Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Well, he writes most of Mein Kampf in Landsberg prison. And then he writes the rest of it in what becomes known as the [German 01:02:10], which is this little wooden hut in the Obersalzberg. And you can still see the remnants of that. And unfortunately, there’s still little candles there and stuff in the woods by neo-Nazis and whatnot, what have you. But that’s where he wrote the rest of it. I mean, it Jean-Jacques Rousseau who says, “Man has his greatest thought when surrounded by nature.” That was something that Hitler took very much to heart. There was a mentor of his called Dietrich Eckart. Dietrich Eckart introduced him to the Obersalzberg and the beauty of the southeast Bavarian Alps around Berchtesgaden. And that was his favorite place on the planet, and that’s where he eventually bought the Berghof with the royalties, it has to be said, from Mein Kampf, which went from being almost pulp to suddenly being a runaway bestseller, unfortunately. Can you actually comment on that? It’s a shitty manifesto as far as manifestos go. I think there’s a lot of values to understand from a first person perspective, the words of a dictator, of a person like Hitler. But it just feels like that’s just such a shitty- Yeah, I mean it’s banned in a number of countries. You don’t need to, because no one’s going to read it, because it’s unreadable. I mean, it’s very untidy. It’s very incoherent. There’s no narrative arc, to use a writer’s phrase. I mean, but it does give you a very clear, the overall impression you get at the end of it is the communists and the Jews are to blame for everything.…

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