51:15.060 | Yeah.

01:51:16.060 | It's hard.

01:51:17.320 | You have been through some dark places in your mind over your life.

01:51:21.700 | What have been some of your darker hours, and how did you find the light?

01:51:26.020 | Well, I would say I started contending with the problem of evil very young, 13 or 14.

01:51:34.500 | And that's been the main, that was my main motivation of study for 30 years, I guess,

01:51:47.020 | something like that.

01:51:49.860 | At the end of that 30 years, it became more and more, I became more and more interested

01:51:54.740 | in fleshing out the alternative.

01:51:57.540 | Once I became convinced that evil existed, that was very young, I always believed that

01:52:06.360 | if you could understand something well enough, that you could formulate a solution to it.

01:52:10.980 | But it turns out that seeing evil and understanding that it exists is less complicated than a

01:52:20.940 | technical description of its opposite.

01:52:24.560 | What is good?

01:52:27.240 | You can say, well, it's not that, for sure.

01:52:30.000 | It's not Auschwitz.

01:52:31.000 | How about we start there?

01:52:32.820 | It's as far from Auschwitz as you can get.

01:52:35.060 | It's as far from enjoying being an Auschwitz camp guard as you can get.

01:52:38.780 | Well, where are you when you're as far away from that as you could possibly get?

01:52:43.860 | What does that mean?

01:52:45.620 | And it does have something to do with play, as far as I'm concerned.

01:52:49.340 | Like I think the antithesis of tyranny is play.

01:52:54.460 | So that took me a long time to figure out that specifically, you know.

01:52:59.580 | And so that was very dark.

01:53:00.860 | I spent a lot of time studying the worst behaviors that I could discover abstractly in books,

01:53:10.100 | but also in my clinical practice and in my observations of people.

01:53:15.020 | And so that's rough.

01:53:17.920 | More recently, I was very ill and in a tremendous amount of pain that lasted pretty much without

01:53:24.820 | any break for three years.

01:53:27.420 | And what was particularly useful to me then was the strength of my relationships, my immediate

01:53:35.780 | relationships, my friendships.

01:53:38.380 | Also the relationships that I had established more broadly with people, you know.

01:53:45.680 | Because by the time I became ill, I was reasonably well known and people were very supportive

01:53:52.260 | when I was having trouble, and that was very helpful.

01:53:54.740 | But it's certainly the case that it was the connections I had, particularly with my family,

01:54:00.940 | but also with my friends, that were the saving grace.

01:54:04.140 | And that's something to know, you know, I mean.

01:54:07.340 | It's necessary to bear the burdens of the world on your own shoulders, that's for sure.

01:54:11.900 | The burdens of your own existence and whatever other responsibilities you can mount.

01:54:15.620 | But that by no means means that you can or should do it alone.

01:54:20.940 | And so, you know, you might say, well, welcoming the adversity of life as a redemptive challenge

01:54:29.600 | is a task that's beyond the ability of the typical person or even maybe of anyone.

01:54:35.740 | But then when you think, well, you're not alone.

01:54:39.540 | Maybe you're not alone socially, you're not alone familial, maybe you're not alone metaphysically

01:54:44.020 | as well.

01:54:45.020 | You know, there's an insistence, and I think it's true, there's an insistence, for example,

01:54:50.100 | in the Old and the New Testament alike, that the more darkness you're willing to voluntarily

01:54:55.740 | encounter, the more likely it is that the spirit of Abraham and the patriarchs will

01:55:00.700 | walk with you.

01:55:02.300 | And I think that's right.

01:55:04.300 | I think it's sort of technically true in that the best parts of yourself make themselves manifest.

01:55:10.820 | If you want to think about it that way, the best parts of yourself, whatever that means,

01:55:14.700 | make themselves manifest when you're contending actively and voluntarily with the most difficult

01:55:20.620 | challenges.

01:55:21.620 | Why wouldn't it be that way?

01:55:23.140 | And then you could think, well, that's yourself.

01:55:25.300 | It's like, well, are the best unrevealed parts of you yourself?

01:55:30.580 | Well, no, they're a kind of metaphysical reality.

