Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #117

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Sheldon Solomon, a social psychologist, a philosopher,

00:00:05.840 | co-developer of terror management theory, and co-author of "The Warm at the Core"

00:00:11.960 | on the role of death in life.

00:00:14.380 | He further carried the ideas of Ernest Becker that can crudely summarize as the idea that

00:00:19.240 | our fear of death is at the core of the human condition and the driver of most of the creations

00:00:25.560 | of human civilization.

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00:00:37.800 | Let me say as a side note that Ernest Becker's book, "Denial of Death" had a big impact

00:00:43.880 | on my thinking about human cognition, consciousness, and the deep ocean currents of our mind that

00:00:50.320 | are behind the surface behaviors we observe.

00:00:53.400 | Many people have told me that they think about death or don't think about death, fear death

00:00:58.520 | or don't fear death, but I think not many people think about this topic deeply, rigorously,

00:01:04.980 | in the way that Nietzsche suggested.

00:01:07.560 | This topic, like many that lead to deep personal self-reflection, frankly is dangerous for

00:01:14.960 | the mind.

00:01:16.240 | As all first principles thinking about the human condition is, if you gaze long into

00:01:20.640 | the abyss, like Nietzsche said, the abyss will gaze back into you.

00:01:25.360 | I've been recently reading a lot about World War II, Stalin, and Hitler.

00:01:30.760 | It feels to me that there's some fundamental truth there to be discovered in the moments

00:01:35.080 | of history that changed everything, the suffering, the triumphs.

00:01:39.440 | If I bring up Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin in these conversations, it is never through

00:01:44.480 | a political lens.

00:01:45.800 | I'm not left nor right.

00:01:48.360 | I think for myself, deeply, and often question everything, changing my mind as often as is

00:01:54.440 | needed.

00:01:55.440 | I ask for your patience, empathy, and rigorous thinking.

00:01:59.040 | If you arrived to this podcast from a place of partisanship, if you hate Trump or love

00:02:03.840 | Trump or any other political leader no matter what he or they do, and see everyone who disagrees

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00:02:16.520 | my hope is to go beyond that kind of divisive thinking.

00:02:21.080 | I think we can only make progress toward truth through deep, empathetic thinking and conversation,

00:02:26.520 | and as always, love.

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00:05:29.880 | And now, here's my conversation with Sheldon Solomon.

00:05:35.040 | What is the role of death and fear of death in life?

00:05:38.440 | - Well, from our perspective, the uniquely human awareness of death and our unwillingness

00:05:48.160 | to accept that fact, we would argue is the primary motivational impetus for almost everything

00:05:56.240 | that people do, whether they're aware of it or not.

00:06:00.160 | - So that's kind of been your life work, your view of the human condition is that death,

00:06:06.400 | you've written the book, "Warm at the Core," that death is at the core of our consciousness

00:06:10.480 | of everything, of how we see the world, of what drives us.

00:06:14.280 | Maybe can you elaborate how you see death fitting in?

00:06:21.320 | What does it mean to be at the core of our being?

00:06:24.560 | - I think that's a great question.

00:06:27.320 | And to be pedantic, I usually start my psychology classes and I say to the students, "Okay,

00:06:36.400 | let's define our terms."

00:06:37.840 | And the ology part, they get right away.

00:06:41.000 | It's the study of, and then we get to the psyche part.

00:06:46.040 | And understandably, the students are like, "Oh, that means mind."

00:06:50.800 | I'm like, "Well, no, that's a modern interpretation."

00:06:55.120 | But in ancient Greek, it means soul, but not in the Cartesian dualistic sense that most

00:07:03.840 | of us in the West think when that word comes to mind.

00:07:07.600 | And so you hear the word soul and you're like, "Well, all right, that's the non-physical

00:07:14.720 | part of me that's potentially detachable from my corporal container when I'm no longer

00:07:20.560 | here."

00:07:21.680 | But Aristotle, who coined the word psyche, I think, he was not a dualist, he was a monist.

00:07:31.760 | He thought that the soul was inextricably connected to the body, and he defined soul

00:07:38.720 | as the essence of a natural body that is alive.

00:07:43.880 | And then he goes on and he says, "All right, let me give you an example.

00:07:50.080 | If an ax was alive, the soul of an ax would be to chop.

00:07:57.680 | And if you can pluck your eyeball out of your head and it was still functioning, then the

00:08:04.600 | soul of the eyeball would be to see."

00:08:08.160 | You know, and then he's like, "All right, the soul of a grasshopper is to hop, the soul

00:08:12.840 | of a woodpecker is to peck," which raises the question, of course, what is the essence

00:08:19.000 | of what it means to be human?

00:08:22.680 | And here, of course, there is no one universally accepted conception of the essence of our

00:08:30.720 | humanity.

00:08:31.720 | All right, Aristotle gives us the idea of humans as rational animals, we're homo sapiens.

00:08:39.960 | But not the only game in town, got Joseph Heusinger, an anthropologist in the 20th

00:08:44.880 | century, he called us homo ludens, that were basically fundamentally playful creatures.

00:08:51.720 | And I think it was Hannah Arendt, homo faber, we're tool-making creatures.

00:08:58.640 | Another woman, Ellen Dizanayake, wrote a book called Homo Aestheticus, and following Aristotle

00:09:04.680 | and his poetics, she's like, "Well, we're not only rational animals, we're also aesthetic

00:09:09.800 | creatures that appreciate beauty."

00:09:13.280 | There's another take on humans, I think they call us homo narratans, we're storytelling

00:09:20.080 | creatures.

00:09:21.440 | And I think all of those designations of what it means to be human are quite useful heuristically,

00:09:29.280 | and certainly worthy of our collective cogitation.

00:09:32.200 | But what garnered my attention when I was a young punk was just a single line in an

00:09:39.200 | essay by a Scottish guy, it was Alexander Smith, in a book called Dreamthorpe, I think

00:09:47.520 | it's written in the 1860s.

00:09:50.360 | He just says right in the middle of an essay, "It is our knowledge that we have to die that

00:09:55.360 | makes us human."

00:09:57.280 | And I remember reading that, and in my gut, I was like, "Oh, man, I don't like that,

00:10:04.260 | but I think you're onto something."

00:10:06.640 | And then William James, the great Harvard philosopher, and arguably the first academic

00:10:12.640 | psychologist, he referred to death as the worm at the core of the human condition.

00:10:20.080 | So that's where the worm at the core idea comes in.

00:10:23.640 | And that's just an allusion to the story of Genesis.

00:10:28.040 | Back in the proverbial old days in the Garden of Eden, everything was going tremendously

00:10:35.920 | well, until the serpent tempts Eve to take a chomp out of the apple of the tree of knowledge,

00:10:42.400 | and Adam partakes also.

00:10:45.640 | And this is, according to the Bible, what brings death into the world.

00:10:51.800 | And from our vantage point, the story of Genesis is a remarkable allegorical recount of the

00:11:01.040 | origin of consciousness, where we get to the point where, by virtue of our vast intelligence,

00:11:08.640 | we come to realize the inevitability of death.

00:11:12.560 | And so the apple is beautiful and it's tasty, but when you get right into the middle of

00:11:18.920 | it, there's that ugly reality, which is our finitude.

00:11:23.320 | And then fast forward a bit, and I was a young professor at Skidmore College in 1980.

00:11:31.040 | My PhD is in experimental social psychology, and I mainly did studies with clinical psychologists

00:11:38.120 | evaluating the efficacy of non-pharmacological interventions to reduce stress.

00:11:44.200 | And that was good work, and I found it interesting, but in my first week as a professor at Skidmore,

00:11:51.040 | I, just walking up and down the shelves of the library, saw some books by a guy I had

00:11:57.800 | never heard of, Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist, recently deceased.

00:12:02.920 | He died in 1974.

00:12:06.360 | After weeks before, actually, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for

00:12:15.200 | his book, The Denial of Death.

00:12:18.240 | And that was his last book?

00:12:20.000 | It's actually his next to last book.

00:12:22.200 | I don't know how you pull this off, but he had one more after he died called Escape from

00:12:27.000 | Evil.

00:12:28.380 | And evidently it was supposed to, originally The Denial of Death was supposed to be this

00:12:32.860 | giant thousand-page book that was both, and they split it up, and what became Escape from

00:12:40.480 | Evil, his wife, Marie Becker, finished.

00:12:44.560 | Well, be that as it may, it is in The Denial of Death where Becker just says in the first

00:12:52.560 | paragraph, "I believe that the terror of death and the way that human beings respond to it

00:13:01.640 | or decline to respond to it is primarily responsible for almost everything we do, whether we're

00:13:09.440 | aware of it or not, and mostly we're not."

00:13:15.200 | And so I read that first paragraph, Lex, and I was like, "Wow.

00:13:19.640 | Okay, this dude's- You're onto something.

00:13:21.760 | You're onto something.

00:13:22.760 | It's the same thing here.

00:13:23.760 | It's the same thing."

00:13:25.720 | And then it reminded me, I think, not to play psychologist, but let's face it, I believe

00:13:33.800 | there's a reason why we end up drifting where we ultimately come to.

00:13:40.120 | So I'm in my mid-20s.

00:13:42.360 | I got Ernest Becker's book in my hand, and the next thing I know I'm remembering when

00:13:48.240 | I'm eight years old, the day that my grandmother died.

00:13:52.200 | And the day before my mom said, "Oh, say goodbye to grandma.

00:13:58.560 | She's not well."

00:13:59.800 | And so I was like, "Okay, grandma."

00:14:03.480 | And I knew she wasn't well, but I didn't really appreciate the magnitude of her illness.

00:14:08.280 | Well, she dies the next day, and it's in the evening, and I'm just sitting there looking

00:14:14.920 | at my stamp collection.

00:14:17.240 | And I'm like, "Wow, I'm going to miss my grandmother."

00:14:20.240 | And I'm like, "No, wait a minute.

00:14:22.040 | That means my mother's going to die after she gets old.

00:14:26.960 | And that's even worse.

00:14:28.180 | After all, who's going to make me dinner?"

00:14:30.840 | And that bothered me for a while, but then I'm looking at the stamps, all the dead American

00:14:35.360 | presidents.

00:14:36.360 | And I'm like, "There's George Washington.

00:14:38.360 | He's dead.

00:14:39.360 | There's Thomas Jefferson.

00:14:40.360 | He's dead.

00:14:41.360 | My mom's going to be dead.

00:14:43.360 | Oh, I'm going to get old and be dead someday."

00:14:48.040 | And at eight years old, that was my first explicit existential crisis.

00:14:52.960 | I remember it being one of these blood-curdling realizations that I tried my best to ignore

00:15:02.240 | for most of the time I was subsequently growing up.

00:15:05.880 | But fast forward back to Skidmore College, mid-20s, reading Becker's book in the 1980s,

00:15:14.680 | thinking to myself, "Wow, one of the reasons why I'm finding this so compelling is that

00:15:20.680 | it squares with my own personal experience."

00:15:23.760 | And then to make a short story long, and I'll shut up, Lex, but what grabbed me about Becker,

00:15:31.560 | and this is in part because I read a lot of his other books, there's another book, The

00:15:37.160 | Birth and Death of Meaning, which is framed from an evolutionary perspective.

00:15:44.560 | And then The Denial of Death is really more framed from an existential psychodynamic vantage

00:15:51.360 | point.

00:15:52.960 | And as a young academic, I was really taken by what I found to be a very potent juxtaposition

00:16:05.200 | that you really don't see that often.

00:16:07.720 | That usually evolutionary types are eager to dismiss the psychodynamic types and vice

00:16:15.280 | versa.

00:16:16.520 | And maybe only John Bowlby, there's other folks, but the attachment theorist John Bowlby

00:16:24.240 | was really one of the first serious academics to say these ways of thinking about things

00:16:32.440 | are quite compatible.

00:16:35.160 | - Can you comment on what a psychodynamic view of the world is versus an evolutionary

00:16:39.800 | view of the world, just in case people are not aware?

00:16:41.800 | - Oh yeah, absolutely, that's a fine question.

00:16:43.920 | Well, the evolutionary types in general are interested in how it is and why it is that

00:16:57.240 | we have adapted to our surroundings in the service of persisting over time and being

00:17:04.240 | represented in the gene pool thereafter.

00:17:08.800 | - Used to be a fish.

00:17:09.800 | - Yes.

00:17:10.800 | - We used to be a fish, and now we end up talking on a podcast, how we came to be that

00:17:16.080 | way.

00:17:17.080 | - How we came to be that way.

00:17:18.480 | And so, whereas the existential psychodynamic types, I would say, are more interested in

00:17:23.640 | development across a single lifespan.

00:17:29.160 | But the evolutionary types dismiss the psychodynamic types as overly speculative and devoid of

00:17:37.120 | empirical support for their views.

00:17:42.120 | They'll just say, "These guys are talking shit," if you'll pardon the expression.

00:17:46.240 | And of course, you can turn right around and say the same about the evolutionary types.

00:17:52.560 | They are often and rightfully criticized, evolutionary psychologists, for what are called

00:17:58.200 | the just-so stories, where it's like, "Oh, this is probably why fill-in-the-blank is

00:18:06.520 | potentially adaptive."

00:18:09.360 | And my thought, again, early on was I didn't see any intrinsic antithesis between these

00:18:20.520 | viewpoints.

00:18:21.520 | I just found them dialectically compatible and very powerful when combined.

00:18:27.440 | - So one question I would ask here is about science being speculative.

00:18:33.960 | We understand so little about the human mind.

00:18:36.360 | You said you picked up Becker's book, and it felt like it was onto something.

00:18:40.600 | That's the same thing I felt when I picked up Becker's book, probably also in my early

00:18:46.880 | 20s.

00:18:47.880 | I read a lot of philosophy, but it felt like the question of the meaning of life kind of...

00:18:54.480 | It seemed to be the closest to the truth somehow.

00:18:59.640 | It was onto something.

00:19:00.640 | So I guess the question I want to ask also is how speculative is psychology?

00:19:08.160 | All of your life's work.

00:19:13.000 | How confident do you feel about the whole thing, about understanding our mind?

00:19:18.160 | - I feel confidently unconfident to have it both ways.

00:19:26.160 | - What do we make of psychology?

00:19:27.160 | What do we make, starting with Freud's, starting just our...

00:19:33.280 | Even just philosophy, even the aspects of the sciences, like my field of artificial

00:19:41.720 | intelligence, but also physics.

00:19:45.320 | It often feels like, "Man, we don't really understand most of what's going on here."

00:19:50.800 | And certainly that's true with the human mind.

00:19:54.080 | - Yeah, well to me that's the proper epistemological stance.

00:19:58.000 | - I don't know anything.

00:20:00.320 | - It's the Socratic, "I know that I don't know," which is the first step on the path

00:20:07.240 | to wisdom.

00:20:08.240 | I would argue forcefully that we know a lot more than we used to.

00:20:18.080 | I would argue equally forcefully, not that I have a PhD in the philosophy of science,

00:20:24.360 | but I believe that the Thomas Kuhns of the world are right when they point out that change

00:20:31.360 | is not necessarily progress.

00:20:35.520 | And so on the one hand, I do think we know a lot more than we did back in the day when

00:20:42.080 | if you wanted to fly, you put on some wax wings and jumped off a mountain.

00:20:47.360 | On the other hand, I think it's quite arrogant when scientists, I'll just speak about psychological

00:20:56.800 | scientists, when they have the audacity to mistake statistical precision for knowledge

00:21:07.280 | and insight.

00:21:09.760 | And when they make the mistake, in my estimation, that Einstein bemoaned, and that's this idea

00:21:17.720 | that the mere accumulation of data will necessarily result in conceptual breakthroughs.

00:21:26.640 | And so I like the, well, we're all, I hope, appreciative of the people who trained us,

00:21:32.840 | but I remember my first day in graduate school at the University of Kansas, they brought

00:21:37.440 | us into a room and on one side of the board was a quote by Kurt Lewin or Levine, famous

00:21:43.560 | German social psychologist.

00:21:47.520 | And the quote is, "There's nothing more useful than a good theory."

00:21:51.280 | And then on the other side was another quote by a German physicist, his name eludes me,

00:21:56.120 | and it was, "All theories are wrong."

00:21:58.840 | And I'm like, which is it?

00:22:02.480 | And of course, the point is that it's both.

00:22:06.680 | Our theories are, I believe, powerful ways to direct our attention to aspects of human

00:22:16.040 | affairs that might render us better able to understand ourselves and the world around

00:22:23.480 | us.

00:22:24.480 | Now, I also, as an experimental psychologist, I adhere to the view that theories are essentially

00:22:34.960 | hypothesis generating devices, and that at its best, science is a dialectical interplay

00:22:42.040 | where you have theoretical assertions that yield testable hypotheses, and that either

00:22:49.360 | results in the corroboration of the theory, the rejection of it, or the modification thereafter.

00:22:57.960 | If we look at the existentialists or even like modern philosopher-psychology types like

00:23:05.920 | Jordan Peterson, I'm not sure if you're familiar with him.

00:23:08.080 | I know Jordan pretty well.

00:23:11.020 | We go way back, actually.

00:23:12.560 | If he were here with us today, he would be jumping in in, I believe, very interesting

00:23:20.240 | and important ways.

00:23:21.920 | But yeah, we go back 30 years ago.

