Lex Fridman Podcast - #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

Sheldon Solomon is a social psychologist, a philosopher, co-developer of Terror Management Theory, co-author of The Worm at the Core. Please support this channel by supporting our sponsors: - Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex – ExpressVPN at https://www.expressvpn.com/lexpod – Cash App: download app & use code "LexPodcast" Episode links: Sheldon's Website: https://www.skidmore.edu/psychology/faculty/solomon.php The Worm at the Core (book): https://amzn.to/31hQAXH Denial of Death (book): https://amzn.to/329Zxl4 If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/podcast or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. Here's the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. OUTLINE: 00:00 - Introduction 05:34 - Role of death in life 22:57 - Jordan Peterson 53:02 - Humans are both selfish and cooperative 56:57 - Civilization collapse 1:10:07 - Meditating on your mortality 1:16:10 - Kierkegaard and Heidegger 1:33:25 - Elon Musk 1:36:56 - Thinking deeply about death 1:45:53 - Religion 1:56:59 - Consciousness 2:03:39 - Why is Ernest Becker not better known 2:07:09 - AI and mortality 2:21:07 - Academia should welcome renegade thinkers 2:36:33 - Book recommendations 2:43:23 - Advice for young people 2:48:17 - Meaning of life

The following is a conversation with Sheldon Solomon, a social psychologist, a philosopher, codeveloper of terror management theory, and co-author of The Warm at the Core, on the role of death in life. He further carried the ideas of Ernest Becker that can crudely summarize as the idea that our fear of death is at the core of the human condition and the driver of most of the creations of human civilization. Quick summary of the sponsors, Blinkist, ExpressVPN, and CashApp. Click the links in the description to get a discount.

It really is the best way to support this podcast. Let me say as a side note that Ernest Becker's book, Denial of Death, had a big impact on my thinking about human cognition, consciousness, and the deep ocean currents of our mind that are behind the surface behaviors we observe. Many people have told me that they think about death or don't think about death, fear death or don't fear death, but I think not many people think about this topic deeply, But I think not many people think about this topic deeply, rigorously, in the way that Nietzsche suggested. This topic, like many that lead to deep personal self-reflection, frankly is dangerous for the mind, as all first principles thinking about the human condition is, if you gaze long into the abyss, like Nietzsche said, the abyss will gaze back into you.

I've been reading a lot about World War II, Stalin, and Hitler. It feels to me that there's some fundamental truth there to be discovered, in the moments of history that changed everything, the suffering, the triumphs. If I bring up Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin in these conversations, it is never through a political lens. I'm not left, nor right. I think for myself, deeply, and often question everything, changing my mind as often as is needed. I ask for your patience, empathy, and rigorous thinking.

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that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Sheldon Solomon. What is the role of death and fear of death in life? Well, from our perspective, the uniquely human awareness of death and our unwillingness to accept that fact, we would argue is the primary motivational impetus for almost everything that people do, whether they're aware of it or not. So that's kind of been your life work, your view of the human condition is that death, you've written the book, Warm of the Core, that death is at the core of our consciousness of everything of how we see the world of what

drives us. Maybe can you elaborate like what, how you see death fitting in? What does it mean to be at the core of our being? So I think that's a great question. And to be pedantic, I usually start my psychology classes. And I say to the students, OK, let's define our terms. And theology part, they get right away. It's the study of. And then we get to the psyche part.

And understandably, the students are like, oh, that means mind. And I'm like, well, no, that's a modern interpretation. But in that ancient Greek, it means soul, but not in the Cartesian dualistic sense that most of us in the West think when that word comes to mind. And so you hear the word soul. And you're like, well, all right, that's the non-physical part of me that's potentially detachable from my corporal container when I'm no longer here. But Aristotle's who coined the word psyche, I think. He was not a dualist. He was a monist. He thought that the soul was inextricably connected to the body. And he defined soul as the essence of a

natural body that is alive. And then he goes on and he says, all right, let me give you an example. alive. And then he goes on and he says, all right, let me give you an example. If an ax was alive, the soul of an ax would be to chop. And if you can pluck your eyeball out of your head, and it was still functioning, then the soul of the eyeball would be to see. functioning than the soul of the eyeball would be to see. You know, in any psychorite, the soul of a grasshopper is to hop the soul of a woodpecker is to pack, which raises the question, of course, what is the essence of what it means to be human? And here, of course, there is no one universally accepted conception of the essence of our humanity. All right, our stoddle gives us the idea of humans as rational animals.

You know, we're homo sapiens. But not the only game in town got Joseph Heusinger, an anthropologist in the 20th century. He called us homo-ludents that were basically fundamentally playful creatures. And I think it was Hana Arent, a homo-favor, were tool-making creatures. Another woman, Ellen Dizanayake, wrote a book called Homoestheticus, and following Aristotle and his poetic, she's like, well, we're not only rational animals, we're also aesthetic creatures that appreciate beauty. There's another take on humans,

I think they call us homo-narratans. We're storytelling creatures. And I think all of those designations of what it means to be human are quite useful, heuristically and certainly worthy of our collective concentration. But what garnered my attention when I was a young punk was just a single line in an essay by a Scottish guy who was Alexander Smith in a book called Dream for I think it's written in the 1860s, he just says right

in the middle of an essay, it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human. And I remember reading that and I'm in my gut. I was like, Oh, man, I don't like that, but I think you're on to something. And then William James, the great Harvard philosopher and arguably the first academic psychologist, he referred to death as the worm at the core of the human condition. So that's where the worm at the core idea comes in. And that's just an illusion to the story of Genesis back in the proverbial old days in the Garden of Eden. Everything was going tremendously well until the serpent tempts Eve to take a chop out of the apple of the tree in knowledge, and Adam partakes also.

And this is according to the Bible, what brings death into the world. And from our vantage point, the story of Genesis is a remarkable allegorical recount of the origin of consciousness, where we get to the point whereby virtue of our vast intelligence, we come to realize the inevitability of death. So, the apple is beautiful and it's tasty, but when you get right into the middle of it, there's that ugly reality, which is our finitude. And then fast forward a bit, and I was a young professor at Skidmore College in 1980. My PhD is an experimental social psychology and I mainly did studies with clinical psychologists

evaluating the efficacy of non-pharmacological interventions to reduce stress. And that was good work and I found it interesting. But in my first week as a professor at Skidmore, I'm just walking up and down the shelves of the library, saw some books by a guy I had never heard of, Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist recently deceased. He died in 1974. he died in 1974. After weeks before actually, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize and nonfiction for his book, The Denial of Death. And that was his last book. It's actually his next to last book. I don't know how you pull this off, but he had one more after he died called Escape from Evil. And evidently it was supposed to, originally the denial of death was supposed to be this

giant thousand-page book that was both. And they split it up and what became Escape from Evil, his wife Marie Becker finished. be that as it may in it is in the denial of death where becker just says it in the first paragraph, I believe, that the terror of death and the way that human beings respond to it or decline to respond to it is primarily responsible for almost everything we do whether we're aware of it or not and mostly We're not and so I read that first paragraph Lex and I was like wow, okay, this dude you're onto something you're onto something the same thing It's the same thing and And then it reminded me, I think, not to play psychologists, but, you know, let's face it, I believe there's a reason why we

end up drifting where we ultimately come to. So I'm in my mid 20s. I got Ernest Becker's book in my hand. And the next thing I know, I'm remembering when I'm eight years old, the day that my grandmother died. And you know, the day before my mom said, oh say goodbye to grandma, she's not well. And okay, I said, okay, grandma. And I knew she wasn't well, but I didn't really appreciate the magnitude of her illness. Well, she dies the next day. And it's in the evening and I'm just sitting there looking at my stamp collection. And I'm like, wow, I'm going to miss my grandmother. And then I'm like, no, wait a minute. That means my mother's going to die. And after she gets old. And that's even worse, after all, who's gonna make me dinner? And that bothered me for a while. But then I'm looking at the stamps, all the dead American

presidents. And I'm like, there's George Washington. He's dead. There's Thomas Jefferson. He's dead. My mom's gonna be dead. Oh, I'm gonna get old and be dead someday. And at eight years old, that was my first explicit existential crisis. I remember it being one of these blood curdling realizations that I tried my best to ignore for the most of the time I was subsequently growing up. But fast forward back to Schidmore College, mid-20s, you know, Readin' Backer's book in the 1980s,

thinking to myself, wow, one of the reasons why I'm finding this so compelling is that it squares with my own personal experience. And then to make a short story long and I'll shut up, Lex, but what grabbed me about backer, and this is in part because I read a lot of his other books. There's another book, The Birth and Death of Meaning, which is framed from an evolutionary perspective. And then the denial of death is really more framed from an existential psychodynamic vantage point. And as a young academic,

I was really taken by what I found to be a very potent juxtaposition that you really don't see that often. potent juxtaposition that you really don't see that often. Yet usually evolutionary types are eager to dismiss the psychodynamic types and vice versa. And maybe only John Bolby, you know, there's other folks, but the attachment theorist, John Bolby, was really one of the first serious academics to say these ways of thinking about things are quite compatible. Can you comment on what a psychodynamics view of the world is versus an evolution? Have you of the world just in case people are not? Yeah, absolutely. That's a fine question. Well, for the evolutionary types in general,

are interested in how it is and why it is that we have adapted to our surroundings in the service of persisting over time and being represented in the gene pool thereafter. He used to be a fish. Yeah. He used to be a fish and I was talking on a podcast. Yeah. How we came to be that way. How we came to be that way.

And so whereas the existential psychodynamic types, I would say, are more interested in development across a single lifespan. But the evolutionary types dismiss the psychodynamic types as overly speculative and devoid of empirical support for their views. They'll just say these guys are talking shit, if you'll pardon the expression. And of course, so you can turn right around and say the same about the evolutionary types that they are often and rightfully criticized, evolutionary psychologists for what are called the just so stories, but where it's like, oh, this is probably why Phil and the blank is potentially adaptive.

And my thought, again, early on was, I didn't see any intrinsic antithesis between these viewpoints. I just found them dialectically compatible and very powerful when combined. So one question I would ask here is about a science being speculative. You know, when there's a little about the human mind, you said you picked up Becker's book and you know, it felt like it was onto something. That's the same

thing I felt when I picked up Becker's book, probably also in my early 20s. You know, I read a lot of philosophy, but it felt like the question of the when I picked up Becker's book, probably also in my early 20s. You know, I read a lot of philosophy, but it felt like the question of the meaning of life, kind of, you know, this seemed to be the most, the closest to the truth somehow. It was onto something. So I guess the question I want to ask also is like,

how speculative is psychology? How like all of your life's work? How do you feel, how confident do you feel about the whole thing, about understanding our mind? I feel confidently, unconfident to have it both ways. Like what do we make of psychology? What do we make of psychology? You want to make starting with Freud's, you know, starting just just our or even just

philosophy, even the aspects of the sciences, like, you know, my field of artificial intelligence, but also physics, you know, it often feels like, man, we don't really understand most of what's going on here. And certainly that's true with the human mind. Yeah, well, to me, that's the proper epistemological stance. I don't know anything. Well, it's the so critic, I know that I don't know, which is the first step on the path to wisdom. I would argue forcefully that we know a lot more than we used to. I would argue equally forcefully, not that I have a PhD in the philosophy of science,

but I believe that the Thomas Coons of the world are right when they point out that change is not necessarily progress. And so, on the one hand, I do think we know a lot more than we did back in the day when if you wanted to fly, you put on some wax wings and jumped off a mountain. On the other hand, I think it's quite arrogant when scientists all just speak about psychological scientists. When they have the audacity to mistake statistical precision for knowledge and insight. And when they make the mistake in my estimation, that Einstein bemoaned, and that's this idea that the mere accumulation of data will necessarily result in conceptual breakthroughs. And so I like the, what, we're all I hope appreciative

of the people who trained us, but I remember my first day in graduate school at the University of Kansas. They brought us into a room and on one side of the board was a quote by Kurt Lewin, or Levine, famous German social psychologist, and the quote is, there's nothing more useful than a good theory. And then on the other side was another quote by a German physicist, his name alludes me, and it was all theories are wrong. And I'm like, which is it? And of course, the point is that it's both our theories, I believe, powerful ways to direct

our attention to aspects of human affairs that might render us better able to understand ourselves in the world around us. Now, I also, as an experimental psychologist, I adhere to the view that theories are essentially hypothesis generating devices, and that at its best, science is a dialectical interplay where you have theoretical assertions that yield testable hypotheses and that either results in the

corroboration of the theory, the rejection of it or the modification thereafter. If we look at the existentialists or even like modern philosopher, psychologist types, like Jordan Peterson, I'm not sure if you're familiar with that. No Jordan pretty well We go way back actually if he were here with us today we would he would be jumping in and I believe very Interesting and important ways, but yeah, we go back 30 years ago. He was Basically saying our work is nonsense. Let's get into this. I'll talk to Jordan eventually and this thing. Go to some rough times right now.