01:55:35.660 | They're not yet manifest.

01:55:36.900 | They only exist in potential.

01:55:38.820 | They transcend anything you're currently capable of, but they have an existence.

01:55:42.980 | You could call that yourself, but like it was Jung's contention, for example, with regards

01:55:48.520 | to such terminology, that the reason we use the term self instead of God is because when

01:55:54.140 | God was dispensed with, let's say, by the processes Nietzsche described, we just found

01:55:58.620 | the same thing deep within the instinctive realm, let's say.

01:56:02.740 | We found it at the bottom of the things instead of at the top.

01:56:05.820 | It's like, it doesn't matter.

01:56:08.140 | It doesn't matter fundamentally.

01:56:10.500 | What matters is whether or not that's a reality.

01:56:13.860 | And I think it's the fundamental reality, because I do think that the deeper you delve

01:56:20.700 | into things, this is what happens to Moses when he encounters the burning bush.

01:56:26.660 | So Moses is just going about his life.

01:56:28.880 | He's a shepherd.

01:56:30.080 | He's an adult.

01:56:31.220 | He has wives.

01:56:32.260 | He has children.

01:56:33.260 | He has responsibilities.

01:56:34.300 | He's left his home and he's established himself.

01:56:37.140 | And so things are pretty good for Moses.

01:56:40.680 | And then he's out by Mount Horeb in that story, but it's the central mountain of the world.

01:56:44.760 | It's the same mountain as Sinai, which is the place where heaven and earth touch.

01:56:49.600 | And he sees something that grabs his attention, right?

01:56:53.180 | That's the burning bush.

01:56:54.180 | And bush is a tree.

01:56:55.680 | That's life.

01:56:56.680 | That's the tree of life.

01:56:57.680 | And the fact that it's on fire, that's life exaggerated, because everything that's alive

01:57:03.080 | is on fire.

01:57:04.440 | And so what calls to Moses is like the spirit of being itself, and it tracks him off the

01:57:09.100 | beaten track.

01:57:10.180 | And he decides to go investigate.

01:57:12.720 | So Moses is everyone who goes off the beaten track to investigate.

01:57:16.980 | And so as he investigates, he delves more and more deeply until he starts to understand

01:57:24.620 | that he's now walking on sacred ground.

01:57:27.480 | So he takes off his shoes, and that's a symbolic reference of identity transformation.

01:57:33.620 | He's no longer walking the same path.

01:57:35.820 | He no longer has the same identity.

01:57:37.680 | He's in a state of flux.

01:57:39.460 | And that's when what happens is that he continues to interact with this calling.

01:57:44.980 | And Moses asks what it is that's being revealed, and God says, "I'm the spirit of being itself."

01:57:51.480 | That's basically the answer.

01:57:52.620 | I am what I am.

01:57:54.580 | It's a more complex utterance than that.

01:57:56.780 | I am what I will be.

01:57:58.900 | I am what was becoming.

01:58:01.060 | It's all of that at the same time.

01:58:02.500 | It's the spirit of being that's speaking to him, the spirit of being and becoming.

01:58:06.280 | And it tells Moses that he now, because he's delved so deeply into something so compelling,

01:58:12.920 | his identity is transformed and he's become the leader who can speak truth to power.

01:58:17.700 | And so he allies himself with his brother Aaron, who's the political arm and who can

01:58:22.020 | communicate and he goes back to Egypt to confront the tyrant.

01:58:25.340 | And that's an indication of that idea, that if you wrestle with life properly, that the

01:58:32.460 | spirit of being and becoming walks with you.

01:58:36.900 | And it's like, how can that not be true?

01:58:40.840 | Because the contrary would be that there would be no growth in challenge.

01:58:45.380 | Well, you have to be infinitely nihilistic to believe that.

01:58:51.140 | It's obvious, but it's also just fascinating that hardship is the thing that ends up being

01:59:00.300 | the catalyst for delving deeply.

01:59:02.860 | It's hardship voluntarily undertaken.

01:59:05.940 | It's crucially true.

01:59:07.100 | Look, if you bring someone into therapy, let's say they're afraid of elevators and you trick

01:59:12.180 | them into getting near an elevator, you'll make them worse.

