Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #448
- The following is a conversation
with Jordan Peterson, his second time on this,
"The Lex Fridman Podcast." You have given a set of
lectures on Nietzsche as part of the new Peterson Academy,
and the lectures were powerful. There's some element of the
contradictions, the tensions, the drama, the way you
like, lock in on an idea, but then are struggling
with that idea, all of that, that feels like it's a Nietzschean. - Yeah, well, he's a big
influence on me stylistically and like in terms of the
way I approached writing. And also many of the people
that were other influences of mine were very influenced by him. So I was blown away when I
first came across his writings. They're so intellectually dense that I don't know if there's anything that approximates that, Dostoevsky maybe, although
he's much more wordy. Nietzsche is very succinct,
partly 'cause he was so (indistinct) 'cause
he would think all day, he couldn't spend a lot of time writing. And he condenses writings into very short, well this aphoristic style he had. And it's really something to strive for. And then he's also an exciting
writer like Dostoevsky and dynamic and romantic
in that emotional way. And so it's really something, and I really enjoyed doing that. I did that lecture that you described, that lecture series is on the first half of "Beyond Good and Evil,"
which is a stunning book. And that was really fun
to take pieces of it and then to describe what they mean and how they've echoed across the decades since he wrote them. And yeah, it's been great. - Taking each sentence seriously and deconstructing it and
really struggling with it. I think underpinning that approach to writing requires deep
respect for the person. I think if we approach writing
with that kind of respect, you can take Orwell, you
can take a lot of writers and really dig in on singular sentences. - Yeah, well those are the great writers because the greatest writers, virtually everything they
wrote is worth attending to. And I think Nietzsche is in some ways the ultimate exemplar of that. Because often when I read a book, I'll mark one way or another, I often fold the corner of the page over to indicate something that I've found that's worth remembering. I couldn't do that with a book
like "Beyond Good and Evil" because every page ends up marked. And that's in marked
contrast, so to speak, to many of the books I read now where it's quite frequently
now that I'll read a book and there won't be an idea in it that I haven't come across before. And with a thinker like Nietzsche, that's just not the case
at the sentence level. And I don't think there's anyone
that I know of who did that to a greater extent than he did. So there's other people whose thought is of equivalent value. I've returned recently and I'm going to do a
course on to the work of this Romanian historian
of religions, Mircea Eliade who's not nearly as well
known as he should be, and whose work, by the
way, is a real antidote to the postmodern
nihilistic Marxist stream of literary interpretation
that the universities as a whole have adopted. And Eliade is like that too. I used this book called
"The Sacred and the Profane" quite extensively in a book that I'm releasing in mid-November. "We Who Wrestle With God"
and it's of the same sort. It's endlessly analyzable. Eliade walked through the whole history of religious ideas. And he had the intellect
that enabled him to do that. And everything he wrote is
dreamlike in its density. So every sentence or
paragraph is evocative in an image rich manner. And that also, what would you say, deepens and broadens the scope. And that's part of often
what distinguishes writing that has a literary end from writing that's more merely technical. Like the literary writings
have this imagistic and dreamlike reference space around them. And it takes a long time to turn a complex image
into something semantic. And so if your writing
evokes deep imagery, it has a depth that can't
be captured merely in words. And the great romantic
poetic philosophers, Nietzsche is a very good example. Dostoevsky's a good example. So is Mircea Eliade,
they have that quality. And it's a good way of thinking about it. You know, it's kind of
interesting from the perspective of technical analysis of intelligence, and there's a good book
called "The User Illusion," which is the best book on
consciousness that I ever read. It explains the manner in which our communication is
understandable in this manner. So imagine that when you're
communicating something, you're trying to change the way that your target audience
perceives and acts in the world. So that's an embodied issue. But you're using words which aren't, obviously aren't equivalent
to the actions themselves. You can imagine that the words
are surrounded by a cloud of images that they evoke and that the images can be
translated into actions. And the greatest writing uses words in a manner that evokes images, that profoundly affects
perception and action. And that's the, so I would take the manner
in which I act and behave. I would translate that
into a set of images. My dreams do that for me, for example. Then I compress them into words. I toss you the words, you decompose them, decompress them into the images
and then into the actions. And that's what happens in
a meaningful conversation. It's a very good way of understanding how we communicate linguistically. - So if the words spring to the visual, full visual complexity and then that can then transform itself into action. - And change in perception.
- Change in perception. - Well those are both relevant and it's an important thing to understand because the classic empiricists
make the presumption, and it's an erroneous presumption, that perception is a
value free enterprise. And they assume that partly because they think of
perception as something passive. You know, you just turn your head and you look at the world and there it is. It's like perception is not passive. There is no perception
without action, ever, ever. And that's a weird thing to understand because even when you're looking
at something like your eyes are moving back and forth,
if they ever stop moving for a 10th of a second,
you stop being able to see. So your eyes are jiggling back and forth, just to keep them active. And then there's involuntary
movements of your eyes, and then there's voluntary
movements of your eyes. Like what you're doing with
your eyes is very much like what a blind person would
do if they were feeling out the contours of a object. You're sampling and you're only sampling a small element of the space
that's in front of you. And the element that you choose to sample is dependent on
your aims and your goals. So it's value saturated. And so all your perceptions
are action predicated. And partly what you're doing
when you're communicating is therefore not only changing
people's actions, let's say, but you're also changing the strategy that they use to perceive. And so you change the way the
world reveals itself for them. See, this is why it's
such a profound experience to read a particularly deep thinker because you could also
think of your perceptions as the axioms of your thought. That's a good way of thinking about it. A perception is like
a, what would you say? It's a thought that's so set in concrete that you now see it rather
than conceptualize it. A really profound thinker changes the way you perceive the world. That's way deeper than
just how you think about it or how you feel about it. - What about not just profound thinkers, but thinkers that deliver a powerful idea? For example, utopian ideas of Marx or utopian ideas, you could
say dystopian ideas of Hitler. Those ideas are powerful and they can saturate all
your perception with values and they focus you in a way where there's only a
certain set of actions. - Yeah, right, even a certain
set of emotions as well. - And it's intense and it's direct and they're so powerful that they completely alter the perception and the words spring to life. - Yeah, it's like a form of possession. So there's two things
you need to understand to make that clear. The first issue is that,
as we suggested or implied, that perception is action predicated, but action is goal predicated, right? The act towards goal. And these propagandistic
thinkers that you described, they attempt to unify all possible goals into a coherent singularity. And there's advantages of that. There's the advantage of
simplicity, for example, which is a major advantage. And there's also the advantage
of motivation, right? So if you provide people
with a simple manner of integrating all their actions,
you decrease their anxiety and you increase their motivation. That can be a good thing
if the unifying idea that you've put forward is valid. But it's the worst of all possible ideas, if you put forward an
invalid, unifying idea, and then you might say,
well, how do you distinguish between a valid unifying idea
and an invalid, unifying idea? Now Nietzsche was very interested in that and I don't think he
got that exactly right. But the postmodernists for
example, especially the ones, and this is most of them
with the neo-Marxist bent, their presumption is that the fundamental
unifying idea is power. That everything's about
compulsion and force essentially. And that that's the only true
unifying ethos of mankind, which is, I don't know if
there's a worse idea than that. I mean there are ideas that
are potentially as dangerous. The nihilistic idea is pretty dangerous, although it's more of
a disintegrating notion than a unifying idea. The hedonistic idea that you
live for pleasure for example, that's also very dangerous. But if you wanted to
go for sheer pathology, the notion that, and this
is Foucault in a nutshell, and Marx for that matter,
that power rules everything. Not only is that a terrible unifying idea, but it fully justifies
your own use of power. And I don't mean the power
Nietzsche talks about, his will to power was more his insistence that a human being is
an expression of will rather than a mechanism of
self-protection and security. Like he thought of the
life force in human beings as something that strived
not to protect itself, but to exhaust itself
in being and becoming. It's like an upward
oriented motivational drive even towards meaning, now he
called it the will to power. And that had some
unfortunate consequences. At least that's how it's translated. But he didn't mean the power motivation that people like Foucault or
Marx became so hung up on. - So it's not power like you're
trying to destroy the other, it's power full flourishing
of a human being, the creative force of a
human being in that way. - Yeah, well you could imagine that and you should, you could imagine that you could segregate
competence and ability, like imagine that you and I were going to work on a project, we could organize our
project in relationship to the ambition that we wanted to attain. And we can organize an agreement
so that you were committed to the project voluntarily. And so that I was committed
to the project voluntarily. So that means that we
would actually be united in our perceptions and our
actions by the motivation of something approximating voluntary play. Now you could also imagine
another situation where I said, here's our goal and you better help me, or I'm gonna kill your family. Well, the probability is that you would be quite motivated to undertake my bidding. And so then you might say, well
that's how the world works. It's power and compulsion. But the truth of the matter
is that you can force people to see things your way, let's say, but it's nowhere near as good a strategy, even practically than the strategy that would be associated with
something like voluntary, voluntary joint agreement of pattern of movement strategy towards a goal. See, this is such an important
thing to understand because it helps you start to understand the distinction
between a unifying force that's based on power and compulsion and one that is much more
in keeping, I would say with the ethos that
governs Western societies, free Western societies. There's really a qualitative difference and it's not some morally
relativistic illusion. - So if we just look at the
nuance of Nietzsche's thought, the idea he first introduced in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"
of the Ubermensch. That's another one that's
very easy to misinterpret because it sounds awfully a
lot like it's about power. - Yeah, right.