00:23:24.440 | He was basically saying our work is nonsense.

00:23:29.400 | Let's get into this, because I'm sure I'll talk to Jordan eventually on this thing.

00:23:33.080 | Yeah.

00:23:34.080 | Going through some rough times right now.

00:23:35.080 | Oh, absolutely, and I wish him well.

00:23:38.560 | Jordan was working on his maps of meaning, and we were publishing our work.

00:23:45.520 | And I think Jordan at the time was concerned about our vague claims to the effect that

00:23:55.680 | all meaning is arbitrary.

00:23:59.600 | He takes a more Jungian as well as evolutionary view that I don't think is wrong, by the way,

00:24:06.880 | which is that there are certain kinds of meanings that are more important, let's say religious

00:24:17.520 | types, and that we didn't pay sufficient attention to that in our early days.

00:24:26.040 | So can you try to elucidate what his worldview is?

00:24:30.320 | Because he's also a religious man.

00:24:32.560 | So what was some of the interesting aspects of the disagreements then?

00:24:38.240 | Yeah, well, back in the day, I just said, Jordan was a young punk.

00:24:42.240 | We were young punks.

00:24:43.240 | He was just kind of flailing in an animated way at some conferences saying that we-

00:24:49.400 | You're still both kind of punks.

00:24:51.320 | Yeah, we are both kind of punks.

00:24:52.720 | So I saw him three or four years ago.

00:24:54.360 | We spoke on a, it was an awesome day.

00:24:56.720 | We were in Canada at the Ontario Shakespeare Festival where we were asked to be on a Canadian

00:25:02.840 | broadcast system program.

00:25:05.480 | I think we were talking about Macbeth from a psychodynamic perspective.

00:25:12.560 | I hadn't seen him in a ton of years, and we spent two days together, had a great time.

00:25:18.360 | We had just written our book, The Worm at the Core, and he's like, "You're missing a

00:25:24.000 | big opportunity every time you say something.

00:25:27.000 | You have to have your phone and you have to film yourself, and then you have to put it

00:25:31.720 | on YouTube."

00:25:32.720 | Yeah.

00:25:33.720 | He was onto something that just as a small tangent, it's almost sad to look at Jordan

00:25:41.160 | Peterson and somebody like yourself.

00:25:43.880 | After having done this podcast, I've realized that there is really brilliant people in this

00:25:48.160 | world, and oftentimes, especially when they're, I mean it with love, are a little bit like

00:25:56.280 | punks.

00:25:57.280 | That's right.

00:25:58.280 | They kind of do their own thing, and the world doesn't know they exist as much as they should.

00:26:03.600 | It's so interesting because most people are kind of boring.

00:26:10.040 | And then the interesting ones kind of go on their own, and there's not a smartphone recording.

00:26:14.240 | No, no, that's what I'm talking about.

00:26:15.240 | It's so interesting.

00:26:16.240 | He was onto something that, I mean, it's interesting that he, I don't think he was thinking from

00:26:21.240 | a money perspective, but he was probably thinking of connecting with people or sharing his knowledge,

00:26:27.920 | but people don't often think that way.

00:26:29.800 | That's right.

00:26:30.800 | So maybe we can try to get back to, you're both brilliant people, and I'd love to get

00:26:36.240 | some interesting disagreements earlier and later about in your psychological work, in

00:26:42.880 | your worldviews.

00:26:43.880 | Sure.

00:26:44.880 | So my disagreements today would be along two dimensions.

00:26:52.440 | One is, and again, I wish he was here to correct me when I say that he is more committed to

00:27:04.560 | the virtues of the Judeo-Christian tradition, particularly Christianity, and in a sense

00:27:12.220 | is a contemporary Kierkegaard of sorts when he's saying there's only one way to leap into

00:27:20.600 | faith.

00:27:22.320 | And I would take ardent issue with that claim on the grounds that that is one, but by no

00:27:27.960 | means not the only way to find meaning and value in life.

00:27:35.840 | And so, and I see his-

00:27:39.440 | What's his worm at the core?

00:27:41.000 | What is, like, so we're talking about a little bit of a higher level of discovering meaning.

00:27:46.480 | What's his, what does he make of death?

00:27:48.960 | Oh, I don't know.

00:27:50.120 | And this is where it would be nice to have him here.

00:27:54.840 | He has, you know, from a distance criticized our work as misguided.

00:28:02.200 | Having said that though, when we were together, he said something along the lines that there

00:28:07.260 | is no theoretical body of work in academic psychology right now for which there is more

00:28:16.040 | empirical evidence.

00:28:18.160 | And so I appreciated that.

00:28:20.040 | He's a great researcher.

00:28:22.120 | He's a good clinician.

00:28:23.560 | The other thing that we will agree to disagree about rather vociferously is ultimately political/economic.

00:28:36.920 | So I remember being at dinner with him and telling him that the next book that I wanted

00:28:41.080 | to write was going to be called Why Left and Right Are Both Beside the Point.

00:28:47.120 | And my argument was going to be, and it is going to be, that both liberal and political,

00:28:52.400 | no, liberal and conservative political philosophy are each intellectually and morally bankrupt

00:29:00.280 | because they're both framed in terms of assumptions about human nature that are demonstrably false.

00:29:06.800 | And Jordan didn't mind me knocking liberal political philosophy on those grounds.

00:29:14.680 | That would basically be like Steven Pinker's blank slate.

00:29:19.160 | But he took issue when I pointed out that actually it's conservative political philosophy

00:29:27.700 | which starts with John Locke's assumption that in a state of nature there are no societies,

00:29:33.520 | just autonomous individuals who are striving for survival.

00:29:40.440 | That's one of the most obviously patently wrong assertions in the history of intellectual

00:29:48.000 | thought.

00:29:49.120 | And Locke uses that to justify his claims about the individual right to acquire unlimited

00:29:57.440 | amounts of property, which is ultimately the justification for neoliberal economics.

00:30:06.160 | And well--

00:30:07.160 | Can you linger on that a little bit?

00:30:09.080 | Sure.

00:30:10.080 | What's the, can you describe his philosophy again as view of the world and what neoliberal

00:30:16.600 | economics is?

00:30:17.600 | Yeah, let me translate it in English.

00:30:19.760 | So basically on all these days, anybody who says I'm a conservative free market type,

00:30:30.680 | you're following John Locke and Adam Smith, whether you're aware of it or not.

00:30:35.260 | So here's John Locke, who by the way, all of these guys are great.

00:30:39.800 | So for me to appear to criticize any of these folks, it is with the highest regard.

00:30:45.180 | And also we need to understand in my estimation how important their ideas are.

00:30:51.760 | Locke is working in a time where all rule was top down by divine right.

00:30:58.500 | And he's trying desperately to come up with a philosophical justification to shift power

00:31:06.400 | and autonomy to individuals.

00:31:10.800 | And he starts in his second treatise on government, 1690 or so, he says, okay, let's start with

00:31:18.920 | a state of nature.

00:31:20.380 | And he's like, in a state of nature, there's no societies, there's just individuals.

00:31:27.640 | And in a perfect universe, there wouldn't be any societies.

00:31:32.240 | There would just be individuals who by the law of nature have a right to survive.

00:31:40.520 | And in the service of survival, they have the right to acquire and preserve the fruits

00:31:49.300 | of their own labor.

00:31:52.580 | But his point is, and it's actually a good one, he's following Hobbes here.

00:31:56.900 | He's like, well, the problem with that is that people are assholes.

00:32:00.920 | I mean, if they would let each other alone, then we would still be living in a state of

00:32:06.580 | nature, everybody just doing what they did to get by each day.

00:32:11.720 | But it's a whole lot easier if I see like an apple tree a mile away, well, I can go

00:32:18.700 | over and pick an apple.

00:32:21.100 | But if you're 10 meters away with an apple in your hand, it's a lot easier if I pick

00:32:25.540 | up a rock and crack your head and take the apple.

00:32:29.660 | And his point was that the problem is that people can't be counted on to behave.

00:32:37.740 | They will take each other's property.

00:32:41.820 | Moreover, he argued, if someone takes your property, you have the right to retribution

00:32:52.020 | in proportion to the degree of the magnitude of the transgression.

00:32:56.220 | English translation, if I take your apple, you have the right to take an apple back.

00:33:03.180 | You don't have the right to kill my firstborn.

00:33:06.340 | But people being people, they're apt to escalate retaliatory behavior, thus creating what Locke

00:33:14.180 | called a state of war.

00:33:16.180 | So he said, in order to avoid a state of war, people reluctantly give up their freedom in

00:33:22.420 | exchange for security.

00:33:24.860 | They agree to obey the law, and that the sole function of government is to keep domestic

00:33:31.220 | tranquility and to ward off foreign evasion in order to protect our right to property.

00:33:38.420 | So now here's the property thing.

00:33:41.620 | So Locke says, if you look in the Bible and in nature, there is no private property.

00:33:51.740 | But Locke says, well, surely if there's anything that you own, it's your body.

00:34:00.020 | And surely you have a right by nature to stay alive.

00:34:05.220 | And then by extension, anything that you do where you exert effort or labor, that becomes

00:34:13.360 | your private property.

00:34:14.980 | So back to the apple tree.

00:34:16.860 | If I walk over to an apple tree, that's everybody's apples until I pick one.

00:34:23.980 | And the minute I do, that is my apple.

00:34:26.380 | And then he says, you can have as many apples as you want as long as you don't waste them

00:34:34.500 | and as long as you don't impinge on somebody else's right to get apples.

00:34:42.180 | So far, so good.

00:34:44.740 | And then he says, well, okay, in the early days, you could only eat so many apples or

00:34:58.980 | you could only trade so many apples with somebody else.

00:35:03.580 | So he was like, well, if you put a fence around a bunch of apple trees, those become your

00:35:09.180 | apples.

00:35:10.180 | That's your property.

00:35:11.680 | If somebody else wants to put a fence around Nebraska, that's their property.

00:35:19.320 | And everybody can have as much property as they want because the world is so big that

00:35:27.140 | there is no limit to what you can have if you pursue it by virtue of your own effort.

00:35:35.360 | But then he says money came into the picture.

00:35:38.500 | And this is important because he noticed long before anybody, before the Freud's of the

00:35:45.080 | world that money is funky because it has no intrinsic value.

00:35:50.000 | He's like, ooh, look at that shiny piece of metal that actually has, if you're hungry

00:35:56.320 | and you have a choice between a carrot and a lump of gold in the desert, most people

00:36:00.980 | are going to go for the carrot.

00:36:03.200 | But his point is, is that the allure of money is that it's basically a concentrated symbol

00:36:12.540 | of wealth, but because it doesn't spoil, Locke said, you're entitled to have as much money

00:36:20.340 | as you're able to garner.

00:36:23.860 | Then he says, well, the reality is, is that some people are more, the word that he used

00:36:32.060 | was industrious.

00:36:33.700 | He said some people more industrious than others.

00:36:36.700 | All right.

00:36:37.700 | Today, we would say smarter, less lazy, more ambitious.

00:36:42.500 | He just said that's natural.

00:36:44.140 | It's also true.

00:36:46.220 | Therefore he argued, uh, over time, some people are going to have a whole lot of property

00:36:54.260 | and other people, not much at all.

00:36:57.180 | Inequality for Locke is natural and beneficial for everyone.

00:37:04.660 | His argument was that, you know, the rising tide lifts all boats and that the truly creative

00:37:11.860 | and innovative are entitled to relatively unlimited worth because we're all better off

00:37:18.460 | as a result.

00:37:20.120 | So the point very simply is that, well, that's base.

00:37:25.160 | And then you have Adam Smith, you know, in the next century with the invisible hand where

00:37:31.000 | Adam Smith says, everyone pursuing their own selfish, that's not necessarily pejorative.

00:37:37.660 | If everyone pursues their own selfish interests, we will all be better off as a result.

00:37:44.920 | And what do you think is the flaw in that way?

00:37:47.320 | Well, there's two flaws.

00:37:48.480 | One is, is that, um, well, one flaw is first of all, that, that it is based on an erroneous

00:37:57.480 | assumption to begin with, which is that there never was a time in human history when we

00:38:01.880 | were an asocial species.

00:38:05.260 | In a sense, you don't feel like that where there's a, this emphasis of a individual autonomy

00:38:10.960 | is a flawed premise.

00:38:12.840 | Like where there's a, there's something fundamentally deeply, uh, interconnected between us.

00:38:18.560 | I do.

00:38:19.560 | I think that Plato and Socrates, uh, you know, in the Crito were closer to the truth, uh,

00:38:26.800 | when they started with the assumption that we were interdependent, then they derived

00:38:31.940 | individual autonomy as a manifestation of a functional social system.

00:38:37.480 | That's fascinating.

00:38:38.480 | When Margaret Thatcher, you're too young, uh, you know, in the 1980s, she said, societies,

00:38:44.520 | there's no such thing as societies.

00:38:46.600 | There's just individuals pursuing their self-interest.

00:38:52.160 | So, uh, so that's one point where I would take issue respectfully with John Locke.

00:38:57.680 | Point number two is when Locke says in 1690, well, England's filled up.

00:39:04.160 | Um, so if you want some land, just go to America, it's empty.

00:39:09.680 | Or maybe there's a few savages there, just kill them.

00:39:13.360 | So, and Melville does the same thing in Moby Dick where he, he thinks about, will there

00:39:19.760 | ever come a time where we run out of whales?

00:39:23.840 | And he says, no, but we have run out of whales.

00:39:27.520 | And so Locke was right, maybe in 1690 that the world was large and had infinite resources.

00:39:37.360 | He certainly wrong today in, in my opinion, also wrong is the claim that the unlimited

00:39:47.860 | pursuit of personal wealth does not harm those around us.

00:39:52.360 | There is no doubt that radical inequality is tragic psychologically and physically is

00:40:00.440 | poverty is not that terrible.

00:40:03.240 | It's easy for me to say it because I have a place to stay and something to eat.

00:40:07.480 | But as long as you're not starving and have a place to be, poverty is not as challenging

00:40:14.360 | as being, having the impoverished in close proximity to those who are obscenely wealthy.

00:40:21.560 | - So it's not the absolute measure of your wellbeing, it's the inequality of that wellbeing

00:40:27.400 | that's quite painful.

00:40:29.760 | So maybe just to linger on the Jordan Peterson thing, in terms of your disagreement in his

00:40:37.240 | worldview, so he went through quite a bit, you know, there's been quite a bit of fire,

00:40:42.200 | right, in his defense or maybe his opposition of the idea of equality of outcomes.

00:40:50.480 | So looking at the inequality that's in our world, looking at, you know, certain groups

00:40:57.840 | measurably having an outcome that's different than other groups, and then drawing conclusions

00:41:03.320 | about fundamental unfairness, injustice, inequality in the system.

00:41:09.520 | So like systematic racism, systematic sexism, systematic anything else that creates inequality.

00:41:16.960 | And he's been kind of saying pretty simple things to say that, you know, the system for

00:41:24.560 | the most part is not broken or flawed.

00:41:29.120 | That the inequality of outcomes is part of our world, what we should strive for is the,

00:41:37.720 | you know, equality of opportunity.

00:41:39.280 | - Yeah, and I do not dispute that as an abstraction.

00:41:44.720 | But again, to back up for a second, I do take issue with Jordan's fervent devotion to the

00:41:51.240 | free market and his cavalier dismissal of Marxist ideas, which he has, in my estimation,

00:42:02.200 | mischaracterized in his public depictions.

00:42:06.640 | - Let's get into it.

00:42:07.640 | He just seems to really not like socialism, Marxism, communism.

00:42:14.440 | Historically speaking, sort of, I mean, how would I characterize it?

00:42:18.440 | I'm not exactly sure, I don't want to, again, he'll eventually be here to defend himself.

00:42:23.400 | John Locke, unfortunately not here to defend himself.

00:42:26.640 | But what's your sense about Marxism and the way Jordan talks about it, the way you think

00:42:36.000 | about it from the economics, from the philosophical perspective?

00:42:39.640 | - Yeah, well, if we were all here together, I'd say we need to start with Marx's economic

00:42:45.600 | and philosophical manuscripts of 1844, before Marx became more of a polemicist.

00:42:53.200 | And I would argue that Marx's political philosophy, he's a crappy economist, I don't dispute that.

00:43:01.640 | But his arguments about human nature, his arguments about the inevitably catastrophic

00:43:09.040 | psychological and environmental and economic effects of capitalism, I would argue every

00:43:16.240 | one of those has proven quite right.

00:43:19.880 | Marx maybe did not have the answer, but he saw in the 18, whenever he was writing, that

00:43:31.600 | inevitably capitalism would lead to massive inequity, that it was ultimately based on

00:43:43.040 | the need to denigrate and dehumanize labor, to render them in his language, a fleshy cog

00:43:50.280 | in a giant machine.

00:43:52.520 | And that it would create a tension and conflict between those who own things and those who

00:44:00.800 | made things, that over time would always, you know, the Thomas Pickardy guy who writes

00:44:07.200 | about capital and just makes the point that return on investment will always be greater

00:44:15.200 | than wages.

00:44:17.440 | That means the people with money are gonna have a lot more.

00:44:21.440 | That means there's gonna come a point where the economic house of cards falls apart.

00:44:27.080 | Now the Joseph Schumpters of the world, they're like, that's creative destruction, bring it.