01:59:15.880 | But if you negotiate with them so that they voluntarily move towards the elevator on their

01:59:23.000 | own recognizance, they'll overcome their fear and they become generally braver, but it has

01:59:30.360 | to be voluntary.

01:59:31.360 | See, I got to push back and explore with you the question of voluntarily.

01:59:35.360 | Let's look at Nietzsche.

01:59:36.960 | He suffered through several health issues throughout his life, migraines, eyesight issues,

01:59:41.520 | digestive problems, depression with suicidal thoughts, and yet he is one of the greatest

01:59:48.120 | minds in the history of humanity.

01:59:50.760 | So were these problems that he was suffering arguably involuntarily a feature or a bug?

01:59:59.000 | That's a good question.

02:00:00.000 | The same thing happens in the story of Job, because Job is a good man.

02:00:04.020 | God himself admits it.

02:00:05.960 | And Satan comes along and says to God, I see you're pretty proud of your man there, Job.

02:00:12.960 | God says, yeah, he's doing pretty well.

02:00:14.440 | And Satan says, I think it's just because things are easy for him.

02:00:17.980 | Let me have a crack at him and see what happens.

02:00:20.100 | And God says, yeah, I think you're wrong.

02:00:22.260 | Do your worst.

02:00:23.260 | Right?

02:00:24.260 | And that's how people feel when those slings and arrows come at them, let's say, like Nietzsche.

02:00:29.120 | Well, Job's response to that, now the story is set up so that what befalls Job is actually

02:00:34.520 | quite arbitrary, right, these catastrophes that you're describing.

02:00:37.920 | The volunteerism in Job is his refusal to despair even in the face of that adversity.

02:00:43.160 | And that seems like something like an expression of voluntary free will.

02:00:47.240 | He refuses to lose faith.

02:00:49.760 | And the way the story ends is that Job gets everything back and more.

02:00:54.120 | And you know, so that's a descent and ascent story.

02:00:57.040 | And a cynic might say, well, the ends don't justify the means.

02:01:01.160 | And I would say, fair enough, but that's a pretty shallow interpretation of the story.

02:01:05.660 | What it indicates instead is that if you're fortunate, because let's not forget that,

02:01:12.280 | and you optimize your attitude, even in the face of adversity, that it's not infrequently

02:01:19.980 | the case that your fortunes will reverse.

02:01:22.460 | You know, and I found that in many situations, the journalists whose goal was most malicious

02:01:34.500 | in relationship to me, who were most concerned with improving their own, what would you say,

02:01:43.220 | fostering their own notoriety and gaining social status at my expense, were the ones

02:01:48.500 | who did me the greatest favor.

02:01:51.300 | Those were the interviews that went viral.

02:01:54.100 | And so that's interesting, you know, because they were definitely the places where the

02:01:58.260 | most disaster was at hand.

02:02:00.800 | And I felt that in the aftermath.

02:02:02.460 | Every time that happened, my whole family was destabilized for like two months because

02:02:07.780 | things, it wasn't obvious at all which way the dice were going to roll.

02:02:13.860 | But you leaned into that.

02:02:15.500 | So in a sense that there's this kind of transformation from the involuntary to the voluntary.

02:02:21.380 | Basically saying, bring it on.

02:02:23.180 | That act of bring it on turns the involuntary hardship into voluntary hardship.

02:02:29.740 | Well not necessarily, let's say.

02:02:32.100 | But you could say that's your best bet.

02:02:35.340 | Well, you know, I'm never going to say that you can transcend all catastrophe with the

02:02:43.140 | right attitude, because that's just too much to say.

02:02:47.460 | But I could say that in a dire situation, there's always an element of choice.

02:02:54.340 | And if you make the right choices, you improve the degree, you improve your chances of success

02:03:02.660 | to the maximal possible degree.

02:03:05.660 | It might be too much to say, but nevertheless, this could be true.

02:03:09.740 | Viktor Frankl, Marcus Aurelius.

02:03:14.140 | Well that's what the resurrection story proclaims, is that even under the darkest imaginable circumstances,

02:03:22.060 | the fundamental finale is the victory of the good.