Absolutely. And I wish him well the time was concerned about our vague claims to the effect that all meaning is arbitrary. He takes a more youngian as well as evolutionary view that I don't think is wrong, by the way, which is that there are certain kinds of meanings that are more important, let's say, religious types, and that we didn't pay sufficient attention to that in our early days. So can you try to lose the data like what his world view is? Because he's also a religious man. So what was some of the interesting aspects

of the disagreements that then? Yeah, well, back in the day, I just said, Jordan was a young punk. We were young punk. So he was just kind of flailing in an animated way at some conferences saying that we... You're still both kind of punk. He was just kind of flailing in an animated way at some conferences saying that we... You're still both kind of punk.

Yeah, we got a punk punk. So I saw him three or four years ago, we spoke on a, it was an awesome day. We're in Canada at the Ontario Shakespeare Festival where we were asked to be on a Canadian broadcast system program. I think we were talking about Macbeth from a psychodynamic perspective. And I hadn't seen him in a ton of years and we spent two days together, had a great time. You know, we had just written our book, The Worm at the Core. And he's like, you know, you're missing a big opportunity. Every time you say something. You have to have your phone and you have to film yourself and then you have to put it on YouTube. Yeah. He was onto something that, you know, just as a small tangent.

It's almost sad to look at Jordan Peterson and somebody like yourself. After having done this podcast, I realized that there is really brilliant people in this world. And oftentimes, especially when they're, I mean, it would love, a little bit like punks. That's right. They kind of do their own thing and the world doesn't know they exist as much as they should. And it's so much, because most people are kind of boring. And then the interesting one's kind of going on their own and there's not a smartphone. And that's that's so interesting. He was on to something that, I mean, it's interesting that you, I don't think he was thinking from a money perspective, but he was probably thinking of like

connecting with people or sharing his knowledge. but people don't often think that way. That's right. So maybe we can try to get back to... Yeah, you're both brilliant people, and I'd love to get some interesting disagreements earlier and later about in your psychological work, in your world views. Well, our disagreements today would be along two dimensions. One is he is, and again, I wish he was here to correct me.

When I say that he is more committed to the virtues of the Judeo-Christian tradition, particularly Christianity, and in a sense is a contemporary curcuguard of sorts. When he sang, there's only one way to leap into faith, and I would take ardent issue with that claim on the grounds that that is one, but by no means not the only way to find meaning and value in life. And so, and I see his... What's his warm at the core? What is, like, we're talking about a little bit of a higher level of discovering meaning.

Yeah. What's his, what does he make of death? Oh, I don't know. And this is where it would be nice to have him here. He has, you know, from a distance criticized our work as misguided. Having said that, though, when we were together, he said something along the lines that there is no theoretical

body of work in academic psychology right now for which there is more empirical evidence. And so I appreciated that. He's a great researcher. He's a good clinician. The other thing that we will agree to disagree about, rather vociferously, is ultimately political slash economic. So I remember being at dinner with him, telling him that the next book that I wanted to write was going to be called Why Left and Right or Both Beside the Point. going to be called why left and right are both beside the point. And my argument was going to be, and it is going to be that both liberal and political, no liberal and conservative political philosophy are each intellectually and morally bankrupt because they're both framed in terms of assumptions about human nature that are demonstrably false. And Jordan didn't mind me knocking liberal political philosophy on those grounds. That would basically be like Stephen Panker's blank slate.

But he took issue when I pointed out that actually it's conservative political philosophy, which starts with John Locke's assumption that in a state of nature there are no societies, just autonomous individuals who are striving for survival. That's one of the most obviously patent-ly wrong assertions in the history of intellectual thought. And Locke uses that to justify his claims about the individual right to acquire unlimited amounts of property, which is ultimately the justification for neoliberal economics. And well, can you look at that a little bit? Sure. What's the, can you describe this philosophy again

as view of the world? Sure. And what neoliberal economics is? Yeah, let me translate it in English. So basically, all these days, anybody who says, I'm a conservative free market type, you're following John Locke and Adam Smith, whether you're aware of it or not. So here's John Locke, who by the way, all of these guys are great. So for me to appear to criticize any of these folks, it is with

the highest regard. And also, need to understand in my estimation how important their ideas are. Locke is working in a time where all rule was top down by divine right. And he's trying desperately to come up with a philosophical justification to shift power justification to shift power and autonomy to individuals. And he starts in his second treatise on government, 1690 or so. He says, okay, let's start with a state of nature. And he's like, in a state of nature, there's no societies, there's just individuals. And in a perfect universe, there wouldn't be any societies. There would just be individuals who by the law of nature have a right to acquire and preserve the fruits of their own labor. But his point is, and it's actually a good one, he's following Hobbes here, he's like, well, the problem with that is that people are assholes.

And if they would let each other alone, then we would still be living in a state of nature, everybody just doing what they did to get by each day. But it's a whole lot easier, you know, if I see like an apple tree a mile away, well, I can go over and pick an apple, but if you're 10 meters away with an apple in your hand, it's a lot easier if I pick up a rock and crack your head and take the apple. And his point was that the problem is that people can't be counted on to behave. They will take each other's property.

Moreover, he argued, if someone takes your property, you have the right to, you have the right to retribution in proportion to the degree of the magnitude of the transgression. English translation, if I take your apple, you have the right to take an apple back. You don't have the right to kill my firstborn, but people being people, they're apt to escalate retaliatory behavior thus creating what law called a state of war.

So he said in order to avoid a state of war, people reluctantly give up their freedom in exchange for security. They agree to obey the law and that the sole function of government is to keep domestic tranquility and to ward off foreign evasion in order to protect our right to property. All right, so now here's the property thing.

All right, so at Locke says, if you look in the Bible and in nature, there is no private property. And but Locke says, well, surely you, if there's anything that you own, it's your body. And surely you have a right by nature to stay alive. And then by extension, to stay alive. And then by extension, anything that you do where you exert effort or labor, that becomes your private property. So back to the apple tree. If I walk over to an apple tree, that's everybody's apples until I pick one. And the minute I do, that is my apple. Right? And then he says, you can have as many apples as you want, as long as you don't waste them, and as long as you don't impinge on somebody else's right to get apples. Right? So far, so good. And then he says, well, okay, in the early days, you could only eat so many apples. Or you could only trade so many apples with somebody else. So he was like, well, if you

put a fence around a bunch of apple trees, those become your apples. That's your property. If somebody else wants to put a fence around Nebraska, that's their property. And everybody can have as much property as they want, because because the world is so big that there is no limit to what you can have if you pursue it by virtue of your own effort. But then he says money came into the picture and this is important because he noticed long before anybody, before the Freud's of the world,

that money is funky because it has no intrinsic value. He's like, oh, look at that shiny piece in metal. That actually has, if you're hungry, and you have a choice between a carrot and a lump of gold in the desert, most people are going to go for the carrot. But his point is, is that the allure of money is that it's basically a concentrated symbol of wealth, but because it doesn't spoil, Locke said, well, the reality is is that some people are more the word that he used was industrious. He said, some people were industrious than others. Right, today we would say smarter, less lazy, more ambitious.

He just said that's natural, it's also true. Therefore, he argued, over time, some people are going to have a whole lot of property and other people not much at all. Inequality for Locke is natural and beneficial for everyone. His argument was that, you know, the rising tide lifts all boats and that the truly creative and innovative are entitled to relatively unlimited worth because we're all better off as a result. So the point very simply is that, well, that space, and then you have Adam Smith, you know, in the next century, with the invisible hand,

where Adam Smith says, everyone pursuing their own selfish, that's not necessarily projardive. If everyone pursues their own selfish interests, we will all be better off as a result. And what do you think is the flawed in that way? Well, there's two flaws. One is that, well, one flaw is, first of all,

that it is based on an erroneous assumption to begin with, which is that there never was a time in human history when we were in a social species. In a sense, you don't feel like that there's a, this emphasis of individual autonomy is a flawed premise. Like, there's something fundamentally deeply interconnected between us. I do.

I think that Plato and Socrates, you know, in the Crito were closer to the truth when they started with the assumption that we were interdependent then they derived individual autonomy as a manifestation of a functional social system. That's fascinating. So when Margaret Thatcher, you're too young,

in the 1980s she said societies, there's no such thing as societies. There's just individuals pursuing their self-interest. So, uh, so that's one point where I would take issue, respectfully, with John Locke. Point number two is when Locke says in 1690, well, England's filled up. Um, so if you want some land, just go to America. It's empty. Or maybe there's a few savages there. Just kill them. So Melville does the same thing in Moby Dick, where he thinks about, well, there ever come a time where we run out of whales. And he says, no, but we have run out of wells. And so Locke was right maybe in 1690 that the world was large and had infinite resources.

He certainly wronged today in my opinion. Also wrong is the claim that the unlimited pursuit of personal wealth does not harm those around us. There is no doubt that radical inequality is tragic psychologically and physically. Its poverty is not that terrible. It's easy for me to say because I have a place to stay and something to eat. But as long as you're not starving and have a place to be, poverty is not as challenging as being having the impoverished and close proximity to those who are obscenely wealthy. So it's not the absolute measure of your well-being is the inequality of that well-being. That's quite fraud. It's a Friday painful.

So maybe just to link on the Jordan Peterson thing in terms of your disagreement as world's due, so he went through quite a bit of fire in his defense or maybe his opposition of the idea of equality of outcomes. So looking at the inequality that's in our world, looking at, you know, certain groups, measurably having an outcome that's different than other groups, and then drawing conclusions about fundamental unfairness, injustice justice inequality in the system.

So like systematic racism, systematic sexism, systematic anything else that creates inequality. And he's been kind of saying pretty simple things to say that, you know, the system for the most part is not broken or flawed. That the inequality is part, the inequality of outcomes is part of our world. What we should strive for is the equality of opportunity. And I do not dispute that as an abstraction, but again, to back up for a second,

I do take issue with Jordan's fervent devotion to the free market and his cavalier dismissal of Marxist ideas, which he has in my estimation mischaracterized in his public depictions. Let's get into it. So he just seems to really not like socialism, Marxism, communism, yeah, historically speaking sort of, I mean, how would I characterize it? I'm not exactly sure. I don't want to, again, yeah, you'll eventually be here to defend himself. John Locke, unfortunately, not here to define exactly. But what's your sense about Marxism and the way Jordan talks about the way you think about it, from the economics, from the philosophical perspective? Yeah.

Well, if we were all here together, I'd say we need to start with Marx's economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 before Marx became more of a polemicist. And I would argue that Marx's political philosophy, he's a crappy economist, I don't dispute that, but his arguments about human nature, his arguments about the inevitably catastrophic psychological and environmental and economic effects of capitalism, I would argue every one of those has proven quite right. Marx maybe did not have the answer, but he saw in the 18, whenever he was writing that inevitably capitalism would lead to massive inequity, that it was ultimately based on the need to denigrate and dehumanize labor to render them in his language a fleshy cog in a giant machine and it would create

Attention and conflict between those who own things and those who made things That over time would always you know the Thomas Pickardy guy who writes about capital and just makes the point that return on investment will always be greater than wages. That means the people with money are going to have a lot more. That means there's going to come a point where the economic house of cards falls apart. Now, the Joseph Shumpters of the world, they're like, that's creative destruction. Bring it. That's great. So I think it's Niles Ferguson. He was, he's a historian. He may be at Stanford now. He was at Harvard. You

know, he writes about the history of money. And he's like, yeah, there's been 20 or whatever depressions and big recessions in the last several hundred years. And when that happens, half of the population or whatever is catastrophically inconvenienced, but that's the price that we pay for progress. other people would argue and I would agree with them that I will happily sacrifice the rate of progress in order to flatten the curve of economic destruction. To put that in plainer English, I would direct our attention to the social democracies that forgetting for the moment of whether it's possible to do this on a scale in a country as big as ours, on all of the things that really matter, you know, gross domestic GDP or whatever, that's just an abstraction. But when you look at whatever

the United Nations says how we measure quality of life, life expectancy, education, rates of alcoholism, suicide, and so on, the countries that do better are the mixed economies, their market economies that have high tax rates in exchange for the provision of services that come as a right for citizens. Yeah, so I mean, I guess the question is, you've kind of mentioned that, you know, like as Marx described, capitalism with a slippery slope, eventually things go awry in some kind of way. So that's the question is, when you have, when you implement a system, how does it go wrong eventually?

