I mean, we wanted to talk for a long time. So, the reason has evolved. One of the reasons is I've listened to you for quite a long time. So, you've become a one-way friend. And I have many one-way friends. Some of my best friends don't even know I exist. So, I'm a big fan of podcasts and audiobooks. Actually, most of my friends are dead.
Yeah, right. The writers of... Definition of a reader. I have a lot of dead, great dead friends.
So, I wanted to meet this one-way friend, I suppose, and have a conversation. And then there's this kind of puzzle that I've been longing to solve, the same reason I went to Ukraine, of asking this question of myself: who am I? And what was this part of the world? What is this thing that happened in the 20th century? That I lost so much of my family there. And I feel so much of my family's defined by that place. Now, that place includes the Soviet Union. It includes Russia and Ukraine. It includes Nazi Germany. It includes these big, powerful leaders and huge millions of people that were lost in the beauty, the power of the dream, but were also the torture that was forced onto them through different governmental institutions. And you were somebody that seemed from some angle to also be drawn to try to understand what was that. And not in some sort of historical sense, but in a deeply psychological, human sense. What is that? Will it repeat again? In what ways is it repeating again?
And how can we stop it? That's the crucial issue.
And how can we stop it? And so I felt I wanted to, from very different backgrounds, pull that thread of that curiosity. You know, I'm an engineer, you're a psychologist, both lost in that curiosity, and both wear suits and talk with various levels of eloquence about sort of the shadows that history cast on us. And so that was one. And also the psychology. I wanted to be a psychiatrist for a long time. I was fascinated by the human mind until I discovered artificial intelligence, the fact that I could program and then make a robot move. Until I discovered that magic, I thought I wanted to understand the human mind by being a psychiatrist, by talking to people, through talk therapy, psychotherapy.
You got the best of both worlds because you get to talk to people and you get to build robots.
Yeah, I mean, but the dream ultimately is the robot. And that I felt like by building the thing you start to try to understand it. And that's one way. I mean, we all have different skills and proclivities. So like my particular one has to do with... I learn by building. I think through a thing by building it. And programming is a wonderful thing because it allows you to build a little toy example. So in the same way you can do a little thought experiment, programming allows you to create a thought experiment in action. It can move, it can live, it can... And then you can ask questions of it. So all of those... because of my interest in Freud and Jung, you've also in different ways delved deeply into humanity, the human psyche, through the perspective of those psychologists. So for all those reasons I thought our paths would cross.
Yeah, so that's quite a frame for a discussion, right? You had all sorts of reasons and then you think, well, are you just letting the conversation go where it will? It's like, well, not exactly. You spent all this time, it's not like this came about by accident, this conversation. You spent all this time framing it. And so all of that provides the implicit substructure for the play in the conversation. And if you have that implicit... here's another way this is very much worth knowing: if you get the implicit structure of perception right, everything becomes a game. And not only that, a game you want to play. And maybe in the final analysis, a game you'd want to play forever. So, you know, that's obviously a distant beckoning ideal, but we know that games need rules or there's no play.
Is there a device you can give now that we know the frame, to give to me, Lex, about how to do this podcast better, how to think about this world, how to be a good engineer, how to be a good human being, from what you know about me?
Take your preoccupation with suffering seriously. It's a serious business. Right? And that's part of that, to circle back to the beginning, let's say. That's that willingness to gaze into the abyss, which is obviously what you were doing when you went to Ukraine. It's like, it's gazing into the abyss that makes you better. The thing is, and this is maybe where Nietzsche's ideas weren't as differentiated as they became. Sometimes your gaze can be forcefully directed towards the abyss. And then you're traumatized. If it's involuntary and accidental, it can kill you. The more it's voluntary, the more transformative it is. And that's part of that idea about facing death and hell. It's like, can you tolerate death and hell? And the answer is, this terrible answer is yes, to the degree that you're willing to do it voluntarily. And then you might ask, well, why should I have to subject myself to death and hell? I'm innocent. And then the answer to that is, even the innocent must be voluntarily sacrificed to the highest good.
That's such an interesting distinction. Voluntary suffering.
Voluntary, yeah. Well, that's why the central Christian doctrine is, pick up your cross and follow me. And I'm speaking not in religious terms saying that. I'm just speaking as a psychologist. And so, one of the things we've learned in the last 100 years is voluntary exposure to that which freezes and terrifies you in measured proportions is curative.
So, a form of at least in part involuntary suffering is depression. Do you have advice for people on how to find a way out? You're a man who has suffered in this way, perhaps continue to suffer in this way. How do you find a way out?
The first thing I do as a clinician, if someone comes to me and says they're depressed, is ask myself a question. Well, what does this person mean by that? So, I have to find out, because maybe they're not depressed, maybe they're hyper-anxious, or maybe they're obsessional. Like there's various forms of powerful negative emotion. So, they need to be differentiated. But then the next question you have to ask is, well, are you depressed, or do you have a terrible life, or is it some combination of the two? So, if you're depressed, as far as I can tell, you don't have a terrible life. You have friends, you have family, you have an intimate relationship, you have a job or a career, you're about as educated as you should be given your intelligence, you use your time outside of work wisely, you're not beholden to alcohol or other temptations, you're engaged in the community in some fundamental sense, and all that's working. Now, if you have all that and you're feeling really awful, you're either ill or you're depressed. And so then sometimes there's a biochemical root to that. Treatment of that, my experience has been as a clinician, is if you're depressed but you have a life and you take an antidepressant, it will probably help you a lot. Now, maybe you're not depressed exactly. You just have a terrible life. What does that look like? You have no relationship. Your family's a mess. You've got no friends. You've got no plan. You've got no job. You use your time outside of work not only badly but destructively. You have a drug or alcohol habit or some other vice, pornography addiction. You are completely unengaged in the surrounding community. You have no scaffolding whatsoever to support you in your current mode of being or you move forward. And then as a therapist, well, you do two things. Well, if it's depression per se, well, like I said, there's sometimes a biochemical route, a nutritional route. There's ways that can be addressed. It's probably physiological if you're at least in part depressed, but you have an okay life. Sometimes it's conceptual. You can turn to dreams sometimes to help people because dreams contain the seeds of the potential future. And if your person is a real good dreamer and you can analyze dreams, that can be really helpful. But that seems to be only true for more creative people. And for the people who just have a terrible life, it's like, okay, you have a terrible life. Well, let's pick a front. How about you need a friend? Like one sort of friend. Do you know how to shake hands and introduce yourself? I'll have the person show me. So, let's do it for a sec. So, it's like this. Hi, I'm Jordan. Right? And people don't know how to do that. And then they can't even get the ball rolling.