02:03:27.540 | And that seems to me to be true.

02:03:31.220 | Do you have regrets when you look back at your life in the full analysis of it?

02:03:40.180 | Well as I said, I was very ill for about three years and it was seriously brutal.

02:03:45.140 | Like every, this is no lie, every single minute of that three years was worse than any single

02:03:51.060 | time I'd ever experienced in my entire life up to that.

02:03:55.900 | So that was rough.

02:03:57.940 | Was the roughest the physical or the psychological?

02:04:01.980 | Pain.

02:04:02.980 | Just literal pain?

02:04:04.660 | Yeah.

02:04:05.660 | Yeah, I was walking like 10 to 12 miles a day, rain or shine, winter, didn't matter.

02:04:16.900 | Not good.

02:04:18.060 | And it was worse than that because as the day progressed, my pain levels would fall

02:04:29.060 | until by 10, 11 at night when I was starting to get tired, I was approaching, what would

02:04:39.180 | you say, I was approaching something like an ordinary bad day.

02:04:46.180 | But as soon as I went to sleep, then the clock was reset and all the pain came back.

02:04:50.860 | And so it wasn't just that I was in pain, it was that sleep itself became an enemy.

02:04:57.260 | And that's really rough, man, because sleep is where you take refuge, you know.

02:05:02.060 | You're worn out, you're tired, and you go to sleep and you wake up and it's generally,

02:05:07.780 | it's something approximating a new day.

02:05:10.300 | This was like Sisyphus on steroids.

02:05:13.260 | And it was very difficult to maintain hope in that, because I would do what I could,

02:05:17.700 | like there were times when it took me like an hour and a half in the morning to stand

02:05:21.380 | up.

02:05:22.780 | And so I'd do all that and more or less put myself back into something remotely resembling

02:05:28.860 | human by the end of the day, and then I knew perfectly well, exhausted, if I fell asleep,

02:05:34.220 | that I was going to be right at the bottom of the bloody hill again.

02:05:37.300 | And so after a couple of years of that, it was definitely the fact that I had a family

02:05:44.380 | that carried me through that.

02:05:46.060 | What did you learn about yourself, about yourself and about the human mind from that, from all

02:05:54.180 | of those days?

02:05:55.180 | Well, I think I learned more gratitude for the people I had around me.

02:06:00.680 | And I learned how fortunate I was to have that and how crucial that was.

02:06:07.240 | My wife learned something similar.

02:06:09.680 | She was diagnosed with a form of cancer that, as far as we know, killed every single person

02:06:14.400 | who ever had it except her.

02:06:16.640 | It's quite rare.

02:06:19.260 | And her experience was that what really gave her hope and played at least a role in saving

02:06:28.320 | her was the realization of the depth of love that her son in particular had for her.

02:06:34.440 | And that says nothing about her relationship with Michaela, with her daughter.

02:06:37.760 | It just so happened that it was the revelation of that love that made Tammy understand the

02:06:45.720 | value of her life in a way that she wouldn't have realized of her own accord.

02:06:51.400 | We're very, very – there's no difference between ourselves and the people that we love.

02:06:56.960 | And there might be no difference between ourselves and everyone, everywhere, but we can at least

02:07:01.040 | realize that to begin with in the form of the people that we love.

02:07:06.160 | And I hope I'm better at that than I was.

02:07:08.720 | I think I'm better at it than I was.

02:07:12.560 | I'm a lot more grateful for just ordinariness than I was, because when I first recovered,

02:07:19.360 | I remember I was standing – first started to recover, I was standing in this pharmacy

02:07:24.360 | waiting for a prescription in a little town, and they weren't being particularly efficient

02:07:28.440 | about it.

02:07:29.440 | And I got standing in the aisle for like 20 minutes, and I thought, "I'm not on fire.

02:07:36.000 | I could just stand here for like the rest of my life, just not being in pain and enjoying that."

02:07:42.160 | And, you know, that would have been something that before that would have been – you know,

02:07:46.560 | I would have been impatient and raring to go, because I didn't have 20 minutes to stand

02:07:50.360 | in the middle of an aisle.