- For example, in the 20th century it was misrepresented and co-opted by Hitler to
advocate for the extermination of the inferior non-Aryan races. - Yeah, and the dominion
of the superior Aryans. And yeah, well, and that was partly because Nietzsche's work
also was misrepresented by his sister after his death. But I also think that there's a fundamental flaw in that Nietzschean conceptualization. So Nietzsche of course famously
announced the death of God, but he did that in a
manner that was accompanied by dire warnings like Nietzsche said, because people tend to think of that as a triumphalist statement. But Nietzsche actually said that, he really said something like, the unifying ethos under which
we've organized ourselves psychologically and socially
has now been fatally undermined by, well by the rationalist proclivity, by the empiricist proclivity. There's a variety of reasons. Mostly it was conflict between
the enlightenment view, let's say, and the classic religious view and that there will be
dire consequences for that. And Nietzsche knew, like
Dostoevsky knew that, see, there's a proclivity
for the human psyche and for human societies to move towards something
approximating a unity because the cost of disunity is high, fractionation of your goals. So that means you're less motivated to move forward than you might be 'cause there's many things
competing for your attention. And also anxiety, because anxiety actually signals something like goal conflict. So there's an inescapable proclivity of value systems to unite. Now if you kill the thing
that's uniting them, that's the death of God, they either fractionate
and you get confusion, anxiety and hopelessness,
or you get social disunity and you get social disunity or something else arises out of the abyss to constitute that unifying force. And Nietzsche said specifically
that he believed that one of those manifestations
would be that of communism and that that would kill, he
said this in will to power, that that would kill tens of millions of people in the upcoming 20th century. He could see that coming 50 years earlier. And Dostoevsky did the same
thing in his book, "Demons." And so this is the thing that the areligious have to contend with. It's a real conundrum because I mean, you could dispute the idea that our value systems
tend towards a unity and society does as well 'cause otherwise we're disunified. But the cost of that disunity, as I said, is goal confusion,
anxiety, and hopelessness. So it's like a real cost. So you could dispense with the
notion of unity altogether. And the postmodernists
did that to some degree, but they pulled off a slight of hand too, where they replaced it by power. Now Nietzsche did, he's
responsible for that to some degree because Nietzsche said, with
his conception of the Uberman, let's say, is that human beings would have to create their own values
because the value structure that had descended from on
high was now shunted aside. But there's a major problem
with that, many major problems. The psychoanalysts were the first people who really figured this
out after Nietzsche, because imagine that we
don't have a relationship with the transcendental anymore. That orients us, okay, now
we have to turn to ourselves. Okay, now, if we were a unity, a clear unity within ourselves, let's say, then we could turn to
ourselves for that discovery. But if we're a fractionated
plurality internally, then when we turn to ourselves, we turn to a fractionated plurality. Well, that was Freud's observation. It's like, well, how can you make your own
values when you're not the master in your own house? Like you're a war of
competing motivations, or maybe you're someone
who's dominated by the will to force and compulsion. And so why do you think that
you can rely on yourself as the source of values? And why do you think you're
wise enough to consult with yourself to find
out what those values are or what they should be say in
the course of a single life? I mean, you know, it's difficult to organize your own
personal relationship, like one relationship in
the course of your life, let alone to try to imagine that out of whole cloth you
could construct an ethos that would be psychologically
and socially stabilizing and last over the long run. It's like, and of course
Marx, people like that, the people who reduce human motivation to a single axis, they had
the intellectual hubris to imagine that they could do that. Postmodernists are a good
example of that as well. - Okay, but if we lay on the table, religion, communism, nazism, they are all unifying ethos. They're unifying ideas, but they're also horribly dividing ideas. They both unify and divide. Religion has also divided people 'cause in the nuances of how the different peoples wrestle with God, they have come to different conclusions and then they use those conclusions that perhaps the people in
power use those conclusions to then start wars, to
start hatred, to divide. - Yeah, well, it's one
of the key sub-themes in the gospels is the sub
theme of the Pharisees. And so the fundamental enemies of Christ in the gospels are the Pharisees and the scribes and the lawyers. So what does that mean? The Pharisees are religious hypocrites. The scribes are academics who
worship their own intellect. And the lawyers are the legal minds who use the law as a weapon. And so they're the enemy of the redeemer. That's a subplot in the gospel stories. And that actually all means something. The pharisaic problem is that the best of all possible ideas can be used by the worst actors in
the worst possible way. And maybe this is an
existential conundrum, is that the most evil people
use the best possible ideas to the worst possible ends. And then you have the conundrum
of how do you separate out, let's say, the genuine religious people from those who use the
religious enterprise only for their own machinations. We're seeing this happen online. Like one of the things that
you're seeing happening online, I'm sure you've noticed this, especially on the right wing troll side, right wing psychopathic troll side of the distribution is the
weaponization of a certain form of Christian ideation. And that's often marked at
least online by the presence of, what would you say cliches
like Christ is king, which has a certain religious meaning, but a completely different
meaning in this sphere of emerging right wing
pathology, right wing, the political dimension
isn't the right dimension of analysis, but it's definitely the case that the best possible ideas can be used for the worst possible purposes. And that also brings up
another specter, which is like, well, is there any reliable and valid way of distinguishing
truly beneficial, unifying ideas from those
that are pathological? And so that's another thing that I tried to detail out in these lectures, but also in this new book is like, how do you tell the good
actors from the bad actors at the most fundamental level of analysis? - And good ideas from the bad ideas, and you lecture on truth that
Nietzsche also struggled with, so how do you know, how do you know that
communism is a bad idea versus it's a good idea
implemented by bad actors? - Right, right, that's
a more subtle variant of the religious problem. And that's what the
communists say all the time. The modern day communists, like real communism has never been tried. And you could say, I suppose
with some justification, you could say that real
Christianity has never been tried because we always fall
short of the ideal mark. And so, I mean, my rejoinder to the communists is something
like every single time it's been implemented, wherever it's been implemented, regardless of the culture
and the background of the people who've implemented it, it's had exactly the same
catastrophic consequences. It's like, I don't know how
many examples you need of that, but I believe we've
generated sufficient examples so that case is basically resolved. Now, the general rejoinder to that is, hmm, it's really something like, well, if I was in charge of
the communist enterprise, the utopia would've come about, right? But that's also a form
of dangerous pretense. Part of the way, see, that
problem is actually resolved to some degree in the notion of, in the developing notion of sacrifice that emerges in the western
canon over thousands and thousands of years. So one of the suggestions, for example, and this is something
exemplified in the passion story, is that you can tell the
valid holder of an idea because that holder will
take the responsibility for the consequences of
his idea onto himself. And that's why, for
example, you see one way of conceptualizing Christ
in the gospel story is as the ultimate sacrifice to God. So you might ask, well,
what's the ultimate sacrifice? And there are variance
of the answer to that. One form of ultimate sacrifice
is the sacrifice of a child, the offering of a child, and the other is the offering of the self. And the story of Christ
brings both of those together because he's the son of
God, that's offered to God. And so it's an archetypal
resolution of that tension between ultimate sacrifice, ultimate because once you're a parent, most parents would rather
sacrifice themselves than their children, right? So you have something that becomes of even more value than
yourself, but the sacrifice of self is also a very high
order level of sacrifice. Christ is an archetype
of the pattern of being that's predicated on the decision to take, to offer everything up to
the highest value, right? That pattern of self-sacrifice. And I think part of the
reason that's valid is because the person who undertakes to do that pays the price themself. It's not externalized, they're not trying to change anyone else
except maybe by example. It's your problem. And like, Solzhenitsyn
pointed that out too when he was struggling with
the idea of good versus evil. And you see this in more
sophisticated literature, you know, in really unsophisticated
literature or drama, there's a good guy and the bad guy and the good guy's all good,
and the bad guy's all bad. And in more sophisticated literature, the good and bad are abstracted. You can think of them as spirits. And then those spirits
possess all the characters in the complex drama to a
greater or lesser degree. And that battle is fought out
both socially and internally. In the high order religious
conceptualizations in the west, if they culminate, let's
say in the Christian story, the notion is that battle between good and evil is fundamentally
played out as an internal drama. - Yeah, so for a religious
ethos, the battle between good and evil is fought within
each individual human heart? - Right, it's your moral duty to constrain evil within yourself. And while there's more to it than that, because there's also the
insistence that if you do that, that makes you the most effective possible like warrior, let's say, against evil itself in the
social world, that you start with the battle that occurs
within you in the soul, let's say, the soul
becomes the battleground between the forces of good and evil. The idea that there's an idea there too, which is if that battle is
undertaken successfully, then it doesn't have to be
played out in the social world as actual conflict, right? You can rectify the conflict
internally without it having to be played out as fate, as Jung put it. - So what would you say to Nietzsche who called Christianity
the slave morality? And his critique of religion in that way was slave morality
versus master morality. And then you put an Ubermensch into that. - Well, that's that, see, I would say that the woke phenomenon
is the manifestation of the slave morality
that Nietzsche criticized, and that there are
elements of Christianity that can be gerrymandered to support that mode of perception and conception. But I think he was wrong and he was wrong in
his essential criticism of Christianity in that regard. Now, it's complicated with Nietzsche because Nietzsche never criticizes the gospel stories directly. What he basically criticizes is something like the pathologies of
institutionalized religion. And I would say most particularly of the, what would you say, of the sort of casually
too nice Protestant form, you know, that's a thumbnail sketch and perhaps somewhat unfair, but given the alignment, let's say, of the more mainstream
Protestant movements with the woke mob, I don't
think it's an absurd criticism. And it's something like the degeneration of Christianity into the notion that good and harmless are the same thing, or good and empathic are the same thing, which is simply not true
and far too simplified. And I also think Nietzsche
was extremely wrong in his presumption that
human beings should take it to themselves to construct
their own values. I think he made a colossal
error in that presumption. - And that is the idea of the Ubermensch, that the great individual, the best of us, should create our own values. - Well, and I think the
reason that he was wrong about that is that, so when
God gives instructions to Adam and Eve in the Garden of
Eden, he basically tells them that they can do anything they
want in the walled garden. So that's the kind of
balance between order and nature that makes up
the human environment. Human beings have the freedom, vouch safe to them by God to do anything they want in the garden, except to mess with the
most fundamental rule. So God says to people, you're
not to eat of the fruit of the tree, of the
knowledge of good and evil, which fundamentally means there is an implicit moral
order, and you're to abide by it. Your freedom stops at the foundation. And you can think about that. I'd be interested even
in your ideas about this as an engineer, let's say, is that, there is an ethos that's
implicit in being itself, and your ethos has to
be a reflection of that. And that isn't under your control. You can't gerrymander the foundation because your foundational beliefs have to put you in harmony,
like musical harmony with the actual structure
of reality as such. So I can give you an example of that. So our goal insofar as we're
conducting ourselves properly, is to have the kind of
interesting conversation that allows both of us to
express ourself in a manner that enables us to learn and grow such that we can share that with everyone who's listening. And if our aim is true and upward, then that's what we're doing, well, that means that we're
going to have to match ourselves to a pattern of interaction. And that's marked for us emotionally. Like you and I both know this,
if we're doing this right, we're gonna be interested
in the conversation. We're not gonna be looking at our watch, we're not gonna be thinking
about what we're aiming at, we're just gonna communicate. Now, the religious
interpretation of that would be that we were doing something like making the redemptive logos manifest
between us in dialogue. And that's something that can be shared. To do that, we have to
align with that pattern. I can't decide that
there's some arbitrary way that I'm gonna play you. I mean, I could do that if I
was a psychopathic manipulator, but to do that optimally, I'm not going to impose a certain mode of, a certain a priori aim, let's say, on our communication and
manipulate you into that. So the constraints on my ethos reflect the actual structure of the world. And I can't, this is the
communist presumption. It's like we're gonna burn everything down and we're gonna start from scratch, and we've got these
axiomatic presumptions, and we're gonna put them into place and we're gonna socialize people. So they now think and live
like communists from day one. And human beings are infinitely malleable, and we can use a rational set
of presuppositions to decide what sort of beings they should be. The transhumanists are doing this too. It's like, no, there's a pattern of being that you have to fall into alignment with. And I think it's the
pattern of being by the way, that if you fall into alignment
with it gives you hope. It protects you from anxiety and it gives you a sense of harmony with your surroundings
and with other people. And none of that's arbitrary. - But don't you think we both
arrived to this conversation with rigid axioms that we have,
maybe we're blind to them, but in the same way that the Marxist came with very rigid axioms
about the way the world is and the way it should be. Aren't we coming to that? - Well, we definitely
come to the conversation with a hierarchy of
foundational axioms, right? And I would say the more
sophisticated you are as a thinker, the deeper the level at
which you're willing to play. So imagine first that
you have presumptions of different depth. There's more predicated on
the more fundamental axioms. And then that there's a
space of play around those. And that space of play is going to depend on the sophistication
of the player, obviously. But those who are capable of engaging in deeper conversations talk about more fundamental
things with more play. Now, we have to come to the conversation with a certain degree of structure, because we wouldn't be able
to understand each other or communicate if a lot of
things weren't already assumed or taken for granted. - How rigid is the hierarchy of axioms that religion provides? This is what I'm trying to understand, the rigidity of that hierarchy. - It's rigid as play. - Well, play is not rigid at all. - No, no, no, no, no, no, it's gotta be. - There's some constraints. - It took me about 40 years to figure out the answer to that question. So it wasn't, I'm serious about that. So it wasn't a random answer. So play is very rigid in some ways. So like, if you and I go out
to play basketball or chess, like there are rules and
you can't break the rules because then you're no longer in the game. But then there's a dynamism
within those rules that's, well, with chess, it's virtually infinite. I mean, I think, what is
it, there's more patterns of potential games on a chess board than there are subatomic particles in the observable universe. Like it's an insane space. So it's not like there's
not freedom within it, but it's a weird paradox
in a way, isn't it? Because music is like this too, is that there are definitely rules. And there are things, you can't throw a basketball
into a chess board and still be playing chess. But weirdly enough, if
you adhere to the rules, the realm of freedom increases
rather than decreasing. And I think you can make the same case for a playful conversation. It's like we're playing by certain rules, and a lot of them are implicit, but that doesn't mean that, it might mean the reverse
of constraint, you know? Because in this seminar, for example, that I was referring
to, the Exodus seminar and then the gospel seminar,
everybody in this seminar, there's about eight of us, played fair. Nobody used power. Nobody tried to prove they were right. They put forward their points, but they were like, here's
a way of looking at that, assess it. And they were also doing it genuinely. It's like, this is what I've
concluded about say this story and I'm gonna make a case for it, but I'd like to hear what you have to say because maybe you can change
it, you can extend it, you can find a flaw in it. And that's, well, that's a
conversation that has flow and that's engaging and that other people
will listen to as well. And that's also a, see, I
think that one of the things that we can conclude now, and we can do this even from
a neuroscientific basis, is that that's sense of engaged
meaning is a marker not only for the emergence of harmony between you and your environment,
but for the emergence of that harmony in a way
that is developmentally rich, that moves you upward
towards, what would you say? Well, I think towards a more
effective entropic state, that's actually the
technical answer to that. But it makes you more than you are, and there's a directionality in that. - Well, I would like to sort of, the reason I like talking about communism, because it has clearly been
shown as a set of ideas to be destructive to humanity. But I would like to understand from an
engineering perspective, the characteristics of
communism versus religion, where you could identify
religious thought is going to lead to a better human being, a better society. And communist Marxist thought is not. - [Jordan] Yeah, right. - Because there's ambiguity, there's room for play in communism and Marxism because they kind of
had a utopian sense of where everybody's headed, don't
know how it's gonna happen. Maybe revolution is required, but after the revolution is
done, we'll figure it out. And there's an underlying assumption that maybe human beings are good and they'll figure it out
once you remove the oppressor. I mean all these ideas kind of, until you put 'em into
practice, you could, they can be quite convincing, if you were in the 19th century. If I was reading, which
is kind of fascinating, the 19th century produced
such powerful ideas, Marx and Nietzsche. - Oh, fascism too, for that matter. - Fascism, so, you know,
if I was sitting there, like, especially if I'm
feeling shitty about myself, a lot of these ideas are pretty powerful as a way to plug the nihilist hole. - Yeah, right, absolutely. Well, and some of them may actually have an appropriate scope of application. It could be that some of
the foundational axioms of communism, socialism slash communism
are actually functional in a sufficiently small social group, maybe a tribal group even. Like I also have a, I'm
not sure this is correct, but I have a suspicion that
the pervasive attractiveness of some of the radical left ideas that we're talking about
are pervasive precisely because they are functional
within, say, families, but also within the small tribal groups that people might have
originally evolved into. And that once we become civilized, so we produce societies that
are united, even among people who don't know one another,
different principles have to apply as a consequence of scale. So that's partly an engineering response, but I think there's a
more, a deeper way of going after the communist problem. So I think part of the
communist, the problem, fundamental problem with the
communist axioms is the notion that the world of complex social
interactions can be simplified sufficiently so that
centralized planning authorities can deal with it. And I think the best way to think about the free exchange rejoinder to that presumption is no, the sum total of human interactions in a large
civilization are so immense that you need a distributed
network of cognition in order to compute
the proper way forward. And so what you do is you
give each actor their domain of individual choice so that they can maximize
their own movement forward. And you allow the aggregate direction to emerge from that rather than trying to
impose it from the top down, which I think is
computationally impossible. So that might be one engineering reason why the communist solution doesn't work. Like I read in Solzhenitsyn, for example, that the central Soviet
authorities often had to make 200 pricing decisions a day. Now, if you've ever started a
business or created a product and had to wrestle with
the problem of pricing, you'd become aware of just
how intractable that is. Like how do you calculate worth? Well, there's the central
existential problem of life. How do you calculate worth? It's not something like a
central authority can sit down and just manage. And there is a lot of inputs that go into a pricing decision. And the free market answer
to that is something like, well, if you get the price right, people will buy it and you'll survive. - This is a fascinating way
to describe how ideas fail. So communism perhaps fails because just like what people
believe the earth is flat, when you look outside, it looks flat, but you can't see beyond
the horizon, I guess. So in the same way with communism, communism seems like a
great idea in my family and my people I love,
but it doesn't scale. - And it doesn't iterate. And that's a form scaling of too. - Well, I mean, whatever
ways it breaks down, it doesn't scale. And you're saying religious thought is a thing that might scale. - I would say religious thought
is the record of those ideas that have in fact scaled, right. - In theory.
