#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning

29:23And 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 variants of an 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 a market -tippled resolution of that tension between ultimate sacrifice, ultimate because once you're apparent, most parents would rather sacrifice themselves than their children.

30:06Right? 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 themselves. It's not externalized. They're not trying to change anyone else except maybe by example. It's your problem. Like Sojournitz pointed that out too when he was struggling with the idea of good versus evil.

30:46And you see this in more sophisticated literature, you know, in really unsophisticated literature or drama. There's a good guy in the bad guy and the good guys all good and the bad guys 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 connection. And the general 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.

31:34Yeah. So the for a religious ethos, the battle between good and evil has fought within each individual human heart. Right. It's your moral duty to constrain it to constrain evil within yourself. And well, 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. So 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.

32:21Right. You can rectify the conflict internally without it having to be played out as fate as young 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 in a margin to that. 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 there are elements of Christianity that can be jerrymandered 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.

33:09Now 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 this 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.

34:01And so, and I also think Nietzsche was extremely wrong in his presumption that human being 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 great individual, the best of us, yeah, should create our own values. 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 wall garden. So that's the kind of balance between order and nature that makes up the human environment.

34:36Human 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 isn't implicit moral order and you're to abide by it. You're freedom stops at the foundation. And you can think about that, or 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.

35:17You 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 an example of that. So our goal in so far as we're conducting ourselves properly is to have the kind of interesting conversation that allows both of us to express herself 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.

35:58And that's marked for us emotionally, like you and I both know this. If we're doing this right, we're going to be interested in the conversation. We're not going to be looking at our watch. We're not going to be thinking about what we're aiming at. We're just going to communicate. Now, the religious interpretation of that would be that we were doing something like making the redemptive logos. We're going to be doing 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 going to play you.

36:28I 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 presumptions. Like we're going to burn everything down and we're going to start from scratch. We've got these axiomatic presumptions. And we're going to put them into place and we're going to socialize people so they now think and live like communists from day one. And human beings are infinitely malleable.

37:12And 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 arrive to this conversation with rigid axioms that we have maybe we're blind to them. But in the same way that the Marxists came with very rigid axioms about the way the world is and the way it should be.

37:52Aren't we calling to that? We definitely come to the conversation with a hierarchy of foundation laxiums. 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.

38:30Now we have to come to the conversation with a certain degree of structure because we wouldn't be able to understand each other communicate. If if a lot of things were 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. It's rigid as play. Well, play is not rigid at all. No, no, no, no, no, no, it's got to retain it. 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 it wasn't a random answer. So play is very rigid in some way.

39:08So 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. I could say in the same space. So it's not like there's not freedom within it. But by the it's a weird paradox in a way isn't it because music is like this too is that there are definitely rules. And so and there are things you can't throw a basketball into a chess board and still be playing chess.

39:46But 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 the 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.

40:23Assess it. And they were also doing it genuinely. It's like, this is what I've concluded about say this story. And I look and I'm going to 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 on 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 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?

41:09Well, 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. Yeah, right. Because there's ambiguity.

41:49There'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 going to 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 when once you remove the oppressor. Yeah. I mean, all these ideas kind of until you put them into practice, you could, they can be quite convincing. Very or in the 19th century, if I was reading, which is kind of fascinating, the 19th century produces such powerful ideas, Marx and Nietzsche.

42:27Oh, 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 whole. Yeah, right. Absolutely. Well, in 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.

43:21So we produce societies that are united even among people who don't know on another different principles have to apply as a consequence of scale. So that's partly an engineering response, but, 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 plan.

44:18So that's why the problem with the communist is that the world of complex social interactions can be simplified.

44:25So that's why I think the world of complex social interactions can be simplified. So that's why I think the world of complex social interactions can be simplified.

45:09So that's why I think the world of complex social interactions can be simplified. So that's why I think the world of complex social interactions can be simplified. 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. Yeah, 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 of scaling too. Well, I mean, whatever ways it breaks down, it doesn't scale. And you're saying religious thought is the thing that might scale.