02:07:52.360 | And I thought, "Well, you know, if you're just standing there and you're not on fire,

02:07:56.040 | things are a lot better than they might be."

02:07:58.520 | And I certainly – I know that, and I think I remember it almost all the time.

02:08:04.400 | You gain a greater ability to appreciate the mundane moments of life.

02:08:09.240 | Yeah, definitely.

02:08:11.000 | The miracle of the mundane, right?

02:08:13.400 | Yeah.

02:08:14.400 | I think Nietzsche had that, because he was very ill.

02:08:19.600 | And so I suspect he had – you know, and he was regarded by the inhabitants of the

02:08:27.200 | village that he lived in near the end of his life as something approximating a saint.

02:08:32.240 | He apparently conducted himself very admirably, despite all his suffering.

02:08:37.000 | You know, but that's still – there's this tension, as there is in much of Nietzsche's

02:08:40.920 | work, between the miracle of the mundane – appreciating the miracle of the mundane versus fearing

02:08:50.440 | the tyranny of the mediocre.

02:08:52.720 | It's more the mediocre and resentful.

02:08:55.520 | Yes, but that's you giving him a pass, or seeing the good.

02:09:00.400 | Well, fair enough, you know.

02:09:01.400 | There's a kind of – I mean, the tyranny of the mediocre – I always hated this idea

02:09:07.400 | that some people are better than others.

02:09:09.720 | And I understand it, but it's a dangerous idea.

02:09:12.960 | This is why I like the story of Cain and Abel, I would say.

02:09:17.040 | Because Cain is mediocre, but that's because he refuses to do his best.

02:09:23.120 | It's not something intrinsic to him.

02:09:24.600 | And I actually think that's the right formulation, because, you know, I had people in my clinical

02:09:28.760 | practice who were – they were lost in many dimensions, from the perspective of comparison.

02:09:37.720 | One woman I remember in particular, who – man, she had a lot to contend with.

02:09:42.940 | She was not educated, she was not intelligent.

02:09:46.420 | She had a brutal family, like, terrible history of psychiatric hospitalization.

02:09:55.560 | And when I met her at a hospital, she was an outpatient from the psychiatric ward.

02:10:07.240 | And she had been in there with people that she thought were worse off than her.

02:10:11.200 | And they were.

02:10:12.360 | And that was a long way down.

02:10:14.160 | That was like Dante's Inferno leveled down.

02:10:17.100 | It was a long-term psychiatric inpatient ward.

02:10:21.260 | Some of the people had been there for 30 years.

02:10:24.280 | It made One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest look like a romantic comedy.

02:10:31.160 | And she had come back to see if she could take some of those people for a walk, and

02:10:36.160 | was trying to find out how to get permission to do it.

02:10:39.740 | And so, you know, better than other people – some people are more intelligent, some

02:10:47.360 | people are more beautiful, some people are more athletic – maybe it's possible for

02:10:53.240 | everyone at all levels of attainment to strive towards the good.

02:10:59.000 | And maybe those talents that are given to people unfairly don't privilege them in

02:11:03.680 | relationship to their moral conduct.

02:11:05.760 | And I think that's true.

02:11:07.520 | Like, there's no evidence, for example, that there's any correlation whatsoever

02:11:10.920 | between intelligence and morality.

02:11:15.320 | You're not better because you're smart.

02:11:17.440 | And what that also implies is if you're smart, you can be a lot better at being worse.

02:11:21.960 | I think, for myself, I'm just afraid of dismissing people because of my perception

02:11:30.960 | of them.

02:11:31.960 | Yeah, well, that's why we have that metaphysical presumption that everybody's made in the

02:11:35.560 | image of God, right, despite that immense diversity of apparent ability.

02:11:41.160 | There's that underlying metaphysical assumption that, yeah, we all vary in our perceived and

02:11:48.800 | actual utility in relationship to any proximal goal, but all of that's independent of the

02:11:54.520 | question of axiomatic worth.

02:11:57.320 | And preposterous as that notion appears to be, it seems to me that societies that accept

02:12:03.920 | it as a fundamental axiomatic presumption are always the societies that you'd want

02:12:08.760 | to live in if you had a choice.