You know, the, you know, eventually will all be dead. That's exactly right. No, no, no, no, no, that's right. So, and then the criticism, I mean, I think these days, unfortunately, Marxism is like, is a dirty word. I say unfortunately, because even if you disagree with the philosophy, you should, like calling somebody a Marxist, should not be a thing that shuts down all conversation.

No, that's right. And the fact is is I'm sympathetic with Jordan's dismissal of the folks in pop you the talking heads these days who spew Marxist words To me it's like fashionable nonsense. I don't do you know that book that the physicist wrote mocking You two young so in the 20 or so years. Well, pretty young. Well, yeah, that's right.

But I think they're with you. Exactly. You physicists, they wrote a paper just mocking the kind of literary postmodern types. Oh, yes. Oh, those kinds of, yes. It was just nonsense. And of course, it was made the lead article.

And, you know, my poor is Marx wouldn't be a Marxist. Yeah. True. I have a red and listen to some of the work of Richard Wolfe. He speaks pretty eloquently about Marxist. I like him. He's one of the only, you know, one of the only people speaking about a lot about Marxism in the way we are now in a serious way

in it, in a sort of saying, you know, what are the flaws of capitalism? Not saying like, yeah, basically sounding very different, people should check out his work. No, I, because all this kind of work, this kind of outrage, mob culture of sort of demanding equality of outcome. That's not Marxism. It is not Marxism. And he didn't say that. You know, he literally said what it was like, each according to their needs and each according

to their abilities or something like that. So the question is the implementation. Like absolutely humans are messy. So how does it go wrong? Like, there you go. Lessy, absolutely. Humans are messy. So how does it go wrong? Like, there you go. Lexi. Brilliant. It's messy.

And this gets back to my rant about the book that I want to try. If I don't stroke out, why left and right are both beside the point. You know, the people, the conservatives are right when they condemn liberals for being simple-minded by assuming that a modification of external conditions will yield changes in human nature. Again, that's where Marx and Skinner are odd bedfellows. Here they are just saying, oh, let's change the surroundings. And things will inevitably get better.

On the other hand, when conservatives say that people are innately selfish, and they use that as the justification for glorifying the unbridled pursuit of wealth. Well, they're only half right because it turns out that we can be innately selfish, but we are also innately generous and reciprocating creatures. There's remarkable studies. I think they've been done at Yale of, you know, babies, 14-month-old babies, if someone hands them a toy and then wants something in return, babies before they can walk and talk will reciprocate. All right. Fine. If someone, if they want a toy, let's say, or the bottle of water, baby wants a bottle of water. And I look like I'm trying to give it to the baby, but I drop the bottle. So the

baby doesn't get what she or he wanted. When given a chance to reciprocate, little babies will reciprocate because they're aware of and are responding to intention. Similarly, if they see somebody behaving unfairly to someone, they will not help that person in return. So my point is, is, yeah, we are selfish creatures at times, but we are also simultaneously uber social creatures who are eager to reciprocate. And in fact, we're congenitally prepared to be reciprocators to the point where we will reciprocate on the basis of intentions above and beyond what actually have. How slow is your work as on the fundamental role of the fear of mortality in ourselves? How fundamental is this reciprocation, this human connection to other human beings? I think it's really in a... Yeah, I think it goes, yeah, bats reciprocate, not by intention, but this I'm going here

from Richard Dawkins, the selfish gene. I love the early Dawkins, I'm less enamored with... Take that, the early Beatles. Yeah, no, no, yeah, I say this with great respect, but, you know, Dawkins just points out that, you know, reciprocation is just fundamental. Cooperation is fundamental. You know, it is the, it's a one-sided view of evolutionary takes on things when we see it solely in terms of individual competition. It's almost all from a game to the erratic perspective too. It's just easier to see the world that way. It's easier to, I don't know, I mean, you see this in physics.

There's a whole field of folks like complexity that kind of embraced the fact that it's all an intricately connected mess and it's just very difficult to do anything with that kind of science, but it seems to be much closer to actually representing what the world is like. So like you put it earlier, Lex, it's messy. So left and right, you mentioned you're thinking of maybe actually putting a down on paper or something? Yeah, I would like to because what I would what I would like to point out again, an admiration

of all of the people that I will then try and have the goal to criticize is, look, these are all geniuses. Um, lock, genius. Adam Smith genius when he uses the notion that we're bartering creatures. So he uses that reciprocation idea as the basis of his way of thinking about things. But that's not at the core. No. The bartering is not at the core of the human nature.

It's not at... Well, he says it is. He says we're fundamentally bartering creatures. Well, that doesn't even make sense then, because then how can we then be autonomous individuals? Well, because we're going to barter with an eye on for self-interest. That's our self-interest. That's our self-interest. Yeah, but all right.

But back to Adam Smith for a second. Well, I see, he's like, Adam Smith, he's got the invisible hand and my conservative friends. I'm like, you need to read his books because he is a big fan of the free market. And this is my other gripe with the folks who support just unbridled markets. Adam Smith understood that there was a role for government for two reasons. One is, is that a role for government for two reasons. One is, is that just like Locke, people are not going to behave with integrity. And he understood that one role of government is to maintain a proverbial, you know, even playing field. And then the other thing Smith said was that there's some things that can't be done well for a profit. And I believe he talked about education and public health and infrastructure as things that are best done by governments

because you can't, you can make a profit, but that doesn't mean that the institutions themselves will be maximally beneficial. Yeah, so I would, I'm just eager to engage people by saying, let's start with our most contemporary understanding of human nature, which is that we are both selfish and tend to cooperate. And we also can be heroically helpful to folks in our own tribe. And of course, how you define one's tribe becomes critically important. But what some people say is, look, we let what would then be what kind of political institutions and what kind of economic organization? Can we think about to kind of hit that sweet spot? And that would be, in my opinion, how do we maximize individual autonomy in a way

that fosters creativity and innovation and the self-regard that comes from creative expression while engaging our more cooperative and reciprocal tendencies in order to come up with a system that is potentially stable over time, because the other thing about all capital-based systems is the fundamental and unstable. Yeah, because it's based on infinite growth. And it's a positive feedback loop

to be silly, infinite growth is only good for malignant cancer cells and compound interest. Otherwise, you know, we want to seek a steady state. And that would be, you know, so when Stephen Pinker writes, for example, again, great scholar, but I'm going to disagree when he says the world has never been better. And all we need to do is keep making stuff and buying stuff. So your sense is the world, sort of in disagreement with Stephen Pinker, that the world is like facing a potential catastrophic collapse in multiple directions. Yes.

And the fact that there are certain like the rate of violence and aggregators decreasing, the death, you know, the quality of life, all those kinds of measures that you can plot across centuries that it's improving, that doesn't capture the fact that our world might be dis... We might destroy ourselves in very painful ways in the... in the... in the next century. Yeah. So I'm with Jared Diamond, you know, in the book Collapse, where he points out studying the collapse of major civilizations

that it often happens right after things appear to never have been better. In that regard, I mean, there are more known voices that have taken issue with Dr. Pinker. I'm thinking of John Gray, who's a British philosopher and here in the States. I don't know where he is these days, but Robert J. Liff and the psycho historian. Yeah, they're both of my view, and which I hope is by the way wrong, but me too. Yeah, but between ongoing ethnic tensions, environmental degradation, economic instability, and the fact that the world has become a

petri dish of psychopathology. Like, what really worries me is the quiet economic pain that people are going through, the businesses that are closed, the dreams that are broken because you can no longer do the thing that you've wanted to do, and how I mentioned to you off camera that I've been reading longer do the thing that you've wanted to do and how I mentioned to you off camera that I've been reading the rise and fall of the third Reich. And I mean, the amount of anger and hatred and on the flip side of that sort of a nationalist pride that can arise from deep economic pain. Like what happens with economic pain is you become bitter.

You start to find the other, whether it's other European nations that mistreated you, whether it's other groups that mistreated you, those ends up being the Jews somehow or fall here. That's what worries me is where this quiet anger and pain goes in 2021, 2022, 2030. If you look, sorry, sorry to see the parallels. No, no, no, I'll rise and fall the third right. But you know, what happens 10, 15 years from now from what's because of the COVID pandemic. Yeah, it's happening now. And Lex, you make a, I think a really profoundly important point, you know, back to our work for a better Ernest Becker, rather, you know, his point is, is that the way that we manage

existential terror is to embrace culturally constructed belief systems that give us a sense that life has meaning that we have value. And in the form of self-esteem, which we get from perceiving that we meet or exceed the expectations associated with the role that we play in society, well, here we are right now in a world where first of all, if you have nothing, you are nothing. And secondly, as you were saying before we got started today, a lot of jobs are gone and they're not coming back. And that's where the self-esteem, that's where the self-esteem and identity come in. People. It's not only that you don't have anything to eat.

You don't even have a self anymore to speak of, because we typically define ourselves, as Marx put it, you are what you do. And now who are you when your way of life, as well as your way of earning a living is no longer available? Yeah, and it feels like that yearning for self-esteem, though we could talk a little bit more

because you about defining self-esteem is quite interesting. The more I've read, the more I'm at the core, and just in general, you're thinking, it may be realized I haven't thought enough about the idea of self-esteem. But the thing I want to say is it feels like when you lose your job then it's easy to find. It's tempting to find that self-esteem in a tribe

that's not somehow often positive. That's exactly. It's like a tribe that defines itself on the hatred of somebody else. So that's brilliant and this is what John Gray, the philosopher in the 1990s, he predicted what's happening today. He wrote a book about globalism and actually Hana Arrent in the 1950s said the same thing in her book about totalitarianism. When she said that, you know, that economics has reached the point where most money is made, not by actually making stuff, you know, you use money to make money. And therefore, what happens is money, chases money across national boundaries. Ultimately, governments become subordinate to the corporate entities whose sole function

is to generate money. And what John Gray said is that that will inevitably produce economic upheaval in local areas, which will not be attributed to the economic order. It will be misattributed to whoever the scapegoat de jour is and the anger and the distress associated with that uncertainty will be picked up on by ideological demagogues who will transform that into rage. So both Hannah Arun at this well as John Gray, they just said, watch out. We're going to have right wingish populist movements where demagogues who are the alchemists of hate, what makes them brilliant, is they don't,

they don't, the hates are already there, but they take the fears and they expertly redirect them to who it is that I need to hate and kill in order to feel good about myself. So back to your point, Lex, that's right. So the self regard that used to come up from having a job and doing it well. And as a result of that, having adequate resources to provide a decent life for your family, well, those opportunities are gone.

And yeah, what's left? So Max Weber, German sociologist at the beginning of the 20th century, he said in times of historical upheaval, we are apt to embrace. He was the one who coined the term charismatic leader, right? Seemingly larger than life individuals, who often believe or their followers believe are divinely ordained to rid the world of evil. or Dane to rid the world of evil. Yeah. All right.

Now, Ernest Becker, he used Weber's ideas in order to account for the rise of Hitler. Hitler was elected. And he was elected when Germans were an extraordinary state of existential distress. And he said, I'm going to make Germany great again. All right, now what Becker adds to the equation is his claim that what underlies our affection for charismatic populist leaders, good and bad, is death anxiety. All right, now here's where we we come in where egghead experimental researchers, you know, backer wrote this book, The Denial of Death, and he couldn't get a job. People just dismissed

these ideas as fanciful speculation for which there's no evidence. And you've done some good experiments. Yeah. And here's where I can be more cavalier and where what I would urge people like what you said Lex is ignore my history on again, polemic language if possible. And step back if you can, myself included. And let's just consider the research findings because consider the research findings because in September 11th, 2001, people that are old enough to remember that horrible day, two days before George W. Bush had the lowest approval rating and the history of presidential polling. Right, three weeks later, after he said, we will rid the world of the evil doers.

