Hey, true weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation.

It was supposed to be a new Garden of Eden, a utopian wonderland where the abundance of nature more than met every need, a peaceful haven for the laws of man, and clothing both were irrelevant.

It's such a human thing, you know, our belief that paradise is something that can be found

or created. And it's so very human the way we're shocked by the serpent who always finds

its way in.

We don't see until it's far too late that we are the serpent, that there can be no such

thing as a new Garden of Eden, not with us in it.

But why not give it a try? Am I right?

And they got a small beam of light against the mirror.

True, weird, weird, stuff.

Friedrich Ritter was a successful dentist and physician in Berlin, Germany.

His medical practice was thriving. His marriage to a talented opera singer was solid, if unfulfilling,

and his future as a respectable member of German society was firmly on track. Dr. Ritter was

miserably unhappy with all of it. The professional acclaim, the gracious home, the plump bank account meant little to him.

Ritter had a different dream for himself, a dream he'd clung to for more than 20 years.

He said that all he wanted was to live wholly and completely in contemplation and communion with nature.

Ritter yearned for the freedom of a more natural and pure life, and even had a spot in mind,

a lonesome little island in the Pacific.

Ritter was a huge admirer of the German philosopher of Friedrich Nietzsche.

He was obsessed with Nietzsche's concept of the Ubermitsch or Superman.

Ritter worried that his own comfortable life in Berlin was nothing but a distraction,

a feast of simple pleasures that only blinded him to his own mediocrity.

...