02:12:11.300 | And that, to me, is an existence proof for the utility of the presumption.

02:12:16.400 | And also, you know, if you treat people like that in your life, every encounter you have,

02:12:21.740 | you make the assumption that it's an assumption of, what would you, it's radical equality

02:12:29.080 | of worth despite individual variance in ability, something like that.

02:12:33.440 | Man, your interactions go way better.

02:12:35.920 | I mean, everyone wants to be treated that way.

02:12:38.800 | Look, here's a developmental sequence for you.

02:12:42.240 | Naive and trusting, hurt and cynical.

02:12:46.560 | Okay, well, is hurt and cynical better than naive and trusting?

02:12:50.000 | It's like, yeah, probably.

02:12:53.120 | Is that where it ends?

02:12:54.320 | How about cynical and trusting as step three?

02:12:59.920 | Right, and then the trust becomes courage.

02:13:02.520 | Like, yeah, I'll put my hand out for you, but it's not because I'm a fool.

02:13:09.480 | And I think that's right, because that's the re-instantiation of that initial trust, right,

02:13:13.880 | that makes childhood magical and paradisal.

02:13:18.400 | But it's the admixture of that with wisdom.

02:13:20.720 | It's like, yeah, you know, we could be, we could walk together uphill, but that doesn't

02:13:27.360 | mean, and I'll presume that that's your aim.

02:13:31.560 | But that doesn't mean that I'm not going to watch.

02:13:35.040 | What's a better life, cynical and safe, or hopeful and vulnerable to be hurt?

02:13:42.720 | Oh, you can't dispense with vulnerable to be hurt.

02:13:46.400 | That's the other realization.

02:13:47.560 | It's like, you're going to stake your life on something.

02:13:50.960 | You could stake your life on security, but it's not going to help.

02:13:54.360 | You don't have that option.

02:13:55.960 | So what do you do when you're betrayed, ultimately by some people you come across?

02:14:02.560 | Grieve and look elsewhere.

02:14:06.760 | Do what you can to forgive, and not least so you lighten your own burden.

02:14:14.080 | Maybe do what you can to help the person who betrayed you.

02:14:18.280 | And if that all proves impossible, then wash your hands of it and move on to the next adventure.

02:14:27.320 | And do it again.

02:14:29.040 | Yeah.

02:14:30.040 | Yeah.

02:14:31.040 | Boy, this life.

02:14:32.960 | Something else.

02:14:33.960 | So we've been talking about some heavy, difficult topics, and you've talked about truth in your

02:14:38.880 | Nietzsche lectures and elsewhere.

02:14:41.480 | When you think, when you write, when you speak, how do you find what is true?

02:14:47.200 | You know, Hemingway said, "All you have to do is write one true sentence."

02:14:50.960 | Yeah.

02:14:51.960 | How do you do that?

02:14:52.960 | Well, I would say first that you practice that.

02:14:56.280 | It's like, that question is something, and Hemingway knew this, at least to some degree,

02:15:02.200 | and he certainly wrote about it, is that you have to orient your life upward as completely

02:15:08.320 | as you can, because otherwise you can't distinguish between truth and falsehood.

02:15:12.480 | It has to be a practice.

02:15:14.040 | Now, and for me, I started to become serious about that practice when I realized that it

02:15:20.400 | was the immorality of the individual, the resentful, craven, deceitful immorality of

02:15:27.080 | the individual that led to the terrible atrocities that humans engage in that make us doubt even

02:15:34.720 | our own worth.

02:15:35.720 | I became completely convinced of that.

02:15:38.080 | That the fundamental root cause of evil, let's say, wasn't economic or sociological.

02:15:44.440 | That it was spiritual, just psychological.

02:15:48.360 | And that if that was the case, you had an existential responsibility to aim upward and

02:15:54.640 | to tell the truth.

02:15:56.320 | And that everything depends on that.

02:15:58.680 | And I became convinced of that.

02:16:00.700 | And so then, look, you set your path with your orientation.

02:16:07.340 | That's how your perceptions work.

02:16:08.580 | As soon as you have a goal, a pathway opens up to you and you can see it.

