Beauty Points Up: Jordan Peterson on God, Tyranny, and How to Live

Lex Fridman opens with a line from Dostoevsky's *The Idiot*, spoken by Prince Myshkin: beauty will save the world. Alexander Solzhenitsyn quoted it in his Nobel lecture. Peterson does not treat the sentence as a slogan. He says that in the highest sense it is the divine that saves the world, and that the classical virtues, beauty among them, are pointers toward that source rather than the source itself. The arrow, he insists, points up. What beauty indicates transcends beauty.

He offers a working definition of God that is almost biological. What is divine to you is your most fundamental axiom; if you claim to have none, you are either carrying a bundle of contradictory axioms or you are epistemologically lost. In the highest sense, God is "the spirit that you must emulate in order to thrive." Spirit, here, is a pattern. Admiration is the instinct that detects it: you notice someone you would like to become, and worship, at bottom, is the celebration and imitation of that pattern. Extract the admirable from the set of all admirable people, purify it, and that is as close as a human being gets to a representation of God.

The conversation keeps circling a practical problem that will run through the next three hours: how a person finds order in chaos without letting order harden into tyranny. Music that is too ordered sounds like a drum machine. A life that is too chaotic produces anxiety, which Peterson calls an entropy signal for too many pathways forward. Beauty, at its best, is the living balance of structure and fire, not a simple, sterile clarity.

Peterson's favorite image of that balance is Moses and the burning bush. The bush does not shout for attention; it shines forth, which is what *phenomenon* originally meant, and Moses has to stop and look. The tree is hierarchical, self-similar, fractal: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil at once. The fire is the transformation always happening inside every structure. That the fire does not consume the bush is the picture of transformation held in equilibrium with form, and that equilibrium, Peterson says, is presented as God. A great painting works the same way. It is a burning bush people often cannot bear.

His house, he tells Fridman, has been covered with paintings, and visitors find it hard. His mother asked why he would want to live in a museum. His answer is that he would rather live in a museum than anywhere else. Beauty is daunting. People are afraid to buy art because their taste is then on display, and they should be afraid, he says, because most people have terrible taste. Walking past a painting every day is a daily exposure of the self: how mundane, how clichéd, how sterile, how chaotic. Real art does not go dead with repetition. You keep noticing details. The whole stays larger than the parts.

The image that stopped him during his Genesis lectures is the cherubim with flaming swords posted at the gate after Adam and Eve are expelled. From a book on Genesis symbolism by Matthew Pagel, he takes cherubim as the supporting monsters of God, partly a picture of what will not fit inside a conceptual system, angelic and demonic at once. A sword is judgment, the tool that separates wheat from chaff. A flaming sword also burns. What it cuts and burns, if you want paradise, is everything about you that is not perfect. The Christian story, he says, is already inside that picture: not only death, but death and hell, before you get anywhere near heaven. That is why people stand in museums in front of pictures they cannot explain, and why even the proudly secular make pilgrimages to Europe's cathedrals. "Beauty is a terrible pointer to God."

Fridman asks who God is, one short-lived biological creature to another. Peterson will not let the question stay ornamental. The postmodern line descending from Nietzsche announces that God is dead. Nietzsche, whom he admires, did not say that lightly: we have killed him, and we will not find enough water to wash away the blood. The new-atheist sequel is that killing the transcendent frees science from superstition. Peterson's reply is that a scientist does not merely believe in the transcendent. He believes in it more than in his own theory.

A theory describes the world, and as far as you are concerned the description *is* the world. Because you are a scientist, you still assume there is an object beyond the description. You throw the theory at the object, watch where it breaks, and treat the breakage as information. That move is impossible unless you first posit an ontological beyond, and unless you further assume that contact with it, annoying as it is, is what sets you free. The scientific story therefore already contains a vow: follow the truth no matter what, treat knowledge structures with humility, and treat truth as a redemptive force. Why bother with science at all? So people do not starve, so they can move, so life can be more abundant. The whole enterprise sits inside an ethic.

If someone answers that this is "just nature," not God, Peterson asks what makes them think they know what nature is. The word already presupposes a reductionist, materialist, objective picture. A real scientist should think: in the final analysis I do not know what nature is, where it originates, where it is going, or what it is for. Saying "it is only nature" cannot mean "it is only the nature I currently understand." Matter is not dead dust. He does not know what it is. By the time there is a fully reductionist account of cognition, our picture of matter will look nothing like today's reductionism.