- And iterated. - Does religious thought iterate? So I mean, there's a
fundamental conservative aspect to religious thought, tradition. - This is why I like
Mircea Eliade, for example, who I referred to earlier,
one of the things Eliade did and very effectively, and
people like Joseph Campbell, who in some ways were popularizer of Eliade's ideas, and Carl Jung's, what they really did was devote themselves to an analysis of those ideas that scaled and iterated across the
largest possible spans of time. And so Eliade and Jung, Erich
Neumann, they were looking, and Campbell, they were looking
at patterns of narrative that were common across
religious traditions that had spanned millennia
and found many patterns. The hero's myth, for example,
is one of those patterns, and it's, I think the evidence that it has its reflection
in human neurophysiology and neuropsychology is incontrovertible. And so these foundational
narratives, they last, they're common across
multiple religious traditions. They unite, they work psychologically, but they also reflect the underlying
neurophysiological architecture. So I can give you an example of that. So the hero myth is really a quest myth. And a quest myth is really
a story of exploration and expansion of adaptation, right? So Bilbo the Hobbit, he's a
kind of an ordinary everyman. He lives in a very constrained
and orderly and secure world. And then the quest call
comes and he goes out and he expands his personality
and develops his wisdom. And that's reflected in human neuropsychological architecture at a very low level, way below cognition. So one of the most fundamental elements of the mammalian brain, and even in lower animal
forms, is the hypothalamus. It's sort of the root
of primary motivation. So it governs lust and it
regulates your breathing, and it regulates your hunger,
and it regulates your thirst and it regulates your temperature. Like really low level
biological necessities are regulated by the hypothalamus. When you get hungry,
it's the hypothalamus. When you're activated in a
defensively aggressive manner, that's the hypothalamus. Half the hypothalamus is the origin of the dopaminergic tracts,
and they subsume exploration. And so you could think of the
human motivational reality as a domain that's governed by axiomatic motivational states, love, sex, defensive aggression, hunger, and another domain that's
governed by exploration. And the rule would be something like when your basic motivational
states are stated, explore, well, and then, and that's not cognitive, like I said, this is deep, deep brain architecture. It's extraordinarily ancient. And the exploration
story is something like go out into the unknown and take the risks because the information that you discover and the skills you
develop will be worthwhile even in saving the basic
motivational drives. And then you wanna learn to
do that in a iterative manner. So it sustains across time,
and you wanna do it in a way that unites you with other people. And there's a pattern to that. And I do think that's the
pattern that's we strive to encapsulate in our
deep religious narratives. And I think that in many ways
we've done that successfully. - What is the belief in God? How does that fit in? What does it mean to believe in God? - Okay, so in one of
the stories that I cover in "We Who Wrestle With God,"
which I only recently begun to take apart say in the last two years, is the story of Abraham. And it's a very cool story, and it's also related by the way, to your question about
what makes communism wrong. And Dostoevsky knew this, not
precisely the Abraham story, but the same reason. In "Notes From Underground," Dostoevsky made a very
telling observation. So he speaks in the voice
of a cynical nihilistic and bitter bureaucrat
who's been a failure, who's talking cynically about
the nature of human beings, but also very accurately. And one of the things he
points out with regards to modern utopianism is that human beings are
very strange creatures. And that if you gave them what
the socialist utopians want to give them, so let's say all
your needs are taken care of, all your material needs are taken care of, and even indefinitely,
Dostoevsky's claim was, you don't understand
human beings very well, because if you put them
in an environment that was that comfortable, they would
purposefully go insane, just to break it into bits, just so something interesting
would happen, right? And he says it's the human proclivity to curse and complain. And he says this in quite
a cynic and caustic manner, but he's pointing to something deep, which is that we're not built
for comfort and security. We're not infants, we're
not after satiation. So then you might ask, well, what the hell are we after then? That's what the Abraham story addresses. And Abraham is the first true individual in the biblical narrative. So you could think about his
story as the archetypal story of the developing individual. So you said, well, what's God? Well, in the Abraham story,
God is characterized a lot of different ways in the
classic religious texts, like the Bible is actually a compilation of different characterizations
of the divine with the insistence that they
reflect an underlying unity. In the story of Abraham, the divine is the call to adventure. So Abraham has the
socialist utopia at hand. He's from a wealthy family,
and he has everything he needs. And he actually doesn't do anything, until he is in his seventies. Now, hypothetically, people in those times lived much longer, but a voice comes to Abraham and it tells him something very specific. It says, leave your zone of comfort. Leave your parents, leave your
tent, leave your community. Leave your tribe, leave your
land, go out into the world. And Abraham thinks, well, why? I've got naked slave girls peeling grapes and feeding them to me, it's like, what do I need an adventure for? And God tells them, and this
is the covenant, by the way, part of the covenant that the God of the Israelites makes with his people. It's very, very specific,
it's very brilliant. He says, if you follow
the voice of adventure, you'll become a blessing to yourself. So that's a good deal
because people generally live at odds with themselves. And he says, God says, that's not all. You'll become a blessing
to yourself in a way that furthers your reputation among people and validly so that you'll
accomplish things that were real, and people will know it,
and you'll be held high in their esteem, and that will be valid. So that's a pretty good deal because social people
would like to be regarded as of utility and worth by others. And so that's a good deal. And God says, that's not all. You'll establish something of lasting permanent and deep value. And that's why Abraham
becomes the father of nations, and finally caps it off. And he says, there's a
better element even to it. There's a capstone, you'll do all three of those things in a way that's maximally beneficial
to everyone else. And so the divinity in the Abrahamic story is making a claim. He says, first of all, there's a drive that you should attend to,
so the spirit of adventure that calls you out of
your zone of comfort. Now, if you attend to that and you make the sacrifices
necessary to follow that path, then the following benefits
will accrue to you. Your life will be a blessing. Everyone will hold you in high esteem. You'll establish something
of permanent value, and you'll do it in a way that's maximally beneficial
to everyone else. And so think about what
this means biologically or from an engineering standpoint. It means that the instinct to develop that characterizes outward
moving children, let's say, or adults, is the same
instinct that allows for psychological stability, that allows for movement upward in a social hierarchy, that establishes something iterable. And that does that in a manner
that allows everyone else to partake in the same process. Well, you know, that's a good deal. And like I can't see
how it cannot be true. Because the alternative hypothesis
would be that the spirit that moves you beyond yourself to develop, the spirit of a curious child, let's say, what is that antithetical to? Your own esteem? Is that antithetical to
other people's best interest? Is it not the thing that
increases the probability that you'll do something permanent? That's a stupid theory. - So God is a call to adventure
with some constraints. - A call to true adventure.