00:44:32.000 | That's great.

00:44:33.000 | So I think it's Niles Ferguson, he's a historian.

00:44:36.040 | He may be at Stanford now, he was at Harvard.

00:44:38.920 | He writes about the history of money and he's like, yeah, there's been 20 or whatever depressions

00:44:44.820 | and big recessions in the last several hundred years.

00:44:50.180 | And when that happens, half of the population or whatever is catastrophically inconvenienced,

00:44:58.520 | but that's the price that we pay for progress.

00:45:03.320 | Other people would argue and I would agree with them that I will happily sacrifice the

00:45:13.100 | rate of progress in order to flatten the curve of economic destruction.

00:45:20.420 | To put that in plainer English, I would direct our attention to the social democracies that

00:45:31.900 | forgetting for the moment of whether it's possible to do this on a scale in a country

00:45:37.140 | as big as ours on all of the things that really matter, gross domestic GDP or whatever, that's

00:45:45.700 | just an abstraction.

00:45:47.460 | But when you look at whatever the United Nations says, how we measure quality of life, life

00:45:54.260 | expectancy, education, rates of alcoholism, suicide, and so on, the countries that do

00:46:01.760 | better are the mixed economies, they're market economies that have high tax rates in exchange

00:46:10.740 | for the provision of services that come as a right for citizens.

00:46:17.500 | Yeah, so I mean, I guess the question is, you've kind of mentioned that, you know, as

00:46:24.540 | Marx described capitalism with a slippery slope, eventually things go awry in some kind

00:46:30.520 | of way.

00:46:31.520 | The question is, when you implement a system, how does it go wrong eventually?

00:46:37.160 | You know, eventually we'll all be dead.

00:46:39.760 | That's exactly right.

00:46:41.760 | No, that's right.

00:46:44.120 | And then the criticism, I mean, I think these days, unfortunately, Marxism is a dirty word.

00:46:50.400 | I say unfortunately because even if you disagree with a philosophy, you should, like calling

00:46:58.280 | somebody a Marxist should not be a thing that shuts down all conversation.

00:47:04.640 | No, that's right.

00:47:05.840 | And the fact is, is I'm sympathetic with Jordan's dismissal of the folks, the talking heads

00:47:13.520 | these days who spew Marxist words.

00:47:19.200 | To me, it's like fashionable nonsense.

00:47:21.600 | Do you know that book that the physicist wrote, Mocking?

00:47:25.080 | You're too young.

00:47:26.080 | I think it was 20 or so years ago.

00:47:28.040 | We're all pretty young, relatively.

00:47:29.040 | Yeah, that's right.

00:47:30.040 | But I think there were these NYU physicists, they wrote a paper just mocking the kind of

00:47:36.120 | literary postmodern types.

00:47:39.200 | Oh, those kinds of, yeah.

00:47:40.840 | Yeah, and it was just nonsense.

00:47:42.080 | And of course, it was made the lead article.

00:47:46.080 | And you know, my point is Marx wouldn't be a Marxist.

00:47:49.720 | True.

00:47:51.440 | I've read and listened to some of the work of Richard Wolff.

00:47:56.000 | He speaks pretty eloquently about Marxism.

00:47:58.120 | I like him.

00:47:59.120 | He's one of the only people speaking a lot about Marxism in the way we are now in a serious

00:48:08.240 | way.

00:48:09.240 | And it's sort of saying, you know, what are the flaws of capitalism?

00:48:13.900 | Not saying like, yeah, basically sounding very different.

00:48:17.480 | People should check out his work.

00:48:18.880 | Because all this kind of outrage, mob culture of sort of demanding equality of outcome,

00:48:29.920 | that's not Marxism.

00:48:30.920 | It is not Marxism.

00:48:33.200 | He didn't say that.

00:48:34.200 | You know, he literally said each, what was it, like each according to their needs and

00:48:39.320 | each according to their abilities or something like that.

00:48:42.480 | So the question is the implementation, like.

00:48:44.880 | Absolutely.

00:48:45.880 | Humans are messy, so how does it go wrong?

00:48:48.520 | There you go, Lex.

00:48:50.080 | It's messy.

00:48:51.080 | Brilliant.

00:48:52.080 | It's messy.

00:48:53.080 | And this gets back to my rant about the book that I want to try if I don't stroke out,

00:48:57.640 | why left and right are both beside the point.

00:49:01.360 | You know, the people, conservatives are right when they condemn liberals for being simple

00:49:10.600 | minded by assuming that a modification of external conditions will yield changes in

00:49:19.120 | human nature.

00:49:20.800 | You know, again, that's where Marx and Skinner are odd bedfellows.

00:49:26.500 | You know, here they are just saying, oh, let's change the surroundings and things will inevitably

00:49:32.860 | get better.

00:49:34.240 | On the other hand, when conservatives say that people are innately selfish and they

00:49:44.120 | use that as the justification for glorifying the unbridled pursuit of wealth, well, they're

00:49:51.280 | only half right because it turns out that we can be innately selfish, but we are also

00:49:58.920 | innately generous and reciprocating creatures.

00:50:03.680 | There's remarkable studies, I think they've been done at Yale, of, you know, babies, 14

00:50:09.720 | month old babies.

00:50:12.680 | If someone hands them a toy and then wants something in return, babies before they can

00:50:20.120 | walk and talk will reciprocate.

00:50:23.000 | All right, fine.

00:50:26.120 | If someone, if they want a toy, let's say, or a bottle of water, baby wants a bottle

00:50:31.480 | of water and I look like I'm trying to give it to the baby, but I dropped the bottle so

00:50:40.560 | the baby doesn't get what she or he wanted, when given a chance to reciprocate, little

00:50:47.320 | babies will reciprocate because they're aware of and are responding to intention.

00:50:54.640 | Similarly, if they see somebody behaving unfairly to someone, they will not help that person

00:51:04.320 | in return.

00:51:05.960 | So my point is, yeah, we are selfish creatures at times, but we are also simultaneously uber

00:51:15.620 | social creatures who are eager to reciprocate.

00:51:20.280 | And in fact, we're congenitally prepared to be reciprocators to the point where we will

00:51:26.400 | reciprocate on the basis of intentions above and beyond what actually happens.

00:51:32.080 | - How close, so, I mean, your work is on the fundamental role of the fear of mortality

00:51:39.960 | in ourselves.

00:51:42.080 | How fundamental is this reciprocation, this human connection to other humans?

00:51:46.840 | - Oh, I think it's really innate.

00:51:48.680 | Yeah, I think it's because, yeah, bats reciprocate not by intention, but this, I'm going here

00:51:55.960 | from Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene."

00:52:00.960 | I love the early Dawkins, I'm less enamored with-

00:52:04.560 | - The early Beatles.

00:52:05.880 | - Yeah, no, no, no.

00:52:07.200 | And again, I say this with great respect, but Dawkins just points out that reciprocation

00:52:15.920 | is just fundamental, cooperation is fundamental.

00:52:21.240 | You know, it's a one-sided view of evolutionary takes on things when we see it solely in terms

00:52:29.800 | of individual competition.

00:52:32.840 | - It's almost, from a game theoretic perspective too, it's just easier to see the world that

00:52:36.920 | way.

00:52:37.920 | It's easier to, I don't know, I mean, you see this in physics, there's a whole field

00:52:43.480 | of folks like complexity that kind of embrace the fact that it's all an intricately connected

00:52:49.840 | mess and it's just very difficult to do anything with that kind of science.

00:52:55.080 | But it seems to be much closer to actually representing what the world is like.

00:52:59.040 | - So like you put it earlier, Lex, it's messy.

00:53:02.680 | - So left and right, you mentioned, you're thinking of maybe actually putting it down

00:53:06.760 | on paper or something?

00:53:07.760 | - Yeah, I would like to, because what I would like to point out, again, in admiration of

00:53:13.440 | all of the people that I will then try and have the gall to criticize is, look, these

00:53:18.760 | are all geniuses.

00:53:20.760 | Locke, genius.

00:53:23.280 | Adam Smith, genius, when he uses the notion that we're bartering creatures.

00:53:29.760 | So he uses that reciprocation idea as the basis of his way of thinking about things.

00:53:35.480 | - But that's not at the core.

00:53:37.000 | The bartering's not at the core of human nature.

00:53:39.080 | - It's not at, well, he says it is.

00:53:41.200 | He says we're fundamentally bartering creatures.

00:53:43.520 | - Well, that doesn't even make sense then, because then how can we then be autonomous

00:53:49.360 | individuals?

00:53:50.360 | - Well, because we're gonna barter with an eye on--

00:53:53.520 | - For self.

00:53:54.520 | - For ourselves.

00:53:55.520 | - Self-interest.

00:53:56.520 | - Yeah, but all right, so, but back to Adam Smith for a second, Lex.

00:53:59.880 | It's like Adam Smith, he's got the invisible hand, and my conservative friends, I'm like,

00:54:05.520 | you need to read his books, because he is a big fan of the free market, and this is

00:54:12.400 | my other gripe with folks who support just unbridled markets.

00:54:20.720 | Adam Smith understood that there was a role for government for two reasons.

00:54:26.400 | One is that, just like Locke, people are not gonna behave with integrity, and he understood

00:54:33.040 | that one role of government is to maintain a proverbial even playing field.

00:54:41.600 | And then the other thing Smith said was that there's some things that can't be done well

00:54:45.760 | for a profit, and I believe he talked about education and public health and infrastructure

00:54:53.440 | as things that are best done by governments, because you can make a profit, but that doesn't

00:55:02.760 | mean that the institutions themselves will be maximally beneficial.

00:55:06.920 | Yeah, so I would, I'm just eager to engage people by saying, let's start with our most

00:55:16.800 | contemporary understanding of human nature, which is that we are both selfish and tend

00:55:27.280 | to cooperate, and we also can be heroically helpful to folks in our own tribe.

00:55:40.680 | And of course, how you define one's tribe becomes critically important.

00:55:47.880 | But what some people say is, look, what would then be, what kind of political institutions

00:55:55.760 | and what kind of economic organization can we think about to kind of hit that sweet spot?

00:56:04.040 | And that would be, in my opinion, how do we maximize individual autonomy in a way that

00:56:12.120 | fosters creativity and innovation and the self-regard that comes from creative expression,

00:56:21.200 | while engaging our more cooperative and reciprocal tendencies in order to come up with a system

00:56:31.720 | that is potentially stable over time?

00:56:35.320 | Because the other thing about all capital-based systems-

00:56:38.480 | The stability, it's fundamentally unstable.

00:56:41.160 | Yeah, because it's based on infinite growth, and it's a positive feedback loop.

00:56:46.520 | To be silly, infinite growth is only good for malignant cancer cells and compound interest.

00:56:53.080 | Otherwise, we want to seek a steady state.

00:56:59.920 | So when Steven Pinker writes, for example, again, great scholar, but I'm going to disagree

00:57:06.040 | when he says the world has never been better, and all we need to do is keep making stuff

00:57:13.600 | and buying stuff.

00:57:14.600 | So your sense is the world, sort of in disagreement with Steven Pinker, that the world is facing

00:57:24.800 | a potential catastrophic collapse in multiple directions?

00:57:28.880 | Yes.

00:57:29.880 | And the fact that there are certain, like the rate of violence in aggregate is decreasing,

00:57:34.680 | the death, the quality of life, all those kinds of measures that you can plot across

00:57:41.000 | centuries that it's improving, that doesn't capture the fact that our world might be-

00:57:45.920 | We might destroy ourselves in very painful ways in the next century.

00:57:52.200 | So I'm with Jared Diamond in the book "Collapse," where he points out, studying the collapse

00:57:59.620 | of major civilizations, that it often happens right after things appear to never have been

00:58:05.880 | better.

00:58:07.840 | And in that regard, I mean, there are more known voices that have taken issue with Dr.

00:58:15.720 | Pinker.

00:58:16.720 | I'm thinking of John Gray, who's a British philosopher, and here in the States, I don't

00:58:23.400 | know where he is these days, but Robert J. Lifton, the psycho historian.

00:58:27.040 | Yeah, they're both of my view, which I hope is, by the way, wrong.

00:58:33.840 | Me too.

00:58:35.400 | No, but between ongoing ethnic tensions, environmental degradation, economic instability, and the

00:58:47.520 | fact that the world has become a Petri dish of psychopathology.

00:58:53.120 | What really worries me is the quiet economic pain that people are going through, the businesses

00:58:59.460 | that are closed, dreams that are broken because you can no longer do the thing that you've

00:59:03.840 | wanted to do, and how, I mentioned to you off camera that I've been reading "The Rise

00:59:10.600 | and Fall of the Third Reich," and I mean, the amount of anger and hatred, and on the

00:59:20.440 | flip side of that, sort of a nationalist pride that can arise from deep economic pain.

00:59:26.880 | What happens with that economic pain is you become bitter.

00:59:30.380 | You start to find the other, whether it's other European nations that mistreated you,

00:59:36.400 | whether it's other groups that mistreated you, it always ends up being the Jews that

00:59:41.800 | somehow are at fault here.

00:59:45.200 | That's what worries me, is where this quiet anger and pain goes in 2021, 2022, 2030.

00:59:53.920 | If you look, sorry to see the parallels.

00:59:57.960 | "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," but what happens 10, 15 years from now from what's,

01:00:04.660 | because of the COVID pandemic that's happening now?

01:00:08.260 | And Lex, you make, I think, a really profoundly important point.

01:00:12.860 | Back to our work for a bit, or Ernest Becker, rather, his point is that the way that we

01:00:19.420 | manage existential terror is to embrace culturally constructed belief systems that give us a

01:00:28.740 | sense that life has meaning and we have value.

01:00:32.640 | And in the form of self-esteem, which we get from perceiving that we meet or exceed the

01:00:38.720 | expectations associated with the role that we play in society, well, here we are right

01:00:45.360 | now in a world where, first of all, if you have nothing, you are nothing.

01:00:50.800 | And secondly, as you were saying before we got started today, a lot of jobs are gone

01:00:58.740 | and they're not coming back.

01:01:00.840 | And that's where the self-esteem-

01:01:02.320 | That's where the self-esteem and identity come in.

01:01:04.640 | With people, it's not only that you don't have anything to eat, you don't even have

01:01:09.160 | a self anymore to speak of.

01:01:12.200 | Because we typically define ourselves, as Marx put it, you are what you do.

01:01:17.920 | And now who are you when your way of life as well as your way of earning a living is

01:01:25.140 | no longer available?

01:01:26.480 | Yeah, and it feels like that yearning for self-esteem, though we could talk a little

01:01:31.040 | bit more because you, about defining self-esteem is quite interesting.

01:01:37.280 | The more I've read, so to warm up the core and just in general, your thinking, it made

01:01:43.240 | me realize I haven't thought enough about the idea of self-esteem.

01:01:46.000 | But the thing I want to say is it feels like when you lose your job, then it's easy to

01:01:54.160 | find, it's tempting to find that self-esteem in a tribe that's not somehow often positive.

01:02:04.520 | That's exactly-

01:02:05.760 | A tribe that defines itself on the hatred of somebody else.

01:02:09.040 | So that's brilliant.

01:02:10.040 | And this is what John Gray, the philosopher in the 1990s, he predicted what's happening

01:02:16.480 | today.

01:02:17.480 | He wrote a book about globalism.

01:02:20.520 | And actually, Hannah Arendt in the 1950s said the same thing in her book about totalitarianism.

01:02:27.880 | And she said that economics has reached the point where most money is made not by actually

01:02:37.640 | making stuff.

01:02:39.840 | You use money to make money.

01:02:42.880 | And therefore, what happens is money chases money across national boundaries.

01:02:51.760 | Ultimately, governments become subordinate to the corporate entities whose sole function

01:03:00.240 | is to generate money.

01:03:03.480 | And what John Gray said is that that will inevitably produce economic upheaval in local

01:03:11.320 | areas, which will not be attributed to the economic order.

01:03:19.460 | It will be misattributed to whoever the scapegoat du jour is, and the anger and the distress

01:03:30.160 | associated with that uncertainty will be picked up on by ideological demagogues who will transform

01:03:39.240 | that into rage.

01:03:41.220 | So both Hannah Arendt as well as John Gray, they just said, "Watch out.

01:03:48.360 | We're going to have right-wingish populist movements where demagogues who are the alchemists

01:03:57.160 | of hate, what makes them brilliant is they don't – the hate's already there, but

01:04:05.000 | they take the fears and they expertly redirect them to who it is that I need to hate and

01:04:13.280 | kill in order to feel good about myself."

01:04:16.680 | So back to your point, Lex, that's right.

01:04:19.400 | So the self-regard that used to come from having a job and doing it well, and as a result

01:04:27.680 | of that, having adequate resources to provide a decent life for your family, well, those

01:04:34.440 | opportunities are gone, and yeah, what's left?

01:04:40.000 | So Max Weber, German sociologist at the beginning of the 20th century, he said in times of historical

01:04:47.800 | upheaval, "We are apt to embrace."

01:04:50.880 | He was the one who coined the term charismatic leader, seemingly larger-than-life individuals

01:04:58.080 | who often believe or their followers believe are divinely ordained to rid the world of

01:05:03.920 | evil.

01:05:04.920 | All right.

01:05:05.920 | Now, Ernest Becker, he used Weber's ideas in order to account for the rise of Hitler.

