Lex Fridman

So it's the fact that it's very difficult to detect lies and overconfidence in policing creates a huge problem.

Is there a combination of the dark tetrad and how good you are at lying?

Like are people with the certain traits, maybe psychopathy, are better at lying than others?

Is there a psychological cost to empathizing with so-called monsters?

You reference Nietzsche in the book, you know, gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.

If you study quote-unquote evil or study monsters, you may a bit become that.

Is there a danger of that?

I worry from my own brain that when I confront people and see them as a puzzle, which I do, I see the beauty in the puzzle.

All the puzzles look beautiful to me.

I'm sometimes like a Prince Mishkin character from The Idiot by Dostoevsky, where you just see, it's not the good in people, but the beauty in the puzzle.

And I think you can lose your footing on the moral landscape if you see the beauty in everything a bit too much.

Because everyone is interesting, everyone is complicated.

Speaking of which, you've done a lot of really great stuff, podcast shows.

One of them is Bad People Podcast.

You co-host it.

It has over a hundred episodes, each covering a crime.

What's maybe the most disturbing crime you've covered?

And he has done, I imagine, a lot of really difficult cases.

So what kind of person feeds their victims to pigs?

What's interesting about that psychology?