- To true adventure. - Yeah, and then that's a good observation because that begs the question, what constitutes the most true adventure? Well, that's not fully fleshed out until, at least from the Christian
perspective, let's say, that's not fully fleshed
out until the gospels because the passion of Christ is the, you could say this is the
perfectly reasonable way of looking at it. The passion of Christ is the
truest adventure of Abraham. That's a terrible thing,
eh, because it's a, the passion story is a
catastrophic tragedy, although it obviously has
its redemptive elements. But one of the things
that's implied there is that there's no distinction between
the true adventure of life and taking on the pathway of maximal responsibility and burden. And I can't see how that cannot be true. Like, 'cause the counter
hypothesis is, well, Lex, the best thing for
you to do in your life is to shrink from all challenge and hide, right, to remain infantile,
to remain secure. Not to ever push yourself
beyond your limits, not to take any risks. Well, no one thinks that's true. - So basically, the maximally
worthwhile adventure could possibly be highly correlated with the hardest possible
available adventure. - The hardest possible available adventure voluntarily undertaken. - Does it have to be voluntary? - It has to be, absolutely. - How do you define voluntarily? - Well, here's an example of that. That's a good question too. When Christ is, the night
before the crucifixion, which in principle he knows is coming, he asks God to relieve him of his burden. And understandably so. I mean, that's the scene
famously in which he's sweating, literally sweating blood
because he knows what's coming. And the Romans designed crucifixion to be the most agonizing and humiliating possible,
agonizing, humiliating, and disgusting possible death, right? So there is every reason to
be apprehensive about that. And you might say, well,
could you undertake that voluntarily as an adventure? And the answer to that is something like, well, what's your relationship with death? That's a problem you have to solve. And you could fight it and
you could be bitter about it. And there's reasons for that, especially if it's painful and degrading. But the alternative is something like, well, that's what's fleshed out
in religious imagery always. It's very difficult to cast into words. It's like, no, you welcome the struggle. That's why I called the book
"We Who Wrestle With God," you welcome the struggle. And Lex, I don't see how
you can come to terms with life without construing
it something like, construing it as something
like bring it on. Welcome the struggle. And I can't say that
there's a limit to that. It's like, well, I welcome the struggle until it gets difficult, well. - So there's not a bell curve like the struggle in moderation. Basically, you have to welcome
whatever as hard as it gets. And the crucifixion in
that way is a symbol. - Of that, well, it's worse
than that in some ways because the crucifixion exemplifies the worst possible death. But that isn't the only
element of the struggle because mythologically classically, after Christ's death, he herlads hell. And what that means, as far
as I can tell psychologically, is that you're not only
required, let's say, to take on the full
existential burden of life and to welcome it
regardless of what it is, and to maintain your upward aim, despite all temptations to the contrary. But you also have to confront the root of malevolence itself. So it's not merely tragedy. And I think the malevolence
is actually worse. And the reason I think that is because I know the literature on post-traumatic stress disorder, and most people who encounter, let's say, a challenge that's so brutal
that it fragments them, it isn't mere suffering
that does that to people. It's an encounter with
malevolence that does that to people, their own sometimes, often by the way, soldier
will go out into a battlefield and find out that there's a part of him that really enjoys the mayhem and that conceptualization
doesn't fit in well with everything he thinks
he knows about himself and humanity. And after that contact with
that dark part of himself, he never recovers. That happens to people. And it happens to people who encounter bad actors in the world too. If you're a naive person and the right narcissistic
psychopath comes your way, you are in like mortal
trouble because you might die. But that's not where the trouble ends. - If there's a young man
in their twenties listening to this, how do they escape the pull of Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground"? With the eyes open to the world, how do they select the adventure? - So there's other characterizations of the divine, say, in
the Old Testament story. So one pattern of characterization that I think is really
relevant to that question is the conception of God as
calling and conscience. Okay, so what does it mean? It's a description of the manner in which your
destiny announces itself to you. And I'm using that terminology and it's distinguishable
say from Nietzsche's notion that you create your own values. It's like, part of the way you
can tell that that's wrong is that you can't voluntarily gerrymander your own interests, right? Like you find some things interesting and that seems natural and autonomous and other things you
don't find interesting and you can't really force yourself to be interested in them. Now, so what is the domain of interest that makes itself manifest to you? Well, it's like an autonomous spirit. It's like certain things
in your field of perception are illuminated to you think,
oh, that's interesting, that's compelling, that's gripping. Rudolf Otto, who studied the phenomenology of religious experience
described that as numinous, the thing grips you 'cause
you're compelled by it. And maybe it's also
somewhat anxiety provoking. It's the same reaction that like a cat has to a dog when when the
cat's hair stands on end. That's an awe response. And so there's gonna be things in your phenomenological
field that pull you forward, compel you, that's like the voice of
positive emotion and enthusiasm. Things draw you into the world. Might be love, might
be aesthetic interest. It might be friendship,
it might be social status, it might be duty and industriousness. Like there's various domains
of interest that shine for people, that's sort
of on the positive side. God is calling, right? That would be akin to the
spirit of adventure for Abraham. But there's also, God is conscience. And this is a useful thing to know too. Certain things bother you. They take root within you and they turn your thoughts
towards certain issues. Like there are things you're interested in that you've pursued your whole life. There are things I'm
interested in that I felt as a moral compulsion. And so you could think, and
I think the way you can think about it technically is that
something pulls you forward so that you move ahead and you develop and then another voice. This is a voice of negative emotion, says, while you're moving forward, stay on this narrow pathway, right? And it'll mark deviations and
it marks deviations with shame and guilt and anxiety, regret. And that actually has
a voice, don't do that. Well, why not? Well, you're wandering off
the straight narrow path. So the divine marks the
pathway forward and reveals it, but then puts up the
constraints of conscience. And the divine in the Old
Testament is portrayed not least as the dynamic
between calling and conscience. - What do you do with
the negative emotions? You didn't mention envy. There's some really dark ones that can really pull you
into some bad places. Envy, fear. - Yeah, envy's a really bad one. Pride and envy are among the worst. Those are the sins of Cain, by the way, in the story of Cain and Abel 'cause Cain fails because his
sacrifices are insufficient. He doesn't offer his best,
and so he's rejected. And that makes him bitter and unhappy. And he goes to complain to God. And God says to him two things. He said, God tells him if your sacrifices were
appropriate, you'd be accepted. It's a brutal thing,
it's a brutal rejoinder. And he also says, you can't blame your
misery on your failure. You could learn from your failure. When you failed, you invited
in the spirit of envy and resentment and you
allowed it to possess you. And that's why you're miserable. And so Cain is embittered by that response and that's when he kills Abel. And so you might say, well, how do you fortify yourself against
that pathway of resentment? And part of classic religious practice is aimed to do that precisely. What's the antithesis of envy? Gratitude. That's something you can practice, right? And I mean literally practice. - I think envy is one
of the biggest enemies for a young person. Because basically you're
starting from nowhere. Life is hard, you've achieved nothing. And you're striving and you're
failing constantly because. - And you see other people whom you think aren't
having the same problem. - Yeah, and they succeed. And they could be your neighbor,
they could be succeeding by a little bit or somebody on the internet succeeding by a lot. And I think that that can
really pull a person down. That kind of envy can
really destroy a person. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, the gratitude element
would be something like, well, yeah, you don't know anything
and you're at the bottom, but you're not 80. You know, one of the best predictors of wealth in the United States is age. So then you might say,
well, who's got it better? The old rich guy or the young poor guy. And I would say most old
rich guys would trade their wealth for youth. So it's not exactly clear
at all at any stage, who's got the upper hand,
who's got the advantage? And you know, you could say, well, I've got all these
burdens in front of me because I'm young and oh my God. Or you could say, every dragon has its treasure and that's actually a
pattern of perception. You know, I'm not saying that people don't have their challenges. They certainly do, but
discriminating between a challenge and an opportunity is
very, very difficult. And learning to see a
challenge as an opportunity, that's the beginning of wisdom. - It's interesting, I
don't know how it works. Maybe you can elucidate, but when you have envy towards somebody, if you just celebrate them. So gratitude, but actually,
as opposed to sort of ignoring and being grateful for
the things you have, like literally celebrate that person. It transforms it, like it lights the way. I don't know why that is exactly. - The only reason you're envious is because you see someone who
has something that you want. Okay, let's think about it. Well, first of all, the
fact that they have it means that in principle, you could
get it, at least someone has. So that's a pretty good deal. And then you might say, well,
the fact that I'm envious of that person means that
I actually want something. And then you might think,
well, what am I envious of? I'm envious of their
attractiveness to women. It's like, okay, well now you
know something about yourself. You know that one true motivation that's making itself manifest
to you is that you wish that you would be the sort of person who was attractive to women. Now, of course, that's an extremely common
longing among men, period. But particularly among young men. It's like, well, what makes you so sure you couldn't have that? Well, how about, here's an answer. You don't have enough faith in yourself, and maybe you don't have enough faith in, well, I would say the divine. You don't believe that
the world is characterized by enough potentiality, so that even miserable you
has a crack at the brass ring. And like, I talked about this
actually practically in one of my previous books, 'cause
I wrote a chapter called compare yourself to who you are and not to someone else
at the present time. Well, why? Well, your best benchmark
for tomorrow is you today. And you might not be able to have what someone else has on the particular axis
you're comparing yourself with them on. But you could make an
incremental improvement over your current state, regardless of the direction
that you're aiming. And it is the case, and this is a law. The return on incremental
improvement is exponential or geometric and not linear. So even if you start, this is why the hero is
always born in a lowly place. Mythologically, right? Christ who redeems the
world is born in a manger with the animals to
poverty stricken parents in the middle of a God-forsaken desert in a nondescript time and place, isolated. Well, why? Well, because everyone young struggles with their insufficiency. But that doesn't mean that great things can't
make themselves manifest. And part of the insistence
in the biblical text, for example, is that it's incumbent on you to have the courage to
have faith in yourself and in the spirit of reality,
the essence of reality, regardless of how you
construe the evidence at hand. Right, look at me, I'm so
useless, I don't know anything. I don't have anything, it's hopeless. I don't have it within me. The world couldn't offer
me that possibility. Well, what the hell do
you know about that? This is what Job figures out in the midst of his suffering in the Book of Job 'cause Job is tortured terribly by God, who makes a bet with Satan
himself to bring him down. And Job's decision in the face
of his intense suffering is, I'm not going to lose faith
in my essential goodness. And I'm not going to lose
faith in the essential goodness of being itself, regardless of how terrible
the face it's showing to me at the moment happens to be. And I think, okay, what
do you make of that claim? Well, let's look at it practically. You're being tortured by
the arbitrariness of life. That's horrible, now you
lose faith in yourself and you become cynical about being, so are you infinitely worse off instantly? And then you might say, well, yeah, but it's really asking a lot of people that they maintain faith even, well, even in their darkest hours. It's like, yeah, that might be asking
everything from people. But then you also might ask, this is a very strange question, is it, if you were brought
into being by something that was essentially
good, wouldn't that thing that brought you into being demand that you make the best
in yourself manifest? And wouldn't it be precisely
when you most need that, that it would be that
you'd be desperate enough to risk what it would
take to let it emerge? - So you kind of make it seem
that reason could be the thing that takes you out of a place of darkness. Sort of finding that
calling through reason. I think it's also possible
when reason fails you to just take the leap,
navigate not by reason, but by finding the thing that scares you. The risk, to take the risk, take the leap, and then figure it out
while you're in the air. - Yeah, well, I think that's always part of a heroic adventure, you know, is that ability to cut the Gordian Knot. But you could also ask from
an engineering perspective, okay, what are the axioms that make a decision like that possible? And the answer would be
something like, I'm going to make the presumption
that if I move forward in good faith, whatever happens
to me will be the best thing that could possibly happen,
no matter what it is. And I think that's actually how you make an alliance with truth. And I also think that
truth is an adventure. And the way you make an alliance
with truth is by assuming that whatever happens to you,
if you are living in truth, is the best thing that could happen. Even if you can't see
that at any given moment 'cause otherwise you'd say that truth would be just
the handmaiden of advantage. Well, I'm gonna say something
truthful and I pay a price. Well, that means I shouldn't have said it. Well, that possibly, but that's not the only
possible standard of evaluation. Because what you're doing is you're making the outcome your deity, right. Well, I just reverse that and say, no, no, truth is the deity, the outcome is variable. But that doesn't eradicate
the initial axiom. Where's the constant,
right, what's the constant? - It may be when you said Abraham was being fed by naked ladies. - That's an interpolation, obviously, but. Wouldn't have been out
of keeping for the times. - But it does make me think
