We live in an eddy pool of counter-entropy

The second law of thermodynamics is unsentimental. Ordered things disperse. Matter thins. The ordinary fate of the universe is dilution, flattening, quiet. In the middle of that vast unwinding, a small region runs the other way: atoms become molecules, molecules become cells, cells become people, people become civilizations.

Psychiatrist Paul Conti, speaking with Lex Fridman, calls that local reversal an eddy pool of counter-entropy. If the background trend is toward nothing, then creating, keeping, and nurturing is work against the current. Destruction, pulling people down, is swimming with it. Good and evil, on this telling, sit on a physical floor, and Conti is willing to make that floor quite specific.

The conversation was recommended by Andrew Huberman, who told Fridman that the two of them had to talk not only about trauma, the subject of Conti's book, but about human nature more broadly: narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy, good and evil, hate and love, happiness and envy. Fridman flags at the outset that he will disagree with Conti more than once, partly for sport and partly because he thinks the tension of ideas is how insight shows up.

Fridman's first question is definitional. Does Conti see psychiatry as fundamentally a study of the human mind, or as a toolbox for treating psychological maladies? Conti's answer is immediate: the first. Psychiatry, he says, is our best way to understand who we are as people.

The reason is a single chain that runs in both directions. Looking down, psychiatry is biology: how the brain works, how its parts connect, how the chemistry does its job. Those are the foundational aspects of who we are. Looking up, the same facts appear as psychology: what we think, what we feel, what we strive for, what we fear. The tools that help people are a byproduct. They only work because the discipline is first a discipline of understanding.

Fridman asks whether every patient, every mind explored, deepens that understanding. Conti says he is trying, and he widens the frame. It does not have to be a patient. Getting a coffee at Starbucks is a few seconds of contact from which something can still be taken. Even if no memory or lesson comes away, the exchange can reinforce gentle kindness, gratitude, and decent human interaction. We keep becoming who we choose to be through repetitions that look trivial.

Fridman offers an engineer's picture. Step back from your own mind, treat it as a machine, watch how it processes the outside world and turns perception into emotion, then oil the gears. If you can see the conversion, you can steer it toward positive feeling, like a mechanic standing over a known assembly.

Conti takes the metaphor and draws a line through it. The defining feature of a machine, as he understands machines, is that they are not inscrutable. Apply enough study and enough skill and you can figure the thing out. Understanding ourselves includes understanding that there are things we cannot understand. He treats that limit as indispensable to health and happiness, and as the source of enough humility to notice how other people differ from us, and how we differ from ourselves.

Fridman pushes the contrast. Machines are usually simpler because they were designed. The complexity of the human mind, at least from the inside, looks nearly infinite. Conti has a name for why: levels of emergence. At rising complexity, novelty appears that cannot be predicted from the layer below.

Atoms to molecules is one jump. Neurons to consciousness is another. Consciousness to culture is another still. Conti says each layer brings a whole new universe of possibility that was not available before. He reaches for Hegel's dialectic: when A and B come together, you do not get a hybrid. You get something new. That, for him, is a sketch of emergence, except that the novelty is larger than a mixture. It is a new space of things that could not happen at the previous level.

This is why he thinks we are infinitely interesting. Functional neuroscience, which he treats as psychology, our ability to think about ourselves and others and to be reflective, sits on so many stacked layers that each person's consciousness is standing on the shoulders of giants of novelty, most of which we do not understand. Even time is not quite shared. Your clock and mine may differ by picoseconds, but the difference is real. We can still occupy a common reality because the perceptions run close enough to parallel. Each of us, he says, is living in a slightly different dimension of time.

Culture is the one emergent thing he thinks we ourselves build: unique individuals aggregating the way cells do, producing something on top of individuality. Then he asks what could sit above culture. The question is immense, and he wants it to plant humility. Look how much we do not know, and then look how reckless we are with ourselves, with resources, with human life.

Fridman adds an example he loves: cellular automata. The local rules are simple. Each cell talks only to its neighbors. Zoom out with blurry vision and structured objects appear. You can even build a Turing machine, arbitrary computation, on top of those naive local rules. That raises a vertiginous question. Did the atoms already know about love, war, hatred, and evil? If not, where does the magic come from? Conti answers that this is the background physics of the universe. If life and good and evil can grow from it, those possibilities were in the lowest rules. In that case we may be an early brick in a very large building.

This is the densest stretch of the episode. Entropy, Conti says, rules the universe around us. How over-selected are we? How many millions of branch points have to go the right way before you fall into an eddy pool of counter-entropy, a place where creation can begin? Sitting here talking about love and hate is already evidence that we occupy an extremely rare exception. Most of the universe has no such luxury. There you find dispersed particles and light-years of emptiness, and no novelty.