45:47I would say religious thought is the record of those ideas that have in fact scaled right and iterated. Well, it does religious thought iterate. So I mean, there's a fundamental conservative aspect to religious thought tradition. Yeah, this is why I like Mircella Elia, for example, who I referred to earlier. One of the things Elia did and very effectively and people like Joseph Campbell, who in some ways were popularizers of Elia and his 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.

46:27And so Elia and Jung, Eric Neumann, they were looking at and Campbell, they were looking at patterns of narrative that were common across religious traditions that had span 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 neuropsychologies, 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.

47:02So 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 every man. 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.

47:42So 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.

48:20And another domain that's governed by exploration and the rule would be something like when your basic motivational states are sated, explore. Well, then and 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 sating the basic motivational drives. And then you want to learn to do that in an iterative manner. So it sustains across time and you want to do it in a way that unites you with other people.

49:02And 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 believe 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. That's a very cool story. And it's also related, by the way, to your question about what makes communism wrong. And Dostyewski knew this, not precisely the Abraham story, but the same reason.

49:42In notes from underground, Dostyewski 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 Dostyewski's claim was you don't understand human beings very well because if you put them in an environment that was that comfortable.

50:21They would purposefully go insane just to break it into bits just so something interesting would happen. Right. And he says it's it's the human pro proclivity to curse and complain and he says this in the 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 they Abraham's story addresses and Abraham is the first true individual in the biblical narrative. So you can think about his story as the archetypal story of the developing individual.

50:58So you said, well, what's God? Well, in the Abraham story, God has 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's 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.

51:39It 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.

52:21And 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. 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.

53:04There'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.

53:40And so, 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 into 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 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?

54:22Is that antithetical to other people's best interest? Is it not the thing that increases the probability that you'll do something permanent? It'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.

55:03The passion of Christ is the truest adventure of Abraham. That's a terrible thing, eh, because it's a, 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 because 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.

55:44Well, 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 possible? Absolutely. How do you define voluntarily? Well, here's an example of that. That's, that's, 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 in famously in which he's sweating, literally sweating blood, because he knows what's coming.

56:27And the, the Romans designed crucifixion to be the most agonizing and humiliating possible, agonizing humiliating and disgusting possible death. Right. So there was 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? Like, 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, but the alternative is something like, well, that's what's fleshed out in religious imagery always.

57:06It's very difficult to cast into words. It's like, no, you, you welcome, 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 see 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 of moderation. Basically, you have to welcome whatever as hard as it gets. And the crucifixion in that way is a symbol of that.

57:48Well, and it, 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, the hero's 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 upper name, 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.

58:29And 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. They're owned 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.

59:09That 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 20s listening to this, how do they escape the pull of the desks he's known from Underground? Well, 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.

59:52Okay, 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 it's distinguishables say from niches 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 gerrymand 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 you?

1:00:33What's like an autonomous spirit? It's like certain things in your field of perception are illuminated to you. Think, oh, that that's interesting. That's compelling. That's gripping Rudolf Otto who studied the phenomenology of religious experience described that as luminous. Think grips you because 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 the cat's hair stands on end. That's an all response. And so there's going to be things in your phenomenological field that pull you forward, compel you. That's like the voice of positive emotion and enthusiasm.

1:01:12Things 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 and and and 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 they they take root within you and they they turn your thoughts towards certain issues like there are things you're interested in that you pursued your whole life.

1:01:56There are things I'm interested in that that I felt as a moral compulsion. And so you can 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 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 while 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.

1:02:45What 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, and these are really bad one pride and envy are among the worst there was a the sins of Cain by the way in the story of Cain enable. Because 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 some two things he said if God tells him if your sacrifices were appropriate you'd be accepted. So brutal thing to 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.

1:03:36And so Cain is embittered by that response and that's when he kills able 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 as 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.

1:04:20Yeah and they succeeded 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 person down that kind of envy can really destroy person. 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.

1:05:20You 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 any towards somebody if you just celebrate them so gratitude. Yeah 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 in Vias is because you see someone who has something that you want.