Fridman turns the lens on Peterson himself. After so much talk about the left, does he carry a resentment toward a worldview? Peterson does not dodge. He is a university professor; universities, he says, are threatened by the left, not the right, and not a little. The pressure ended the way he could practice his profession and cost him his clinical work. He describes ten lawsuits from the College of Psychologists, which, on his account, lets anyone anywhere complain for any reason and then treat investigation itself as punishment. He has been canceled, he says, about forty times, knows some two hundred people who have been through it, and calls even one cancellation among the worst experiences of a life. He adds the hundred million dead of twentieth-century communism, the intellectuals who excused it, and the return of resentful Marxism. Does he have animus? Yes. Does it go too far? He is trying to find out.

Fridman then asks him to steel-man Justin Trudeau. Peterson actually tries. The prime minister seems to get along with his wife, has children, and has no sexual scandal in a job where that is easy to acquire. He has put a fair bit of Canadian ocean into marine protected areas, which might be his real legacy if the protection is real. He is not a Jeffrey Epstein figure; the marriage looks genuine. As a starting point for a leader, that is not nothing. Peterson even grants the Liberal recruitment pitch: after a failed Harvard import, the party told a young man it was him or the Conservatives, and a person might hope to grow into the role, surround himself with better people, and become the thing he was only pretending to be.

Then the first act in office: a cabinet that is fifty percent women when only twenty-five percent of the elected members are female. Fridman asks whether that came from compassion. Peterson's answer is hard. He does not care if it did. He does not regard compassion as a virtue. Compassion is a reflex; *judicious* compassion is a virtue. Treating adults like infants is not love. Love, he says, is a blend of compassion, encouragement, and truth, and growth requires judgment. Mercy and justice have been imagined as the two hands of God for a long time. Mercy says you are acceptable, flaws and all. Do you actually want your flaws accepted? Judgment says you could be more. That is the maternal and paternal exchange, and the information has to flow both ways. He also notes Trudeau's expressed contempt for monetary policy and his admiration for the Chinese Communist Party's efficiency on environmental goals: "the efficiency of the tyranny in the service of your terror." As a westerner he carries a further grievance: Pierre Trudeau's 1982 National Energy Program, in his view, devastated the West, and the son is repeating the pattern. Still, he says he has never refused to talk to anyone. If Trudeau would sit down, he would ask questions. Maybe he has a large part of the man wrong.

A YouTube commenter asked why anyone should trust Peterson's advice on the environment. He spent two weeks on the question. "The claims do not match the facts" is not enough, because facts are slippery and, when the subject is everything, there are too many of them. Bjørn Lomborg's critics, he notes, argue about his facts, not only his reading of them. So he offers a different test. In the face of the apocalyptic unknown, how do you know a guide is trustworthy? "They're not terrified tyrants." How do you recognize one? They are willing to use compulsion on other people when they could have used goodwill.

Canadian farmers, he says, already have every economic reason to use as little fertilizer as they can: it is expensive, they have satellite maps of where it goes, and over forty years they have cut use dramatically while growing far more food. They are already breaking themselves in half. A flat thirty percent cut that ignores food produced per unit of fertilizer is not an efficiency standard. It is an order. If you knew farmers, especially the ones still in business, you would not assume they do not know their jobs. They are, in his view, more sophisticated than the prime minister.

The Dutch case is more extreme. Holland is smaller than Massachusetts, much of it scraped from the sea, and it is the world's second-largest agricultural exporter. After a famine at the end of World War II the country swore that would not happen again. The plan now, as he describes it, is to put about thirty percent of farmers out of business in an ecosystem that is six percent of GDP and runs on roughly a three percent margin. Cut thirty percent by fiat, he asks, and how do you not take down transport, grocery stores, and the rest of the chain? These policies, Fridman says, are paid for by the poor, not eventually but today. Peterson agrees. The other side will claim the poor benefit in the long run. He adds the clause: except the ones who are already dead.