From that rarity he draws a moral floor. Creating and preserving are how you stay in the eddy. Destruction, except in the outline case of protection, pushes you back toward entropy and nothingness. Commonality, collaboration, and nurturing bring new existence into the universe. Aggression and destruction, as general concepts, take it out. We become cavalier with human life, including our own, when we forget how stacked and how improbable the place we are standing actually is.

He then asks whether purposelessness itself has a purpose. If the universe were only random dispersion, why the pull toward creativity? Why should an eddy of counter-entropy exist at all, even if it is fantastically scarce? His answer is careful. There may be a design, natural or intentional, a schema that allows the incredibly rare but not nonexistent place where good can happen, where something novel can grow. This is not, he says, a jump to a religious answer for everything. Science is not a god either. Treat science as a tool, not an endpoint, and then ask what the tool is telling us.

He supports the abstraction with a personal story. He arrived at medical school knowing almost nothing about the body, having visited hospitals only as a guest, having crammed pre-med after years in business. He expected answers: what the organs do, what the cells do. What he learned instead was more amazement, more mystery, more seeming impossibility. A cell's transport, energy, and diffusion already stun; come back out and ask how those cells make a kidney, and the explanation breaks. After his first child was born he asked the obstetrician what the doctor actually understood, watching life created. The answer, as Conti remembers it, was "Nothing. I just marvel." The more we know, he says, the more we should respectfully, and proactively, marvel at every layer where novelty emerges. People who start there are less likely to say they dislike you for race, religion, culture, sexuality, or gender identity, and less likely to demand rights you do not have. Recklessness of that kind is driven by scarcity, insecurity, and envy, and it begins with a missing first respect: we are here, and that is amazing.

Fridman takes the marvel and turns it toward the hardest case. If we are supposed to wonder at the whole human project, what do we make of people who do evil? Are all human beings capable of it? Conti says yes. He believes the capacity is in all of us. Then he adds the qualifier that the whole argument depends on. Capacity is universal. The capacity to do what the worst perpetrators do, on a preset and developed plan, is not.

People have drives toward survival, gratification, and pleasure, and pleasure itself is already complicated, because it can be the relief of distress. If I feel terrible about myself, making you feel worse can make me feel a little better. That plays out in a lot of human beings. Sometimes evil is misunderstanding, anger, impulsivity. Sometimes something else is at work, seen through the lens of unhealthy psychology.

The distinction he wants is between reflexive, impulsive evil and highly orchestrated evil. The latter, he thinks, is driven by envy, and envy accounts for the lion's share of it. Fridman scales the question to history and to someone like Hitler, and wonders whether a dictator might have thought he was doing good for the people he valued, or whether cold narcissism, simple disregard, could be enough. Conti does not buy the split. He thinks it is all fueled by that resentment. The idea that Hitler thought he was doing good "is such a thin facade that it flies away like a handkerchief in a hurricane."

People can stack lies on specious logic: this ethnicity is good, that one is bad, I will change the world, I will make it better, and now there are armies and concentration camps, all supposedly in the service of good. Conti does not think anyone actually thinks that, except as a surface patina they refuse to let the hurricane blow away. How do you decide which group is good and which is bad? What licenses you to play God? What is really going on, he says, is something cobbled together to explain why this is right, okay, even good. It is a lie adorning the gratification of envy. Saying "I think this is good and it is okay if a million people die" and saying "I will enjoy that a million people die" are, for him, the same. The enjoyment is there. It comes from vulnerability, insecurity, and deficits in the sense of self.

Fridman asks Conti to pin the word down. If envy underlies orchestrated evil, what is the psychological concept? Conti starts with a contrast, and he is careful to say that even inside psychology the words can be defined in different ways. For this conversation he takes jealousy as benign. You see something I do not have. I might think I like that, maybe I will work harder to get it. Or I cannot get it, because you are younger than I am, and I accept that you have that and I have other things and I am okay. The thought can become striving or acceptance. Both are healthy.

Envy is a different species, and it is destructive. I see something you have that I do not. Instead of working for it or accepting that I do not have it, I want to bring you down to where I am, and then I will feel better. From envy's point of view, everything is relative. Jealousy is about me improving. Envy is about you deteriorating. One does work. The other saves effort. The cheap path is the one that leads to ruin.

Fridman keeps trying to put himself in Hitler's mind and asks whether the envy is aimed at Jews, at Slavic people, at some amorphous other. Conti says it has all to do with him. There is not a love of the people he allied with, and not even a sense that the people he persecuted were worse than he was. It is projection out of an intense sense of inadequacy, a rage at being someone he perceived as lesser.

Fridman does not accept the clean break. He offers a farmer. I have one row of crops. You have two, because you worked harder. I try to catch up. The weather is bad. I keep failing. You get more successful, a beautiful wife, a new tractor, a field that works. Then the thought arrives: I will steal everything and kill you. Is that not a continuous process, jealousy sliding into murder?