sort of in stark contrast to Nietzsche own life that perhaps getting laid early on in life is a useful starter. Step one, get laid and
then go for adventure. There's some basic
satiation of basic desires. - I think it's perfectly reasonable to bring the sexual element in because it's a powerful motivating force and it has to be integrated. I don't think it's adventure,
it's romantic adventure. - Right, right, but the
lack of basic interaction, sexual interaction, I
feel like is the engine that drives towards that
cynicism of the incel. In Dostoevsky, "Notes From Underground." - Oh, it is but there's very
little doubt about that. We know perfectly well anthropologically that the most unstable social
situation you can generate is young men with no access to women. That's not good, and they'll do anything, anything to reverse that situation. So that's very dangerous. But then I would also say
there's every suggestion that the pathway of adventure
itself is the best pathway to romantic attractiveness. And we know this in some
ways, in a very blunt manner. The Google boys, the
engineers who are too, what would you say, naively
oriented towards empirical truth to know when they're being
politically incorrect. They wrote a great book called
"A Billion Wicked Thoughts," which I really like,
it's a very good book. And it's engineers as psychologists. And so they'll say all
sorts of things that no one with any sense would ever
say that happened to be true. And they studied the pattern
of pornographic fantasy, and women like pornographic
stories, not images. So women's use of pornography is literary. Who are the main protagonists in female pornographic fantasy? Pirates, werewolves, vampires, surgeons. Billionaires, Tony Stark. And so the basic pornographic narrative is beauty and the beast,
those five categories, terrible aggressive male tamable
by the right relationship, hot erotic attraction. And so I would say to the young men who, and I have many times to the young men who are locked in isolation, it's, first of all, join the bloody club because the default value of a 15-year-old male on
the mating market is zero. And there's reason for that, you know? And zero is a bit of an
exaggeration, but not much. And the reason for that is,
well, what the hell do you know? Like, you're not good for anything. You have potential and maybe plenty, and hopefully that'll be made manifest, but you shouldn't be all upset because you're the same loser as everyone else your age has always been since the beginning of time. But then you might ask, well,
what should I do about it? And the answer is, get yourself together. You know, stand up straight
with your shoulders back, take on some adventure, find your calling, abide by your conscience,
put yourself together and you'll become attractive. And we know this is, look,
we know this is true. The correlation between
male sexual opportunity and relative masculine
status is about 0.6. That's higher than the correlation between intelligence and
academic achievement. I don't think that there's
a larger correlation between two independent phenomena in the entire social science
and health literature than the correlation between
relative male social status and reproductive success. It's by far the most
fundamental determinant. - But what's the cause and effect there? - It's a loop, men are motivated
to attain social status because it confers upon
them reproductive success. And that's not only
cognitively, but biologically. I'll give you an example of this. There's a documentary I
watch from time to time, which I think is the most brilliant
documentary I've ever seen. It's called "Crumb," and it's the story of this underground cartoonist, Robert Crumb, who was in high
school, was in the category of males for whom a date
was not only not likely, but unimaginable. So he was at the bottom
of the bottom rung. And almost all the reactions
he got from females wasn't just, no, it was like,
are you out of your mind? Like with that contempt, right? And then he became successful. And so the documentary
is super interesting because it tracks the utter pathology of his sexual fantasies because
he was bitter and resentful. And like, if you wanna
understand the psychology of serial sexual killers and the like, and you watch Crumb, you'll
know, find out a lot more about that than anybody with any
sense would want to know. But then he makes this
transition, and partly 'cause he does take the
heroic adventure path. And he actually has a family and children. And he's actually a pretty
functional person as opposed to his brothers, one of
whom commits suicide. And one of whom is literally
a repeat sexual offender. It's a brutal documentary. But what he did in his adolescence after being rejected was he
found what he was interested in. He was a very good artist, he
was very interested in music, and he started to pursue
those sort of single-mindedly. And he became successful. And as soon as he became successful and the documentary
tracks this beautifully, he's immediately attractive to women. And then you might ask too,
even if you're cynical, it's like, well, why do I have to perform for women? And the answer to that is something like, why the hell should they have anything to do with you, if you're useless? They're gonna have infants. They don't need another one, right? Partly the reason that
women are hypergamous, they want males who are of
higher status than they are, is because they're trying to redress the reproductive burden. And it's substantial. I mean, the female of
any species is the sex that devotes more to the
reproductive function. That's a more fundamental definition than chromosomal differentiation. And that's taken to its
ultimate extreme with humans. And so of course, women are
gonna want someone around that's useful because the
cost of sex for them is an 18-year-old period of
dependency with an infant. So I think the adventure comes first. - Heroic adventure comes first. - Well, it's complex
because the other problem, let's say with the Crumb boys, is that their mother was
extremely pathological and they didn't get a lot of genuine feminine
nurturance and affection. - Oh, of course, but the family and society are not going
to help you most of the time with the heroic adventure, right? They're going to be a
barrier versus a catalyst. - Well, in good families, they're both, because they put up
constraints on your behavior. But they, like, I've interviewed a lot of successful people about
their calling, let's say 'cause I do that with
all my podcast guests. How did the path that you took to success make itself manifest? And it's very, the pattern's very typical. Almost all the people that I've interviewed had
a mother and a father. Now, it's not invariant, but I'd say it's there in 99% of the time. It's really high, and both of the parents, or at least one of them, but often both were very encouraging of the person's interests
and pathway to development. - That's fascinating. I've heard you analyze it that way before. And I had a reaction to that idea 'cause you focused on the
positive of the parents. I feel like it was the, maybe I see biographies differently, but it feels like the struggle within the family was the
catalyst for greatness in a lot of biographies. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it. - No, no, I don't think you, I think that that's a reflection, maybe, correct me if I'm wrong. I think that's a
reflection of that dynamic between positive and negative emotion. Like my son, for example,
who's doing just fine, he's firing on all cylinders
as far as I'm concerned. He has a nice family, he
gets along with his wife. He's a really good musician. He's got a company he's running well, he's a delight to be around. He was a relatively disagreeable infant. He was tough-minded. And so he didn't take no for an answer. And so there was some tussle
in regulating his behavior. He spent a lot of time when he was two, sitting on the steps trying
to get his act together. And so that was the constraint but that wasn't something that was, it's an opposition to him in a way because it was in opposition
to the immediate manifestation of his hedonistic desires. But it was also an impetus
to further development. The rule for me when he
was on the stairs was, as soon as you're willing to
be a civilized human being, you can get off the stairs. And you might think, well, that's nothing but arbitrary, super ego,
patriarchal oppressive constraint. Or you could say, well, no, what I'm actually doing is facilitating his cortical maturation. Because when a child misbehaves, it's usually because
they're under the domination of some primordial emotional
or motivational impulse. They're angry, they're overenthusiastic, they're upset, they're selfish. Like it's narrow
self-centeredness expressed in a immature manner. - But see, okay, tell me if I'm wrong, but it feels like the engine of greatness, at least on the male side of things, has often been trying to
prove the father wrong or trying to gain the
acceptance of the father. So that tension where the
parent is not encouraging, like you mentioned, but
is basically saying, no, you won't be able to do this. - Okay, so my observation
as a psychologist has been that it's very, very difficult for someone to get their act together unless they have at least
one figure in their life that's encouraging and shows
them the pathway forward. So you can have a lot of
adversity in your life, and if you have one person
around who's a good model and you're neurologically intact, you can latch onto that model. Now, you can also find
that model in books. And people do that sometimes. Like I've interviewed people who had pretty fragmented
childhoods who turned to books and found the pattern
that guided them in like, let's say the adventures
of the heroes of the past. Because that's a good
way of thinking about it. And I read a book called
"Angela's Ashes" that was written by an Irish author, Frank McCourt, fantastic book, beautiful book. And his father was an alcoholic
of gargantuan proportions. He just, an Irish drinker
who drank every cent that came into the family and many of whose
children died in poverty. And what Frank did is a
testament to the human spirit, is he sort of divided his father conceptually into two elements. There was sober morning
father who was encouraging and with whom he had a relationship. And then there was drunk and useless later afternoon
and evening father. And he rejected the negative and he amplified his
relationship with the positive. Now, like he had other
things going for him, but he, you know, he did a very
good job of discriminating. And I mean, partly the
question that you're raising is to what degree is it useful to
have a beneficial adversary? Yeah, and I mean, struggle-free
progress is not possible. And I think there are
situations under which where, you know, you might be
motivated to prove someone in your immediate circle wrong, but then that also implies
that at some level, for some reason you actually
care about their judgment. You know, you just didn't
write them off completely. - Well, I mean, that's why
I say there's an archetype of a young man trying to gain the approval of his father. And I think that repeats itself in a bunch of biographies that I've read. I don't know, there must
have been an engine somewhere that they found of
approval, of encouragement, maybe in books, maybe in the mother or maybe the role of
the parents has flipped. - Well, my father was
hard to please, very. - Did you ever succeed? - Yes, but it wasn't easy ever. - When was the moment when you succeeded? - Late, pretty late, like 40, maybe later. - Was it gradual or a definitive moment
when a shift happened? - My father was always willing to approve of the things I did that were good. Although he was not effusive by any stretch of the imagination. And the standards were very high. Now, I was probably
fortunate for me, you know, and it does bear on the
question you're asking. It's like if you want someone
to motivate you optimally, God, it's complicated because there has to be a temperamental dance
between the two people. Like what you really want is for someone to apply the highest
possible standards to you that you're capable of reaching. Right, and that's a vicious dance because you have to have a relationship with your child to do that properly. You know, 'cause if you
wanna be optimally motivating as a father, you keep
your children on the edge. It's like you might not
reward something in your child that you would think would
be good in someone else because you think they could do better. And so my father was
pretty clear about the idea that he always expected me to do better. And was that troublesome? It was like, I felt often when I was young that there was no pleasing him. But I also knew that that wasn't, I knew that that wasn't right. See, I actually knew that wasn't right because I could remember, especially I think when I was very young, that I did things that
he was pleased about. I knew that was possible. So it wasn't unpredictable and arbitrary. It was just difficult. - It sounds like he's hit
a pretty good optimal, but it's for each individual
human that optimal differs. - Well, that's why you have to have a relationship with your children. You have to know them and
well with yourself too, and with your wife, you can't hit that optimal, that optimal is probably love. That's because love isn't just acceptance. Love is acceptance and encouragement. And it's not just that either,
it's also no, don't do that. That's beneath you,
you're capable of more. And how harsh should that be? It's like, that's a really hard question. You know, like if you really love someone, you're not gonna put up
with their stupidity. Don't do that, you know,
one of the rules I had with my little kids was don't do anything that makes you look like
an idiot in public, why? Because I don't want you
disgracing yourself, why not? Because I like you, I think you're great and you're not gonna act
like a bloody fool in public so that people get the
wrong idea about you, no. - What about inside a relationship? How a successful relationship is? How much challenge, how much peace? Is a successful relationship, one that is easy, one that is challenging? - I would say to some degree that depends on your temperament. My wife is quite a provocative person, and there are times when
I suppose do I wish that, there are times when I casually wish that she was easier to get along with. But as soon as I think about
it, I don't think that. Because I've always liked her. We were friends ever
since we were little kids. And she plays rough and I
like that as it turns out. Now that doesn't mean it isn't
a pain from time to time, but, you know, and that is gonna be a
temperamental issue to some degree and an issue of negotiation. Like she plays rough, but fair. And the fair part has been
establishing that's been part of our ongoing negotiation. - And part of it is in the play, you get to find out about yourself
or what your temperament is because I don't think that
that's clear until it's tested. - Oh, definitely not, definitely not. You find out all sorts of things about yourself in a
relationship, that's for sure. Well, and partly the reason
that there is provocative, especially from women
in relationship to men, is they want to test them out. It's like, can you hold your temper when someone's bothering you? Well, why would a woman wanna know that? Well, maybe she doesn't want
you to snap and hurt her kids. And so how's she gonna
find that out, ask you? Well, you're gonna say,
well, I'd never do that. It's like, never, eh, let's find out if it's never. So we don't know how
people test each other out in relationships, or why exactly. But it's intense and necessary. - What's your, and what's in general, should a man's relationship
with temper be? - You should have one and you
should be able to regulate it. Like that's part of that
attractiveness of the monstrous that characterizes women's fantasies. Right, because, and Nietzsche
pointed this out too, to go back to Nietzsche, you know, one of Nietzsche's claims was that most of what passes for morality
is nothing but cowardice. You know, I'd never cheat on my wife. It's like, is there anybody asking you to, that you actually find attractive? Or are there dozens of
people asking you to that you find attractive? It's like, well, I would never cheat. It's like, no, you just