01:05:14.480 | Hitler was elected, and he was elected when Germans were in an extraordinary state of

01:05:20.800 | existential distress, and he said, "I'm going to make Germany great again."

01:05:27.160 | All right.

01:05:28.160 | Now, what Becker adds to the equation is his claim that what underlies our affection for

01:05:36.440 | charismatic populist leaders, good and bad, is death anxiety.

01:05:42.440 | All right.

01:05:44.000 | Now here's where we come in.

01:05:45.520 | We're egghead experimental researchers.

01:05:49.240 | You know, Becker wrote this book, The Denial of Death, and he couldn't get a job.

01:05:54.440 | People just dismiss these ideas as fanciful speculation for which there's no evidence.

01:06:02.480 | You've done some good experimental work.

01:06:04.480 | Yeah, and here's where I can be more cavalier and where what I would urge people, like what

01:06:10.520 | you said, Lex, is ignore my histrionic and polemic language if possible, and step back,

01:06:19.380 | if you can, myself included, and let's just consider the research findings, because in

01:06:28.520 | September 11th, 2001, people that are old enough to remember that horrible day, two

01:06:36.480 | days before George W. Bush had the lowest approval rating in the history of presidential

01:06:43.440 | polling, three weeks later, after he said, "We will rid the world of the evildoers,"

01:06:50.400 | and then a week or two after that, he said in a cover story on Time magazine that he

01:06:55.480 | believed that God had chosen him to lead the world during this, to lead the country, rather,

01:07:01.280 | during this perilous time, he had the highest approval rating.

01:07:05.600 | And so we're like, "Well, what happened?"

01:07:08.420 | You know, what happened to Americans that their approval of President Bush got so high

01:07:15.280 | so fast?

01:07:16.280 | Well, our view, following Becker, is that 2001 was like a giant death reminder.

01:07:24.520 | The people dying plus the symbols of American greatness, World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

01:07:32.420 | So we did a bunch of experiments, and most of our experiments are disarmingly simple.

01:07:36.760 | We have one group of people, and we just remind them that they're going to die.

01:07:41.280 | We say, "Hey, write your thoughts and feelings about dying."

01:07:44.680 | Or in other cases, we stop them outside, either in front of a funeral home or 100 meters to

01:07:50.720 | either side, our thought being that if we stop you in front of a funeral home, then

01:07:55.680 | death is on your mind, even if you don't know it.

01:07:58.760 | And then there's other studies that are even more subtle, where we bring people into the

01:08:02.240 | lab and they read stuff on a computer, and while they're doing that, we flash the word

01:08:08.920 | "death" for 28 milliseconds.

01:08:11.920 | It's so fast, you don't see anything.

01:08:14.640 | And then we just measure people's reactions or behavior thereafter.

01:08:20.180 | So what we found in 2003, leading up to the election of 2004, was that Americans did not

01:08:28.720 | care for President Bush or his policies in Iraq in control conditions.

01:08:36.200 | But if we reminded them of their mortality first, they liked Bush a lot more.

01:08:42.080 | So in every study that we did, Americans like John Kerry, who was running against Bush,

01:08:48.360 | they like Kerry more than Bush.

01:08:51.640 | Policy-wise, in a control...

01:08:52.920 | In a control condition.

01:08:55.520 | But if they were reminded of death first, then they like Bush a lot more.

01:09:02.000 | So by the way, just a small pause, you said there are disarmingly simple experiments.

01:09:06.200 | I think that's... and people should read Warm at the Core for some other description.

01:09:11.000 | You have a lot of different experiments of this nature.

01:09:13.920 | I think it's a brilliant experiment, connected to the Stoics, perhaps, of how your worldview

01:09:22.840 | on anything, on how delicious that water tastes, after you're reminded of your own mortality.

01:09:28.840 | It's such a fascinating experiment that you could probably keep doing millions of them

01:09:33.920 | to draw insight about the way we see the world.

01:09:39.000 | No, that's right, Lex.

01:09:40.000 | And I appreciate the compliment, not because we did anything, but because what these studies,

01:09:47.920 | many of which are now done by other people around the world in labs that we're not connected

01:09:54.360 | with, what I'm most proud about our work, I am proud of the experiments that we've done,

01:09:59.480 | but it's not science until somebody else can replicate your findings, and independent researchers

01:10:05.400 | are interested in pursuing them.

01:10:08.000 | It's such a fascinating idea.

01:10:09.880 | I don't...

01:10:10.880 | I have to think about, a lot about the experiments you've done, and that you've inspired, about

01:10:16.840 | the fact that death changes the way you see a bunch of different things.

01:10:21.840 | I think the Stoics talked about, I mean, in general, just memento mori, like just thinking

01:10:27.940 | about death and meditating on death is a really positive, not a positive, it's an enlightening

01:10:36.800 | way to live life.

01:10:40.560 | So what do you think about that at the individual level?

01:10:45.280 | What is the role about bringing that terror of death, fear of death to the surface, and

01:10:51.800 | being cognizant of it?

01:10:53.000 | For us, that's the ballgame.

01:10:57.200 | So what we write in our book, and here we're just paying homage to the philosophers and

01:11:06.540 | theologians that come before us, is to point out that literally since antiquity, there

01:11:16.840 | has been a consensus that to lead a full life requires...

01:11:25.240 | Albert Camus said, "Come to terms with death, thereafter anything is possible."

01:11:32.080 | So you've got the Stoics, and you've got the Epicureans, and then you've got the Tibetan

01:11:39.320 | Book of the Dead, and then you've got the medieval monks that worked with a skull on

01:11:46.600 | their desk.

01:11:49.560 | The whole idea, I should back up a bit, because and just remind folks that our studies, when

01:11:56.840 | we remind people that they're going to die, and we find that, yeah, they drink more water

01:12:03.080 | if a famous person is advertising it.

01:12:09.600 | They eat more cookies.

01:12:11.400 | They want more fancy clothes.

01:12:14.380 | They sit closer to people that look like them.

01:12:17.600 | It changes who they vote for.

01:12:19.320 | But all of those things, those are very subtle death reminders.

01:12:23.300 | You don't even know that death is on your mind.

01:12:26.200 | And so our point is that, and this is kind of counterintuitive, and that is that the

01:12:33.720 | most problematic and unsavory human reactions to death anxiety are malignant manifestations

01:12:41.720 | of repressed death anxiety.

01:12:44.560 | We try and bury it under the psychological bushes, and then it comes back to bear bitter

01:12:49.200 | fruit.

01:12:50.320 | But what the theologians and the philosophers of the world are saying is it behooves each

01:12:58.560 | of us to spend considerable time.

01:13:02.620 | You don't have to be a goth death rocker, you know, wallowing in death imagery to spend

01:13:11.100 | enough time entertaining the reality of the human condition, which is that you too will

01:13:18.280 | pass, to get to the point where there is, to lapse into a cliche, the capacity for personal

01:13:31.120 | transformation and growth.

01:13:36.240 | Let's go personal for a second.

01:13:39.160 | Are you yourself afraid of death?

01:13:42.280 | Yeah.

01:13:43.280 | I mean, and how much do you meditate on that thought?

01:13:48.960 | Maybe your own study of it is a kind of escape from your own mortality.

01:13:53.720 | It is absolutely, Lex.

01:13:55.000 | So you've got it.

01:13:57.480 | Like if you figure out death, somehow you won't die.

01:13:59.800 | So no, no.

01:14:01.180 | So my colleagues and good friends, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pazinski, we met in graduate school

01:14:07.040 | in the 1970s.

01:14:08.520 | We've been doing this work for 40 years and we cheerfully admit, even though it doesn't

01:14:15.960 | reflect well on us as humans, that I should just speak for myself, but I feel like there's

01:14:23.000 | a real sense in which doing these studies and writing books and lecturing has been my

01:14:31.480 | way of avoiding directly confronting my anxieties by turning it into an intellectual exercise.

01:14:41.320 | And every once in a while, therefore, when I think that I'm making some progress as a

01:14:47.240 | human, I have to remind myself that that is probably not the case and that I have at times,

01:14:57.880 | like all humans, been more preoccupied with the implications of these ideas for my self-esteem.

01:15:03.400 | It's like, "Oh, we're going to write a book and maybe we'll get to go on TV or something."

01:15:11.000 | Well, no, that's not the same as to actually think about it in a way that you feel it rather

01:15:21.240 | than just think it.

01:15:22.920 | Yeah, like you did when you were eight.

01:15:24.960 | That's exactly right.

01:15:27.560 | So when I first read The Denial of Death, I was so literally flabbergasted by it that

01:15:34.760 | I took a leave of absence for a year and just did what would be considered menial jobs.

01:15:41.840 | I did construction work, I worked in a restaurant, and I was just like, "Wait a minute.

01:15:51.400 | If I understand what this guy is saying, then I'm just a culturally constructed meat puppet

01:16:00.760 | doing things for reasons that I know not in order to assuage death anxiety."

01:16:07.080 | And I was like, "That's not acceptable."

01:16:10.880 | Maybe another interesting person to talk about is Ernest Becker himself.

01:16:16.680 | So how did he face his death?

01:16:21.280 | Is there something interesting, personal?

01:16:25.040 | I think so.

01:16:26.040 | So interesting to me is Becker, also from a Jewish family, claimed to be atheistic,

01:16:40.240 | did not identify ultimately as Jewish.

01:16:44.000 | I believe he converted to Christianity, but was himself a religious person, and he said

01:16:51.400 | he became religious when his first child was born.

01:16:55.880 | Now religious, what does that mean?

01:16:58.680 | Does he have a faith?

01:17:01.800 | Let's talk more, most importantly, is the afterlife.

01:17:05.080 | He was agnostic on that.

01:17:09.720 | But he did, now the denial of death is, there's a chapter devoted to Kierkegaard, and he talks

01:17:21.400 | about for Kierkegaard, if you wanna become a mature individual, if you wanna learn something,

01:17:30.240 | you go to the university.

01:17:32.540 | If you wanna become a more mature individual, according to Kierkegaard, you gotta go to

01:17:38.240 | the school of anxiety.

01:17:41.520 | What Kierkegaard said is that we have to let this vague dis-ease, put a hyphen between

01:17:47.360 | dis and ease, about death.

01:17:51.360 | Kierkegaard's point is you have to really think about that.

01:17:57.320 | You have to think about it and feel it.

01:17:59.360 | You gotta let it seep into your mind, at which point, according to Kierkegaard, basically

01:18:11.640 | you realize that your present identity is fundamentally a cultural construction.

01:18:18.640 | You didn't choose the time and place of your birth.

01:18:20.920 | You didn't choose your name.

01:18:23.600 | You didn't choose necessarily even the social role that you occupy.

01:18:28.720 | You might've chosen from what's available in your culture, but not from the full palette

01:18:34.040 | of human opportunities.

01:18:36.880 | What Kierkegaard said is that we need to realize that we've been living a lie of sorts.

01:18:46.480 | Becker calls it a necessary lie.

01:18:50.600 | We have to momentarily dispose of that.

01:18:55.200 | Now Kierkegaard says, "Well, here I am.

01:18:57.800 | I have shrugged off all of the cultural accoutrements that I have used to define myself.

01:19:08.400 | Now what am I or who am I?"

01:19:11.320 | This is like the ancient Greek tragedy where the worst thing was to be no one or no thing.

01:19:19.440 | At this point, Kierkegaard said, you're really dangling on the precipice of oblivion.

01:19:26.040 | Some people tumble into that abyss and never come out.

01:19:31.620 | On the other hand, Kierkegaard said that what you can now do metaphorically and literally

01:19:37.060 | is to rebuild yourself from the ground up.

01:19:41.320 | In the New Testament, there's something you have to die in order to be reborn.

01:19:46.840 | Kierkegaard's view though is that there's only one way to do that.

01:19:50.040 | This is his proverbial leap into faith.

01:19:54.200 | In Kierkegaard's case, it was faith in Christianity, that you can't have unbridled faith in cultural

01:20:02.960 | constructions.

01:20:04.580 | The only thing that you can have unequivocal faith in is some kind of transcendent power.

01:20:13.480 | But of course, this raises the question of, well, is that just another death-denying belief

01:20:20.960 | system?

01:20:22.440 | At the end of the denial of death, Becker admits that there's no way to tell while still

01:20:30.480 | advocating for what is ultimately a religious stance.

01:20:36.680 | One of the things that I don't understand, and Becker has been the most singularly potent

01:20:42.440 | influence in my academic and personal life, but a year or two ago, I started reading Martin

01:20:50.920 | Heidegger.

01:20:51.920 | I'm reading Being and Time, and what I now wonder is why Becker, who refers to Heidegger

01:21:02.960 | from time to time in his work, why he didn't take Heidegger more seriously, because Heidegger

01:21:09.840 | is like a secular Kierkegaard.

01:21:12.320 | He has the same thing, which is death anxiety.

01:21:15.600 | Oh, and I should have pointed out that what Kierkegaard says is that death anxiety, most

01:21:20.680 | people don't go to the school of anxiety.

01:21:25.000 | They flee from death anxiety by embracing their cultural beliefs.

01:21:32.000 | Kierkegaard says they then tranquilize themselves with the trivial.

01:21:37.040 | And I love that phrase.

01:21:38.040 | It's a beautiful phrase, because at the end of the denial of death, Becker's like, "Oh,

01:21:42.280 | wait, look, the average American is either drinking or shopping or watching television,

01:21:47.320 | and they're all the same thing."

01:21:50.320 | Heidegger says the same thing.

01:21:51.640 | He says, "Look," and he acknowledges Kierkegaard.

01:21:54.680 | He says, "What makes us feel unsettled," and evidently that's an English translation of

01:22:01.680 | angst, that it's, "We don't feel at home in the world."

01:22:08.200 | Heidegger says that's death anxiety.

01:22:11.280 | And one direction is the Kierkegaard one.

01:22:15.280 | Heidegger calls it a flight from death.

01:22:17.880 | You just unselfreflexively cling to your cultural constructions.

01:22:23.960 | And Heidegger borrows the term tranquilized, but he points out that he doesn't care for

01:22:31.160 | that term because tranquilized sounds like you're subdued, when in fact what most culturally

01:22:38.760 | constructed meat puppets do is to be frenetically engaged with their surroundings to ensure

01:22:44.640 | that they never sit still long enough to actually think about anything consequential.

01:22:51.360 | Heidegger says there's another way, though.

01:22:53.480 | He's like, "Yo, what you can do is to come to terms with that death anxiety in the following

01:23:01.480 | way.

01:23:02.480 | Way number one is to realize that not only are you going to die, but your death can happen

01:23:13.000 | at any given moment."

01:23:14.760 | So for Heidegger, if you say, "I know I'm going to die in some vaguely unspecified future

01:23:20.280 | moment," that's still death denial because you're saying, "Yeah, not me, not now."

01:23:27.360 | Heidegger's point is you need to get to the point where you need to realize that, you

01:23:34.360 | know, I need to realize that I can walk outside and get smoked by a comet, or I can stop for

01:23:42.880 | gas on the way home and catch the virus and be dead in two days, or any number of potentially

01:23:49.560 | unanticipated and uncontrollable fatal outcomes.

01:23:52.800 | - That's brilliant, by the way, sorry, to bring it into the now.

01:23:58.280 | - Yeah, it is brilliant.

01:23:59.840 | I agree, Lex, and this is why I'm wondering why didn't Becker notice this, because that's

01:24:05.120 | the being and time thing, is it's gotta be now.

01:24:09.600 | And then he says, "So okay, so now I've dealt somewhat with the death part," and now he

01:24:18.120 | says, "Now you've gotta deal with what he calls existential guilt."

01:24:24.040 | And he says, "Well, all right, you have to realize that like it or not, you have to make

01:24:33.000 | choices."

01:24:34.000 | You know, this is Jean-Paul Sartre, "We are condemned by virtue of consciousness to choosing,"

01:24:40.760 | but Heidegger's a little bit more precise.

01:24:42.800 | He's like, "Look, as I was saying earlier, you're in reality, you're an insignificant

01:24:51.560 | speck of respiring carbon-based dust born into a time and place not of your choosing

01:24:58.240 | when you're here for a microscopic amount of time after which you are not."

01:25:06.160 | And for Heidegger, you have to realize that, like I said, I didn't choose to be born a

01:25:15.720 | male or Jewish or in America the offspring of working-class people.

01:25:24.160 | And Heidegger, what he says is, "Yeah, but you still have to make choices and accept

01:25:31.360 | responsibility for those choices."

01:25:36.000 | Even though you didn't choose any of the parameters that ultimately limit what's available to

01:25:41.120 | you.

01:25:42.600 | And moreover, you're gonna not always make good choices.

01:25:48.720 | So now you're guilty for your choices.

01:25:54.840 | And then he uses the poet Rilke, he has a phrase, Becker uses it in "The Denial of

01:26:03.080 | Death," "The guilt of unlived life."

01:26:06.720 | I just love that.

01:26:08.680 | You have to accept that you have already diminished and in many ways amputated your own possibilities

01:26:20.920 | by virtue of choices that you've made or just as often have declined to make because you

01:26:28.400 | are reluctant to accept responsibility for the opportunities that you are now able to

01:26:38.000 | create by virtue of seeing the possibilities that lay before you.