02:16:12.840 | And the world divides itself into obstacles and things that move you forward.

02:16:17.600 | And so the pathway that's in front of you depends on your aim.

02:16:20.300 | The things you perceive are concretizations of your aim.

02:16:25.780 | If your aim is untrue, then you won't be able to tell the difference between truth

02:16:29.100 | and falsehood.

02:16:30.820 | And you might say, well, how do you know your aim is true?

02:16:32.700 | It's like, well, you course-correct continually and you can aim towards the ultimate.

02:16:37.820 | Are you ever sure that your aim is the right direction?

02:16:40.580 | You become increasingly accurate in your apprehension.

02:16:44.980 | Is it like part of the process to cross the line?

02:16:48.700 | To go outside the Overton window, to dip a toe outside the Overton window for a bit?

02:16:52.980 | Of course.

02:16:53.980 | When I was in part in play, I was at the Comedy Mothership and every single comedian was like

02:16:59.180 | completely reprehensible.

02:17:01.380 | All they were doing was saying things that you can't say.

02:17:04.660 | Well, but it was in play.

02:17:07.060 | What I'm trying to do in my lectures is, I'm on the edge.

02:17:10.380 | I have a question I'm trying to address and I'm trying to figure it out.

02:17:12.860 | I don't know where the conversation is going, truly.

02:17:17.740 | It's an exploration.

02:17:18.880 | And I think the reason that the audiences respond is because they can feel that.

02:17:22.340 | It's a high wire act, you know?

02:17:24.300 | And I could fail.

02:17:25.300 | And, you know, my lectures have degrees of success.

02:17:28.460 | Sometimes I get real fortunate and there's a perfect narrative arc.

02:17:30.820 | I have a question, I'm investigating it.

02:17:33.580 | It comes to a punchline conclusion just at the right time and it's like the whole act

02:17:37.620 | is complete.

02:17:38.620 | And sometimes it's more fragmented, but I can tell when the audience is engaged because

02:17:43.100 | everyone's silent, you know, except maybe when they're laughing.

02:17:47.300 | There's a kind of sense that you're arguing with yourself when you're lecturing.

02:17:50.100 | It's beautiful.

02:17:51.100 | It's really, really beautiful and powerful to watch, like Nietzsche does the same.

02:17:53.860 | There's contradictions in what you're saying.

02:17:55.460 | There's a struggle with what you're saying.

02:17:57.040 | But I do think that when you're doing the same on the internet, you get punished for

02:18:01.500 | the deviations.

02:18:02.500 | You get punished for the exploration, especially when that explores outside the Overton window.

02:18:07.900 | Look, if you're going to play hard in a conversation to explore, you're going to say things that

02:18:15.020 | are edgy, right?

02:18:16.020 | That are going to cause trouble and that might be wrong.

02:18:18.720 | And that's another reason why free speech protection is so important.

02:18:21.580 | You actually have to protect the right.

02:18:24.480 | Let's say in the optimal circumstance, you have to protect the right of well-meaning

02:18:27.640 | people to be wrong.

02:18:29.200 | Now you probably have to go beyond that to truly protect it.

02:18:33.000 | You have to even protect the right of people who aren't meaning well to be wrong, you know,

02:18:37.520 | and we also need that because we're not always well-meaning.

02:18:41.420 | But I don't, you know, the alternative to that protection would be the insistence that

02:18:45.440 | people only say what was 100% right all the time.

02:18:49.660 | I'm also, I guess this is a call to our fellow humans not to reduce a person to a particular

02:18:55.880 | statement, which is what the internet tends to want to do.

02:19:01.520 | Especially if it's the worst thing they ever said.

02:19:03.720 | Yeah.

02:19:04.720 | Yeah.

02:19:05.720 | Because God, well, anyone judged by that standard is doomed unless they're silent.

02:19:08.480 | But it also just makes you not want to play.

02:19:11.040 | Yeah, right.

02:19:12.040 | You don't want to take sort of radical thought experiments and carry out to a natural conclusion.

02:19:16.520 | Yeah, well, that's kind of the definition of a totalitarian state.

02:19:19.000 | Yes.