And then a week or two after that, he said in a cover story on Time magazine that he believed that God had chosen him to lead the world during the lead the country rather, during this perilous time. He had the highest approval rating. And so we're like, what happened? What happened to Americans that their approval of President Bush got so high so fast?

Well, our view following Becker is that 2001 was like a giant death reminder. The people dying plus the symbols of American greatness, World Trade Center, and the Pentagon. So we did a bunch of experiments, and most of our experiments are disarmingly simple. We have one group of people, and we just remind them that they're going to die. We say, hey, write your thoughts and feelings about dying. Or in other cases, we stop them outside, either in front of a funeral home or a hundred meters to either side. Our thought being that if we stop

you in front of a funeral home, then death is on your mind, even if you don't know it. And then there's other studies, they're even more subtle, where we bring people into the lab. And they read stuff on a computer. And while they're doing that, we flash the word death for 28 milliseconds. It's so fast, you don't see anything. And then we just measure people's reactions or behavior thereafter. So what we found in 2003 leading up to the election of 2004, was that Americans did not care for president Bush or his policies in Iraq in control conditions. But if we reminded them of their mortality first, they like Bush a lot more. So in every study that we did, Americans like John Kerry, who was running against Bush, they like Kerry

more than Bush policy wise in a control in a control condition. And but if they were reminded of death first, then they like Bush a lot more. So by the way, just a small pause, you said there are dissonally simple experiments. I think that's, and people should read a warm at the core for some other descriptions. They have a lot of different experiments of this nature. I think it's a brilliant experiment connected to the stoics, perhaps, of how your worldview on anything and how delicious that water tastes. Yes. After you're reminded of your own mortality, it's such a fascinating experiment that you could

probably keep doing like millions of them to draw insight about the way we see the world. No, that's right, Lex. And I appreciate the compliment not because we did anything, but because what these studies, many of which are now done by other people around the world in labs that we're not connected with, what are most proud about our work. I am proud of the experiments that we've done, but it's not science until somebody else can replicate your findings and independent researchers are interested in pursuing them. It's just a fascinating idea. I don't have to think about a lot about the experiments you've done and that you've inspired about the fact that death changes the way you see a bunch of different

things. I think the Stoics talked about the, I mean in general, just Mementemore, like just thinking about death and meditating on death is a really positive, not a positive, it's an enlightening way to live life. So what do you think about that at the, at the individual level, like what is the role about being bringing that terror of death, fear of death to the surface and being cognizant of it? For us, that's the ball game. So what we write in our book and here we're just paying homage to the philosophers and theologians that come before us is to point out that literally since antiquity, there has been a consensus that to lead a full life requires Albert Camus had come to terms with death thereafter anything is possible. So you've got the Stoics and you've got the Epicurians and then you've got the Tibetan book of the dead and then you've got the medieval monks that worked with a skull on their desk.

And the whole idea, I should back up a bit because then just remind folks that our studies, when we remind people that they're gonna die and we find that, yeah, they drink more water if a famous person is advertising it, they eat more cookies, they want more fancy clothes, they sit closer to people that look like them, it changes who they vote for. But all of those things, those are very subtle death reminders. You don't even know that death is on your mind. And so our point is, is that, and this is kind of counterintuitive, and that is that

the most problematic and unsavory human reactions to death anxiety are malignant manifestations of repressed death anxiety. You know, we try and bury it under the psychological bushes and then it comes back to bear bitter fruit. But what the Theologians and the philosophers of the world are saying is It behooves each of us To spend considerable time. You don't have to be a goth death rocker, you know, wallowing in death imagery to spend enough time entertaining the reality of the human condition, which is that you too will pass

to get to the point where there is to lapse into a cliche, the capacity for personal transformation and growth. Let's go personal for a second. Are you yourself afraid of death? Yeah. I mean, and how much do you meditate on that thought? Maybe your own study of it is a kind of escape from your own mentality. It is absolutely.

We relax. So you got it. And like if you figure out death somehow, you won't die. So no, no. So my colleagues and good friends, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pizzensky, you know, we met in graduate school in the 1970s. We've been doing this work for 40 years and we cheerfully admit, even though it doesn't reflect well on us as humans, that I should just speak for myself, but I feel like there's a real sense in which doing these studies and writing books and lecturing has been my way of avoiding directly confronting my anxieties by turning it into an intellectual exercise.

And every once in a while, therefore, when I think that I'm making some progress as a human, every once in a while, therefore, when I think that I'm making some progress as a human, I have to remind myself that that is probably not the case. And that I have at times, like all humans, been more preoccupied with the implications of these ideas for myself esteem. It's like, oh, we're going to write a book and maybe we'll get to go on TV or something. Well, no, that's not the same as to actually think about it in a way that you feel it rather than just think it. No, doing your eight. That's exactly right. So when I first read the denial of death, I was so literally flabbergasted by it that I took a leave of absence for a year and just like did what would be considered meanial jobs. I did construction work, I worked in a restaurant

work, I worked in a restaurant, and I was just like, wait a minute. If I, if I understand what this guy is saying, then I'm just a culturally constructed meat puppet. Doing things for reasons that I know not in order to assuage death anxiety. And I say that that's not acceptable. Maybe another interesting person to talk about is Ernest Becker himself. Sure. So how did he face his death? Is there something interesting personal? I think so. So interesting to me is Becker also from a Jewish family claimed to be atheistic, did not identify ultimately as Jewish. I believe he converted to Christianity, but was himself a religious person.

And he said he became religious when his first child was born. Now religious, what does that mean? Well, is he ever faith? And well, let's talk more. Yeah. It's important. He's the afterlife. He was, is he on the afterlife?

He was agnostic on that. But he did, no, the denial of death is, there's a chapter devoted to Kirkagaard. And he talks about for Kirkagaard, if you want to become a mature individual, you know, if you want to learn something, you go to the university. If you want to become a more mature individual, according to Kierkegaard, put a hyphen between dis and ease, about death, Kirchegard's point is you have to really think about that, you have to think about it and feel it. You gotta let it seek in or seep into your mind at which point according to to Kierkegaard, basically, you realize that your present

identity is fundamentally a cultural construction. You didn't choose the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your name. You know, you didn't choose necessarily even the social role that you occupy. You might have chosen from what's available in your culture, but not from the full palette of human opportunities. And so what Kierkegaard said is that we need to realize that we've been living a lie of sorts, back or calls it a necessary lie. And we have to momentarily dispose of that.

And so now Kierkegaard says, well, here I am. I have shrugged off all of the cultural accoutrements that I have used to define myself. and now what am I or who am I. This is like the ancient Greek tragedy where the worst thing was to be no one or no thing. At this point, Kirchegard said, you're really dangling on the precipice of oblivion. some people tumble into that abyss and never come out. On the other hand, Kierkegaard said that what you can now do metaphorically and literally is to rebuild yourself from the ground up. And there's a in the New Testament, there's something you have to die in order to be reborn. And Kierkegaard's view, though, is that there's only one way to do that. This is his proverbial leap into faith. And in Kierkegaard's case, it was faith and

Christianity that you can't have unbridled faith in cultural constructions. The only thing that you can have on a quivicle faith in is some kind of transcendent power. But of course, this raises the question of, well, is that just another death denying belief system? And at the end of the denial of death, Becker admits that there's no way to tell while still advocating for what is ultimately a religious stance. No, one of the things that I don't understand, and Becker has been the most singularly potent influence in my academic and personal life. But a year or two ago, I started reading Martin Heidegger. I'm reading being in time. And what I now wonder is why why becker who refers to Heidegger from time to time and his work, why he didnard. He has the same thing, which is death anxiety. Oh, and I should have pointed out that what Kirchegard says is that death anxiety, most people don't go to the school of anxiety.

They flee from death anxiety by embracing their cultural beliefs. Kirchegard says, the school of anxiety, they flee from death anxiety by embracing their cultural beliefs. Kierkegaard says they then tranquilize themselves with the trivial. And I love that phrase. It's a beautiful phrase because at the end of the denial of death, beckers like, look, the average American is either drinking or shopping or watching television. And they're all the same thing.

Right? Heidegger says the same thing. He says, look, and he acknowledges Kirchgaard. He says, what makes us feel unsettled. And evidently, that's an English translation of angst that it's, we don't feel at home in the world. Heidegger says that's death anxiety. And one direction is the Kirchegard one.

Heidegger calls it a flight from death. You just unself reflexively cling to your cultural constructions. And Heidegger borrows the term tranquilized, but he points out that he doesn't care for that term because tranquilized sounds like you're subdued. When in fact, what most culturally constructed meat puppets do is to be frenetically engaged with their surroundings to ensure that they never sit still long enough to actually think about anything consequential. Heidegger says there's another way though. He's like, yo, what you can do is to come to terms with that death anxiety in the following way. Thing number one is to realize that not only

Number one is to realize that not only are you going to die, but your death can happen at any given moment. So for Heidegger, if you say, I know I'm going to die in some vaguely unspecified future moment, that's still death denial because you're saying, yeah, not me, not now. Heidegger's point is you need to get to the point where you need to realize that, I need to realize that I can walk outside and get smote by a comet, or I can stop for gas on the way home and catch the virus and be dead in two days. Or any number of potentially unanticipated and uncontrollable fatal outcomes. But I need to bring it into the now. Yeah, it is brilliant. I agree, Lex.

And that's just why I'm wondering why I didn't back or notice this because that's the being and time thing is it's got to be now. And then he says, so okay. So now I've dealt somewhat with the the death part. And now he says, now you've got to deal with what he calls existential guilt. And he says, well, all right, what you have to, you have to realize the like it or not, you have to make choices.

You know, this is Jean Paul Sartre. We are condemned by virtue of consciousness to choosing. But Heidegger is a little bit more precise. He's like, look, as I was saying earlier, you're in reality. You're an insignificant speck of aspiring carbon-based dust, born into a time and place, not of your choosing when you're here for a microscopic amount of time after which you are not. you are not. And for Heidegger, you have to realize that, like I said, I didn't choose to be born a male or Jewish or in America, the offspring of working class people. And Heidegger, what he says, yeah, but you still have to make choices and accept responsibility for those choices, even though you didn't choose any of the parameters that ultimately limit

what's available to you. And moreover, you're going to not always make good choices. So now you're guilty for your choices. And then he uses the poet Rilka. He has a phrase, backer uses it in the denial of death, the guilt of unlived life. I just love that. You have to accept that you have already diminished and in many ways,

amputated your own possibilities by virtue of choices that you've made or just as often have declined to make because you are reluctant to accept responsibility for the opportunities that you are now able to create by virtue of seeing the possibilities that lay before you. So anyway, Heidegger then says, look, okay, so, you know, I'm a professor and I live in America in the 21st century. Well, if I was in the third century living in a year in Mongolia, I'm not going to have an opportunity to be a professor. But what he submits is that there is some aspects of whatever I am that

are independent of my cultural and historical circumstances. In other words, there is a me of sorts. Heidegger would take vigorous issue, it's so would Heidegger scholars because I'm not claiming to understand him. This is my classic comic book rendering. But Heidegger's point is that you get to the point where you're able to say, okay, I am a contingent historical and cultural artifact. But so what? If I was transported a thousand years in the past in Asia, I'd be in the same situation. I would still be conditioned by time and place.

I would still have choices that I could make within the confines of what opportunities are afforded to me. And then Heidegger says, if I can get that far, in this is his language, he says that there is a transformation. And he literally, he calls it a turning. You're turning away from a flight from death, and you are allowed, therefore you see a horizon as his word of opportunity that makes you in a state of anticipatory

resolute-ness with solicitous regard for others that makes your life seem like an adventure perfused with unshakable joy. All right, let me unpack those things. It is beautiful. I love Lex that you're resonating to the time thing. So he's like, okay, we already talked about now. Anticipatory is already hopeful because it's looking forward. All right, to be resolute, it means to be steadfast

and to just have confidence in what you're doing, moving forward. All right, solicitous, I had to look up all these words by the way. It just means that you are concerned about your fellow human beings. And, but I love the idea, that you are concerned about your fellow human beings. But I love the idea,

even if it seems allegorical, I don't mind that at all. This idea you said love earlier, and I think that when Heidegger is talking about being solicitous, that's as close as he can get. There's an Italian. Yes, I said you in trouble. So what was that line again with the solicitist of the...