01:26:44.600 | So anyway, Heidegger then says, "Look, okay, so I'm a professor and I live in America in

01:26:53.560 | the 21st century.

01:26:55.080 | Well, if I was in the third century living in a yurt in Mongolia, I'm not gonna have

01:27:01.880 | an opportunity to be a professor."

01:27:05.880 | But what he submits is that there is some aspects of whatever I am that are independent

01:27:15.520 | of my cultural and historical circumstances.

01:27:19.040 | In other words, there is a me of sorts.

01:27:21.520 | Heidegger would take vigorous issue and so would Heidegger scholars, because I'm not

01:27:25.080 | claiming to understand him.

01:27:26.680 | This is my classic comic book rendering.

01:27:29.460 | But Heidegger's point is that you get to the point where you're able to say, "Okay, I am

01:27:37.740 | a contingent historical and cultural artifact, but so what?

01:27:45.520 | If I was transported a thousand years in the past in Asia, I'd be in the same situation.

01:27:54.120 | I would still be conditioned by time and place.

01:27:57.680 | I would still have choices that I could make within the confines of what opportunities

01:28:04.440 | are afforded to me."

01:28:07.320 | And then Heidegger says, "If I can get that far," and this is his language, he says that

01:28:14.520 | there is a transformation.

01:28:17.040 | And he literally, he calls it a turning.

01:28:19.320 | You're turning away from a flight from death, and you are allowed, therefore you see a horizon,

01:28:28.160 | is his word, of opportunity that makes you in a state of anticipatory resoluteness with

01:28:38.800 | solicitous regard for others that makes your life seem like an adventure perfused with

01:28:48.540 | unshakable joy.

01:28:50.720 | Let me unpack those things.

01:28:51.720 | That's beautiful.

01:28:52.720 | It is beautiful.

01:28:53.720 | I love, Lex, that you're resonating to the time thing.

01:28:56.120 | So he's like, "Okay, we already talked about now anticipatory is already hopeful because

01:29:02.920 | it's looking forward."

01:29:05.400 | To be resolute, it means to be steadfast and to just have confidence in what you're

01:29:15.200 | doing moving forward.

01:29:17.400 | All right.

01:29:18.400 | Solicitous, I had to look up all these words, by the way.

01:29:21.800 | It just means that you are concerned about your fellow human beings.

01:29:28.240 | But I love the idea, even if it seems allegorical, I don't mind that at all.

01:29:35.340 | This idea, you said love earlier, and I think that when Heidegger is talking about being

01:29:41.200 | solicitous, that's as close as he can get.

01:29:45.680 | There's an Italian-

01:29:46.680 | Yes, Sargentrave.

01:29:47.680 | So what was that line again with the solicitous of the-

01:29:50.840 | Okay, so-

01:29:51.840 | I mean, the whole thing of turning away from death and the-

01:29:53.840 | Yeah, he-

01:29:54.840 | I mean, all the words you said are just beautiful.

01:29:56.200 | I love those words, yeah.

01:29:58.200 | "A solitary resoluteness that is accompanied with solicitous regard to our fellow humans,

01:30:05.080 | which makes life appear to us to be an ongoing adventure that is permeated by unshakable

01:30:15.040 | joy."

01:30:16.040 | Now, again, Heidegger's not Mary Poppins.

01:30:19.120 | This-

01:30:20.120 | I just got a tattoo.

01:30:21.120 | This is great.

01:30:22.120 | I just love the-

01:30:23.760 | Wait, is that an exact quote?

01:30:25.160 | No, I'm piecing together.

01:30:27.240 | These are his exact words that, and I spent the last two years reading almost everything

01:30:33.440 | that I can find because I want to, I'm sick of death.

01:30:38.320 | You said it, so I want to second what you say, Lex.

01:30:41.600 | It's not about death.

01:30:43.520 | It's the Sherwood Anderson guy.

01:30:46.480 | He's a novelist that I like about, he wrote a book called "Winesburg, Ohio," and now I'm

01:30:53.520 | going to forget what he said on his tombstone.

01:30:56.960 | But it was something to the effect, oh, he said, "Life, not death, is the great adventure."

01:31:04.160 | The point being is that to consider that we must die and the existential implications

01:31:12.640 | of that, really the goal, the way I see it, is getting from hate to love.

01:31:22.240 | I feel like Heidegger has a way of thinking about things that moves us more in that direction.

01:31:32.840 | So that's kind of my current preoccupation is to take what I just said to you and to

01:31:42.000 | talk about it with my colleagues and other academic psychologists because the way we

01:31:47.720 | started with Ernest Becker, remember I said earlier, I wasn't trained in any of these

01:31:53.880 | things.

01:31:54.880 | I'm an egghead researcher that was doing experiments about biofeedback.

01:32:02.080 | Then we read these Becker books, and I thought they were so interesting that for the first

01:32:07.800 | few years, we didn't have any studies.

01:32:10.680 | I just would travel around and I'd be like, "Here's what this Becker guy says.

01:32:14.200 | I think this is cool."

01:32:16.320 | Well, my present view is I'm like, "Here's what this Heidegger guy says.

01:32:22.120 | I think these ideas are consistent with what Becker is saying because they are anchored

01:32:29.960 | in death anxiety."

01:32:32.680 | But I like that direction as an alternative to the Kierkegaardian insistence that the

01:32:42.080 | only psychologically tenable way to extricate ourselves from maladaptive reactions to death

01:32:51.520 | anxiety is through faith in the traditional sense.

01:32:55.960 | Yeah.

01:32:56.960 | I always kind of saw Kierkegaard unfairly, like you said, in a comic book sense of the

01:33:03.920 | word faith as a non-traditional sense.

01:33:06.120 | I kind of like the idea of leap of faith.

01:33:07.760 | Oh, I love that idea.

01:33:09.440 | And so what I've been babbling about with Kierkegaard or Heidegger, I'm like, "Yeah,

01:33:15.720 | Kierkegaard is a leap of faith in God.

01:33:19.600 | Heidegger's a leap of faith in life."

01:33:22.960 | And I just, I like it.

01:33:25.400 | I found the leap of faith really interesting in the technological space.

01:33:30.400 | So I've talked to on this thing with Elon Musk, but I think he's also just in general

01:33:37.160 | for our culture a really important figure.

01:33:39.200 | Oh, absolutely.

01:33:40.320 | That takes, I mean, he's sometimes a little bit insane on social media and just in life.

01:33:48.360 | When I met him, it was kind of interesting that of course there's, I mean, he's a

01:33:54.360 | legit engineer, so he's fun to talk to about the technical things.

01:33:58.240 | But he also just the way the humor and the way he sees life, it just like refuses to

01:34:06.160 | be conventional.

01:34:07.160 | Yeah.

01:34:08.160 | So it's a constant leap into the unknown.

01:34:13.240 | And one of the things that he does, and this isn't even like fake, a lot of people say,

01:34:19.840 | because he's a CEO, there's a business owner, so he's trying to make money.

01:34:23.680 | No, I think this is, I looked him in his eyes, I mean, this is real, is a lot of the things

01:34:30.520 | he believes that are going to be accomplished that a lot of others are saying are impossible,

01:34:36.480 | like autonomous vehicles, he truly believes it.

01:34:39.440 | To me, that is the leap of faith of what was going like, we're like, the entirety of our

01:34:44.800 | experience is shrouded in mystery.

01:34:47.200 | We don't know what the hell's going to happen.

01:34:49.600 | You don't know what we're actually capable of as human beings.

01:34:52.400 | He just takes the leap.

01:34:54.200 | He fully believes that we can, you know, we can go to Mars, we can colonize Mars.

01:34:59.120 | I mean, how crazy is it to just believe and dream and actually be taking steps towards

01:35:07.640 | it to colonizing Mars when most people are like, that's the stupidest idea ever?

01:35:12.840 | Yeah, well, I'm in agreement with you on that.

01:35:16.000 | You know, two things, you know, one is it reminds me of Ben Franklin, who in his autobiography,

01:35:21.680 | you know, has a similarly childish in the best sense of the word, unbridled imagination

01:35:30.680 | for what might become, you know, Ben Franklin's like, yeah, I got electricity, that's cool,

01:35:37.440 | but we'll be levitating soon.

01:35:39.480 | And I, we can't even begin to imagine what we are capable of.

01:35:44.960 | And of course, people are like, dude, that's crazy.

01:35:48.800 | And there's a guy with FCS Schiller, some humanistic guy at the beginning of the 20th

01:35:56.000 | century.

01:35:57.240 | He's like, you know, lots of things that people think about may appear to be absurd to the

01:36:08.640 | point of obscene, but the reality is historically, every fantastic innovation has generally been

01:36:19.080 | initiated by someone who was condemned for being a lunatic.

01:36:25.480 | And it's not that anything is possible, but surely things that we don't try will never

01:36:31.960 | manifest as possibilities.

01:36:34.240 | - Yeah, and that's, there's something beautiful to that.

01:36:39.440 | That's the embracing the abyss.

01:36:42.520 | And again, it's like the, it's the embracing the fear of death, the reality of death, and

01:36:49.960 | then turning and to look at all the opportunities before us.

01:36:54.000 | - Oh, yeah, that's right.

01:36:55.080 | - Let me ask you, whenever I bring up Ernest Becker's work, which I do, and yours quite

01:37:00.840 | a bit, I find it surprising how, that it's not a lot more popular in a sense that, no,

01:37:12.560 | I don't mean just your book.

01:37:15.400 | That's well-written, people should read it, should buy it, whatever.

01:37:19.040 | I think it has the same kind of qualities that are useful to think about as like Jordan

01:37:23.960 | Peterson's work and stuff like that.

01:37:26.520 | I just mean like why people are not, don't think of that as a compelling description

01:37:37.240 | of the core of the human condition.

01:37:41.920 | I think what you mentioned about Heidegger's quite connects with me quite well.

01:37:45.880 | So I ask, on this podcast, I often ask people if they're afraid of death.

01:37:51.480 | It's like almost every single, I almost always get criticized for asking world-class people,

01:37:57.720 | scientists and technologists about the fear of death and the meaning of life.

01:38:04.560 | And on the fear of death, they often don't say anything interesting.

01:38:12.920 | What I mean by that is they haven't thought deeply about it.

01:38:17.600 | You kind of brought this up a few times of really letting it sink in.

01:38:21.360 | They kind of say this thing about exactly what you said, which is like, it's something

01:38:26.280 | that happens not today.

01:38:29.000 | I'm aware that it's something that happens.

01:38:32.480 | The thing they usually say is, I'm not afraid of death.

01:38:35.560 | I just want to live a good life kind of thing.

01:38:40.920 | What I'm trying to express is like when I look in their eyes and the kind of the core

01:38:45.000 | of the conversation, it looks like they haven't really become, like they haven't really meditated

01:38:51.120 | on death.

01:38:52.120 | I guess the question is, what do I say to people that there's something to really think

01:38:59.320 | about here?

01:39:02.000 | There's some demons, some realities that need to be faced by more people.

01:39:07.080 | - Well, that's a tough one.

01:39:09.040 | I could tell you what not to do.

01:39:12.160 | So when we are young and annoying, a lot of famous people, mostly psychologists, because

01:39:19.200 | that's who we intersected with, we would lay out these ideas and they would be, well, I

01:39:29.120 | don't think about death like that.

01:39:32.320 | So these ideas must be wrong.

01:39:35.200 | And we would say, well, you don't think about death because you're lucky enough to be comfortably

01:39:41.720 | ensconced in a cultural worldview from which you derive self-esteem.

01:39:46.880 | And that has spared you the existential excruciations that would otherwise arise.

01:39:53.460 | But that's like Freud.

01:39:55.600 | You're repressing, so you either agree with me, in which case I'm right, or you disagree

01:40:00.920 | with me, in which case you're repressing and I'm right.

01:40:04.840 | - So that's the Nietzsche thing.

01:40:08.400 | What I've felt when I've, there've been moments in my life when I really thought about death.

01:40:13.480 | I mean, there's not too many, like really, really thought about it and feel the thing

01:40:18.120 | when you felt at eight, maybe I'm dramatizing or romanticizing it, but I feel like it's,

01:40:26.960 | the conservatives call it popularly, or the movie Matrix call it the red pill moment.

01:40:34.400 | I feel like it's a dangerous thought because I feel like I'm taking a step out of society.

01:40:41.000 | Like there's a nice narrative that we've all constructed.

01:40:43.920 | - You are.

01:40:44.920 | - And I'm taking a step out and it feels, there's this feeling like you're basically

01:40:51.960 | drowning.

01:40:52.960 | I mean, it's not a good feeling.

01:40:56.120 | - It is not.

01:40:57.120 | But this gets back to the Heidegger-Kierkegaard school of anxiety.

01:41:00.200 | You are stepping out and you are momentarily shrugging off, again, the culturally constructed

01:41:08.340 | psychological accoutrements that allow you to stand up in the morning.

01:41:13.880 | And--

01:41:14.880 | - So, I mean, in that sense, it feels like, I mean, how do you have that conversation?

01:41:26.200 | Because I guess I'm dancing around a set of questions, which is like, I guess I'm disappointed

01:41:32.400 | that people are not as willing to step outside.

01:41:42.120 | Even any kind of thought experiment.

01:41:44.760 | Forget denial of death.

01:41:49.420 | There's now a community of people, let's take an easy one that I think is scientifically

01:41:53.760 | ridiculous, which is there's a community of people that believe that the earth is flat.

01:41:59.860 | Or actually, even better, that space is fake.

01:42:06.100 | What I find surprising is that a lot of people I talk to are not willing to, imagine if it

01:42:15.940 | is, imagine the earth is flat.

01:42:18.460 | Think about it.

01:42:19.460 | A lot of people are just like, no, the earth is round.

01:42:23.260 | They're like scientists, too.

01:42:25.540 | They're like, yeah, well, actually, wait, have you actually thought about it?

01:42:30.940 | Imagine, it's a thought experiment.

01:42:34.460 | Basically step outside the little narrative that we are comfortable with.

01:42:38.700 | Now, that one in particular has really strong evidence and scientific validation, so it's

01:42:48.260 | a pretty simple thing to show that it at least is not flat.

01:42:53.420 | But just the willingness to take a step outside of the stories that bring us comfort has been

01:43:00.820 | disappointing that people are not willing to do that.

01:43:04.620 | I think the philosophy that you've constructed and that Ernest Becker's constructed and you've

01:43:09.220 | tested, I think is really compelling in the fact that people aren't often willing to take

01:43:14.860 | that step.

01:43:15.860 | It's disappointing.

01:43:16.860 | Yeah.

01:43:17.860 | Well, yes, but perhaps understandable.

01:43:21.060 | This is an anecdote, of course, but when we were trying to get a publisher for our book,

01:43:28.620 | we had a meeting with a publisher who published some Malcolm Gladwell books.

01:43:40.120 | She said, "I'm very interested in your book, but can you write it without mentioning death

01:43:45.860 | because people don't like death?"

01:43:48.260 | We're like, "No, it's really kind of central."

01:43:53.860 | I think that's part of it.

01:43:55.820 | I think, again, if these ideas have merit, and I actually like the way that you put it,

01:44:03.860 | Lex, it's that to step away is to momentarily expose yourself to all of the anxiety that

01:44:18.060 | our identity and our beliefs typically enable us to manage.

01:44:22.900 | I think it's as simple as that.

01:44:24.700 | Yeah.

01:44:25.700 | I had this experience in college with my best friend who got really high, and he forgot

01:44:37.060 | it was in the winter.

01:44:38.340 | It was really freezing.

01:44:39.340 | It was memorable to me.

01:44:40.620 | I think as an analogist, very useful.

01:44:43.740 | He went to get some pizza.

01:44:45.140 | Of course.

01:44:46.140 | He left me outside and said, "I'll be back in five minutes."

01:44:55.940 | He forgot that he left me outside.

01:44:58.220 | I remember I was in shorts.

01:45:01.300 | It was freezing winter.

01:45:03.140 | I remember standing outside his dorm, and I'm looking from the outside in.

01:45:07.900 | It's light and it's warm.

01:45:10.460 | I'm just standing there frozen, I think for an hour or more.

01:45:16.120 | That's how I think about it.

01:45:18.260 | I don't give a damn about the stupid winter.

01:45:23.740 | I'm drawn to be back to the warm.

01:45:27.020 | That's how I feel about thinking about death.

01:45:29.300 | At a certain point, it's too much.

01:45:33.620 | It's that cold.

01:45:34.820 | I want to be back into the warm.

01:45:36.620 | I want to be back.

01:45:38.140 | Getting back to Heidegger for a moment.

01:45:42.740 | He uses a lot the idea of feeling at home.

01:45:48.500 | Not as in your house, but just feeling like you're comfortably situated.

01:45:53.180 | Maybe we could talk about ... I had a conversation about this with my dad a little bit.

01:45:59.780 | How does religion relate to this?

01:46:03.800 | I see it as the disease and the cure.

01:46:09.600 | In a sense, a few things.

01:46:16.460 | One is that I think a case could be made that humans are innately religious.

01:46:26.760 | Now we're going to get into territory where there's going to be a lot of disputes.

01:46:31.480 | What do you mean by religious?

01:46:35.940 | Religion is an evolutionary adaptation.

01:46:39.420 | Religion is like a belief in something outside of yourself kind of thing.