02:19:20.000 | No one's playing in a totalitarian state ever.

02:19:22.000 | But in this case, it's an emergent one.

02:19:24.320 | Yeah.

02:19:25.320 | With psychopaths roaming the landscape.

02:19:27.520 | Yeah.

02:19:28.520 | Well, you know, that might be the general pattern of totalitarianism.

02:19:31.840 | Well, in totalitarianism, there's usually one psychopath, not multiple.

02:19:36.040 | Yeah, but everyone, well, everyone else is complicit, at least in their silence.

02:19:40.920 | Yeah.

02:19:41.920 | Does the study of the pathology of psychopaths online wear on you?

02:19:46.160 | Yes, definitely.

02:19:47.160 | Do you ever consider doing less of that?

02:19:51.520 | Yes.

02:19:52.520 | Yes, definitely.

02:19:54.760 | But you know, probably I experience most of that on X.

02:20:05.920 | But that's also where I find most of my guests.

02:20:08.280 | That's also where I get a sense of the zeitgeist, which is necessary.

02:20:13.360 | For example, if you're going to be a podcast host, it's necessary for me to make my lectures

02:20:17.280 | on point and up to date to get a sampling of the current moment.

02:20:22.380 | You have to be of the moment in many ways to function at a high level.

02:20:28.160 | Is there a price?

02:20:29.160 | There's a price to be paid for that, because you're exposed to everything in a sense.

02:20:35.880 | You can also oversample the darkness.

02:20:38.520 | Yeah.

02:20:39.520 | Yeah, definitely.

02:20:40.520 | And it can make you more and more cynical.

02:20:42.080 | Yeah, well.

02:20:43.080 | It's a danger, right?

02:20:44.080 | Yeah.

02:20:45.080 | Yeah.

02:20:46.080 | Well, luckily for me, you know, I have many things that counterbalance that, the familial

02:20:49.360 | relationships we talked about, the friendships, and then also all of the public things I do

02:20:54.480 | are positive.

02:20:55.480 | The lecture tours, for example, which I'm on a lot, they're basically 100% positive.

02:21:02.720 | So I'm very well buttressed against that.

02:21:09.040 | That's great to hear.

02:21:10.040 | Darker element.

02:21:11.040 | As a fan in the arena watching the gladiators fight, your mind is too important to be lost

02:21:16.200 | to the cynical, to the battles with the abyss.

02:21:21.760 | Well, you have a moral obligation too, to maintain a positive orientation.

02:21:27.840 | It's a moral obligation.

02:21:29.860 | The future is, of course, rife with contradictory possibilities.

02:21:34.640 | And I suppose in some ways, the more rapid the rate of transformation, the more possibility

02:21:40.800 | for good and for evil is making itself manifest at any moment.

02:21:44.880 | But it looks like the best way to ensure that the future is everything we wish it would

02:21:49.940 | be is to maintain faith that that is the direction that will prevail.

02:21:54.880 | And I think that's a form of moral commitment, when it's not just naive optimism.

02:22:00.100 | Well, Jordan, thank you for being courageous and being the light amid the darkness for

02:22:06.840 | many, many people.

02:22:08.740 | And thank you for once again talking today.

02:22:10.900 | Thanks very much for the invitation and for the conversations.

02:22:13.500 | But it's always a pleasure to see you, and you're doing a pretty decent job yourself

02:22:19.340 | about there illuminating dark corners and bringing people upward.

02:22:24.620 | I mean, you've got a remarkable thing going with your podcast, and you're very good

02:22:28.700 | at it.

02:22:29.700 | Thank you, Jordan.

02:22:30.700 | Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jordan Peterson.

02:22:33.460 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:22:37.920 | And now, let me leave you with some words from Friedrich Nietzsche.

02:22:42.020 | I would like to learn more and more to see as beautiful that which is necessary in things.

02:22:48.020 | Then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.

02:22:52.860 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:22:55.660 | Bye.

02:22:56.660 | Bye.

02:22:57.660 | Bye.

02:22:58.660 | Bye.

02:22:59.660 | Bye.

02:23:00.660 | Bye.

02:23:01.660 | Bye.

02:23:01.660 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #448

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