1:06:06Okay so let's think 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 in Vias of that person means that I actually want something and then you might think well what am I in Vias of I'm in Vias 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 is attractive to women. Now of course that's an extremely common longing among men period but a 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 that.

1:06:58You 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 because 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 day. 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.

1:07:41The 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 non -descript 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 the world.

1:08:28The essence of reality regardless of how you can screw 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 because 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 the world.

1:09:28So that's a great question for you to be able to stand in your way 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's that might be asking everything from people but then you also might ask this is a very strange question is if you were brought into being by something that was the most important thing is that you know that's the most important thing that you have to do is to do something that's the most important thing.

1:09:58So if you were brought into being 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 that I think that's always part of a heroic adventure You know is that ability to cut the Gordia not but 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 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're living in truth is the best thing that could happen even if you can't see that At any given moment because otherwise you'd say that truth would be just the handmade in 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 You can because what you're doing is you're making the outcome your deity, right?

1:11:49Well, I just reversed 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, where's what's the constant? You may be When you said Abraham was being fed by naked ladies That's an interpolation obviously, but well, I wouldn't be out of keeping for the times, but it does make me think Sort of in stark contrast in each his own life Hmm that Perhaps getting laid early on in life as a useful starter Step one get laid and then go for adventure. There's some basic I would miss a cessation of 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.

1:12:39It's romantic adventure. Right, right, but the the lack of basic interaction Sexual interaction I feel like is the engine that drives towards that cynicism of the in -cell It is but it is not There's there's 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 two what would you say?

1:13:33Naively oriented towards empirical truth to note 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 pornographic pornography is literary Who are the main protagonists in female pornographic fantasy? Pirates were wolves vampires surgeons billionaires Tony Stark, you know, yeah, and so The basic pornographic narrative is beauty in the beast those five categories terrible aggressive male Tameable by the right relationship Hot erotic attraction and so I would say to the young man 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?

1:14:49Yeah, 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? 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 point six 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.

1:15:51What's the cause and effect there? So loop manner motivated to attain social status because it confers upon them reproductive success and that's not only Cognitively but biologically now give you an example of this up. 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 in unimaginable so he was At the bottom of the bottom rung and almost all the Reactions he got from females weren't wasn't just no it was like are you out of your mind?

1:16:36right with that contempt Right, and then he became successful and so the documentary super interesting because it tracks the utter pathology of His sexual fantasies because he was bitter and resentful and if you want to 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 because he does take the heroic adventure path And he actually has a family and a and children and he 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 he what he did in his adolescence after being rejected was he found what he was interested in his 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 and then you might ask too even if you're cynical it's like well, why do women?

1:17:42Why 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 going to have infants. They don't need another one Right partly the reason that women are hypergamous unless they want hot 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 differential definition than chromosomal differentiation and that's taken to its ultimate extreme with with humans And so of course women are going to 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 so I think the adventure comes first heroic adventure comes first It's complex because the other is 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 Of course with the family and society are not going to help you most of the time with the heroic adventure, right?

1:18:49They're going to be a barrier versus 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 They're calling Let's say because that's I do that with all my podcast guess how How did the path that you took to success make itself manifest and it's very the patterns Very typical almost all the people that I have 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 persons interests and pathway to development that's fascinating.

1:19:34I've heard you analyze it that way before and I I had a reaction to that idea because you focus on the positive of the parents. Yeah, I feel like it was the Maybe I I see biographies differently, but it feels like the struggle within the family Was the catalyst for greatness in in a lot of biographies. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it I just 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 Um, he's firing on all cylinders as far as I'm concerned he has a nice family He gets along with his wife.

1:20:14He's a really good musician. He's got a company. He's running well He's he's a delight to be around He was a relatively Disagreeable infant. He was tough -minded and so and 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 and but that wasn't that wasn't something that was It's an opposition to him away because it was in opposition to the immediate manifestation of his hedonistic desires But it was also an impetus to further development.

1:20:55My 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 know 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 over enthusiastic. They're 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 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.