01:46:44.380 | Not necessarily.

01:46:45.380 | Here we got to be a little bit more careful.

01:46:48.320 | Again, I'm not a scholar.

01:46:53.180 | How about I'm a well-intentioned dilettante in this regard?

01:47:00.240 | What I have read is that religion evolved very early on, long before our ancestors were

01:47:11.260 | conscious and the issue of death arose.

01:47:18.540 | The word religion evidently is from a Latin word, regatear.

01:47:24.060 | We can look it up.

01:47:25.780 | It means to bind.

01:47:28.300 | Emile Durkheim, the dead French sociologist, he said, "Originally, religion is a," Darsa

01:47:36.580 | Lessing, who's a dead novelist, she calls it the substance of we feeling.

01:47:43.020 | That it's literally that it arose because we're uber social creatures who from time

01:47:51.500 | to time took comfort in just being in physical proximity with our fellow humans and that

01:48:00.740 | there is this kind of sense of transcendent exuberance, just back to the unshakable joy

01:48:12.260 | that Heidegger alludes to.

01:48:16.580 | The original function of religion was to foster social cohesion and coordination and that

01:48:25.620 | it was only subsequently, some claim, that a burgeoning level of consciousness made it

01:48:33.300 | such that religious belief systems that included the hope of some kind of immortality were

01:48:43.700 | just naturally selected thereafter.

01:48:47.540 | So there are some people, so it's David Sloan Wilson wrote a book called Darwin's Cathedral

01:48:57.180 | and he said religion has nothing to do with death.

01:48:59.900 | It evolved to make groups viable.

01:49:03.860 | He's actually a group selection guy.

01:49:06.820 | What's group selection?

01:49:08.260 | The idea that it's the group that is selected for rather than the individual.

01:49:13.060 | Yeah, so people have vigorous disagreements about that.

01:49:16.300 | But I guess our point would be we see religion as being inextricably connected ultimately

01:49:24.540 | to assuaging concerns about death.

01:49:29.460 | Well I guess another question to ask around this, what does the world look like without

01:49:35.740 | religion?

01:49:36.740 | Will we, if it's inextricably connected to our fears of death, do you think it always

01:49:46.020 | returns in some kind of shape?

01:49:49.380 | Maybe it's not called religion, but whatever, it just keeps returning?

01:49:52.220 | Yeah, who knows?

01:49:53.220 | So that's a great question, Lex.

01:49:54.980 | There's a woman named Karen Armstrong.

01:49:58.420 | She was a nun turned historian and she's, I can't remember the name of the book, but

01:50:07.300 | no matter.

01:50:09.220 | We could look that up, but-

01:50:10.500 | If you want I can look it up, but I can also, I'll just add it and post it.

01:50:14.220 | Yeah, her point, it has God in the title of course, but she's like, "Look, all religions

01:50:23.100 | are generally fairly right-minded in that they advocate the golden rule, and all religions

01:50:32.140 | at their best do seem to foster pro-social behavior towards the in-group, and that confers

01:50:42.380 | both psychological as well as physical benefits.

01:50:46.660 | That's the good news, and the bad news is historically all religions are subject to

01:50:53.900 | being hijacked by a lunatic French who declares that they're the ones in sole possession of

01:51:05.980 | the liturgical practices or whatever they call them, and they're the ones that turn

01:51:14.460 | at its best into your crusades and holocausts."

01:51:21.060 | My view, not that it should matter for much, but I grew up just skeptical of religion because

01:51:33.340 | I'm like, as a kid, I'm like, "Well, if we didn't have these beliefs, we wouldn't be

01:51:39.660 | killing each other because of them."

01:51:43.620 | And I'd be like to my parents, "Well, you're telling me that all people should be judged

01:51:49.220 | on the merits of their character, but don't come home if you don't marry a Jewish woman,"

01:51:56.180 | which is implying that if you're not Jewish, you're an inferior form of life.

01:52:01.180 | That's what tribes always do.

01:52:02.500 | And there's the tribal thing.

01:52:04.060 | And so there's a guy named Amin Malouf, a Lebanese guy who writes in French in the 1990s,

01:52:10.380 | I think, wrote a book called, in the name of identity, "Violence and the Need to Belong."

01:52:20.180 | And that was his point is, unless we can overcome this tribal mentality, this will not end well.

01:52:32.540 | But you said earlier something, Lex, that I think is profound and profoundly important,

01:52:38.500 | and that is you did not recoil in horror when I mentioned Kierkegaard's use of the term

01:52:46.180 | faith.

01:52:47.900 | And so I'm a big fan of faith, and I'm not sure what that implies.

01:52:55.020 | I have...

01:52:56.740 | And by the way, this is just a peripheral comment, but I find less resistance to Becker's

01:53:03.580 | ideas in our work when I'm in Jesuit schools.

01:53:09.580 | It's the Americans, the secular humanists who are most disinclined to accept these ideas.

01:53:18.580 | - It's an important side comment because I think it's mostly because they don't think

01:53:23.260 | philosophically.

01:53:24.260 | I mean, I speak with a lot of scientists, and I think that's my main criticism is you

01:53:31.820 | don't...

01:53:32.820 | I mean, that's the problem with science.

01:53:35.180 | It's so comforting to focus in on the details that you can escape thinking about the mystery

01:53:42.060 | of it all, the big picture things, the philosophical, the fact that you don't actually know shit

01:53:46.660 | at all.

01:53:48.660 | Yeah, so in terms of Jesuit, that's the beauty of the experience of faith and so on is wherever

01:54:00.100 | that journey takes you is you actually explore the biggest questions of our world.

01:54:04.500 | - Yeah.

01:54:05.500 | - Yeah.

01:54:06.500 | - So I don't see religion going away because I don't see humans as capable of surviving

01:54:15.500 | without faith and hope, and everyone from the Pope to Elon Musk will acknowledge that

01:54:25.900 | it is a world that is unfathomably mysterious, and like it or not, in the absence of beliefs...

01:54:35.820 | Here I'm Charles Peirce, the pragmatic philosopher.

01:54:40.500 | He just said, "Beliefs are the basis of action."

01:54:42.900 | If you don't have any beliefs, you're paralyzed with indecision.

01:54:46.620 | Whether we're aware of it or not, whether we like it or not, in order to stand up in

01:54:51.500 | the morning, you have to subscribe to beliefs that can never be unequivocally proven right

01:54:59.780 | or wrong.

01:55:00.780 | Well, then why do you maintain them?

01:55:04.340 | Well, ultimately, it's because of some form of faith.

01:55:09.420 | - But also, faith shouldn't be a dogmatic thing that you should always be leaping.

01:55:16.700 | - Yes.

01:55:17.900 | - I guess the problem with science or with religion is you could sort of all of a sudden

01:55:25.300 | take a step into a place where you're super confident that you know the absolute truth

01:55:30.580 | of things.

01:55:31.580 | - There you go.

01:55:32.580 | And again, back to Socrates, Plato, back in the cave.

01:55:36.900 | At Skidmore, where I work, that's what I have the students read in their first week, and

01:55:42.980 | Plato's like, "Oh, look at all those poor bastards.

01:55:45.820 | They're in the cave, but they don't know it."

01:55:49.020 | And then they are freed from their chains, and they have to be dragged out of the cave,

01:55:54.700 | by the way, which is another interesting point.

01:55:56.720 | They don't run out, but that gets back to why people don't like to be divested of their

01:56:02.820 | comfortable illusions.

01:56:04.080 | But anyway, they get dragged out of the cave into the sunlight, which he claims is a representation

01:56:09.140 | of truth and beauty.

01:56:11.620 | And I say to the students, "Well, what's wrong with that?"

01:56:15.740 | And they're like, "Nothing.

01:56:18.060 | That's like awesome."

01:56:19.620 | And then I'm like, "Yo, dudes, you're out of the cave, but how do you know that you're

01:56:25.740 | not in another cave?

01:56:28.220 | The illumination may be better, but the minute you think you're at the end of the proverbial

01:56:38.820 | intellectual/epistemological trail, then you have already succumbed to either laziness

01:56:49.740 | or dogmatism or both."

01:56:51.380 | That's really well put.

01:56:52.380 | - That's both terrifying and exciting, that there's always a bigger cave.

01:56:59.460 | A little bit of an out there question, but I think some of the interesting qualities

01:57:03.820 | of the human mind is the ideas of intelligence and consciousness.

01:57:10.800 | So what do you make of consciousness?

01:57:13.220 | So do you think death creates consciousness?

01:57:18.420 | Like the fear of death, the terror of death creates consciousness?

01:57:22.380 | - And consciousness in turn magnifies the terror of death.

01:57:29.700 | I do.

01:57:30.700 | - Like what is consciousness to you?

01:57:33.700 | - Oh, don't ask me that.

01:57:34.700 | So now, because if I could answer that, I'd be chugging rum out of a coconut with my Nobel

01:57:40.380 | Prize.

01:57:41.380 | That, it's literally...

01:57:45.100 | Steven Pinker, I do agree with his claim, and I think how the mind works, that it is

01:57:50.180 | the key question for the psychological sciences broadly defined in the 21st century.

01:58:01.660 | - What is consciousness?

01:58:02.660 | - What is consciousness?

01:58:04.260 | And I don't think it's an epiphenomenological afterthought.

01:58:09.660 | So a lot of people, I think Dan Wegner at Harvard, a lot of folks consider it just the

01:58:17.860 | ass end of a process that by the time we are aware of what it is, it's just basically an

01:58:28.960 | integrated rendering of something that's already happened.

01:58:34.460 | Evidently there's a half second delay between when something happens, you know those studies,

01:58:39.780 | and our awareness of it.

01:58:43.660 | - And then that's where ideas of free will will step in, so you can explain away a lot

01:58:47.580 | of stuff.

01:58:48.580 | - And I think those are all important and interesting questions.

01:58:52.820 | I'm of the persuasion, I mean even, not even, but Dawkins in The Selfish Gene is very thoughtful,

01:59:05.900 | actually in a lot of, it's actually more in notes than in the text of the book, but he's

01:59:11.280 | just like, it's hard for me to imagine that consciousness doesn't have some sort of important

01:59:22.420 | and highly adaptive function.

01:59:25.040 | And what Dawkins says is, he thought about it in terms of just that we can do mental

01:59:31.320 | simulations.

01:59:33.320 | That one possibly extraordinary product of consciousness is to, rather than find out

01:59:43.460 | often by adverse consequences through trying something, would be to run mental simulations.

01:59:51.520 | And so one possibility is that consciousness is highly adaptive.

01:59:57.280 | Another possibility is Nicholas Humphrey, a British dude who wrote a book about, I think

02:00:02.800 | it's called Regaining Consciousness, and he hypothesized, I think this is 1980s, maybe

02:00:09.400 | even earlier, that consciousness arose as a way to better predict the behavior of others

02:00:18.560 | in social settings, that by knowing how I feel makes me better able to know how you

02:00:26.680 | may be feeling.

02:00:27.680 | This is like the rudiments of a theory of mind.

02:00:31.320 | And that it really may not have had anything to do with intelligence so much as social

02:00:38.080 | intelligence.

02:00:39.080 | - So in that sense, consciousness is a social construct?

02:00:44.640 | - Yes.

02:00:45.640 | - It's just a useful thing for interacting with other humans.

02:00:48.720 | - Yeah.

02:00:49.720 | - I don't know, but there seems to be something about realizing your own mortality that's

02:00:57.640 | somehow intricately connected to the idea of consciousness.

02:01:00.680 | - Well I think so also.

02:01:01.920 | So this is where, and Nietzsche, he said a solitary creature would not need consciousness.

02:01:10.040 | - Well what do you think?

02:01:13.480 | - Well I don't know what I think about that.

02:01:15.720 | But what I do, and then he goes on to say that consciousness is the most calamitous

02:01:19.360 | stupidity by which we shall someday perish.

02:01:22.920 | And wow, I was like dude.

02:01:26.320 | - Relax.

02:01:29.440 | But so what, if you, say you were on an island alone and you saw a reflection of yourself

02:01:36.040 | in the water, like if you were alone your whole life.

02:01:41.400 | - Great question.

02:01:43.220 | - Nietzsche's view would be that your thoughts of yourself would never come to mind.

02:01:50.360 | I don't know how I feel about that though.

02:01:52.720 | - In a sense, this sounds weird, but in a sense I feel like my mental conversation has

02:02:00.360 | always been with death.

02:02:02.060 | It's almost like another notion, like there's these visualizations of a death in the cloak.

02:02:12.960 | I always felt like I am a living thing, and then there's an other thing that is the end

02:02:20.560 | of me.

02:02:21.560 | And I'm having a conversation with that.

02:02:24.520 | So in a sense that's the way I construct my, the fact that I am a thing is because there's

02:02:33.800 | somebody else that tells me, well you won't be a thing eventually.

02:02:38.240 | - Wow.

02:02:39.520 | - So this feels like a conversation perhaps, but that might be kind of this mental simulation

02:02:46.280 | kind of idea that you're kind of, it's not really a, it's a conversation with yourself

02:02:51.200 | essentially.

02:02:52.200 | - Sure.

02:02:53.200 | - Yeah, but yeah, I don't know how I feel about that, but I tend to be in agreement

02:03:00.160 | with you when we're talking about economics more so that we're deeply social beings.

02:03:08.840 | Like everything, the way, it just feels like we're humans.

02:03:13.280 | I'm with Harari, with the Sapiens, that we're kind of, we seem to construct ideas on top

02:03:20.240 | of each other, and that's a fundamentally a social process.

02:03:23.520 | - Absolutely.

02:03:24.520 | I think that's a fine book.

02:03:26.840 | It overlaps considerably with our take on these matters.

02:03:31.440 | And the fact that we get to these points, drawing on different sources I think makes

02:03:37.560 | me more confident.

02:03:39.240 | - It's so fascinating, just like reading your book, I'm sorry, on a small tangent, that

02:03:45.560 | Sapiens is like one of the most popular books in the world.

02:03:51.880 | - Yep.

02:03:52.880 | - And just reading your book is like, oh this sounds, I mean like, I don't know, I don't

02:04:01.160 | know what makes a popular book.

02:04:02.720 | - Well if you want me to be petty and stupid, I will tell you that from time to time, we

02:04:08.680 | also wonder why our book, you know, like all books, people can take issue with it, but

02:04:19.640 | we thought it would be--

02:04:21.240 | - A bigger hit.

02:04:22.240 | - That it would be more widely read.

02:04:24.960 | - It's funny because I've, I don't know if I have good examples, 'cause I forgot already,

02:04:31.280 | but I'm often saddened by like Franz Kafka, I think he wasn't known in his life.

02:04:37.560 | But I always wonder like, these great, like some of the greatest books ever written are

02:04:44.920 | completely unknown during the author's lifetime, and it's like, man, for some reason it's again

02:04:52.720 | this identity thing, I think, oh man, that sucks.

02:04:56.520 | - Well I'm comforted by that, so Van Gogh sold one painting in his life, and evidently

02:05:03.160 | Thoreau sold like 75 copies of Walden, Nietzsche's books did not sell well.

02:05:13.280 | - How did Ernest Becker sell?

02:05:17.120 | - His books are published by the free press, and have sold more than any other books that

02:05:24.800 | they have published, so.

02:05:26.680 | - So what does that mean, it's a lot?

02:05:28.240 | - I don't know if it's like Jordan Peterson millions, but it's hundreds of thousands.

02:05:32.720 | - Was he respected?

02:05:35.120 | I just don't see him, okay.

02:05:37.960 | I don't see him brought up as like in the top 10 philosophers of--

02:05:43.880 | - No, not at all.

02:05:45.760 | - So how far away is he, is he in the top 100 for people?

02:05:50.400 | - I don't think so.

02:05:51.400 | - Like he's not brought up that often.

02:05:53.460 | - Like your work is brought up more often.

02:05:57.920 | 'Cause I think he got, yeah, I mean I think he's one of the great philosophers of the

02:06:03.040 | 20th century.

02:06:04.040 | - So what we say, Lex, is that our goal, certainly when we first started, and now just as much

02:06:11.400 | actually, but what I say at all my talks is, look, if these ideas have interest you enough

02:06:18.320 | to go read Ernest Becker, then this has been good.

02:06:21.160 | I consider him to be one of the most important voices of the 20th century who does not get

02:06:28.720 | the attention that he deserves.

02:06:33.120 | Similarly, our work I believe to be important because point by point we provide empirical

02:06:41.060 | corroboration for all of the claims.

02:06:48.900 | So that's literally, the students that read The Denial of Death and then Escape from Evil,

02:06:54.940 | they're like, yeah, wow, every chapter of the book you have studies.

02:07:00.480 | And I'm like, yeah, because for 40 years if a Skidmore student said, oh, that's gotta

02:07:05.200 | be bullshit, I'm like, well, let's do a study.

02:07:08.900 | - Let's do a study.

02:07:10.660 | My own dreams are in creating robots and artificial intelligence systems that a human can love.

02:07:18.780 | And I think there's something about mortality and fear mortality that is essential for implementing

02:07:26.500 | in our AI systems.

02:07:29.640 | And so maybe can you comment on that?

02:07:36.380 | So this is a different perspective on your work, which is like, how do we engineer a

02:07:42.140 | human?

02:07:43.140 | - Yeah, so, no, this is awesome, Lex.