don't have the opportunity. Now I'm not saying that
everyone's in that position, you know, that they would cheat even if they had the opportunity,
because that's not true. But, and it's the same with regards to, oh, I'm a peaceful man. It's like, no, you're not,
you're just a weak coward. You wouldn't dare to have a confrontation, physical or metaphysical, and you're passing it off as morality because you don't want to
come to terms with the fact of your own weakness and cowardice. And part of the, what I would say is twisted
pseudo Christian morality that Nietzsche was criticizing
was exactly of that sort. And it tied into resentment and envy. And he tied that in explicitly, said that failure in life
masked by the morality, that's nothing but weak cowardice turns to the resentment that undermines and destroys everything. And it does that purposefully. - Yeah, I think it was
criticizing if under the facade of niceness, there's
an ocean of resentment. - Yeah, that's for sure, that's for sure. That's also the danger of being
too forthcoming with people. See, this is another thing,
let's say about my wife who's not particularly agreeable. It's like she's not
particularly agreeable, but she's not resentful. And that's because she
doesn't give things away that she isn't willing to. And if you're agreeable and nice and you're conflict avoidant,
you'll push yourself too far to please the other person. And then that makes you
bitter and resentful. So that's not helpful. - Do you think you'll be in trouble for saying this on a podcast later? - No, no, we know each other pretty well. And like I said, it's a
trait that I find admirable. It's provocative and challenging. - And it seems to work. - Well, we've been together 50 years, so. - Quick pause, bathroom break. If we can descend from
the realm of ideas down to history and reality. I would say the time between World War I and World War II was one of history's biggest testing of ideas and really the most
dramatic kinds of ideas that helped us understand
the nature of good and evil. I just want to ask you sort of a question about good and evil. Churchill in many ways was not a good man. Stalin, as you've documented extensively, was a horrible man. But you can make the case
that both were necessary for stopping an even worse
human being in Hitler. So to what degree do you need
monsters to fight monsters? Do you need bad men to be able to fight off greater evils? - It's everything in its proper
place is the answer to that. You know, we might think that our life would be
easier without fear. Let's say, we might say that our life would be
easier without anger or pain, but the truth of the matter is that those things are beneficial, even though they can
cause great suffering, but they have to be in their proper place. And that capacity that could in one context be
a terrible force for evil can, in the proper context, be the
most potent force for good. A good man has to be formidable. And partly what that means,
as far as I can tell, is that you have to be able to say no and no means, like I
thought a lot about no, working as a clinician, because I did a lot of
strategic counseling with my clients in a lot of
extremely difficult situations. And I learned to take apart what no meant. And also when dealing
with my own children, because I used no sparingly, because it's a powerful weapon,
let's say, but I meant it. And with my kids, what it meant was, if you continue that pattern of behavior, something you do not
like will happen to you with 100% certainty. And when that's the case and you're willing to
implement it, you don't have to do it very often. With regards to monstrosity, it's like weak men aren't
good, they're just weak. That's Nietzsche's observation. That's partly, again, why he was tempted to place
the will to power, let's say, and to deal with that
notion in a manner that, when it was tied with the revaluation of all values was counterproductive and counterproductive
in the final analysis. It's not like there wasn't something to what he was driving at. You know, formidable men are admirable and you know, don't mess with them. Douglas Murray's a good example of that. He's, you know, he's a rather slight guy, but he's got a spine of steel and there's no more than a bit
of what's monstrous in him. And Jocko Willink is like that, and Joe Rogan is like
that, and you're like that. - But there's a different level. I mean, if you look, to me, Churchill might represent the
thing you're talking about, but World War II, Hitler would not be
stopped without Stalin. - Well, I wonder, yes, yes. - And if I may insert into
this picture of complexity, Hitler would've not
stopped until he enslaved and exterminated the entirety
of the Slavic people, the Jewish people, the
Slavic people, the gypsies, everybody who's not Aryan, but then Stalin in the
mass rape of German women by the Red Army as they march
towards Berlin, is a kind of manifestation, the full
monstrosity that a person can be. - You can easily be in this situation. You can easily unfortunately
find yourself in a situation where all you have in front of you are a variety of bad options. You know, that's partly
why, if you have any sense, you try to conduct yourself
very carefully in life because you don't want to be in a position where you've made so many mistakes that all the options
left to you are terrible. And so you said, well, was it
necessary to ally with Stalin? It's like, well, it's very difficult to second guess the trajectory of something as complex as World War II but we could say casually, at least as Westerners have in general, that that alliance was necessary. Now, I think the mistake that
the West made in the aftermath of World War II was in not
dealing as forthrightly with the catastrophes of communism as an ideology as we did with fascism. And that's especially true of the intellectuals in the universities. I mean, it was very common
when I was teaching, both at Harvard and at
the University of Toronto for the students in my personality class where we studied Solzhenitsyn, who's actually an existential
psychologist in many ways, and a deep one, none of them knew anything about the Soviet atrocities. None of them knew anything
about what happened in Ukraine. And the death of 6
million productive people. Had no idea that the communists
killed tens of millions of people in the aftermath
of the Russian Revolution. - They know even less about
Mao and The Great Leap Forward. - Right, right. Which some estimates are
a hundred million people. Now, you know, when your
error bars are in the tens of millions, well, that's a
real indication of a cataclysm. And nobody knows how many people
died from direct oppression or indirect in the Soviet Union. 20 million, it seems like
a reasonable estimate. Solzhenitsyn's upper bound
was higher than that. - And how do you measure
the intellectual output that was suppressed and killed off, the number of intellectuals, artists and writers that
were put into the gulags? - The productive farmers for that matter, and anyone who was
willing to tell the truth. Right, absolutely, so, yeah, catastrophic. And so I think the West's failure wasn't so much allying with Stalin. I mean, it was Douglas MacArthur
who wanted to continue. He thought we should
just take the Soviets out after the Second World War. And they removed them from
any position of authority where such a thing might be made possible. And people were tired
but was MacArthur wrong? Well, he certainly wasn't
wrong in his insistence that Stalin was as big a
monster as Hitler or bigger. So the valorization of
the leftist proclivity, the radical leftist proclivity
is the sin of the West, I think more intensely
than allying with Stalin. - Tricky nuanced topic. But if we look at the modern day and the threat of communism
Marxism in the United States, to me it's disrespectful to the atrocities of the 20th century to call somebody like
Kamala Harris a communist. But I see the sort of
escalation of the extremeness of language being used
when you call somebody like Donald Trump a fascist,
then it makes total sense to then use similar extreme terminology for somebody like Kamala Harris. But maybe I could ask your evaluation, if you look at the
political landscape today, somebody like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. - Okay, well, the first thing
I would say is that I think that viewing the political
landscape of today as a political landscape
is actually wrong. I think it's not the
right frame of reference, because what I see happening
are a very small percentage of dark tetrad personality types. So Machiavellian,
manipulative, narcissistic, wanting undeserved attention, psychopathic that makes them predatory
parasites and sadistic, because that goes along
with the other three. That's about in the serious manifestation, that's probably three
to 5% of the population. And they're generally kept
under pretty decent control by civilized people and
stable social interactions. I think that their
machinations are disinhibited by cost-free social media communication. So they gain disproportionate influence. Now, these people want
undeserved recognition and social status and everything
that goes along with it, and they don't care how they get it 'cause when I say they want that, I mean that's all they want. - So in the realm of social
media, you mentioned, yes, but are you also suggesting that they're overrepresented
in the realm of politics, politicians and so on? - They're overrepresented in the realm of fractious political discourse because they can use ideas,
first of all, they can use, let's say, the benevolent
ideas of the right and the benevolent ideas
of the left, either one, and switch back and forth for
that matter as a camouflage for what they're actually up to. - So how do you, you've
interviewed a lot of people and you have a really powerful mind. You have a good read on people. So how do you know when you're sitting across from a psychopath? - I wouldn't say that I do know. In normal social circumstances,
we have evolved mechanisms to keep people like that under control. Let's say that you and I
have a series of interactions and you screw me over once. I'm not gonna forget that. Now, I might not write you
off because of the one time, but if it happens three times, it's like we're not gonna
play together anymore. And in normal times, most of our social networks
are connected and interacting. So like if you ripped me off three times and I noted that, I'm
gonna tell everybody I know and they're gonna tell
everybody they know, and soon everyone will know, and that's the end of your tricks. But that assumes that we know who you are and we're in continual communication. Well, all of that's gone online. So anonymity does that and
so does the amplification of emotional intensity, by the social media platforms
and their algorithms. I think what we're doing, this is happening on Twitter
continually, is we're giving the 5% of psychopaths a
radically disproportionate voice. And what they're doing is there's a bunch of them on the left, and they're all, we're so compassionate, and there's a bunch of them on the right, and at the moment they're
all, we're so Christian and free speech oriented. It's like, no, you're not,
you're narcissistic psychopaths and that's your camouflage. And you hide behind your
anonymity and you use fractious and divisive language to attract fools and to elevate your social
status and your clout. And not only that, to
gain, what would you say, satisfaction for your sadistic impulses. - See, the problem is, it's hard to tell who is the psychopath and who
is a heterodox truth seeker. - Yeah, well, if you were charitable about Tucker Carlson's recent interview, you'd say that was exactly
the conundrum he faced. And it is hard, like I've
thought about, for example, interviewing Andrew Tate, and
I thought, I don't think so. And then I thought, why? I figured it's not obvious to me at all that he wouldn't charm me. So I knew this guy, Robert Hare. Robert Hare was the
world's foremost authority on psychopathy. He established the field
of clinical analysis of psychopathic behavior. And Hare was a pretty agreeable guy. So, you know, he would give
people the benefit of the doubt. And he interviewed hundreds
of serious psychopaths, like imprisoned violent offenders. And he told me in one of our conversations that every time he sat down with a violent offender psychopath, and he had a measure for psychopathy that was a clinical checklist, so he could identify the psychopaths from just the say run
of the mill criminals. Every time he sat down with them, they pulled the wool over his eyes. And it wasn't in, he
videotaped the interviews. And it wasn't until later when
he was reviewing the videos that he could see what they were doing, but in person, their tricks
were more sophisticated than his detection ability. - Well, okay, this is fascinating because again, you're a great interviewer. I would love it if you
interviewed somebody like Putin. So this idea that you
are a fool in the face of psychopathy just doesn't jive with me. - I'm an agreeable guy,
that's the problem, man. I'll give people the benefit
of the doubt right away. - But that's good because the
way you reveal psychopathy is by being agreeable, not weak, but seeking with empathy to
understand the other person and in the details, in
the little nuanced ways that they struggle with questions, the psychopathy is revealed. So from a, we're kind of just
to separate the two things. So one overrepresentation
of psychopathy online with anonymity, that's a
serious fascinating problem. But in the interview one-on-one. I don't know if the job of a human being in conversation is to
not talk to psychopaths, but to talk, I mean, like how
would you interview Hitler? - Well, you know, I've had very difficult
clinical interviews with people in my clinical practice. - So how do you approach that? - Well, I really probably approach that the way I approach
most conversations. And it's something like,
I'm going to assume that you're playing a straight
game, but I'm gonna watch, and if you throw the
odd crooked maneuver in, then I'll note it. And after you do it three
times, I'll think, okay, I see. I thought we were playing one game, but we're actually playing another one. And if I'm smart enough to pick that up, that usually works out
quite successfully for me. But I'm not always smart
enough to pick that up. - But see, here's the nice thing. There's the one-on-one conversation that's not recorded is
different than the one that's listened by a lot of people. Because I would venture to, I trust the intelligence of
the viewer and the listener. - Right, yeah, yeah. - To detect even better than you. - Yes, and I think
that's true, by the way. - To detect the psychopathy. - Yeah, I've had the odd
interview with people that I wasn't happy with having organized, because I felt that I
had brought their ideas to a wider audience than
might've been appropriate. But my conclusion and the
conclusion of my producers and the people I talked to was that we could run the
interview, the discussion and let the audience sort it out. And I would say they do. So I think as a general
rule of thumb, that's true. And I also think that the long form interviews
are particularly good at that because it's not that easy to maintain a manipulative stance,
especially if you're empty for like two and a half hours. So you get tired, you get irritable, you show that you lose the track. You're gonna start leaking
out your mistakes, and so. - And that actually is the
case for all the world leaders. I would say one hour is too short and something happens at
like two hour plus mark where you start to leak. And I trust in the
intelligence of the listener to sort, to detect that. - Yeah, and it might be the intelligence of the distributed crowd. And I mean, that is what I've seen with the YouTube interviews is
that it's hard to fool people as such over a protracted period of time. And I guess it's partly because everybody brings a
different, slightly different set of falsehood detectors to the table. And if you aggregate that,
it's pretty damn accurate. - But of course, you
know, it's complicated because ideas of Nazi ideology
spread in the twenties. There was a real battle
between Marxism and Nazis. - Oh, yeah.