Okay, so the whole thing of turning away from death and this. Yeah, he... All the words you said are just beautiful. I love those words. Yeah, anticipatory resolute-ness that is accompanied with solicitous regard to our fellow humans, which makes life appear to us to be an ongoing adventure that is permeated by unshakable joy. Now, again, Heidegger is not Mary Poppins.

This, I just got a tattoo. No, I, this is not great. I just love that exact quote. No, I'm piecing together. These are his exact words that, and I spent the last two years reading almost everything that I can find because I want to, I'm sick of death. You said it, so I want to second what you say, Lex. So it's not about death. It's the Sherwood Anderson guy. He's a novelist that I like about. He wrote a book called

Winesburg, Ohio, and now I'm going to forget what he said on his tombstone. But it was something to the effect. Oh, he said life not death is the great adventure. The point being is that adventure. The point being is that, you know, to consider that we must die and the existential implications of that, really, the goal, the way I see it, is getting from hate to love. And I feel like Heidegger has a way of thinking about things that moves us more in that direction. And so that's kind of my current preoccupation is to take what I just said to you and to talk about it with my colleagues and other academic psychologists because the way we started with Ernest Becker, remember I said earlier, I wasn't trained in any of these things. I'm an egghead researcher that was doing experiments about biofeedback. And you know, then we

read these Becker books and I thought they were so interesting that for the first few years we didn't have any studies. I just would travel around and I'd be like, here's what this backer guy says. I think this is cool. Well, my present view is I'm like, here's what this Heidegger guy says. I think these ideas are consistent with what Becker is saying, because they are anchored in death anxiety. But I like that direction as an alternative to the Kierkega Guardian insistence that the only psychologically tenable way to extricate ourselves from maladaptive reactions to death anxiety is through faith in the traditional sense.

Yeah. I always kind of saw Kirchegard and Farley. Like you said, in a comic book sense of the word faith is a non-traditional sense. I kind of like the idea of leap of faith. Oh, I love that idea. And so what I've been babbling about with, you know, Kierkegaard or Heidegger, I'm like, yeah, Kierkegaard is a leap of faith in God.

Heidegger is a leap of faith in life. And I just, yeah, I like it. I found the leap of faith really interesting in the so in the technological space. So of, I've talked to an honest thing with Elon Musk, but I think he's also just in general for our culture a really important figure. Oh, absolutely. That takes, I mean, sometimes a little bit insane on social media and just in life. When I met him was kind of interesting that of course there's, I mean, he's a legit engineer so he's fun to talk to about the technical things.

But he also just the way the humor and the way he sees life, it just like refuses to be conventional. Yeah. sees life, it just like refuses to be conventional. I have a lot of it. So it's a constant leap into the unknown. And one of the things that he does, and this isn't even fake, a lot of people say

because he's a CEO, there's a business owner, so he's trying to make money. Now, I think it's just, I looked him in his eyes. I mean, this is real, is a lot of the things he believes that are going to be accomplished that a lot of others are saying are impossible like autonomous vehicles. He truly believes it.

To me, that is the leap of faith. I'm almost going like, we're like, the entirety of our experience is shrouded in mystery. We don't know what the hell is going to happen. You don't know what we're actually capable of assuming beings. And he just takes the leap. He fully believes that we can, you know, we can go to what we can colonize Mars.

Yeah. I mean, how crazy is it to just believe and dream and actually be taking steps towards it. To colonizing Mars when most people are like, that's the stupidest idea ever. Well, I'm an agreement with you on that. Two things, one is it reminds me of Ben Franklin who in his autobiography has a similarly child dish in the best sense of the word,

unbridled imagination for what might become. You know, Ben Franklin's like, yeah, I got electricity, that's cool, but we'll be levitating soon. And I can't even begin to imagine what we are capable of. And of course, people are like, dude, that's crazy. And there's a guy with its FCS Schiller, some humanistic guy, the beginning of the 20th century. He's like, you know,

lots of things that people think about may appear to be absurd to the point of obscene. But the reality is historically, every fantastic innovation has generally been initiated by someone who was condemned for being elunatic. And it's not that anything is possible, but surely things that we don't try will never manifest as possibilities. Yeah, and that's that's, uh, that there's something beautiful to that. That's the, uh, embracing the abyss. And again, it's like the, uh, it's the embracing the fear of death, the reality of death, and then turning into look at all the opportunities before us.

Oh, I do. That's right. Let me ask you, whenever I bring up Ernest Becker's work, which I do, and yours quite a bit, I find it surprising how that it's not a lot more popular in a sense that not I don't mean just your book. Yeah. That's well written. People should read it. I should buy it whatever. I think it has the same kind of qualities that are useful to think about is like Jordan Peterson's work and stuff like that. But I just mean like why people are not don't think of that as a compelling description of the core of the human condition. I think what you mentioned about Hi-Degers is quite connected me quite well. So I ask

you mentioned about hi-degers, it's quite connected me quite well. So I ask on this podcast, I often ask people if they're afraid of death. That's like almost every single part, I almost always get criticized for asking world-class people, scientists and technologies and about fear of death and the meaning of life. And on the fear of death, they often like don't say anything interesting. What I mean by that is they haven't thought deeply about it. Like what you kind of brought this up a few times of really letting it sink in. They kind of say this thing about what exactly you said, which is like, it's something that happens not today. Like I'm like, it's something that happens not today. Like I'm aware that it's something that happens.

And I'm not, the thing that usually says, I'm not afraid of death. I just want to live a good life kind of thing. And what I'm trying to express is like, when I look in their eyes and the kind of the core of the conversation, it looks like they haven't really become like they haven't really meditated on death. I guess the question is, what do I say to people that there's something to really think about here? Like there's some demons, some realities that need to be faced by more people. Well, that's a tough one. I could tell you what not to do. So when we are young and annoying, a lot of famous people, mostly psychologists, because

that's who we intersected with, that we would lay out these ideas, and they would be, well, I don't think about death like that. So these ideas must be wrong. And we would say, well, you don't think about death because you're lucky enough to be comfortably and scanced in a cultural world view from which you derive self-esteem, and that has it's spared you the existential excruciations that would otherwise arise. But that's like Freud, you know, you're repressing, so you're either agree with me, in which case I'm right, or you disagree with me, in which case you're repressing, and I'm right. Well, so that's the the the knee she think I what I felt when I've

been moment in my life moments in my life when I really thought about death. I mean, there's not too many like really, really thought about it. And feel the thing when you felt that eight maybe I'm traumatizing or romanticizing it, but I feel like it's a conservative conservatives call it popular, like, or the movie Matrix call it the Red Pill moment. I feel like it's a dangerous thought, because I feel like I'm taking a step out of society. Like, there's a nice narrative that we've all constructed. You are.

And I'm sticking a step out. And it feels this feeling like you're basically drowning. I mean, it's not a good feeling. It is not. But this gets back to the Heidegger Kirchegard School of Anxiety. You are stepping out. And you are momentarily shrugging off the again, the culturally constructed psychological accoutrements that allow you to stand up in the morning. And so I mean, in that sense, it feels like, I mean, what do you, how do you have that conversation? Because I guess I am dancing around a set of questions, which is like, I guess I'm disappointed that people don't are not as willing to step outside.

Like even just, even any kind of thought experiment. Yeah. Let's forget, now, Danal, like, there's, there's not a community of people, let's take an easy one that I think is scientifically ridiculous, which is there's a community of people that believe that the earth is flat, yeah, or actually even even better, the space is fake. Yeah. Like what I find surprising is that a lot of people I talk to are not willing to like imagine if it is like imagine the earth is flat like think about it.

Right. Like a lot of people just like, no, the earth is round. They they're like like scientists too. They're like, yes, well, actually, wait, have you actually thought about it? Like, imagine, like, as a thought experiment, that basically step outside the little narrative that we are comfortable with. Now, that one in particular has a really strong evidence and scientific validation. So it's a pretty simple thing to show that at least is not flat. But just the willingness to take a step outside of the stories that

bring us comfort is been disappointing that people are not willing to do that. And I think the philosophy that you've constructed and the Ernest Beckis constructed and you've tested, I think it's really compelling and the fact that people aren't often willing to take that step. Yeah. It's disappointing. Well, yes, but perhaps understandable. I mean, one of this is an anecdote, of course, but when we were trying to get a publisher for our book. I had a meeting with a publisher who published some Malcolm Gladwell books.

And she said, I'm very interested in your book, but can you write it without mentioning death? Because people don't like death. And we're like, no, it's really kind of central. And I think that's part of it. I think, again, if these ideas have merit, and I actually like the way that you put it, Lex, it's that to step away is to momentarily expose yourself to all

of the anxiety. Yeah, that our identity and our beliefs typically enable us to manage. I think it's as simple as that. Yeah, I had this experience in college with my best friend who got really high. And he forgot it was in the winter. It was really freezing. It was memorable to me. I think it's an analogous, very useful. So he wanted to get some pizza. And of course, and he, so I, and he left me outside and said, I'll be back in five minutes.

And he forgot that he left me outside. And I remember it was, I was in like shorts. It was freezing winter. Wow. And I remember standing outside is a dorm and I'm looking from the outside in it's a light in its warm And I'm just standing there frozen as I think for an hour or more and That's how I think about it like I just I don't give a damn about the stupid winter I just want to I like it's like a I'm drawn to be back to the warm

Yeah, and that's how I feel about thinking about like death is like yeah, at a certain point it's like, I'm drawn to be back to the warm. Yeah. And that's how I feel about thinking about like death. It's like, yeah, at a certain point, it's like, it's too much. It's like that cold. I like that. I want to be back into the warm. I want to be back. I'm getting back to Heidegger for a moment. I like the, yeah, he uses a lot, the idea of feeling at home, not as like in your house, but just feeling

like you're comfortably situated. Maybe we can talk about, like I had a conversation about this with my dad a little bit. How does religion relate to this? I see it as the disease and the cure in a sense of a few things. One is that I think a case could be made that humans are innately religious. So now we're going to get into territory where there's going to be a lot of disputes. What do you mean by religion? Religion is an evolutionary adaptation. And religion is like a belief in something outside of your self kind of thing. Not necessarily. So here we got to be a little bit more careful. And again, I'm not a scholar. How about I'm a well-intentioned dilatant in this regard?

Because what I have read is that religion evolved very early on, long before our ancestors were conscious and the issue of death arose. Um, and the word religion evidently is from a Latin word, regate, we can look it up, but and it means to bind and a meal der Kheim the dead French sociologist he said you know Originally religion is a d'Arce-Lassin who's a dead novelist she calls it the substance of we Feeling that it's literally that it arose because we're Uber social creatures who from time to time took comfort in just being in physical proximity with our fellow humans. And that there is of sense of transcendent exuberance, just back to the unshakable joy that Heidegger alludes to.

And that the original function of religion was to foster social cohesion and coordination, and that it was only subsequently some claim that a burgeoning level of consciousness made it such that religious belief systems that included the hope of some kind of immortality were just naturally selected thereafter. So there are some people, so David Sloan Wilson wrote a book called Darwin's Cathedral. And he said religion has nothing to do with death. It's evolved to make groups viable. He's actually a group selection guy. What's group selection? The idea that it's the group that is selected for rather than the individual.

Yeah, so people have vigorous disagreements about that. But I guess our point would be we see religion as being inextricably connected ultimately to a swaging concerns about death. Well, I guess another question to ask around this, like what does the world look like without religion? Will we, if it's an extricably connected to our fears of death, do you think it always returns in some kind of shape?

