Friedrich Nietzsche is remembered as the philosopher of supreme willpower, the man who declared that God is dead and demanded a ruthless rejection of weakness. Yet the biographical and medical record shows a nearly blind, stateless exile wracked by days-long migraines, typing on a primitive writing-ball machine in freezing boarding houses across Switzerland, Italy, and France. This episode traces his life from a devout Lutheran childhood in Prussia, through the loss of his faith at university, his appointment as a full professor at 24 without a completed doctorate, his health-destroying service in the Franco-Prussian War, and his break with Richard Wagner over nationalism and anti-Semitism.

The conversation unpacks the mechanics of his core ideas: the Ubermensch as a psychological ideal of someone who can face the void without clinging to n ...