- And I believe there's some attempts at
censorship of Nazi ideology. Censorship very often does the opposite. It gives the fringe ideologies power if they're being censored. Because that's an indication that the man in power doesn't
want the truth to be heard. This kind of idea. And that just puts fuel to the fire. - It also motivates the paranoid types because one of the reasons that paranoia spirals out of control is because paranoid people almost inevitably end up being persecuted
because they're so touchy and so suspicious that people
start to walk on eggshells around them as if there are things going on behind the scenes. And so then they get more
distrustful and more paranoid, and eventually they start
misbehaving so badly that they are actually persecuted often by legal authorities. And you know, it's down
the rabbit hole they go. And so, you know, Musk is
betting on that to some degree. Right, he believes that free expression on Twitter, X will sort itself
out and be of net benefit. And I follow a lot of
really bad accounts on X 'cause I like to keep an eye
on the pathology of the left, let's say, and the pathology of the right, thinking, at least in my clinical way that I'm watching the
psychopaths dance around and try to do with their subversion. And it's an ugly place to
inhabit, that's for sure. But it's also the case
that a very tiny minority of seriously bad actors can have a disproportionate influence. And one of the things
I've always hoped for, for social media channels is that they separate the anonymous accounts from the verified accounts. They should just be in
different categories. People who will say what they think and take the hits to their
reputation, anonymous types. If you want to see what the anonymous types
say, you can see it. But don't be confusing
them with actual people 'cause they're not the same. We know that people are,
we know that people behave more badly when they're anonymous. That's a very well established
psychological finding. Well, and I think the danger
to our culture is substantive. I think the reason that
everything, perhaps the reason that everything started
to go sideways pretty seriously around 2015 is because we invented these
new modes of communication. We have no idea how to police them. And so the psychopathic
manipulators, they have free reign. About 30% of the internet is pornography. A huge amount of internet
traffic is outright criminal. And there's a penumbra around that. That's, you know, psychopathic, narcissistic troublemaking trolls. And that might constitute the bulk of the interactions online. And it's partly because people
can't be held responsible. So the free riders have free reign. - It's a fascinating technical challenge of how to make our society resilient to the psychopaths on
the left and the right. - Yeah, it might be the
fundamental problem of the age, given the amplification of communication by our social networks. - And so to generalize across psychopaths. You could also think about bots which behave similar to
psychopaths in their certainty and not caring, they're
maximizing some function. They're not caring about
anything else, attention, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, short-term
attention even worse. Because you might, you know,
that's another problem, if the algorithms are
maximizing for the grip of short-term attention, they're acting like immature
agents of attention. Right, and so then imagine
the worst case scenario is negative emotion garners more attention and short-term gratification
garners more attention. So then you're maximizing for the grip of short-term attention
by negative emotion. I mean, that's not gonna be a principle. We were talking earlier about,
you know, unsustainable, unifying axioms. That's definitely, that's
definitely one of them. Maximize for the spread
of negative attention, negative emotion that
garners short-term attention. Jesus, brutal. - I just, I tend to not think there's
that many psychopaths. So maybe to push back a little bit, it feels like there's a
small number of psychopaths. - Three to 5% is the estimate worldwide. - In terms of humans? But in terms of the pattern
of stuff we see online, my hope is that a lot of people on the extreme left and extreme right, or just the trolls in
general are just young people kind of going through the similar stuff that we've been talking
about, trying on the cynicism and the resentment, there's
a drug aspect to it. There's a pull to that, to talk shit about somebody,
to take somebody down. I mean, there is some pleasure in that. There's a dark pull
towards that, and I think. - That's the sadistic pull. - And I think a lot of people, I mean, you see, when you say sadistic, it makes it sound like some
kind of, it's a pathology. - It's pleasure in the
suffering of others. - Right, but I just think that all of us have the capacity for that. All humans have the capacity for that. - Yeah, some more than others,
but everyone to some degree. - And when you're young, you don't understand the full implications of that on your own self. So if you participate in
taking other people down, that's gonna have a cost
on your own development as a human being, like it's gonna take you towards a Dostoevsky
"Notes From Underground" in the basement, cynical,
all that kind of stuff. - Yeah, alone. - Which is why a lot of
young people try it out. You know, the reason is
you get older and older, you realize that there's
a huge cost to that, so you don't do it. But there's young people that, so like I would like to sort of believe and hope that a large number of people who are trolls are just
trying out the derision. - No doubt. - And then so they can be saved. They could be helped. They could be shown that
there's more growth, there's more flourishing to
celebrating other people. And it actually, and criticizing ideas, but not in the way of derision LOL, but by formulating your
own self in the world, by formulating your ideas
in a strong, powerful way, and also removing the cloak of anonymity and just standing behind your ideas. And carrying the responsibility
of those ideas, yeah. - I think all of that is right. I think the idea that
that's more likely to occur among young people, that's clear. People as they mature, get more
agreeable and conscientious. So we actually know that what
you said is true technically. It's definitely the case that there's an innate
tilt towards pleasure in that sort of behavior. And it is associated to some degree with dominance driving. And I do think it's true, as
you pointed out, that many of the people who are
toying with that pattern can be socialized out of it. In fact, maybe most people, even the repeat criminal types tend to desist in their late
twenties, so imagine that. So 1% of the criminals
commit 65% of the crimes. So imagine that that 1% are the people that you're really concerned with. They often have stable
patterns of offending that emerged in very, very young, like even in infancy, and continued through adolescence and into adulthood. If you keep them in prison
until they're in their, in the middle of their late
twenties, most of them stop. And that might be the
easiest way to understand that might just be delayed maturation. So are most people salvageable? Yes, definitely. Is everyone salvageable? Well, at some point it becomes, first of all, they have
to wanna be salvaged. That's a problem. But then it also becomes
something like, well, how much resources are
you gonna devote to that? Like the farther down the
rabbit hole you've gone, the more energy it takes to haul you up. So there comes a point
where the probability that you'll be able to get
enough resources devoted to you to rescue you from the pit of
hell that you've dug is zero. And that's a very sad thing. And it's very hard to around someone who's in that situation, very, very hard. - And it seems that it's
more likely that the leaders of movements are going to be psychopaths, and the followers of movements are going to be the people that we're
mentioning that are kind of lost themselves to the
ideology of the movement. - Well, we know that what you said is true even
historically to a large degree, because Germany was
successfully de-nazified. And it's not like everybody who participated in every element of the Nazi movement
was brought to justice. Not in the least, the same
thing happened in Japan. So to some degree, the same thing happened in South Africa. Right, and so, and it's
the case for example, also in the stories that we
were referring to earlier, the biblical stories, the
patriarchs of the Bible, most of them are pretty bad people when they first start out. Like Jacob's a really good, Jacob is the one who becomes Israel. He's a major player in
the biblical narrative. And he's a pretty bad actor
when he first starts out, he's a mama's boy, he's a liar. He steals from his own brother and in a major way he deceives his father. He's a coward, you know, and
yet he turns his life around. - So be careful, the leaders
you idolize and worship, but then it's not always clear to know who is the good and who's
the evil, it's hard. You have been through some
dark places in your mind, over your life. What have been some of your darker hours and how did you find the light? - Well, I would say I started
contending with the problem of evil, very young, 13 or 14. And that's been the main, that was my main motivation of study for 30 years, I guess something like that. At the end of that 30 years,
it became more and more, I became more and more interested in fleshing out the alternative. Like once I became
convinced that evil existed, and that was very young, I always believed that if you could understand
something well enough that you could formulate a solution to it. But it turns out that seeing evil and understanding that it
exists is less complicated than a technical
description of its opposite. Like, what is good? You can say, well, it's not that. For sure it's not Auschwitz,
how about we start there? It's as far from Auschwitz as you can get. It's as far from enjoying being an Auschwitz camp guard as you can get. Okay, well where are you when
you're as far away from that as you could possibly get? What does that mean? And it does have something to do with play as far as I'm concerned. Like, I think the antithesis
of tyranny is play. So that took me a long time to
figure out that specifically, you know, and so that was very dark. Like I spent a lot of time studying the worst behaviors that I could discover abstractly in books, but also in my clinical practice and, and in my observations of people. And so that's rough. More recently, I was very ill and in a tremendous amount of pain, like that lasted pretty much without any break for three years. And what was particularly useful to me then was the strength
of my relationships, my immediate relationships,
my friendships. Also the relationships that I
had established more broadly with people, you know. Because by the time I became ill, I was reasonably well known and people were very supportive
when I was having trouble. And that was very helpful. But it's certainly the case that it was the connections I had,
particularly with my family, but also with my friends,
that were the saving grace. And that's something to
know, you know, I mean. It's necessary to bear the burdens of the world on your own
shoulders, that's for sure. The burdens of your own existence and whatever other
responsibilities you can mount. But that by no means, means that you can or should do it alone. And so, you know, you might say, well, welcoming the adversity of life as a redemptive challenge is a task that's beyond the ability
of the typical person or even maybe of anyone. But then when you think,
well, you're not alone, maybe you're not alone socially,
you're not alone familial, maybe you're not alone
metaphysically as well. You know, there's an insistence. And I think it's true. There's an insistence, for example, in the old and the New
Testament alike, that the more darkness you're willing
to voluntarily encounter, the more likely it is
that the spirit of Abraham and the patriarchs will walk with you. And I think that's right. Like I think it's sort of
technically true in that the best parts of yourself
make themselves manifest. If you want to think about it that way, the best parts of yourself,
whatever that means, make themselves manifest, when you're contending actively and voluntarily with the
most difficult challenges, why wouldn't it be that way? And then you could think,
well, that's yourself. It's like, well, are the
best unrevealed parts of you yourself? Well, no, they're a kind
of metaphysical reality. They're not yet manifest,
they only exist in potential. They transcend anything
you're currently capable of. But they have an existence,
you could call that yourself. But like it was Jung's contention, for example, with regards
to such terminology that the reason we used the
term self instead of God is because when God was
dispensed with, let's say, by the processes Nietzsche described, we just found the same thing deep within the instinctive realm. Let's say we found it at the bottom of the things instead of at the top. It's like, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter fundamentally, what matters is whether
or not that's a reality. And I think it's the fundamental reality because I do think that the
deeper you delve into things, this is what happens to Moses when he encounters the burning bush. So Moses is just going about
his life, he's a shepherd. He's an adult, he has wives, he has children, he has responsibilities. He's left his home and
he's established himself. And so things are pretty good for Moses. And then he's out by
Mount Horeb in that story. But it's the central
mountain of the world. It's the same mountain as Sinai, which is the place where
heaven and earth touch. And he sees something that
grabs his attention, right? That's the burning bush, and
bush is a tree, that's life. That's the tree of life. And the fact that it's on fire is that's life exaggerated 'cause everything that's alive is on fire. And so what calls to Moses is like the
spirit of being itself. And it tracks him off the beaten track and he decides to go investigate. So Moses is everyone who goes off the beaten
track to investigate. And so as he investigates, he delves more and more deeply until
he starts to understand that he's now walking on sacred ground. So he takes off his shoes, and that's a symbolic reference
of identity transformation. He's no longer walking the same path. He no longer has the same
identity, he's in a state of flux. And that's when what
happens is that he continues to interact with this calling. And Moses asks what it
is that's being revealed. And God says, I'm the
spirit of being itself. That's basically the
answer, I am what I am. It's a more complex utterance than that. I am what I will be, I
am what was becoming. It's all of that, at the same
time, it's the spirit of being that's speaking to him, the
spirit of being and becoming. And it tells Moses that he now, because he's delved so deeply
into something so compelling, his identity has transformed. And he's become the leader
who can speak truth to power. And so he allies himself
with his brother Aaron, who's the political arm,
and who can communicate. And he goes back to Egypt
to confront the tyrant. And that's an indication of that idea that if you wrestle with life properly, that the spirit of being
and becoming walks with you. And it's like, how can that not be true? 'Cause the contrary would be that there would be no
growth in challenge. Well, that's, you have to be infinitely
nihilistic to believe that. - It's obvious, but it's also just fascinating
that hardship is the thing that ends up being the
catalyst for delving deeply. - It's hardship voluntarily undertaken. Well, and it's crucially true. Look, if you bring someone into therapy, let's say, they're afraid of elevators and you trick them into getting near an elevator, you'll make them worse. But if you negotiate with them so that they voluntarily
move towards the elevator on their own recognizance,
they'll overcome their fear and they become generally braver. But it has to be voluntary. - See, I gotta push back and explore with you the
question of voluntarily. Let's look at Nietzsche. He suffered through several health issues throughout his life,
migraines, eyesight issues, digestive problems, depression
with suicidal thoughts. And yet he is one of the greatest minds in
the history of humanity. So were these problems that
he was suffering arguably involuntarily a feature or a bug? - That's a good question,
the same thing happens in the story of Job 'cause Job is a good man,
God himself admits it. And the Satan comes along and says to God, I see you're pretty proud of your man there, Job. God says, yeah, he's doing pretty well. And Satan says, I think it's just because things are easy for 'em. Let me have a crack at
him and see what happens. And God says, yeah, I think
you're wrong, do your worst. Right, and that's how people
feel when those slings and arrows come at them. Let's say like Nietzsche,
well, Job's response to that. Now the story is set up so that what befalls Job is actually
quite arbitrary, right? These catastrophes that you're describing, the volunteerism in Job is his refusal to despair even in the
face of that adversity. And that seems like
something like an expression of voluntary free will. He refuses to lose faith. And the way the story ends is that Job gets everything back and more. And, you know, so that's a
descent and ascent story. And a cynic might say, well, the ends don't justify the means. And I would say, fair enough. But that's a pretty shallow
interpretation of the story. What it indicates instead
is that if you're fortunate, because let's not forget that, and you optimize your
attitude even in the face of adversity, that there,
it's not infrequently the case that your fortunes will reverse. You know, and I've found
that in many situations, the journalists whose
goal was most malicious in relationship to me,
who were most concerned with improving their
own, what would you say? Fostering their own notoriety and gaining social status
at my expense were the ones who did me the greatest favor. Those were the interviews that went viral. And so that's interesting, you know, because they were definitely the places where the most disaster was at hand. And I felt that in the aftermath,
every time that happened, my whole family was destabilized for like two months because things, it wasn't obvious at all which
way the dice were gonna roll. - But you leaned into that. So in a sense that there's this kind of transformation from the involuntary to the voluntary basically
saying, bring it on. That act of bring it
on turns the hardship, involuntary hardship
into voluntary hardship. - Well, not necessarily, let's say, but you could say that's your best bet. Well, you know, I'm never going to say that you can transcend all catastrophe with the right attitude, because that's just too much to say. But I could say that in a dire situation, there's always an element of choice. And if you make the right choices, you improve the degree, you
improve your chances of success to the maximal possible degree. - It might be too much to say, but nevertheless this could be true. Viktor Frankl, Marcus Aurelius. - Well that's what the resurrection
story proclaims is that, you know, even under the darkest
imaginable circumstances, the fundamental finale is
the victory of the good. And that seems to me to be true. - Do you have regrets when
you look back at your life? In the full analysis of it? - Well, as I said, I was very
ill for about three years and it was seriously brutal. Like every, this is no
lie, every single minute of that three years was
worse than any single time I'd ever experienced in
my entire life up to that. So that was rough. - Was the roughest the
physical or the psychological? - Pain.