On Ukraine, Peterson says he was widely attacked for an article that listed four causes. Critics, including in *The Atlantic*, compressed the argument into one caricature and hit that. The four, as he restates them, are Western mismanagement of Russia since the wall fell; Europe's hyper-reliance on Russian energy after what he calls idiot environmental-globalist utopianism; Russia's expansionist, empire-building streak; and Putin's belief, or his willingness to make his people believe, that Russia is a salvific force against Western "wokeism." The fourth is the one that got him accused of justifying Putin. His reply is that it is not only Russians who think the West has lost its mind. Eastern Europeans think so too. That spring he went to fifteen countries and spoke with some three hundred political and cultural leaders, not all conservatives: many liberals, and a fair number of canceled progressives.

Why does he think Putin believes his own story? He has been reading Putin's speeches for fifteen years. People become what they practice. Neurologically, a new concept lights up broad cortex; with repetition the right hemisphere drops out, then the left, until specialized machinery remains and you start to *see* the frame rather than think it. "If you're telling the same lies over and over, who do you think you're fooling?" Effective lies, reflected back by millions, are not something the speaker can withstand. So he takes seriously the "third way" Alexander Dugin and Putin have discussed for years, and Solzhenitsyn's hope of an Orthodox recovery, even while noting the hazard of a church co-opted by the state. Even if Putin is only a manipulator, the claim has been planted in a population, and the West still has to deal with it.

Fridman brings the conversation down from geopolitics to people who lost homes, and to Russian soldiers who genuinely believe they are freeing villages from Nazis. On February 24, he says, hate was born at a scale that region had not seen, aimed not at Putin or at soldiers but at all Russians, and it will last generations. Peterson offers an ugly thought: during COVID lockdowns, how much face-to-face contact was there between the West and Putin, given Europe's energy dependence? Probably none, and that was the wrong amount. A leader can live in a human bubble, not only an information bubble. He contrasts that with the hospitality of an Exodus seminar he hosted: scholars, a rented house, a security team laying out food, jet skis, eight days of work that then doubled because they could not finish. Daily Wire Plus paid. Trust made the talk deeper. Washington, by contrast, has lost that culture. Forty percent of members of Congress sleep in their offices. Families are elsewhere. He once gathered about fifteen young Democrats and Republicans and asked each to spend three minutes on why they ran. The stories were the same: the country gave us much, we should give back. You could not tell party. A lot of this, he says, is healed by ordinary social interaction, by listening, humor, and the reminder that everyone is human. A good leader aggregates misery and hope and brings them where they can be redressed.

Jimmy Carr told Peterson that standup is the most dialogical enterprise, which sounded odd for a monologue. The method is the dialogue. Before a tour you take new bits to fifty clubs, watch what the crowd laughs at, and kill the rest. Subject yourself to that judgment long enough and even a person who is not very funny can become a scream, because the crowd has told him what is funny. Do the arithmetic: fifty hours, two funny minutes a night, more than 98 percent discarded. That, Peterson says, is also what a good leader does. He goes out, aggregates misery and hope, and carries them to a place they can be answered. It revives someone who would otherwise go cynical: despite the system's defects and his own, he is gathering something and bringing it forward. Fridman adds: giving it a voice.

Fridman asks for a speaking day. Peterson is usually up by seven and ready by 7:30 or eight. Breakfast is steak and water, three or four times a day, steak and sparkling water, nothing else. Travel is now mostly private flights because commercial airlines are not reliable enough, and rule one of a tour is that you make the show. Rule two is that anyone who causes trouble is gone: errors will happen, but unaddressed error is not allowed. Typically four thousand people are waiting. On the plane there is no internet, so he writes the new book. They land in the early afternoon at a boutique hotel rather than a corporate chain. Lunch is often an air fryer and a steak in the room. "I leave a trail of air fryers behind me all across the world." Then a walk with his wife Tammy, then a twenty-minute nap, which she, still recovering from illness, needs to take longer. Without that restart, everything frays.

At the venue, if he is lecturing rather than doing a Q&A, he sits for an hour with a single question: what mystery am I trying to unravel? Each night maps onto a rule from the book, and each rule is an investigation into an ethic with no end of depth. "Put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world" breaks into what *house* means, what *put* means, what *perfect order* means, what criticism of the world even is. He decomposes, notices which branches are live, juxtaposes stories he has never set beside each other, and walks onstage with a question, a frame, and a few narrative places he might land. Then he watches whether the words land, and waits for a spontaneous arc with an ending. If you fall into a conversation and know the timeframe, he says, you can feel the midpoint and the place to stop. That is the comedian's punchline: balls in the air, then they come together. Fridman prefers an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole, the wilder the better, as in talks with Elon Musk. Peterson says that is still following the thread, the balance of structure and spontaneity that shows up as the instinct of meaning, the logos in the *dialogos*.