1:21:57Okay, 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 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 frag fragmented childhoods who turned to books and found the pattern that guided them in Like let's say they 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's fantastic book beautiful book And his father was an alcoholic of gargantuan proportions He just an Irish drinker who drank every scent 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.

1:23:08There was sober morning father Who was encouraging and with whom he had a relationship and then there was drunken useless later afternoon and evening father and he rejected the negative and he Amplified his relationship with the positive now he like he had other He had other things going for him, but he you know, he did a very good job of discriminating and 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 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 the parents has flipped Well, my my father was hard to please very did you ever succeed?

1:24:38Yes, but it wasn't easy ever when when when was the moment when you uh succeeded Late pretty late like 40 Maybe later was it uh gradual or a definitive moment when a shift happened My father always 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 and it does bear on the question you're asking is 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 that's a that's a vicious dance because You have to have a relationship with your child to do that properly You know, because you want to if you want to be optimally motivating as a father you keep your children on the edge.

1:25:49It's like You might not reward something in your child that you would think would be good in somewhere 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 do 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 art. It wasn't Unpredictable in arbitrary.

1:26:33It 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 and well with yourself too and and with your wife you You 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 going to 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?

1:27:29Why not because I like you I think you're great and you're not going to 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 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 I don't think that yeah because I've always liked her we were friends ever since we were little kids And she's 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 going to be a temperamental issue to some degree and and an issue of negotiation like She plays rough but fair and the fair part has been Establishing that it'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.

1:28:51Oh definitely not definitely not you find all those all sorts of things about yourself in a relationship That's for sure Well, and partly the reason that there is provocativeness 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 want to know that? Well, maybe she doesn't want you to uh snap and hurt her kids And so how is she gonna find that out ask you Well, you're gonna say well, I'd never do that. It's like never a let's find out if it's never So we don't know how people test each other out in relationships, but 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 to people back to Nietzsche, you know Nietzsche 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.

1:29:59It's like uh, 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 why would never cheat? It's like no, you just don't have the opportunity now I don't 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 I'm a peaceful man. It's like no, you're not you're just a weak coward You wouldn't dare have it 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 That 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 massed by the morality that's nothing but weak cowardice Turns to the resentment that undermines and destroys everything and that does that purposefully Yeah, I think it was criticizing if under the facade of niceness there's an ocean of resentment.

1:31:09Yeah, that's for sure That's that for sure that's also the danger of being To 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 that she isn't willing to and if you're agreeable and nice and your 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 at a podcast later? No, we know each other pretty well and like I said, it's it's not it's a trait that I find admirable.

1:31:50It's provocative and Challenging and it seems to work Well, we've been together 50 years so uh quick pause bathroom break if we can descend from the realm of ideas down to uh History and reality. I would say the time between world war one and world war two was uh one of history's biggest testing of ideas and Really the most dramatic kinds of ideas that Help 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 and even worse human being in Hitler So to what degree do you need Monsters to fight monsters Do you need Bad men Do you be able to fight off greater evils?

1:33:11It'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 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 their 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 man and also when dealing with my own children because I use 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 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.

1:34:33That'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 he not like there wasn't something to what he was driving at you know For a mittable man 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 a monstrous in him And jacke willink is like that and joe rogan is like that and you're like that But there's a different level.

1:35:18I 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 you if I may insert into this picture of complexity Hitler would have not stopped until he enslaved and exterminated the entirety of the Slavic people The Jewish people the Slavic people the gypsies the everybody who's not Aryan But then Stalin in the mass rape of German women By the right army as they marched towards Berlin Is a kind of manifestation the full monstrosity that a person can be you you can easily be in this situation You can easily and unfortunately find yourself in this 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 you are terrible And so you said well Was it necessary to ally with Stalin?

1:36:29It's like well, it's very difficult to second -guess the trajectory of something as complex as world war two 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 two 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 and 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 in the death of six 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 people.

1:37:32Yeah right right which which some estimates are 100 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 the number of intellectuals artists and writers They were put in the deal of farmers for that matter and anyone who was willing to tell the truth right?