Conti says no. Compassion, interest, and jealousy in the benign sense are part of being human. Going from "you have more crops" to "I will kill you" is not a progression of something benign. It is a different thing. Fridman still does not buy it. He thinks Conti is drawing a line through what is actually the same phenomenon at different magnitudes: healthy jealousy, slightly unhealthy jealousy, the John Lennon song "Jealous Guy," which he loves, in which jealousy inside a relationship takes the mind in silly and almost crazy directions, then the next apartment over, then the next, until you arrive at Hitler's envy of a whole population.

Conti grants a causal chain. If you never feel jealous, you may never feel envious; the first can open a gate. He still insists on a disjunction, and he reaches for a mathematical word: an asymptotic shift. Fridman catches the metaphor immediately. It is a way of saying the thing on the other side is entirely different. Once I start thinking I am not going to try to make things better, I would like instead to harm you, the quality has changed. Quantity does not explain it.

They do find one handshake. The judgment sits in the direction of the motivation. If jealousy appears and the motive is to do less of that feeling, you are walking back toward a stable center. If the motive is to do more of it, you have entered a vicious cycle. That is what envy becomes: you cannot sleep, you visualize the farmer, he becomes the devil, and the thing starts to run on its own. The person is no longer merely having a feeling. The person is cultivating evil.

Conti then makes the most practical claim in the conversation. People will say there can be seeds of evil in all of us, then take that seed out, dust it off, plant it, and nurture it. The plant reaches into every other part of the person's life. They behave differently toward others. They cultivate fantasies of evil. They build, inside themselves, the motivation and the will to enact it. Slowly they become someone else. The person doing this is not asleep. They know what they are growing.

He walks the Hitler path in steps. First, childhood: not loved, repeatedly told he was less than. That is why child abuse is so evil. It teaches children the worst possible wrong lessons. They are not good enough. They will always be hurt. They cannot keep themselves safe. They do not deserve safety. Second, the person starts to look at himself through that miserable lens: I cannot paint well enough, no one appreciates me, I do not like how I look, I do not fit with the people I want to fit with, and the list never ends. Self-hatred through a lens of misery, a self that is repulsive to itself.

Third, the turn that matters most. Total self-repulsion is unbearable to the self, so it has to become someone else's fault. Not my fault. Whose fault is it? Fourth, scale. Once the answer points at a group, that group becomes, in the person's mind, responsible for his misery, and evil acquires a justification. The rest is narrative: better for the economy, good for the country, good for everything. Conti calls those lies built to justify the evil. They are surface stories. Envy is the engine. The endpoint being served is destruction, which is why it always brings more destruction.

He asks how often wars started for purposes we would now call evil produced good. The modern world, he says, answers with more evil and more destruction. Hitler's outward destruction eventually came inward; photographs of Berlin after the Second World War are the evidence. Destruction is catchy. People at the time of the Manhattan Project worried that a chain reaction, once started, might not stop inside the bomb. The chain reaction of evil has not yet blown up the whole world, Conti says, but look at how the catastrophe spreads: fifty to sixty million dead in a war that truly was a world war. It also cannot be stopped by success. If Hitler had won, the psychology of destruction would have needed more conquest, then factions and infighting, then the same mass ruin. The enactment of evil never gives the person what they were initially seeking. People want to feel good enough. Conti cites Donald Winnicott, the British pediatrician, on that idea, and extends it. Not limping over the line. Wanting to feel like a decent person whose work matters, who can affect others, who can be liked and cared about. When that is missing, temperament and history can push someone to soothe the deficit through envy. It often starts in childhood, when the brain and the psychology are most vulnerable. Look, he says, at Hitler's background and at Stalin's: salient child abuse.

The through-line of the conversation is almost a straight path. The universe as a whole is dispersing. In a few places complexity runs the other way, stacks through layers of emergence, and produces minds that can reflect on themselves. That rarity is worth stopping to marvel at. When the marvel goes, people become things you can handle without guilt, and evil has an entrance. Its typical shape is envy: I am not doing well, so you should not either, and once the relative positions change I will feel better.

Conti will not grant Fridman a smooth slope from jealousy to envy. He thinks there is a break, and the break is which way the motive points. That disagreement is usable because it happens in ordinary life every day. You see someone doing better than you. What appears in the next second decides the rest of the moves. As for whether the worst people truly believe they are doing good, Conti's answer is that he does not. The justification is a handkerchief. Underneath it, the person knows what is being satisfied.

There is a finer reminder as well. Conti treats not-knowing, including not knowing that we do not know, as part of health. Once you decide you have people figured out, it becomes easy to handle them like parts, and to do it without shame. Marvel's job, in that light, is practical. It is a last brake against becoming a machine that processes other people. Start with the fact that we are here. Then decide whether the feeling that just arrived is a wish to get better, or a wish to make someone else worse.