Maybe it's not called religion, but whatever, it just keeps returning. Yeah, who knows? So that's a great question, Lack. So just a woman named Karen Armstrong, she was a nun, turned historian, and she's, I can't remember the name of the book, but no matter, she, we could look that up, but if you like, I can't remember the name of the book, but no matter she we could look that up,

but you can look it up, but I can also add it to your point. It's it has gotten the title, of course, but you know, she's like, look, all religions are generally fairly right-minded in that they advocate the golden rule. And all religions at their best do seem to foster pro-social behavior towards the in-group, and that confers both psychological as well as physical benefits. That's the good news. And the bad news is historically all religions are subject to being hijacked by a lunatic French who declares that, you know, they're the ones in sole possession of the liturgical practices or whatever they call them. And they're the ones that turn, you know, religion at its best into your crusades and holocausts. My not that it should matter for much, but I grew up just skeptical of religion because I'm

like, as a kid, I'm like, well, if we didn't have these beliefs, we wouldn't be killing each other because of them. And I'd be like, to my parents, well, you're telling me that all people should be judged on the merits of their character, but don't come home if you don't marry a Jewish woman, which is implying that if you're not Jewish, you're in inferior form of life. Yeah. That's what tribes always do. And there's the tribal thing. And so there's a guy named Amine Malouf, a Lebanese guy who writes in French

in the 1990s, I think, wrote a book called, in the name of identity, violence and the need to belong. And that was his point is, unless we can overcome this tribal mentality, this will not end well. But you said earlier, something like that I think is profoundly important. And that is you did not recoil in horror when I mentioned Kierkegaard's use of the term faith. And so I'm a big fan of faith and I'm not sure what that implies. I have, and by the way, this is just a peripheral comment, but I find less resistance to beckers ideas in our work when I'm in like Jesuit schools, you know, it's the Americans that, you know, the secular humanists who are most disinclined to accept these ideas.

It's an important side comment because I think it's mostly because they don't think philosophically. That's, I mean, I speak with a lot of scientists and I think that's my main criticism. You don't, I mean, that's the problem with science. Exactly. It's so comforting to focus in on the details that you can escape thinking about the mystery of it all, the big picture things, the philosophical, like the fact that you don't actually know shit at all, like that, that, that, that, yeah. So that in terms of jazz, like that's, yeah. That's the beauty of the experience of faith and so on is like, uh, well, how, wherever that journey takes you is, you, you actually explore the biggest questions of our world. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't see religion going away because I don't see humans as capable of surviving without

faith and hope. And everyone from the Pope, Elon Musk, will acknowledge that it is a world that is unfathomably mysterious and like it or not in the absence of beliefs here I'm Charles Perse, the pragmatic philosopher, he just said beliefs are the basis of action. If you don't have any beliefs, you're paralyzed within decision, whether we're aware of it or not, whether we like it or not, in order to stand up have any beliefs, you're paralyzed within decision, whether we're aware of it or not, whether we like it or not, in order to stand up in the morning, you have to subscribe to beliefs that can never be unequivocally proven right or wrong. Well, then why do you maintain them well ultimately it's because of some form of faith but also

also faith shouldn't be a dogmatic thing that You should always be leaping. Yes, I guess the problem of science or with religion is you could sort of All of a sudden take a step into a place where you're super confident that you know the absolute truth of things. There you go. Again, back to Socrates Plato, back in the cave. You know, that's good more where I work. That's what I have the students read in their first week. You know, in Plato's like, oh, look at all those poor bastards. You know, they're in the cave, but they don't know it. You know, and then they are freed from their chains. And I have to be dragged out of the cave, by the way, which is another interesting point.

They don't run out. But that gets back to why people don't like to be divested of their comfortable illusions. But anyway, they get dragged out of the cave into the sunlight, which he claims is a representation of truth and beauty. And I say to the students, well, what's wrong with that? And they're like, nothing. That's like awesome. And then I'm like, yo, dudes, you out of the cave, but how do you know that you're not in another cave? You out of the cave, but how do you know that you're not in another cave? The illumination may be better, right? But the minute you think

you're at the end of the proverbial intellectual slash epistemological trail, then you have already succumbed to either laziness or dogmatism or both. That's really well put. That's both terrifying and exciting that we're always, there's always a bigger cave, a little bit of an out there question, but I think some of the interesting qualities of the human mind is the ideas of intelligence and consciousness. So what do you make of consciousness?

So do you think death creates consciousness, like the fear of death, the terror of death, creates consciousness? And consciousness in turn magnifies the terror of death. I do. I like what is consciousness to you. Don't ask me that. So now, if I could answer that, you know, I'd be chugging around out of a coconut with my Nobel Prize. That, you know, it's literally, you know, Stephen Pinker, I do agree with his claim. And I think how the mind works that it is the key question for the psychological sciences broadly defined in the 21st century. What is consciousness? Yeah, what is consciousness? And I don't think it's an epiphenomenological afterthought. So a lot of people,

I think Dan Wagner at Harvard, a lot of folks consider it just the ass end of a process that by the time we are aware of what it is. It's just basically an integrated rendering of something that's already happened. You know, evidently, there's a half-second delay between when something happens, you know those studies and our awareness of it. And then that's where ideas of free will step in. You can explain a way a lot of stuff.

And I think those are all important and interesting questions. I'm of the persuasion, I mean, even, not even, but the dockens in the selfish gene is very thoughtful actually in a lot of it's actually more in notes than in the text of the book, but he's just like, it's hard for me to imagine that consciousness doesn't have some sort of important and highly adaptive function. And what Dawkins says is he thought about it in terms of just that we could do mental simulations that one possibly extraordinary product of consciousness

is to rather than find out often by adverse consequences through trying something would be to run mental simulations. And so one possibility is that consciousness is highly adaptive. Another possibility is a Nicholas Humphrey, a British dude who wrote a book about, I think it's called regaining consciousness. And he hypothesized, I think this in 1980s, maybe even earlier, that consciousness arose as a way to better predict the behavior of others in social settings, that by knowing how I feel makes me better able to know how you may be feeling. This is like the rudiments of a theory of mind.

And it really may not have had anything to do with intelligence, so much as social intelligence. So in that sense, consciousness is a social construct that just is just a useful thing for interacting with him. Yeah, I don't know. But there seems to be something about realizing your own mortality, that somehow intricately connected to the idea of consciousness. Well, I think so also. So this is where, and Nietzsche, he said, a solitary creature would not need consciousness.

Oh, what do you think? Well, I don't know what I think about that, but what I do, and then he goes on to say that consciousness is the most calamitous stupidity by which we shall someday perish. And wow, I was like, dude, I was, or relax. But so what if you say you were in an island alone and you saw a reflection of yourself in the water, like if you were alone, your whole life, yeah, great question. The his view, Nietzsche's view would be that your thoughts of yourself would never come to mind. I don't know how I feel about that though. In a sense, this sounds weird, but in a sense,

I feel like my mental conversation has always been with death. It's almost like another another, you know, another notion, like, you know, there's these visualizations of a death in the cloak. Like, I always felt like, I am a living thing. And then there's another thing that is the end of me. And I'm having a conversation with that. So in the sense, that's the way I construct my the fact that I am a thing is because there's somebody else that tells me, well, you won't be a thing eventually. So it feels like a conversation. Perhaps, but that might be kind of this mental simulation

kind of idea that you're kind of, it's not really a conversation with yourself essentially. Sure. Yeah. But yeah, I don't know how I feel about that, but I tend to be in agreement with you when we're talking about economics more. So that that we're deeply social beings like everything the way it just feels like we're humans. I'm with the Harari with the Indians that we're kind of we seem to construct ideas on top of each other and that's a fundamental social process. Absolutely. I think that's a fine book. It overlaps considerably with our take on these matters.

And the fact that we get to these points, drawing on different sources, I think makes me more confident. It's so fascinating. Just just like reading your book, I'm sorry, on a small tangent, that sapiens is like one of the most popular books in the world. Like, yeah. And it's reading your book is like, well, this sounds... Yeah, well, I mean, like, I don't know. I don't know what makes a popular book.

Well, if you want me to be petty and stupid, I will tell you that from time to time We also wonder Why our book, you know like all books people Can take issue with it, but we thought it would be a bigger hit that would be more widely read I know it's funny because I I've more widely read. And it's funny because I have, I don't know if I have good examples I forgot already, but I'm often saddened by like Franz Kafka. I think he wasn't known in his life. Yeah. But I always wonder like these great. Yeah. Like some of the greatest books ever written are completely unknown during the other's lifetime. And it's like, man, for some reason that it's again this day, identity thing, I think,

man, that sucks. Well, I'm comforted by that. So Van Gogh sold one painting in his life. And evidently, Theroux sold like 75 copies of Walden. Nietzsche's books did not so well. And how did Ernest Beck herself? He is the, his books are published by the Free Press and have sold more than any other books that they have published. So what does that mean? It's a lot. I don't know if it's like Jordan Peterson

millions, but it's hundreds of thousands respected. I just don't see him. Okay. Yeah. I don't see him brought up as a like in the top 10 philosophers of. No, not at all. So how far away is he in the top 100 for people? I don't think so. Like he doesn't, he's not brought up that often because again, your work is brought up more often. Yeah. I like it. Like because I think he got, you know, yeah.

I mean, I think he's one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. So what we say, Lex is that our goal, certainly when we first started and now just as much actually, but what I say at all my talks is look if these ideas have interest you enough to go read Ernest backer, then this has been good. I consider him to be one of the most important voices of the 20th century, who does not get the attention that he deserves. Similarly, our work, I believe, to be important because point by point, we provide empirical corroboration for all of the claims. So, you know, when, so that's literally the students that read the denial of death and then escape from evil, they're like, yeah, wow, every chapter of the book, you have studies. And I'm like, yeah, because for 40 years,

if a skimmer student said, oh, that's gotta be bullshit, I'm like, well, let's do a study. Let's do a study. And my own dreams are in creating robots and artificial intelligence systems that a human can love. And I think there's something about mortality and fear mortality that is essential for implementing in our AI systems. Yeah. And so maybe can you comment on that? Well, on, uh, so this is, this is a different perspective on your work, which is like, how do we engineer a human? Yeah. So, no, this is awesome. Lex, I've delighted that you said that. First of all, and I may mention this to you, and I don't, I can't remember because I am seen out when you first contacted me.

Yeah. I had just been told I have to learn more about your work because I'm working with some very talented people in New York and they're writing a screenplay for a movie about an artificial intelligence. It's a female AI and satin like 30 years in the future. And basically the little twist, this is how I had to read Heidegger. So these people call me and they're like, we're making a movie. It's based on Becker and your work and Heidegger

and this other philosopher, Levinos and then another philosopher, Sylvie Abenzo, who's an Italian philosopher. And the long short story is the movie is about supposedly the most advanced artificial intelligence, entity, an embodied one, and who, human form, who finds out who is having

Having essentially existential anxieties and the I think the project is called a dinner with her or something and it doesn't really matter but the punchline is that She finds out that her creator has made her mortal. And so the question is what happens phenomenologically and behaviorally to an artificial intelligence who now knows that it's mortal. It's actually the same question that you're posing. That is, is that necessary in order for an AI to approximate humanity. Yeah, I think, yeah, so the intuition again, it's unknown, but I think it's absolutely,

I think it's absolutely necessary. A lot of people, the same kind of shallow thinking that people have about our own end of life, our own death, is the same way people think about artificial intelligence. It's like, well, okay, so yeah, so within the system, there's a terminal position where like there's a point at which it ends. The program ends. There's a goal state. You reach the end point, But the thing is making that end a thing that's also within the program. Like the making the thing, like, and then it's also the mystery of it. So the thing is, we don't know what the hell this death thing is. I mean, it's not like, it's not like we, I mean, the program doesn't give us information

about the meaning of it all. Exactly. And that's where the terror is. And it feels like, I mean, in the language that you would think about is the terror of this death or like anticipation of it or thinking about it is the creative force that builds everything. And that feels like, you know, that feels really important to implement. Again, it's very difficult to know how to do technically currently, but it's important

to think about what I find is mentioned like screenplays and so on is sci-fi folks and philosophers are the only ones thinking about it currently. And that's what these folks have convinced me. Yeah. And engineers aren't, which is, I get, yeah, most of the most of the things that talk about it, I get kind of, not people roll their eyes from the engineer. Not these folks. Not, they're like, because again, I saw your name and they're like, well, I've just seen that. They're like, here's someone, you should check out.