- Just literal pain. - Yeah, I was walking
like 10 to 12 miles a day, rain or shine, winter, didn't matter. Not good, and it was
worse than that because as the day progressed,
my pain levels would fall until by 10, 11 at night
when I was starting to get tired, I was approaching a, what would you say? I was approaching something
like an ordinary bad day. But as soon as I went to
sleep, then the clock was reset and all the pain came back. And so it wasn't just that I was in pain, it was that sleep itself became an enemy. And that's really rough, man, because sleep is where you take refuge. You know, you're worn out, you're tired, and you go to sleep and you wake up and it's generally, it's
something approximating a new day. This was like Sisyphus on steroids. And that was, it was very
difficult to maintain hope in that, because I would do what I could. Like, there were times when
it took me like an hour and a half in the morning to stand up. And so I do all that and more or less put myself back into something remotely resembling human
by the end of the day. And then I knew perfectly well
exhausted if I fell asleep that I was gonna be right at the bottom of the bloody hill again. And so after a couple of years of that, it was definitely the
fact that I had a family that carried me through that. - What did you learn about
yourself, about yourself, and about the human mind from
that, from all of those days? - Well, I think I learned more gratitude for the people I had around me. And I learned how fortunate
I was to have that and how crucial that was. My wife learned something similar. She was diagnosed with a form of cancer that as far as we know,
killed every single person who ever had it except
her, it's quite rare. And her experience was that
what really gave her hope and played at least a role in saving her, was the realization of the depth of love that her son in particular had for her. And that that says nothing
about her relationship with Mikhaila, with her daughter. It just so happened that it was
the revelation of that love, that it made Tammy understand
the value of her life in a way that she wouldn't have
realized of her own accord. We're very, very, there's no
difference between ourselves and the people that we love. And there might be no
difference between ourselves and everyone everywhere, but we can at least
realize that to begin with in the form of the people that we love. And I hope I'm better at that than I was. I think I'm better at it than I was. I'm a lot more grateful
for just ordinariness than I was because when I first recovered, I remember I was standing,
first started to recover. I was standing in this pharmacy waiting for a prescription in a little town, and they weren't being
particularly efficient about it. And so I was in that standing in the aisle for like 20 minutes and I
thought, I'm not on fire. I could just stand here for
like the rest of my life, just not being in pain and enjoying that. And, you know, that
would've been something that before that would've been, you know, I would've been impatient and raring to go 'cause I didn't have 20 minutes to stand in the middle of an aisle. And I thought, well, you know, if you're just standing there and you're not on fire,
things are a lot better than they might be. And I certainly, I know that, and I think I remember
it almost all the time. - You gain a greater ability to appreciate the mundane moments of life. - Yeah, definitely. The miracle of the mundane, right? - Yeah. - I think Nietzsche had that
because he was very ill. And so I suspect he had, you know, and he was
regarded by the inhabitants of the village that he lived
in near the end of his life as something approximating a saint. He apparently conducted
himself very admirably, despite all his suffering. - You know, but that
still, there's this tension as there is in much of Nietzsche's work between the miracle of the mundane, appreciating the miracle of the mundane versus fearing the
tyranny of the mediocre. - It's more the mediocre and resentful. - Yes, but that's you giving
him a pass or seeing the good. - Well, fair enough, you know. - There's a kind of, I mean,
the tyranny of the mediocre, I always hated this idea that some people are better than others, and I understand it, but
it's a dangerous idea. - This is why I like the
story of Cain and Abel, I would say, because Cain is mediocre, but that's because he
refuses to do his best. It's not something intrinsic to him. And I actually think that's
the right formulation because, you know, I had people in my
clinical practice who were, they were lost in many dimensions from the perspective of comparison. One woman I remember in
particular, who, man, she had a lot to contend
with, she was not educated, she was not intelligent. She had a brutal family,
like terrible history of psychiatric hospitalization. And when I met her at a hospital, she was an outpatient
from the psychiatric ward, and she had been in there with people that she thought were worse off than her. And they were, and that
was a long way down. That was like Dante's Inferno level down. It was a long-term,
psychiatric inpatient ward. Some of the people had
been there for 30 years. It made "One Flew Over
The Cuckoo's Nest" look like a romantic comedy. And she had come back to
see if she could take some of those people for a walk and was trying to find out how
to get permission to do it. And so, you know, better
than other people. Some people are more intelligent, some people are more beautiful, some people are more athletic, maybe it's possible for everyone
at all levels of attainment to strive towards the good. And maybe those talents that are given to people unfairly don't privilege them in relationship to their moral conduct. And I think that's true. Like there's no evidence, for example, that there's any correlation whatsoever between intelligence and morality. You're not better because you're smart. And what that also implies
is if you're smart, you can be a lot better at being worse. - I think for myself, I'm just
afraid of dismissing people because of my perception of them. - Yeah, well that's why we have that metaphysical presumption that everybody's made in
the image of God, right? Despite that immense
diversity of apparent ability. There's that underlying
metaphysical assumption that, yeah, we all vary in our perceived and actual utility in
relationship to any proximal goal, but all of that's
independent of the question of axiomatic worth. And that preposterous, as
that notion appears to be, it seems to me that
societies that accept it as a fundamental axiomatic
presumption are always the societies that you'd wanna
live in if you had a choice. And that to me is an existence proof for the utility of the presumption. And also, you know, if you treat people like that in your life,
every encounter you have, you make the assumption that, and it's an assumption of, what would you, it's radical equality of worth, despite individual variance in
ability, something like that. Man, your interactions go way better. I mean, everyone wants
to be treated that way. Look, here's the developmental
sequence for you. Naive and trusting, hurt and cynical. Okay, well, is hurt and cynical better than naive and trusting? It's like, yeah, probably. Is that where it ends? How about cynical and
trusting as step three, right? And then the trust becomes courage. It's like, yeah, I'll
put my hand out for you, but it's not 'cause I'm a fool. And I think that's right because
that's the re-instantiation of that initial trust, right? That makes childhood magical and paradisal but it's the admixture
of that with wisdom. It's like, yeah, you know, we could be, we could walk together
uphill, but that doesn't mean, and I'll presume that that's your aim, but that doesn't mean that
I'm not going to watch. - What's a better life, cynical and safe or hopeful and vulnerable to be hurt? - Oh you can't dispense
with vulnerable to be hurt. That's the other realization. It's like you're gonna stake
your life on something. You could stake your life on security, but it's not gonna help. You don't have that option. - So what do you do when you're betrayed ultimately by some people you come across? - Grieve and look elsewhere, do what you can to forgive and not least, so you
lighten your own burden. Maybe do what you can to help
the person who betrayed you. And if that all proves impossible, then wash your hands of it and move on to the next adventure. - And do it again.
- Yeah, yeah. - Boy, this life, something else. So we've been talking about
some heavy, difficult topics and you've talked about truth in your Nietzsche lectures and elsewhere. When you think, when you
write, when you speak, how do you find what is true? You know, Hemingway said, all you have to do is write one true sentence. How do you do that? - Well, I would say first that
you practice that it's like that question is something, and Hemingway knew this
at least to some degree, and he certainly wrote
about it, is that you have to orient your life upward
as completely as you can. Because otherwise you can't distinguish between truth and falsehood. It has to be a practice. And for me, I started
to become serious about that practice when I realized
that it was individual, it was the immorality of the
individual, the resentful, craven, deceitful immorality
of the individual that led to the terrible atrocities
that humans engage in that make us doubt even our own worth. I became completely convinced of that, that the fundamental root cause of evil, let's say, wasn't
economic or sociological. That it was spiritual, just psychological. And that if that was the case, you had an existential
responsibility to aim upward and to tell the truth. And that everything depends on that. And I became convinced of that. And so then, look, you set your path with your orientation, that's how your perceptions work. As soon as you have a goal, a pathway opens up to
you and you can see it. And the world divides
itself into obstacles and things that move you forward. And so the pathway that's in front of you depends on your aim. The things you perceive are
concretizations of your aim. If your aim is untrue,
then you won't be able to tell the difference
between truth and falsehood. And you might say, well, how
do you know your aim is true? It's like, well, you
course correct continually and you can aim towards the ultimate. Are you ever sure that your
aim is the right direction? You become increasingly
accurate in your apprehension. - Is it like part of the
process to cross the line, to go outside the Overton Window, to dip a toe outside the
Overton Window for a bit? - Of course, that's what
you do in part in play. I was at the Comedy Mothership and every single comedian was
like completely reprehensible. All they were doing was saying
things that you can't say. Well, but it was in play. What I'm trying to do in my
lectures is I'm on the edge. Like I have a question
I'm trying to address and I'm trying to figure it out. I don't know where the
conversation is going, truly. Like it's an exploration. And I think the reason that
the audiences respond is because they can feel
that it's a high wire act. You know, and I could fail and you know, my lectures
have degrees of success. Sometimes I get real fortunate and there's a perfect narrative arc. I have a question, I'm investigating it. It comes to a punchline
conclusion just at the right time. And it's like the whole act is complete. And sometimes it's more fragmented, but I can tell when
the audience is engaged because everyone's silent, you know? Except maybe when they're laughing. - But there's a kind of
sense that you're arguing with yourself and you're lecturing. It's beautiful, it's really
beautiful and powerful to watch. Like Nietzsche does the same. There's contradictions
in what you're saying. There's a struggle in what you're saying. But I do think that when
you're doing the same on the internet, you get
punished for the deviations, you get punished for the
exploration, especially when that explores outside the Overton Window. - Look, if you're gonna
play hard in a conversation to explore, you're gonna say
things that are edgy, right? That are gonna cause trouble
and that might be wrong. And that's another reason why free speech protection
is so important. You actually have to protect the right, let's say in the optimal circumstance. You have to protect the right of well-meaning people to be wrong. Now you probably have to go beyond that to truly protect it, you have
to even protect the right of people who aren't meaning
well to be wrong, you know? And we also need that because we're not always well-meaning, but I don't, you know, the alternative to that protection would be the insistence that people only say what
was 100% right all the time. - I'm also, I guess this is a call to our fellow humans
not to reduce a person to a particular statement. This is what the internet
tends to want to do. - Especially if it's the
worst thing they ever said. Yeah 'cause God, well, anyone judged by that standard is doomed
unless they're silent. - But it also just makes
you not want to play. Not want to take sort of radical thought
experiments and carry out to natural conclusion. - Well that's kind the definition
of a totalitarian state. No one's playing in a
totalitarian state ever. - But in this case it's an emergent one. With psychopaths, roaming the
landscape, the barbarians. - Yeah, well, you know, that
might be the general pattern of totalitarianism. - Well, in totalitarianism there's usually one psychopath, not multiple. - Yeah, but everyone, well,
everyone else is complicit, at least in their silence. - Does the study of the pathology of psychopaths online wear on you? - Yes, definitely. - Do you ever consider doing less of that? - Yes, yes, definitely, but you know. Probably I experience most of that on X, but that's also where I
find most of my guests. That's also where I get
a sense of the zeitgeist, which is necessary. For example, if you're
gonna be a podcast host, it's necessary for me to
make my lectures on point and up to date to get a
sampling of the current moment. You have to be of the moment in many ways, to function at a high level. There's a price to be
paid for that because you're exposed to everything in a sense. - And you can also over
sample the darkness. - Yeah, yeah, definitely. - And it can make you
more and more cynical. It's a danger, right? - Yeah, yeah, well,
luckily for me, you know, I have many things that
counterbalance that, the familial relationships
we talked about, the friendships, and then also all of the public things I do are positive. The lecture tours, for example, which I'm on a lot, they're
basically 100% positive. So I'm very well buttressed against that darker element.
- That's great to hear. As a fan in the arena,
watching the gladiators fight, your mind is too important
to be lost to the cynical, to the battles with the abyss. - Well, you have a moral obligation too, to maintain a positive orientation. It's a moral obligation. The future is of course rife with contradictory possibilities. And I suppose in some ways,
the more rapid the rate of transformation, the
more possibility for good and for evil is making itself
manifest at any moment. But it looks like the best way to ensure that the future is everything
we wish it would be, is to maintain faith, that that is the direction
that will prevail. And I think that's a
form of moral commitment when it's not just naive optimism. - Well, Jordan, thank
you for being courageous and being the light amid the darkness for many, many people. And thank you for once
again talking today. - Thanks very much for the invitation and for the conversation. It's much always a pleasure to see you, and you're doing a pretty
decent job yourself, about there illuminating dark corners and bringing people upward. I mean, you've got a
remarkable thing going with your podcast and
you're very good at it. - Thank you, Jordan. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jordan Peterson. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Friedrich Nietzsche. I would like to learn more
and more to see as beautiful that which is necessary in things. Then I shall be one of those
who make things beautiful. Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.