Peterson has been writing about what is real. One answer is matter. Another is *what matters*, because that is what you actually act on. Of the things that matter, what is most real? Pain. Try arguing it away. Good luck. A philosophy that stops there looks like an enemy of being: the most fundamental fact is suffering. Is anything more fundamental? Love. "If you're in pain, love and truth, that's what you got. And if they're more powerful than pain, maybe they're the most real things." Fridman says physical description still misses something deep in the human condition that modern science cannot yet name, though it is reaching. Peterson agrees. Underneath science is the assumption of a logos. There is a Greek rational tradition that finds logos in nature and approaches it by science, and a Judeo-Christian logos that is more embodied and spiritual. The West, he says, is the attempt to unite them, and they need uniting.

He and Frans de Waal have talked about chimpanzee sovereignty. Biology often says the most dominant male gets the mating success. If dominance means compulsion, the answer is sporadically, rarely, and briefly. Subordinates wait for a weak moment and tear the tyrant apart. That is every dictator's fear, for good reason. De Waal's work, as Peterson tells it, shows that males with real preferential access are reliably the best peacemakers and the most reciprocal. Even among chimps, the principle of sovereignty looks like iterated reciprocity, which is a far better principle than power.

What is the antithesis of the spirit of power? He thinks it is the spirit of play. A good podcast is play: ordered enough to be a conversation, loose enough that something can happen, and if you get that right it grows its own narrative arc. He did not arrive with an instrumental list of things to extract from Lex Fridman. He likes the podcast, the questions are interesting, and he will see where the talk goes. "Wherever it goes."

The hour before a lecture is nerve-wracking. Joe Rogan, after taping a special, has to sit with the comedian's terror: no material, start from scratch. When Peterson was doing lectures rather than Q&As, he was in effect writing a book chapter every night, never simply repeating rote material. Can I find the question, think the structure, grow the narrative, land it? The honest answer, each night, is that he does not know. Onstage he does not speak to "the audience." He speaks to one person, then another, watching whether the words land. He listens for rustling versus dead quiet. Quiet is focus. His public-speaking rule is that he does not say a word until the room is 100 percent silent. That sets the frame: this is not a place where everyone talks. Stillness becomes expectation, then a nervous "what is he doing?" Timing, not manipulation, tells him when to begin. Afterward they play music from illustrated books due in the fall, *ABC of Childhood Tragedy*, which he calls dark, comic, terrible, heartbreaking. Then he meets about 150 people for photographs. Ten seconds can be intense if you pay attention. It is like a wedding receiving line people actually wanted to attend. He bought expensive suits and hated the cost until he decided to dress with respect; about 60 percent of the crowd now arrives in two- or three-piece suits. A few words, especially to the young, can change a life's direction.

After 150 faces he is burnt out, which is when Twitter used to catch him. New city, new hotel, five thousand new people, a new chapter, a new horizon of ideas, another city tomorrow: impulse control is at its worst. He used to call Tammy from writing sessions and say she had to come get him, he could not stop, a hypomanic focus. Fiction is a better landing, Stephen King for narrative and character. Fridman then asks the unkind question: does he worry that fame traps him in the man he was before he was famous? Elvis died an Elvis impersonator. Is he becoming a Jordan Peterson impersonator, the always-right man in the suit? He says he worries about it more than anything else. He hopes he does. He had better. Has fame corrupted him? "No doubt, in some regard." People are more likely to do what you ask. Optimal pushback is one of the things that keeps you dying properly, shedding the old self. Tyrants lose that. Everyone laughs at their jokes, opens their doors, wants something, and the red carpet is always out. "Not if the red carpet is rolled out to you while you're on your way to perdition. That's not a good deal. You just get there more efficiently." So he tries to keep critics nearby: too harsh, unnecessarily alienating, not enough background work. Influence raises the duty. He admits using anger as fuel for columns on things like a forthcoming famine, which then makes his YouTube tone harsher than is optimal.