Yeah. So this was a delightful comment. Yeah, it was a huge fan of your work and Ernest Becker. And it's funny that not enough people are talking about it. Yeah, I don't know what to do with that. I think that there's a possibility to create real, deep, meaningful connections between AI systems and humans. Absolutely.

And I think some of these things of fear mortality are essential for the element of human experience. I don't think it might be essential to create general intelligence, like very intelligent machines, but to create a machine that connects the human in some deep way. What's your view, not to make me the interviewer, but what's your view about machine ethics? Can you imagine an ethical AI without some semblance of, yeah, some finitude, let's say? Well, I think ethics is, you know, there's a trolley problem that's often used in the work that I've done at my team. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, the time was vehicles in particular. Oh, yeah, yeah. That people, I think they offload, they ask like, how would a machine deal with an ethical situation that they themselves, humans don't know how to deal. Exactly. And so I don't know if a machine is able to do a better job on difficult ethical questions, but I certainly think to behave properly

and effectively in this world and used to have a fear of mortality and be able to even dance dance because I don't think you can solve ethical problems but you have to I think like ethics is like a dance for you have to just you have to dance properly with the rest of the humans like people dancing tango you have to dance in the same kind of way and for that you have to have a fear of mortality Like I think of more practically speaking, like I said, autonomous vehicles, like the way you interact with pedestrians. Fundamentally has to have a sense

of mortality. So when pedestrians cross the road, now I've watched Most certainly a hundred plus hours of pedestrian videos There's a kind of social Contract where you walk in front of a car and you're putting your life in the hands of another And if like death is Is a is in the car in the game that's being played. Death is right there. It's part of the calculus. It's not a simple equation. I don't know what it is, but it's in there. It has to be part of the optimization problem. It's not as as so from the computer vision, from the artificial intelligence perspective, it's detecting there's a human estimating, right?

estimating the trajectory, like treating everything like it's a billier balls, as opposed to like being able to construct an effective model, the world model of the what the person is thinking, what they're going to do, what are the different possibilities of how the scene might evolve. I think requires having some sense of, yeah, fear of mortality, of mortality. I don't see the thing is, I think it's really important to think about. I can be honest enough to say that it's, I haven't been able to figure out how to engineer any of these things.

But I do think it's really, really important. Like I have, so I have a bunch of Roombas here. I can show to you after that I have Roombas is a robot that has vacuum the floor and I've had them make different sounds like I had them scream in pain and it It You immediately anthropomorphize absolutely and it creates I don't know knowing that they can feel pain It's, I don't know, knowing that they can feel pain, see, I'm speaking, like knowing that I immediately imagine that they can feel pain and it immediately draws me closer to them.

Yes. That's a human experience. That there's something in that that should be engineered in our systems, it feels like, right? I believe, I don't know what you think, but I believe it's possible for a robot and a human to fall in love, for example, in the future. I think it's already there.

No, there's a certain kind of deep connection with technology in a real, like you would choose to marry. I mean, again, it sounds, I'll find a book title and I'll send it to you. And it's a serious consideration of people who started out with these sex dolls, but it turned into a relationship of enduring significance that the woman who wrote the book is not willing to dismiss as a perversion. Yeah, that's what people joke about sex robots, which is funny.

It's a funny, there's a lot of stuff about robots, it's just fun to talk about that is not necessarily connected to reality. People joke about sex robots, but if you actually look how sex robots, which are pretty rare these days, are used, they're not used by people who want sex. Precisely. They're actually... They're companions. They become companions.

Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. And we're not even talking about any kind of intelligence. We're talking about human beings, see companionships. We're deeply lonely. I mean, that was the other sense I have that I don't know if I can articulate clearly. You can probably do a better job, but I have a sense that there's a deep loneliness within all of us.

Absolutely. In the face of death, it feels like we're alone. So, you know, what drew me to the existential take on things, Lex, was the, who is it, Rolo May and Erwin Yolum, right, about existentialism, and they're like, look, there's different flavors of existentialism, but they all have in common, what is it, four universal concerns, the overriding law is about death, and that next is choice and responsibility. The next one is existential isolation. And they're like, that's one of the things about consciousness.

And the last one is meaninglessness. But the existential isolation point is, you know, we are by virtue of consciousness able to apprehend that unless you're a Syemist twin, you are fundamentally alone. And because it is claimed, it's Eric from in a book called Escape from Freedom. He's like, look, you're smart enough to know that the most direct way that we typically communicate with our fellow human beings is through language. But you also know that language is a pale shadow of the totality of our interior of the totality of our interior

phenomenal logical existence. Therefore, there's always gonna be times in our lives where even under the best of circumstances, you could be trying desperately to convey your thoughts and feelings. And somebody listening could be like, yeah, I get it, I get it, I get it. And you're like, you have no fucking idea what I'm talking about. So you can be desperately lonely in a house where you live with 10 people in the

middle of Tokyo where there's millions. Yeah, it's the great gaspie. Yeah, it could be a lonely party. Exactly. Yeah, yes, the great gaspie. Yeah, it could be a loan party. Yeah, exactly. Maybe this is a small tangent But let me ask you on the topic of academia you're kind of I we talked about Jordan Peterson with there's a lot of sort of renegade type of thinkers Certainly psychology, but it applies in all disciplines

What are your thoughts about academia being a place to harbor people like yourself that, you know, people who think deeply about things who are not constrained by sort of the, I don't think you're quite controversial. Not really, but you are a person with things deeply about things and it feels like academia can sometimes stifle that. I think so. So my concern right now, Lex, for young scholars, is that the restrictions and expectations are such that it's highly unlikely that

anybody will do anything of great value or innovation except for, and this is not a bad thing, but stepwise improvement of existing paradigms. So the, you know, in simple English, you know, I went to Princeton for a job interview 40 years ago and they're like, what are you gonna do if we give you a job? And I'm like, I don't know. I wanna think about it and read and I saw that that

interview was over. The window of opportunity shut in my face. And they actually called my mentors and they're like, what are you doing? Tell this guy to buy some pants. I had hair down in my waist also. This guy looks like Charles Manson and Jesus. But the expectation is that you come to a post, you start publishing so that you can get grants. That's certainly true, but there's also kind of a behavior that you said like long hair. There's a certain style of the way you're supposed to behave. For example, like I'm wearing a suit.

It sounds weird, but I feel comfortable in this. I wore it when I was teaching at MIT. I wore it to meetings and so on, to different, sometimes, a blue and red tie. But that was an outside of the thing to do at MIT. So there was an outsider thing to do on my tee. So like there was a strong pressure to not wear a suit. No, that's right. And there's a pressure to behave, to have a hair thing. No, that's right.

Like the way you wear your hair, the way you, this isn't like a liberal or a lot of it. No, no, no, no, no. And it's just the tribes. That's right. And academia to me, or a place, any place that dreams of having like, renegade free thinkers, like really deep thinkers should, in fact, like glorify the outsider, right? Yeah.

Should welcome just, should welcome, you know, people that don't fit in. Yeah. No, that sounds weird, but I don't't I can just imagine the interview with at Princeton You know, I can imagine why aren't people why aren't you at Harvard for example? Or at MIT? Yeah, well, so that look I would love to you know, I I haven't lectured at MIT, but I've lectured at Harvard. I've gotten to lectured almost every place that wouldn't consider me for a job. And I, well, a few things, I'm lucky because I go to Princeton,

and I'm like, I don't know what I wanna do. And then two days later, I go to Schymor, and I'm like, I don't know what I want to do. And then two days later, I go to Schymor, and I'm like, I don't know what I want to do. And they offer me a job later that day, which I declined for months because of the extraordinary pressure of my mentors who right mindedly felt that I wouldn't get much done there. And, but what they told me at Schymor was, take your time. Show up for your classes

and don't molest barnyard animals, and you'll probably get tenure. And I'm like, I'll show up for my classes. We'll talk. That was the negotiation. Yeah, I negotiated. I drove up our bargain. But honestly, Lex, that's, I feel I'm very committed to skim or because I was given tenure when our first tear management paper wasn't published. It took eight years to publish. It was rejected at every journal. And I submitted it as like a purple, diddo sheet thing. I'm like, here's what I've been doing.

Here's the reviews. Here's why I think this is still a pretty good idea. And I don't know that this would happen even at Skidmore anymore. But I was very lucky to be given the latitude and to be encouraged. I took classes at Skidmore. That's how I learned all this stuff. I graduated, I got a PhD unscathed by knowledge. We were great statisticians and methodologists, but we didn't have any substance. You know, I don't mean this cynically, but we were trained in a method in search of a question. So I appreciate having five years at Skimoor, basically, to read books. And I also appreciate that I looked like this 40 years ago. And my view is that this is how I comported myself. Other people, the guy I learned the most from at Skimor's now dead, a history professor, Ted Karota. He wore a bow tie. And there's another guy, Darnell Rocker, who taught me about philosophy. And he was very proper. And he had like his jacket with like the leather patches.

But these guys weren't pompous at all. They were, this is the way I am. And I always felt that that's important that somebody who looks at you and says, oh, what a stiff. He's probably an MBA. Well, they're wrong. And someone who looks at me, when I first got to give more other professors, what asked when I'd be coming to their office to empty the garbage, they just assumed, you know, as in my 20s, they assumed I was housekeeping. I

always felt that was important that the students learn not to judge an idea by the appearance of the person who pervades it. And yeah, I mean, that's, uh, I guess this is such a high concern now because I personally still have faith that academia is where the great geniuses will come from. I do too. I'm a lot of people. I'm a lot of people. I love hearing you say that. I still, and it's one of the reasons why really apprehensive about the future of education right now in the context of the pandemic, I, um, I am, is that a lot of folks, and a lot of these are Google type people who I don't,

you know, they're geniuses also, but I don't like this idea that all learning can be virtual and that much could happen. I'm thinking on embodied environments with actual humans. Yeah, there's acting. I mean, there's so much to the universe education, but I think the key part that is the mentorship that occurs somehow at the human level.

I've gotten a lot of flack, like this conversation, we're in person now. And I've, even with Edward Snowden, who done all interviews remote. I'm a stickler to in person. It has to be in person like and a lot of people just don't get it. They're like, well, why can't this is so much easier? Like why go through the pain? Like I've traveled, I'm traveling in the next month to Paris for a single stupid conversation. Nobody cares about just to be in person. Well, it's important to me. Honestly, I was like this. And thank you for coming down to it. It's my pleasure, but again, it's very self-serving. I've enjoyed this. I knew I was going to, but it's not about our enjoyment per se. Again, at the risk of sounding Cavalier, there are a host of factors beyond verbal. Yeah. can be adequately captured. I don't care how much the acuity is decent on a Zoom conversation.

I feel, again, I felt within five minutes that this was going to be, for me, easy in the sense that I could speak freely. I just don't see that happening so easily from a distance. Yeah, I tend to, well, I'm hopeful, I agree with you on the current technology, but I am hopeful unlike some others on the technology eventually being able to create that kind of experience.

I think it's, or quite far away from that, but it might be, my hope is, I'm hopeful. I was at Microsoft in Seattle, and I can't remember why. And no, I can't. I, that's how I'm in my early Mr. McGoof phase. And somebody there was showing us like a virtual wall, And somebody there was showing us like a virtual wall where the entire wall, you know, when you're talking to somebody. So it's life size.

And they were beginning to get the appearance of motion and stuff. It looked pretty. Yeah. With virtual reality too, I don't know if you've ever been inside of virtual world. Yeah. Yeah, with virtual reality too, I don't know if you've ever been inside of virtual world. Yeah, it's to me, I can just see the future. It's quite real. Yeah. In terms of like a terror of death, I'm afraid of heights.

Me too. And there's, I don't know if you've ever tried. You should, if you haven't, there's a virtual reality experience, but you can walk a plank. Yeah. And you can look down and, man, I was on the ground. I was, I was afraid. Deeply afraid, it was as real as anything else could be. These are very early days of that technology, relatively speaking. I don't know what to do with

that. Same with like crossing the street, we did these experiments across the street in front of a car. And you know, it's being run over by a car. It's terrifying. Yeah. It's just that. Yeah, so there's a rich experience to be created there. We're not there yet, but Yeah, and I've seen a lot of people try like you said the Google folks Silicon Valley folks try to create a virtual online education. I don't know. I think they've raised really important questions about like what makes the really important questions about what makes the education experience fulfilling what makes it effective. Yeah, these are important questions. And I think what they highlight is we have no clue.