1:38:09absolutely so yeah catastrophic and so I think the West's failure Wasn't so much allying with Stalin. I mean it was Doug the smac Arthur 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 and 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 you 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 Didn't make total sense to the news 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 Kamala Harris.

1:39:40Well 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 five percent of the population and they're generally kept under pretty decent control by Civilized people and stable social interactions.

1:40:27I 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 because 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.

1:41:30So 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 going to 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 going to play together anymore and in normal times Most of our social networks are connected and interacting so like if you Rip me off three times and I noted that I'm going to tell Everybody I know and they're going to 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.

1:42:34I think what we're doing This is happening on Twitter continually is we're giving The 5 % of psychopaths I'm 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 a narcissistic psychopaths And that's your camouflage and you hide behind your anonymity and you use fractious and divisive language to to attract fools and To elevate your social status and your clout and 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's the psychopath and who is a The 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.

1:44:04So you know, he would give people the benefit of 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 Violent offender psychopath 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 wall over his eyes and it wasn't in he videotape the like 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.

1:45:00That's the problem. I'll give people the benefit of the doubt right? 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 Yeah, the psychopathy is revealed so yeah, so from a We're kind of just to separate the two things. So one over representation of psychopathy online With an anonymity that's a serious fascinating problem But in the interview one on one yeah I don't know if the job of a human being in conversation is to Not talk to psychopaths, but to talk any like how would you interview Hitler?

1:45:49Well, I've you know, I've had very difficult clinical interviews with people in my clinical practice and so what do you how do you approach that? Well, I really probably approached 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 it the odd crooked moon maneuvering 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.

1:46:31There's one on one conversation. It's not recorded Is different than one that's listened by a lot of people because I would venture to I trust the intelligence of the view on the listener Yeah, to detect even better than you Yes, and I think that's true by the way to detect this I cop with yeah, I've had the audience review 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 have 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 Yes, so you get tired you get irritable You show that you lose the track you're you're gonna start leaking out your mistakes And so and that actually is the case for all the world leaders.

1:47:40I would say One hours too short In something happens like two hour plus Mark where you start to leak and I trust in the intelligence of the of the listener to sort of To detect that yeah, and it 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 it's complicated because Ideas of Nazi ideology spread in the 20s.

1:48:26There was a real battle between Marxism and Nazi ism. 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 the the the man in power doesn't want the truth to be heard Yeah, it's kind of idea and that just puts fuel to the fire and also motivates the paranoid types because General 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 egg shells 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 because 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 what 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 because 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 is a fascinating technical challenge Yeah of how to make our society resilient to the psychopaths on the left and the right It might be the fundamental problem of the age Given the amplification of communication by our social By our social networks and so to generalize across psychopaths.

1:51:38Yeah, you could also think about bots Yeah Which behaves similar to Psychopaths in their certainty and not carrying their maximizing some function. They're not caring about anything else attention Yeah, yeah short -term attention even worse Yeah, because you might you know that's another problem aid like 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 Garlanders more attention and short -term gratification Garner's more attention. So then you're maximizing for the grip of short -term attention by negative emotion.

1:52:18I mean That's not going to be a principle if 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 garner 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 five percent is the is the estimate worldwide in terms of humans. Yeah sure, but in terms of the 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 there's a drug aspect to it.

1:53:16There's a pull to that To talk shit about somebody to take somebody down. I mean there is some pleasure in that. Mm -hmm. There's a dark Pull towards that and I think that's the sadistic pull and I think a lot of people I mean see when you say sadistic it makes it sound like some kind of is 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. Yeah, 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 dusty Eskies notes from underground yeah in the basement.

1:54:05Yeah cynical all that kind of 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 that there's a huge cost less you don't do it But there's young people that So like I would 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 can be they can be helped they can they can be shown that there's a 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.