The marriage has had to be renegotiated in public view. Tammy did not want to tour one spring; he was ill again; she went home, came back, and nervously said she needed her own hotel room. Part of him heard, are we not married? Her reasons were concrete: she had been very sick, needed exercise, prayer, meditation, and time for a podcast that was going well. "I need this in order to continue." She had not said she wanted off the tour. She had asked how to stay. He calls it a very good decision, and a model of proper selfishness in a relationship: he does not want to travel without her, does not want her miserable, and wants her fully on board. The day he described was also missing the dinners with ten to thirty local cultural and political people in each country, sometimes stacked on lecture days, which she also has to meet with grace.

Peterson wants to correct the public story of his illness. It looked as if benzodiazepines had wrecked him. That, he says, is not why he got sick. He took a low dose for a long time and it helped; the underlying problem looks like allergy, or several. When the drug stopped working he raised the dose for about a month, got much worse, then cut back hard, and everything came apart. Underneath were immune troubles that run in the family: his daughter Mikhaila has a highly reactive immune system; Tammy has three serious immunological conditions; he had psoriasis, peripheral uveitis, alopecia areata, and chronic gum disease. He used to feel he could breathe about a fifth of what he sometimes could, always short of breath, possibly on the edge of anaphylaxis, sympathetic system maxed, parasympathetic almost off, unable to relax. He is reluctant to evangelize, but the meat-only diet, on his account, stopped the cascade: psoriasis gone, supposedly incurable gum disease gone in three years, a cloudy right eye cleared, fifty pounds off and stable. He is not a nutrition scientist and is skeptical of the field's mysteries and profiteers. Personally, he feels best eating only meat.

Fridman came to fat-adapted running and intermittent fasting through ultramarathoners, and finds his mind almost nervously focused when he eats once a day. Peterson reads that as an optimization of death: in a fast the body scavenges damaged tissue first. Starve dogs down about 20 percent below optimal weight and they live some 30 percent longer. The alertness may be hunting mode, not despair. Maybe humans should spend more time there. They do not know. Fridman worries there is no free lunch and that chronic stress will collect a bill. Peterson says that, at least for fasting, it does not look that way.

How does he think through an idea? The writing app he and his son built, Essay.app, starts with what bugs you? "Your destiny is to be found in what bothers you." A million things could irritate you; some grip you, even make you resentful, because they are yours. Then find a question you actually want answered and do not already have. That is humility: here is a mystery, I do not know. Then comes what he calls revelation: if the question is real, thoughts appear. Where from? It depends on intent. Aimed at making things better, perhaps they come from the place designed for that; aimed at making things worse, they come from hell. Before a lecture he interrogates himself: the goal is to do the best job possible; people did not come for political sport but to make their lives better; ingratitude is no place to start. He writes about thirty point notes and often uses none of them onstage. Since 1985 he has practiced feeling whether each word is a stepping stone or a foundation stone. People ask if he prays. "I pray before every word." Production and editing are separate neural systems; trying to perfect every sentence on the first pass is a mistake. The way to be careful and still free is to aim right, scour out fame, notoriety, or money if they are contaminating you, and then trust what happens.

Fridman asks how a depressed person finds a way out. Peterson's first clinical move is to ask what the person means. They may be hyper-anxious or obsessional; powerful negative emotion has several forms. The next question is whether they are depressed, or have a terrible life, or both. If there are friends, family, an intimate relationship, work matched to intelligence, time outside work used well, no alcohol or other traps, and some community, and they still feel awful, they are ill or depressed. In his experience, antidepressants often help a lot in that situation.

The other picture is a life with no relationship, a wrecked family, no friends, no plan, no job, leisure used destructively, a drug or pornography habit, no community, no scaffolding. Then you pick a front. You need one friend. Do you know how to shake hands and introduce yourself? He has people demonstrate. "Hi, I'm Jordan." Many cannot even get the ball rolling. Elementary social skills, if you were cared for, arrived around age three; some clients never received that attention and need something like ten thousand hours of it, much of it listening, because they have ten thousand hours of unspoken conversation tangled in their heads. He worked fifteen years with a woman who wanted him to shut up for fifty minutes while she told him what had happened. It was hard for him. Over the years discussion grew until it was about 80 percent of the hour. She had never been properly attended to. She was, in the Taoist image, uncarved wood, never put through the flaming sword.