Like there's Thomas Soh wrote a book about recent book on charter schools. Yeah, I would like to talk to him. Yeah, he's an interesting guy. We will disagree about a lot, but respectfully. Yeah, such a powerful mind. But I need to read, I've only heard him talk about the book, but he argues quite seemingly effectively that the public education system is broken. That we blame, he basically says that we blame the conditions or the environment, but the upbringing of people like parenting blah blah blah like the

the set of opportunities, but okay putting that aside, it seems like charter schools, no matter who it is that it tends them does much better than in public schools and he puts a bunch of data behind it. And in his usual way, as you know, just is very eloquent in arguing with the points. Yeah. So that to me just highlights, man, we don't, education is like one of the most important, it's probably the most important thing in our civilization

and we're doing a shady job of it. Yeah. Yeah. In academia, in the universe education and, you know, a younger education, the whole thing, the whole thing. And yet we value just about anyone or anything more than educators, you know, part of it is just the relatively low regard that Americans have for teachers for teachers. Also similarly, like, just people, people of service, I think great teachers are the

greatest thing in our society. Now let's say now in a controversial, no like Black Lives Matter, great police officers is the greatest thing in our society also, like all people that do service, we undervalue cops, this whole defund the police is missing the point. And it's a stupid word.

With you on that, Lex. Our neighbors to one side of our house are three generations of police, our neighbors across the street, our police. They know my, you know, political predilections. And we've gotten along fine for 30 years, and I go out and tell them every day, you know, when you go in today, you tell the people on the force that I appreciate what they're doing. I think it's really important to not tribalize those concerns. I mean, we mentioned so many brilliant books and philosophers, but it would be nice to sort of

in a focused way to try to see if we can get some recommendations from you. So what three books technical or fiction or philosophical had a man big. That's the worst question. At a big impact in your life and you would recommend spent four hours driving here, perseverating about that. I didn't, everything else you sent me. That's fine. And I actually, I skimmed it and I'm like, I don't wanna look at it because I want, I want us to talk. Yeah. The ones in blue, I'm like, all right.

And, you know, I've already said that I've found backer's work and I've put the denial of death out there. Is that his best, sorry, to have a small tangent? Is there other books of his, yeah, see, if I could have this count as one, the birth and death of meaning, the denial of death and escape from evil are three books of Ernest Becker's

that I believe to all be profound. In a little sort of brief dance around topics, I've only read denial of death. How do those books connect in your? Yeah, nice. So the birth and death of meaning is where Becker situates his thinking in more of an evolutionary foundation.

So I like that for that reason. Escape from evil is where he applies the ideas in the denial of death more directly to economic matters and to inequality and also to our inability to peacefully coexist with other folks who don't share our beliefs. So I would put Ernest Becker out there as one. I also like novels a lot. And here I was like, God damn it, no matter what I say, I'm going to be like, yes, but the existentialist, you like all those folks? Come on.

You like that literary existentialist? I do, but I mean, you know, I've read all those books. I will tell you the last line of the plague. We learn in times of pestoence that there's more to admire in men than to despise. And I love that. Yeah. Oh, and plagues, such a, I don't know, I find the plague is a brilliant book.

Me too. Before the plague has come to us in 2020, I was just such a good book. Yes, so book about love about that. But I'll toss a one that may be less known to folks. I'm enamored with a novel by a woman named Carson McCullors, written in 1953 called Clock Without Hands. And I find it a brilliant literary depiction of many of the ideas that we have spoken about.

Fiction? Fiction, yeah. What's, what kind of ideas have we talked about? It, all of the existential ideas that we have encountered today, but in the context of a story of someone who finds out that he is terminally ill, it's set in the south in the heyday of like segregation. So there's a lot of social issues, a lot of existential issues. But it's basically a fictional account of someone who finds out that they're terminally ill and who reacts originally as you might expect anyone becomes more hostile to people who are different, like petty and stupid, denies

that anything's happening. But as the book goes on and he comes more to terms with his own mortality, it ends lovingly and I back to your idea about, you know, love being incredibly potent. So that's the nice thing, as you mentioned before with with Heidegger. I really like that idea and I've seen that in people who are terminally ill is they bring, who are terminally ill, is they bring, you know, the idea of death becomes current. Yes. It becomes like a thing, you know, I could die. I really like that idea.

I can die not just tomorrow, but like, no. No, no, no. Yeah. That's a really useful, I don't even know, I think I've been too afraid to even think about that. I have, like sit here and think like in five minutes, it's over. Yeah.

This is it, five minutes it's over. Yeah. So that would be my most recent addition, as I really am struck by Heidegger Well, would you recommend well? Okay, well if you have a few years I remember I tuned out being in time I was like I try to read it. I was like that's it. It's it look. It took me 40 years to read Ulysses It could not get past

the first five pages and it took me 40 years to read being in time. It's a slog. And I took a James Joyce course in college. So I've, I even, I guess red parts of fitting his wake. No way. But like, there's a difference if you're reading in like, yeah. I don't think I understood anything.

I like his short stories. Me too. The dead, the dead, yeah. Yeah,'t think I understood anything. I like his short stories. The dead. The dead. Yeah. Yeah. And I like Falkner. Absalom. Absalom is a fine book. But would you is there something Heidegger connected in a book you would recommend? No. So maybe I got to abandon him. I mean being in time is awesome. But here's an interesting thing and not to get all academic, but you know, there's two parts to it. And most of the most philosophers are preoccupied with the first part. It's in the second part where he gets into all the flight from death stuff and this idea of, you know, a turning and philosophers don't like that.

And I'm like, this is where he's starting to really shine to really shine before me. So yeah. All right, that's a beautiful set of books. So what advice would you give to a young person today about their career, about life, about how to survive in this world for suffering? Yeah, great. Yeah.

My advice is to get confident advice. And what I've done, my students, it's different. Don't listen to me. Yeah, don't listen to me. Yeah, don't listen to me. Well, I think my big piece of advice these days, is again, it's at the risk of sounding like a simpleton, but it's to emphasize a few things. One is, one of your questions, I think, was, you know,

what's the meaning of life. And of course, the existentialist say, life has no meaning, but it doesn't follow from that that it's intrinsic, that it's meaningless. You know what, the existential point is not that life is meaningless so much as it doesn't have one inevitable and intrinsic meaning. You know, which then it opens up, you know, I think it was Kirchegard who said, consciousness gives us the possibility of possibilities. But there's another lunatic, Oswald Spangler, who wrote a book called The Kind of the West. And he says that the philosopher, the German philosopher, Gerta, he says the purpose of life is to live. And I want that's one of my pieces of advice.

So the possibility of possibilities, it's interesting. So what do you do with this kind of sea of possibilities? Like, well, this is one of the when when young folks talk to me, especially these days, is there swimming in the sea of possibilities? Yeah. Well, so this is great. And so that's another existential point, which is that we yearn for freedom. We react vigorously when we perceive that our choices have been curtailed. And then we're paralyzed by indecision in the wake of seemingly unlimited possibilities because we're not choking on choice. And I'm not sure if this is helpful advice or not,

but what I say to folks is that the fact of the matter is is that, you know, for most people, choice is a first world problem. And sometimes the best option is to do something as silly as it sounds. And then if that doesn't work, do something else, which just sounds like my mom torturing me when I was young. But you know, part of the thing that I find myself singularly ill-equipped is that we're at the, I may be at the tail end of the last generation of Americans, where you'd like picked something and that's what you did. Like, I've been at a job for 40 years,

where you can expect to do better than your parents, because those days are gone. And where you can make a comfortable inference that the world in a decade or two will have any remote similarity to the one that we now inhabit. And so, but still your recommendations do. Yeah. And to do so, I'm again, this is some so back to the Heightager guy because all right, I may, you know, I consider

myself a professor, but what happens if most of the schools go out of business? Somebody else may consider themselves a restaurant tour, but what happens if there's no more restaurants? So what I, this is negative advice, but I tell folks, don't define yourself as a social caricature. Yeah.

Don't limit how you feel about yourself by through identification with a host of variables that may be uncertain and temporary. What? Let's say, no, but of course that gets back to your point earlier Lex where you're like yeah, but when you step out of that It's extraordinarily discombobulating So what I think you talked about an axe of chopping wood yeah and soul Socrates yeah, What is your soul?

What is the essence of Sheldon? Wow. That was awesome. Like when God, when you show up at the end of this thing, he kind of looks at you. He's like, oh yeah. Yeah. I remember you. Yeah. I remember you.

Yeah. Well, you know, to be honest, what I'm used about is to me, the when, when people are, I told you, we have two kids, when people are, I told you we have two kids, late 20s, early 30s. And over the years, when we meet people that know our kids and they're like, oh, your kids are kind and decent. And I'd be like, that's what I would like to be. Because I think intelligence is vastly overrated.

You know, the unibomber was a smart guy. And I do admire intelligence. And I do venerate education. And I find that to be tremendously important. But if I had to pay the ultimate homage to myself, it would be to be known as somebody who takes himself too seriously to take myself too seriously. Again, as corny as it sounds, I'd like to leave the world a tad better than I found it or at least do no harm. And I think you did all right in that regard. I love that question Alex. That's a good one. I think everyone

should be asked that. What is your soul? Do you have maybe just a few lingering questions around it? So, I mean, on the point of the soul, you've talked about the meaning of life. Do you have an answer to the meaning of your life, of something that brought you meaning happiness? Some sense of sense. Yeah. No, I mean, yes, yes and no. I mean, I, you know, I'm 66. So I'm in the kind of not ready to wrap it up literally or metaphorically, but you look, I look back and

just really with a sense of awe and wander gratitude. Is there memories that stand out to you from childhood from earlier that like, it's like, you know, stand out as something you're really proud of or just happy to have been on this earth. Mainly that stuff happened. Yeah, that. I mean, you know, my family also, chunk, were my folks and my grandparents are from Eastern Europe, you know, Russia, Austria.

As far as we know, some of them never made it out. I consider myself very fortunate to have been a so-called product of the American dream. You know, my grandparents were basically peasants. My parents, my dad worked two full-time jobs when I was growing up and I would see him on the weekends. I'd be like, why are you working all the time? He'd be like, so you won't have to. And he said, look, the world does not owe you a living. And so your first responsibility is to take care of yourself. And then your next responsibility is to take care of other people. And I think you did a pretty good job of that.

I don't know, but I, I, I, I, so those are the things that I'm proud of. So those are the things that I'm proud of. It's funny, you've talked about just yourself as a human being, but you've also contributed some really important ideas for your ideas and also kind of integrating and maybe even popularizing the work of Ernest Becker of connecting it, of making it legitimate scientifically. I mean, you know, as a human, of course, you want to be, you want your ripple to be one that makes the world a better place, but also I think in the span of time,

I think it's of great value where you've contributed in terms of how we think about the human condition, how we think about ourselves as finite beings in this world. And I hope also in our technology of engineering intelligence, I think at least for me, and I'm sure there's a lot of other people like me that your work has been a gift for.

Oh, well, thank you. No, I like that. And we have described ourselves as giant interneurons. I'm like, we have had no original ideas, and maybe that's the only thing that's original about our work is we don't claim to be original. What we claim to have done is to integrate, to connect these disparate and superficially unconnected discourses. So existentialists, they'd be like, evidence, what's that? And yeah, there's

now a branch of psychology, experimental existential psychology that I think we could take credit for having encouraged the formation of. And that in turn has gotten these ideas in circulation and academic communities where they may not have otherwise gotten. So I think that's good. Well, Sheldon is a huge honor. I can't believe you came down here. I've been a fan of your work. I hope we get to talk again.

Huge honor to talk to you. Thank you so much for talking today. Thanks, Lex. We'll do it again soon. I hope. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sheldon Solomon. And thank you to our sponsors, Blinkist, ExpressVPN, and Cash App.

Click the links in the description to get a discount. It's the best way to support this podcast. To enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars, not a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Vladimir and the book of that Sheldon uses in his book, More Met the Core. The cradle rocks above and abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief

crack of light between two Thank you.