1:54:52Yeah, I'm not caring. There's possibility of those ideas 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 I actually know that that what you said is true technically It's definitely the case that there is an innate tilt towards pleasure in that sort of behavior and it's it is associated to some degree with dominance driving um, 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 most people even even the repeat criminal types tend to desist in their late 20s 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 have and continue through it adolescents and into adulthood If you keep them in prison until they're in their in the middle of their late 20s Most of them stop and that might be the easiest way to understand that might just be delayed maturation so So Our most people salvageable Yes, definitely is everyone salvageable Well, at some point it becomes First of all, they have to want to be salvaged that's a problem But then it also becomes something like well How much resources are you going to devote to that?

1:56:28Like 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 be 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 the people that we're mentioning that are Kind of lost themselves to the ideology of the movement Well, we we know that what you said is true even historically to a large degree because Germany was successfully de -nautified and it's not like everybody who participated in every element of the Nazi movement was brought to justice Not 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.

1:57:51He's a mama's boy. He's a liar. He He steals from his own brother and in a major way deceives his father He's a coward, you know, and yet he turns his life around So be careful the leaders you idolize in worship So but then it's not always clear to know who is the good and who's the evil. Yeah, it's hard You have been through some dark places in your mind over your life. Oh 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 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 I once I became convinced that evil existed and that was very young I I always I always believe 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.

1:59:29It'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 that 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 um 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 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 I 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 a 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 you're not alone socially you're not alone familial.

2:01:41Maybe 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 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, there are kind of metaphysical reality They're not yet manifest.

2:02:36They 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 use the term self instead of God is because When God was dispensed with let's say by the process is Nietzsche described we just found the same thing Deep within the instinctive realm let's say we founded it 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.

2:03:27He'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 horrib in that story But it's the central mountain of the world. It's the same mountainous 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 because everything that's alive is on fire And so what calls to Moses is like the spirit of being itself and it tracks them 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.

2:04:32He'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 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 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 is transformed and he's become the leader who can speak truth to power And so he allows 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 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 I how can that not be true Because the the contrary would be that there would be no growth in challenge.

2:05:44Well, 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 is 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 If you negotiate with them so that they voluntarily move towards the elevator on their own recognizance They're they'll overcome their fear and they become generally braver But it has to be voluntary.

2:06:30See I got to push back and explore with you the question of voluntarily Yeah, let's look at Nietzsche. Yeah, he suffered through several health issues throughout his life migraines, eyesight issues, digestive problems, depression, 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 Feature or a bug that's a good question the same thing happens in the story of Job Because 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 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 him Let me have a crack out of him and see what happens and God says yeah, I think you're wrong.

2:07:20Do you're 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 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 Ascetic 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 who's Who whose goal was most malicious?

2:08:33In 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 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 Our 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 a kind of transformation from the involuntary to the voluntary Basically saying bring it on that act of bring it on Turns the hardship in voluntary hardship into voluntary hardship well not necessarily Let's say but you could say that's your best bet Well, you know, I'm 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 You improve the degree you improve your chances of success To the maximal possible degree It might be too much to say but nevertheless is could be true Victor Franco Marcus really is 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 ever regrets when you look back at your life in the full analysis of it?

2:10:38Well 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 little pain Yep, yeah, I was walking like 10 to 12 miles a day Rainer shine winter didn't matter Not good and it it was 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 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.

2:11:52It 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 sysophys 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 going to 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 that carried me through that.

2:12:45What did you learn about yourself about Yourself and about the human mind from that from all those days? Well, I think I learned more gratitude for the people I had around me and I learned And how fortunate I was to have that and how crucial that was my wife learned something similar she 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 says nothing about her relationship with Michaela with her daughter.

2:13:36It 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 ordinary Ordinaryness than I was because when I first recovered I remember I was standing for started to recover.

2:14:20I was standing in this pharmacy waiting for a prescription in little town and they weren't being particularly efficient about it 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 have been something that before that would have been you know I would have been impatient and rare and to go because I didn't have 20 minutes to stand in the middle of an aisle And I thought well, you know if 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.