If a therapist is hard to find, and he says it is getting harder because therapists are pressured to agree with clients, which is as damaging as arbitrary opposition, there is the Self-Authoring suite online: autobiography, a faults-and-virtues analysis of the present, and a guided future plan. Wait at least eighteen months after a trauma before writing it, or you just injure yourself again. Young men who spend ninety minutes on the future-authoring piece, he says, are 50 percent less likely to drop out of college. When the cloud is so heavy that a step is impossible, you shrink the dragon. A client who could not get out of bed: can you sit up once today? No. Can you prop yourself on your elbows once? Scale the dragon until it is conquerable. Aggregates then grow exponentially, for failure as well as success. That same client could not sit with him in a café at the start and was doing standup and reading poetry onstage by the end.

Advice for people in high school: take on some responsibility. Do something for other people; you are doing something for your future self even if you cannot see it, because you are a community across time. Find something to serve, someone to help, a job, and do right by the customers. Do not be above the work. You know nothing yet; you can still be the boss of the job you have. Be decent to customers, learn the boss-employee relation, arrive fifteen minutes early and leave fifteen late. Competent employers, he says, are desperate for competence. Show it and doors you did not know existed open. How do you start putting a house in order? Make the bed. Look around the room and see what bugs you: peeling paint, dust, a bad lamp, a closet you will not open. That is a lot of problems and a lot of opportunity. Pick a fix you know would help, that you could do, and that you would do. Negotiate with yourself. The whole room is too big a dragon; one drawer might not be. A sock drawer is thirty seconds every morning, which is hours a year. Life, he roughs out, is something like two hundred five-minute chunks a day, many of them repeating. Get the mundane right and then you can play. Play in children is neurologically fragile; competing motives suppress it. Everything has to be a walled garden first. Voluntary order is not tyranny. It is the precondition of freedom.

Many of his male clients came home to a fight at the door. He is tired and hungry and wants welcome; she has been with the children, tired and hungry, and wants some recognition; they collide, trade a day's troubles, and lose the evening. The exercise: you get to choose what happens when you come home, but you have to know what it is. Imagine the scene you actually want. Then ask her for hers. Combine the two visions so both get what they want and, because they have been joined, more than either wanted alone. Who would refuse that unless they were aiming down? Pair it with a grace period: let me do this stupidly at least twenty times, and I will give you the same. Practice badly, then maybe get the next ten thousand right.

How do you find the love of your life? He was asked that three times running on tour, via Slido, and realized it is a stupid question: cart before horse. The right question is, how do I make myself into the perfect date? If I offered everything I could to a partner, who would I be? Clean, reasonably fit, productive, generous, honest, willing to delay gratification. A dance is a test of whether you can align with patterns of being, with her, playfully and without grabbing. Work on offering people what they need and they line up to play. The cynical objection is that they will take advantage. Factor that in: be as soft as a dove and as wise as a serpent. Offer real trust anyway. Even with people who are full of snakes, and he has treated the criminal and the psychopathic, alert trust is still the best bet, and it can evoke the best in them.

Fridman brings in Solzhenitsyn's line that the divide between good and evil runs through every heart and moves. Peterson reads the cosmic drama of Satan versus Christ as, at minimum, a story about you. Great literature lets you identify with the villain; pop stories split good and evil into separate bodies. He would make a case that *The Brothers Karamazov* is Dostoevsky's crown, though *Crime and Punishment* was his own book because he recognized Raskolnikov's Luciferian intellect; Fridman loved *The Idiot* because he recognized Myshkin, the holy fool, childlike rather than merely naive. Dostoevsky, Peterson says, had an edge on Nietzsche because he could show in action what cannot be fully propositionally stated: Ivan wins the argument, Alyosha is still the better man. The meaning of life, asked at the end, is "the adventure along the route," found in a faith that the highest value is love and truth is its handmaiden. You cannot know from the armchair. You have to act it out. Nietzsche warned that if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. Peterson's counter-wager, the one he says he is betting his life on, is that if you gaze long enough you see the light, not the darkness. If all you see is abyss, you have not looked long enough. The flaming swords are still there. Death is not enough. The story requires a voluntary journey through hell.