02:07:44.540 | I'm delighted that you said that.

02:07:46.180 | First of all, and I may have mentioned this to you, I can't remember 'cause I am senile.

02:07:51.660 | When you first contacted me, I had just been told I have to learn more about your work

02:07:58.740 | because I'm working with some very talented people in New York and they're writing a screenplay

02:08:09.700 | for a movie about an artificial intelligence, it's a female AI, it's set in like 30 years

02:08:20.180 | in the future.

02:08:23.060 | And basically the little twist, this is how I had to read Heidegger.

02:08:29.220 | So these people call me and they're like, we're making a movie, it's based on Becker

02:08:35.200 | and your work and Heidegger and this other philosopher, Levinas, and then another philosopher,

02:08:44.060 | Silvia Benso, who's an Italian philosopher.

02:08:47.580 | And the long short story is the movie is about supposedly the most advanced artificial intelligence

02:08:57.140 | entity, an embodied one, and who-

02:09:03.960 | - Human form?

02:09:05.140 | - Human form, who finds out who is having essentially existential anxieties.

02:09:16.240 | And I think the project is called "A Dinner with Her" or something, and it doesn't really

02:09:21.120 | matter, but the punchline is that she finds out that her creator has made her mortal.

02:09:33.200 | And so the question is what happens phenomenologically and behaviorally to an artificial intelligence

02:09:46.480 | who now knows that it's mortal?

02:09:50.360 | And it's actually the same question that you're posing.

02:09:55.320 | And that is, is that necessary in order for an AI to approximate humanity?

02:10:05.200 | - Yeah, so the intuition, again, it's unknown, but I think it's absolutely necessary.

02:10:16.080 | A lot of people, the same kind of shallow thinking that people have about our own end

02:10:22.160 | of life, our own death, is the same way people think about artificial intelligence.

02:10:27.680 | It's like, well, okay, so yeah, so within the system there's a terminal position where

02:10:34.080 | like there's a point at which it ends, the program ends.

02:10:40.240 | There's a goal state.

02:10:41.880 | You reach the end point.

02:10:43.840 | But the thing is making that end a thing that's also within the program, like making the thing,

02:10:56.320 | and it's also the mystery of it.

02:10:58.920 | The thing is we don't know what the hell this death thing is.

02:11:03.600 | It's not like we, the program doesn't give us information about the meaning of it all.

02:11:12.280 | And that's where the terror is.

02:11:15.360 | And it feels like, I mean, in the language that you would think about is the terror of

02:11:23.000 | this death or like anticipation of it or thinking about it is the creative force that builds

02:11:27.480 | everything.

02:11:28.680 | And that feels like, that feels really important to implement.

02:11:34.920 | Again, very difficult to know how to do technically currently, but it's important to think about.

02:11:41.040 | What I find is, you mentioned screenplays and so on, is sci-fi folks and philosophers

02:11:47.600 | are the only ones thinking about it currently.

02:11:51.200 | And that's what these folks have convinced me.

02:11:53.920 | Yeah.

02:11:54.920 | And engineers aren't, which is, I get, yeah, most of the things I talk about I get kind

02:12:03.120 | of, people roll their eyes from the engineer perspective.

02:12:07.160 | Not these folks.

02:12:08.160 | They're like, because again, I saw your name and they're like, wait a minute, I've just

02:12:12.320 | seen that.

02:12:13.320 | They're like, here's someone you should check out.

02:12:17.360 | Yeah.

02:12:18.360 | So this was a delightful confluence.

02:12:20.240 | Yeah.

02:12:21.240 | I was a huge fan of your work and Ernest Becker.

02:12:27.640 | It's funny that not enough people are talking about it.

02:12:31.960 | Yeah.

02:12:32.960 | I don't know what to do with that.

02:12:33.960 | But I think that there's a possibility to create real deep, meaningful connections between

02:12:38.680 | AI systems and humans.

02:12:41.240 | Absolutely.

02:12:42.240 | And I think some of these things of fear mortality are essential for the element of human experience.

02:12:49.880 | I don't think it might be essential to create general intelligence, like very intelligent

02:12:55.520 | machines, but to create a machine that connects to a human in some deep way.

02:13:02.320 | What's your view, not to make me the interviewer, but what's your view about machine ethics?

02:13:10.360 | Can you imagine an ethical AI without some semblance of finitude, let's say?

02:13:20.200 | Well, I think ethics, there's a trolley problem that's often used in the work that I've done

02:13:29.560 | at MIT.

02:13:30.560 | Joshua Green.

02:13:31.560 | Yeah.

02:13:32.560 | Well, the Thomas vehicles in particular.

02:13:33.560 | Oh, yeah, yeah.

02:13:35.440 | That people, I think they offload, they ask like, how would a machine deal with an ethical

02:13:42.320 | situation that they themselves, humans don't know how to deal with?

02:13:47.920 | Exactly.

02:13:48.920 | And so I don't know if a machine is able to do a better job on difficult ethical questions,

02:13:57.680 | but I certainly think to behave properly and effectively in this world, it needs to have

02:14:03.720 | a fear of mortality and be able to even dance, because I don't think you can solve ethical

02:14:10.120 | problems, but you have to, I think ethics is like a dance floor, you have to dance properly

02:14:17.800 | with the rest of the humans.

02:14:19.160 | If people are dancing tango, you have to dance in the same kind of way.

02:14:22.400 | And for that, you have to have a fear of mortality.

02:14:25.760 | I think of more practically speaking, I said, autonomous vehicles, like the way you interact

02:14:31.760 | with pedestrians fundamentally has to have a sense of mortality.

02:14:37.960 | So when pedestrians cross the road, now I've watched most certainly a hundred plus hours

02:14:47.560 | of pedestrian videos, there's a kind of social contract where you walk in front of a car

02:14:57.160 | and you're putting your life in the hands of another human being.

02:15:01.920 | And like death is in the car, in the game that's being played, death is right there.

02:15:09.040 | It's part of the calculus, but it's not like a simple calculus, it's not a simple equation.

02:15:17.000 | I mean, I don't know what it is, but it's in there and it has to be part of the optimization

02:15:23.160 | problem.

02:15:24.160 | Like it's not as simple as, so from the computer vision, from the artificial intelligence perspective,

02:15:29.440 | it's detecting there's a human estimating the trajectory, like treating everything like

02:15:36.680 | it's a billiard balls, as opposed to like being able to construct an effective model,

02:15:45.280 | a world model of what the person's thinking, what they're going to do, what are the different

02:15:50.160 | possibilities of how the scene might evolve, I think requires having some sense of, yeah,

02:15:58.040 | fear of mortality.

02:15:59.040 | See, the thing is, I think it's really important to think about, I can be honest enough to

02:16:06.640 | say that I haven't been able to figure out how to engineer any of these things.

02:16:14.400 | But I do think it's really, really important.

02:16:16.080 | Like I have a bunch of Roombas here, I can show it to you after, Roombas is a robot that

02:16:26.240 | vacuums the floor.

02:16:27.480 | And I've had them make different sounds, like I had them scream in pain.

02:16:33.720 | And it, you immediately anthropomorphize.

02:16:41.960 | And it creates a, I don't know, knowing that they can feel pain, see I'm speaking, like

02:16:49.600 | knowing, I immediately imagine that they can feel pain and it immediately draws me closer

02:16:55.880 | to them, the human experience.

02:16:58.480 | And there's something in that that should be engineered in our systems, it feels like.

02:17:05.720 | I believe personally, I don't know what you think, but I believe it's possible for a robot

02:17:11.360 | and a human to fall in love, for example, in the future.

02:17:14.560 | - Oh, I think, yeah, it's already there.

02:17:17.720 | - Well, there's a certain kind of deep connection with technology, but I mean a real, like you

02:17:23.880 | would choose to marry.

02:17:26.360 | - I mean, again, it sounds, I'll find a book title and I'll send it to you.

02:17:31.760 | And it's a serious consideration of people who started out with these sex dolls, but

02:17:42.640 | it turned into a relationship of enduring significance that the woman who wrote the

02:17:48.360 | book is not willing to dismiss as a perversion.

02:17:52.280 | - Yeah, that's what, you know, people kind of joke about sex robots, which is funny.

02:17:58.520 | I mean, there's a lot of stuff about robots that's just kind of fun to talk about that

02:18:04.120 | is not necessarily connected to reality.

02:18:07.240 | People joke about sex robots, but if you actually look how sex robots, which are pretty rare

02:18:11.900 | these days, are used, they're not used by people who want sex.

02:18:18.200 | - Precisely.

02:18:19.200 | - They're actually--

02:18:20.200 | - They're companions.

02:18:21.200 | - They become companions.

02:18:24.200 | It's fascinating, and they're just, we're not even talking about any kind of intelligence,

02:18:30.320 | we're talking about just, I mean, human beings seek companionships.

02:18:33.720 | We're deeply lonely.

02:18:34.720 | I mean, that was the other sense I have that I don't know if I can articulate clearly.

02:18:39.160 | You can probably do a better job, but I have a sense that there's a deep loneliness within

02:18:43.880 | all of us.

02:18:44.880 | - Absolutely.

02:18:45.880 | - In the face of death, it feels like we're alone.

02:18:48.800 | So what drew me to the existential take on things, Lex, was the, who is it, Rollo May

02:19:01.800 | and Erwin Yalom write about existentialism, and they're like, look, there's different

02:19:11.240 | flavors of existentialism, but they all have in common, what is it, four universal concerns.

02:19:18.520 | The overriding one is about death, and that next is choice and responsibility.

02:19:28.760 | The next one is existential isolation, and they're like, that's one of the things about

02:19:36.120 | consciousness, and the last one is meaninglessness.

02:19:39.880 | But the existential isolation point is we are, by virtue of consciousness, able to apprehend

02:19:53.200 | that unless you're a Siamese twin, you are fundamentally alone.

02:20:00.320 | And because it is claimed, it's Eric Fromm in a book called "Escape from Freedom," he's

02:20:08.080 | like, look, you're smart enough to know that the most direct way that we typically communicate

02:20:14.800 | with our fellow human beings is through language, but you also know that language is a pale

02:20:21.680 | shadow of the totality of our interior phenomenological existence.

02:20:29.880 | Therefore, there's always gonna be times in our lives where even under the best of circumstances,

02:20:37.000 | you could be trying desperately to convey your thoughts and feelings, and somebody listening

02:20:43.880 | could be like, yeah, I get it, I get it, I get it, and you're like, you have no fucking

02:20:48.360 | idea what I'm talking about.

02:20:51.080 | So you can be desperately lonely in a house where you live with 10 people in the middle

02:20:58.240 | of Tokyo where there's millions.

02:21:00.480 | - Ah, yeah, it's the Great Gatsby.

02:21:04.560 | You could be alone in a big party, yeah.

02:21:06.720 | - Exactly.

02:21:07.720 | - Maybe this is a small tangent, but let me ask you on the topic of academia, you're kind

02:21:14.680 | of, we talked about Jordan Peterson, there's a lot of sort of renegade type of thinkers,

02:21:22.680 | certainly in psychology, but it applies in all disciplines.

02:21:27.840 | What are your thoughts about academia being a place to harbor people like yourself, that

02:21:38.560 | people who think deeply about things, who are not constrained by sort of the, I don't

02:21:46.240 | think you're quite controversial.

02:21:47.920 | - No, not really.

02:21:49.600 | - But you are a person who thinks deeply about things, and it feels like academia can sometimes

02:21:57.440 | stifle that.

02:21:58.440 | - I think so.

02:21:59.520 | So my concern right now, Lex, for young scholars is that the restrictions and expectations

02:22:13.400 | are such that it's highly unlikely that anybody will do anything of great value or innovation

02:22:24.600 | except for, and this is not a bad thing, but stepwise improvement of existing paradigms.

02:22:32.320 | So in simple English, I went to Princeton for a job interview 40 years ago, and they're

02:22:39.160 | like, "What are you gonna do if we give you a job?"

02:22:42.160 | And I'm like, "I don't know, I wanna think about it and read."

02:22:48.720 | And I saw that that interview was over, the window of opportunity shut in my face, and

02:22:55.200 | they actually called my mentors, and they're like, "What are you doing?

02:23:00.480 | Tell this guy to buy some pants."

02:23:02.000 | I had hair down to my waist also.

02:23:03.440 | He's like, "This guy looks like Charles Manson in Jesus."

02:23:06.000 | But the expectation is that you come to a post, you start publishing so that you can

02:23:18.040 | get grants.

02:23:19.040 | That's certainly true, but there's also kind of a behavioral thing.

02:23:22.640 | You said long hair.

02:23:26.200 | There's a certain style of the way you're supposed to behave.

02:23:28.520 | For example, I'm wearing a suit.

02:23:33.200 | It sounds weird, but I feel comfortable in this.

02:23:36.160 | I wore it when I was teaching at MIT.

02:23:38.440 | I wore it to meetings and so on, the different, sometimes a blue and red tie.

02:23:44.760 | But that was an outsider thing to do at MIT.

02:23:49.360 | So there was a strong pressure to not wear a suit.

02:23:52.440 | - No, that's right.

02:23:53.440 | - And there's a pressure to behave, to have a hair thing.

02:23:56.320 | - No, that's right.

02:23:57.320 | - The way you wear your hair, the way you...

02:23:59.800 | This isn't a liberal or a left-wing or anything.

02:24:02.680 | It's just in tribes and academia, to me, or any place that dreams of having renegade,

02:24:12.160 | free thinkers, really deep thinkers should, in fact, glorify the outsider.

02:24:20.240 | Should welcome people that don't fit in.

02:24:25.520 | - Yeah.

02:24:26.520 | - That sounds weird, but I can just imagine an interview at Princeton.

02:24:32.760 | I can imagine, why aren't you at Harvard, for example, or MIT?

02:24:40.160 | - Yeah, well, so that, look, I would love to...

02:24:46.520 | I haven't lectured at MIT, but I've lectured at Harvard.

02:24:49.400 | I've gotten to lecture at almost every place that wouldn't consider me for a job.

02:24:55.960 | And I...

02:24:58.960 | Well, a few things.

02:25:01.560 | I'm lucky because I go to Princeton, I'm like, "I don't know what I wanna do."

02:25:05.440 | And then two days later, I go to Skidmore, and I'm like, "I don't know what I wanna do."

02:25:10.000 | And they offer me a job later that day, which I declined for months because of the extraordinary

02:25:16.080 | pressure of my mentors, who right-mindedly felt that I wouldn't get much done there.

02:25:24.400 | But what they told me at Skidmore was, "Take your time.

02:25:28.860 | Show up for your classes and don't molest barnyard animals, and you'll probably get tenure."

02:25:34.160 | And I'm like, "I'll show up for my classes.

02:25:35.840 | We'll talk about it."

02:25:36.840 | - That was the negotiation.

02:25:37.840 | - Yeah, I negotiated.

02:25:38.840 | I drove a hard bargain.

02:25:43.160 | But honestly, Lex, that's...

02:25:46.040 | I feel I'm very committed to Skidmore because I was given tenure when our first terror management

02:25:54.640 | paper wasn't published.

02:25:57.280 | It took eight years to publish.

02:25:59.000 | It was rejected at every journal.

02:26:01.840 | And I submitted it as like a purple ditto sheet thing.

02:26:05.560 | I'm like, "Here's what I've been doing.

02:26:07.560 | Here's the reviews.

02:26:09.720 | Here's why I think this is still a pretty good idea."

02:26:13.120 | And I don't know that this would happen even at Skidmore anymore, but I was very lucky

02:26:17.560 | to be given the latitude and to be encouraged.

02:26:21.800 | I took classes at Skidmore.

02:26:24.160 | That's how I learned all this stuff.

02:26:26.680 | I got a PhD unscathed by knowledge.

02:26:29.960 | We were great statisticians and methodologists, but we didn't have any substance.

02:26:39.280 | And I don't mean this cynically, but we were trained in a method in search of a question.

02:26:45.240 | So I appreciate having five years at Skidmore basically to read books.

02:26:51.980 | And I also appreciate that I look like this 40 years ago.

02:26:57.880 | And my view is that this is how I comported myself.

02:27:08.440 | Other people, the guy I learned the most from at Skidmore is now dead, a history professor,

02:27:14.440 | Ted Kuroda.

02:27:16.040 | He wore a bow tie.

02:27:18.200 | And there's another guy, Darnell Rucker, who taught me about philosophy.

02:27:22.560 | And he was very proper and he had his jacket with the leather patches.

02:27:31.000 | But these guys weren't pompous at all.

02:27:34.240 | They were, "This is the way I am."

02:27:38.640 | And I always felt that that's important, that somebody who looks at you and says, "Oh, what

02:27:46.080 | a stiff.

02:27:47.080 | He's probably an MBA."

02:27:48.080 | Well, they're wrong.

02:27:50.400 | And someone who looks at me, when I first got to Skidmore, other professors would ask

02:27:56.640 | when I'd be coming to their office to empty the garbage.

02:27:59.720 | They just assumed, as in my 20s, they assumed I was housekeeping.

02:28:04.680 | I always felt that was important that the students learn not to judge an idea by the

02:28:10.080 | appearance of the person who purveys it.

02:28:13.720 | - Yeah, I mean, I guess this is such a high concern now because I personally still have

02:28:22.520 | faith that academia is where the great geniuses will come from.