2:15:08Yeah, definitely The miracle of the mundane Right. Yeah, I think Nietzsche had that Because he was very ill and so I suspect he Had it You know him he was regarded by the inhabitants of the village that he lived in near the end of his life is something approximating a saint He apparently conducted himself very admirably despite all his suffering You know, but that's still there's this tension as there is in much of Nietzsche's work between the 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 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.

2:16:12This is why I like the story of Kane enable. I would say Because Kane 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 condemn with she was not educated. She was not intelligent She had a brutal family like terrible history of psychiatric hospitalization um 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 kukus 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 Better than other people Some people are more intelligent.

2:17:46Some people are more beautiful. Some people are more athletic Is 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.

2:18:31Yeah, 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 is that notion appears to be It seems to me that societies that accepted as a fundamental axiomatic presumption are always the societies that you'd want to 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 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.

2:19:34I mean everyone wants to be treated that way Look here's the developmental sequence for you naive and trusting hurt And cynical Okay, well, it's 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 because I'm a fool And I think that's right because that's the re -estantiation 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?

2:20:35cynical and safe for hopeful and vulnerable to be hurt. Oh you can't dispense with vulnerable to be hurt That's that's the other realization. It's like you're going to stake your life on something You could stake your life on security, but it's not going to help You don't have that option. So what are you doing when you're betrayed Ultimately by some people you come across Greave 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.

2:21:27Yeah Boy this life Something else Say we've been talking about some heavy difficult topics and you've talked about truth in your niche 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. Yeah, how do you do that? Well, I would say first that you practice that it's like It 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 Now 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.

2:22:34I became completely convinced of that That the fundamental root cause of evil. Let's say it wasn't economic or sociological That it was spiritual to 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 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 devise itself into obstacles and 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 Concertizations of your aim If your aim is untrue then you won't tell the difference between truth and falsehood And you might say well, how do you know your aim is true?

2:23:31It'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 To go outside the over to window to dip a toe outside the window for a bit Of course, that's what you do in part and play um I was at the comedy mothership in 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.

2:24:10I'm trying to address and I'm trying to figure out. I don't know where the conversation is going Truly like it's it's an exploration and I think the reason that the audience is 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. 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 is beautiful It's really beautiful and powerful to watch like Nietzsche does the same.

2:24:52There's contradictions in what you're saying There's a struggle with 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 over -to -window look if you're gonna play hard in a conversation To explore you're gonna say things that Cost that are edgy right that are gonna cost 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 and we also need that because we're not always well -meaning But 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.

2:25:49I'm also I guess this is a call To our fellow humans not to reduce the person to a particular statement That we should what the internet test to want to do especially if it's the worst thing they ever said yeah Yeah, cuz God well at anyone judged by that standard is doomed unless they're silent But it also just makes you not want to play yeah, right not want to Take sort of radical thought experiments and carry out Yes, playing in a totalitarian state ever but in this case it's an emergent one yeah with psychopaths roaming the landscape well The barbarians that that might be the general pattern of totalitarianism well in totalitarianism There's usually one psychopath Yeah, but everyone well everyone else is complicit at least in their silence.

2:26:39Yeah Does the study of the pathologist psychopaths online where on you yes Definitely, they will consider doing the less of that yes Yes definitely but you know Probably I experienced most of that on x But that's also where I found 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 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 Is there a pride there's a price to be paid for that because you're You're You're exposed to everything in the sense and you can also over sample the darkness.

2:27:37Yeah Yeah, definitely and it can make you more more cynical. Yeah, well it's a danger right? Yeah, yeah Well luckily for me, you know, I have Many things that counterbalance that the familiar relationships we talked about the friendships the and then also All of the public things I do are positive the lecture tours for example, which I'm on a lot There are Basically 100 % positive so I'm very well Butchers against that 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 To the battles with the with the abyss well you you have a moral obligation to to maintain a A positive positive orientation.

2:28:26It'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 manifested 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 conversations but it's always a pleasure to see you and You're doing a pretty decent job yourself about their Illuminating dark corners and and bringing people upward I mean you've got a remarkable thing going with your podcast and you're very good at it.

2:29:28Thank 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 they may 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 should be one of those who make things beautiful Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time