02:28:25.840 | - I do too.

02:28:26.840 | - And great ideas.

02:28:27.840 | - I love hearing you say that.

02:28:29.480 | I still, and it's one of the reasons why I'm really apprehensive about the future of education

02:28:37.800 | right now in the context of the pandemic.

02:28:41.120 | - Oh, yeah.

02:28:42.120 | - Is that a lot of folks, and a lot of these are Google-type people who I don't, you know,

02:28:49.520 | they're geniuses also, but I don't like this idea that all learning can be virtual and

02:28:56.720 | that much could happen.

02:28:58.680 | I'm big on embodied environments with actual humans interacting.

02:29:02.840 | - I mean, there's so much to the university education, but I think the key part is the

02:29:12.720 | mentorship that occurs somehow at the human level.

02:29:16.400 | Like I've gotten a lot of flack, like this conversation, we're in person now, and I've,

02:29:24.560 | even with Edward Snowden, who done all interviews remote, I'm a stickler to in-person.

02:29:32.280 | It has to be in person.

02:29:34.520 | And a lot of people just don't get it.

02:29:36.320 | They're like, "Well, why can't, this is so much easier.

02:29:39.640 | Why go through the pain?"

02:29:40.960 | Like I've traveled, I'm traveling in the next month to Paris for a single stupid conversation

02:29:48.240 | nobody cares about just to be in person.

02:29:51.440 | - Well, it's important to me.

02:29:54.040 | Honestly, I was like, this...

02:29:59.200 | - And thank you for coming down today.

02:30:00.440 | - Oh, it's my pleasure.

02:30:01.440 | But again, it's very self-serving.

02:30:03.320 | I've enjoyed this.

02:30:04.320 | I knew I was going to, but it's not about our enjoyment per se.

02:30:09.600 | Again, at the risk of sounding cavalier, there are a host of factors beyond verbal that I

02:30:21.360 | don't believe can be adequately captured.

02:30:25.400 | I don't care how much the acuity is decent on a Zoom conversation.

02:30:30.800 | I feel, again, I felt within five minutes that this was going to be, for me, easy in

02:30:43.880 | the sense that I could speak freely.

02:30:45.840 | I just don't see that happening so easily from a distance.

02:30:50.560 | - Yeah, I tend to.

02:30:52.040 | Well, I'm hopeful, I agree with you on the current technology, but I am hopeful, unlike

02:30:56.960 | some others, on the technology eventually being able to create that kind of experience.

02:31:01.680 | - Oh, I think it's...

02:31:03.040 | - We're quite far away from that, but it might be able...

02:31:05.800 | My hope is, I'm hopeful.

02:31:09.520 | - I was at Microsoft in Seattle, and I can't remember why.

02:31:14.920 | No, I can't.

02:31:18.200 | That's how...

02:31:19.420 | I'm in my early Mr. Magoo phase, and somebody there was showing us a virtual wall where

02:31:29.360 | the entire wall, when you're talking to somebody...

02:31:34.120 | So it's life-size, and they were beginning to get the appearance of motion and stuff.

02:31:41.960 | It looked pretty...

02:31:42.960 | - Yeah, with virtual reality, too.

02:31:44.840 | I don't know if you've ever been inside a virtual world.

02:31:47.720 | To me, I can see the future.

02:31:53.120 | It's quite real.

02:31:54.880 | In terms of a terror of death, I'm afraid of heights.

02:31:58.920 | - Me too.

02:31:59.920 | - And there's...

02:32:00.920 | I don't know if you've ever tried.

02:32:03.360 | You should if you haven't.

02:32:04.360 | There's a virtual reality experience where you can walk a plank, and you can look down,

02:32:08.600 | and man, I was on the ground, like, terrified.

02:32:12.360 | I was like...

02:32:13.360 | I was afraid.

02:32:14.360 | I was deeply afraid.

02:32:15.360 | It was as real as anything else could be.

02:32:21.560 | I mean, these are very early days of that technology, relatively speaking.

02:32:25.840 | So yeah, I mean, I don't know what to do with that.

02:32:30.560 | Same with crossing the street.

02:32:31.920 | We did these experiments crossing the street in front of a car, and just being run over

02:32:39.200 | by a car.

02:32:41.600 | It's terrifying.

02:32:43.280 | It's just that...

02:32:44.760 | Yeah, so there is a rich experience to be created there.

02:32:49.200 | We're not there yet, but yeah.

02:32:52.600 | And I've seen a lot of people try, like you said, the Google folks, Silicon Valley folks

02:32:57.320 | try to create a virtual online education.

02:33:00.440 | I don't know.

02:33:01.440 | I think they've raised really important questions about what makes the education experience

02:33:10.280 | fulfilling, what makes it effective.

02:33:12.440 | Yeah, these are important questions.

02:33:14.560 | And I think what they highlight is we have no clue.

02:33:20.120 | There's Thomas Sowell wrote a book about...

02:33:27.640 | Recent book on charter schools.

02:33:30.680 | Yeah, I would like to talk to him.

02:33:32.560 | Yeah, he's an interesting guy.

02:33:34.520 | We will disagree about a lot, but respectfully.

02:33:37.120 | Yeah, such a powerful mind.

02:33:40.200 | I need to read...

02:33:42.560 | I've only heard him talk about the book, but he argues quite seemingly effectively that

02:33:52.200 | the public education system is broken.

02:33:55.440 | That we blame...

02:33:56.440 | He basically says that we kind of blame the conditions or the environment, but the upbringing

02:34:06.200 | of people like parenting, blah, blah, blah, like the set of opportunities.

02:34:11.960 | But okay, putting that aside, it seems like charter schools, no matter who it is that

02:34:18.760 | attends them, does much better than in public schools.

02:34:22.840 | And he puts a bunch of data behind it.

02:34:25.360 | And in his usual way, as you know, just is very eloquent in arguing his points.

02:34:31.840 | So that to me just highlights, man, education is probably the most important thing in our

02:34:39.840 | civilization and we're doing a shitty job of it.

02:34:45.680 | In academia, in university education, and younger education, the whole thing.

02:34:53.200 | The whole thing.

02:34:54.600 | And yet we value just about anyone or anything more than educators.

02:35:06.160 | Part of it is just the relatively low regard that Americans have for teachers.

02:35:15.680 | Also similarly, just people of service, I think great teachers are the greatest thing

02:35:25.860 | in our society.

02:35:26.860 | And I would say now on a controversial note, like Black Lives Matter, great police officers

02:35:33.920 | is the greatest thing in our society also.

02:35:36.620 | All people that do service, we undervalue cops.

02:35:42.160 | This whole defund the police is missing the point.

02:35:45.160 | And it's a stupid word.

02:35:47.480 | I'm with you on that, Lex.

02:35:50.480 | Neighbors to one side of our house are three generations of police, our neighbors across

02:35:56.240 | the street are police.

02:36:00.000 | They know my political predilections.

02:36:07.960 | And we've gotten along fine for 30 years.

02:36:11.720 | And I go out and tell them every day, when you go in today, you tell the people on the

02:36:18.280 | force that I appreciate what they're doing.

02:36:24.800 | I think it's really important to not tribalize those concerns.

02:36:32.480 | - I mean, we mentioned so many brilliant books and philosophers, but it'd be nice to sort

02:36:42.040 | of in a focused way, try to see if we can get some recommendations from you.

02:36:47.440 | So what three books, technical or fiction or philosophical had a-

02:36:53.000 | - Oh man.

02:36:54.000 | - This is the worst question.

02:36:55.000 | - Well, you know what?

02:36:56.000 | - Had a big impact in your life and you would recommend?

02:36:59.000 | - I spent four hours driving here, perseverating about that.

02:37:03.920 | Everything else you sent me.

02:37:04.920 | - That's fine.

02:37:05.920 | - And I actually, I skimmed it and I'm like, I don't want to look at it because I want

02:37:11.320 | us to talk.

02:37:12.760 | The ones in blue, I'm like, all right.

02:37:15.840 | And I've already said that I've found Becker's work and I put "The Denial of Death" out there.

02:37:26.320 | - Is that his best?

02:37:27.320 | Sorry, to go on a small tangent.

02:37:28.960 | Is there other books of his?

02:37:31.200 | - Yes, if I could have this count as one, that "The Birth and Death of Meaning", "The

02:37:36.800 | Denial of Death" and "Escape from Evil" are three books of Ernest Becker's that I believe

02:37:43.920 | to all be profound.

02:37:47.480 | - In a little sort of brief dance around topics, I've only read "Denial of Death".

02:37:54.200 | How do those books connect in your-

02:37:55.600 | - Yeah, nice.

02:37:56.600 | So "The Birth and Death of Meaning" is where Becker situates his thinking in more of an

02:38:04.320 | evolutionary foundation.

02:38:06.660 | So I like that for that reason.

02:38:09.160 | "Escape from Evil" is where he applies the ideas in "The Denial of Death" more directly

02:38:19.080 | to economic matters and to inequality, and also to our inability to peacefully coexist

02:38:28.520 | with other folks who don't share our beliefs.

02:38:30.940 | So I would put Ernest Becker out there as one.

02:38:36.560 | I also like novels a lot.

02:38:39.520 | And here I was like, "God damn it, no matter what I say, I'm gonna be like, 'Yes, but.'"

02:38:46.200 | - "The Existentialist", do you like all those folks?

02:38:49.000 | "Camus", do you like that literary existentialist?

02:38:52.320 | - I do, but I mean, I've read all those books.

02:38:58.240 | I will tell you the last line of "The Plague", "We learn in times of pestilence that there's

02:39:02.800 | more to admire in men than to despise."

02:39:06.800 | And I love that.

02:39:07.800 | - Yeah.

02:39:08.800 | "The Plague" is such a, I don't know, I find "The Plague" is a brilliant book.

02:39:12.680 | - Me too.

02:39:13.680 | - And before "The Plague" has come to us in 2020, it was just such a good book.

02:39:18.960 | - Yes, so.

02:39:19.960 | - A book about love, about...

02:39:21.800 | - But I'll toss one that may be less known to folks.

02:39:25.240 | I'm enamored with a novel by a woman named Carson McCullers, written in 1953, called

02:39:31.400 | "Clock Without Hands".

02:39:34.120 | And I find it a brilliant literary depiction of many of the ideas that we have spoken about.

02:39:41.440 | - Fiction?

02:39:42.440 | - Fiction, yeah.

02:39:43.440 | - What kind of ideas are we talking about?

02:39:46.880 | - All of the existential ideas that we have encountered today, but in the context of a

02:39:52.840 | story of someone who finds out that he is terminally ill.

02:39:59.280 | It's set in the South, in the heyday of like segregation.

02:40:04.980 | So there's a lot of social issues, a lot of existential issues, but it's basically a fictional

02:40:11.120 | account of someone who finds out that they're terminally ill and who reacts originally

02:40:19.660 | as you might expect anyone, becomes more hostile to people who are different, like petty and

02:40:30.160 | stupid, denies that anything's happening.

02:40:33.620 | But as the book goes on and he comes more to terms with his own mortality, it ends lovingly.

02:40:45.700 | And back to your idea about love being incredibly potent.

02:40:53.980 | - That's the nice thing, as you mentioned before with Heidegger.

02:40:59.500 | I really like that idea, and I've seen that in people who are terminally ill, is they

02:41:06.420 | bring, the idea of death becomes current.

02:41:12.540 | It becomes like a thing, I could die.

02:41:15.300 | I really like that idea, I can die not just tomorrow, but like now.

02:41:23.820 | That's a really useful, I don't even know, I think I've been too afraid to even think

02:41:28.980 | about that.

02:41:29.980 | - I have.

02:41:30.980 | - Like sit here and think like in five minutes, it's over.

02:41:38.100 | - Yeah.

02:41:39.100 | - This is it, in five minutes it's over.

02:41:43.060 | - So that would be my most recent addition, is I really am struck by Heidegger.

02:41:50.580 | - Would you recommend that?

02:41:51.580 | - Well, okay, if you have a few years.

02:41:53.580 | - I remember I tuned out, being in time, I was like, I tried to read it, I was like,

02:41:57.260 | that's it.

02:41:58.260 | It took me 40 years to read Ulysses, I could not get past the first five pages, and it

02:42:05.700 | took me 40 years to read Being in Time, it's a slog.

02:42:11.620 | - I took a James Joyce course in college, so I even, I guess read parts of Finnegans

02:42:19.300 | Wake.

02:42:20.300 | - No way.

02:42:21.300 | - But like, there's a difference between reading and like, I don't think I understood anything.

02:42:27.340 | - I like his short stories.

02:42:29.020 | - Me too.

02:42:30.020 | - The Dead.

02:42:31.020 | - Yeah, I love that.

02:42:32.020 | - And I like Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom is a fine book.

02:42:37.860 | - But would you, is there something Heidegger connected in a book you would recommend or

02:42:43.500 | no?

02:42:44.500 | - No, so maybe I got to abandon him.

02:42:46.060 | I mean, Being in Time is awesome, but here's an interesting thing, and not to get all academic-y,

02:42:54.220 | but you know, there's two parts to it, and most philosophers are preoccupied with the

02:43:01.180 | first part.

02:43:02.860 | It's in the second part where he gets into all the flight from death stuff and this idea

02:43:09.300 | of a turning, and philosophers don't like that.

02:43:14.460 | And I'm like, this is where he's starting to--

02:43:17.300 | - Really shine.

02:43:18.300 | - To really shine for me, so.

02:43:20.020 | - Yeah.

02:43:21.020 | - Yeah.

02:43:22.020 | - All right, that's a beautiful set of books.

02:43:23.020 | So what advice would you give to a young person today about their career, about life, about

02:43:34.580 | how to survive in this world full of suffering?

02:43:37.900 | - Yeah, great.

02:43:40.780 | My advice is to get competent advice.

02:43:42.980 | That's what I tell my students at Stitt-Mart.

02:43:46.780 | - Don't listen to me.

02:43:47.780 | - Yeah, don't listen to me.

02:43:48.780 | - Well, you know, I think my big piece of advice these days is, you know, again, it's

02:43:59.580 | at the risk of sounding like a simpleton, but it's to emphasize a few things.

02:44:08.420 | One is, you know, one of your questions, I think, was, you know, what's the meaning of

02:44:16.500 | life?

02:44:17.500 | And I think the existentialists say, life has no meaning, but it doesn't follow from

02:44:22.740 | that that it's intrinsic, that it's meaningless.

02:44:26.340 | You know what, the existential point is not that life is meaningless so much as it doesn't

02:44:32.740 | have one inevitable and intrinsic meaning, you know, which then it opens up, you know,

02:44:42.180 | I think it was Kierkegaard who said, "Consciousness gives us the possibility of possibilities."

02:44:48.740 | But there's another lunatic, Oswald Spengler, who wrote a book called "Decline of the West."

02:44:55.620 | And he says that the philosopher, the German philosopher, Goethe, he says, "The purpose

02:45:01.140 | of life is to live."

02:45:04.300 | And so that's one of my pieces of advice.

02:45:07.300 | - So the possibility of possibilities, it's interesting.

02:45:11.200 | So what do you do with this kind of sea of possibilities?

02:45:14.460 | Like while, this is one of the, when young folks talk to me, especially these days, is

02:45:23.220 | there swimming in a sea of possibilities?

02:45:25.220 | - Yeah, well, so this, it's great.

02:45:27.500 | And so that's another existential point, which is that we yearn for freedom, we react vigorously

02:45:35.540 | when we perceive that our choices have been curtailed, and then we're paralyzed by indecision

02:45:43.100 | in the wake of seemingly unlimited possibilities because we're not choking on choice.

02:45:49.700 | And I'm not sure if this is helpful advice or not, but what I say to folks is that the

02:45:58.020 | fact of the matter is, is that for most people, choice is a first world problem.

02:46:06.540 | And sometimes the best option is to do something, as silly as it sounds, and then if that doesn't

02:46:18.020 | work, do something else, which just sounds like my mom torturing me when I was young.

02:46:24.300 | But part of the thing that I find myself singularly ill-equipped is that we're at the, I may be

02:46:33.860 | at the tail end of the last generation of Americans where you like picked something

02:46:40.860 | and that's what you did.

02:46:42.400 | Like I've been at a job for 40 years, where you can expect to do better than your parents

02:46:48.100 | because those days are gone, and where you can make a comfortable inference that the

02:46:56.100 | world in a decade or two will have any remote similarity to the one that we now inhabit.

02:47:05.260 | And so-

02:47:06.260 | But still, you recommend just do.

02:47:09.020 | Yeah.

02:47:10.100 | And to do so, again, this is, so back to the Heidegger guy, because, all right, I consider

02:47:20.740 | myself a professor, but what happens if most of the schools go out of business?

02:47:26.400 | Somebody else may consider themselves a restaurateur, but what happens if there's no more restaurants?

02:47:34.460 | So what I, this is negative advice, but I tell folks, don't define yourself as a social

02:47:42.860 | caricature.

02:47:43.860 | Yeah.

02:47:44.860 | Don't limit how you feel about yourself by, through identification with a host of variables

02:48:01.260 | that may be uncertain.

02:48:03.420 | Maybe temporary.

02:48:04.420 | What?

02:48:05.420 | Oh, sorry.

02:48:06.420 | No, but of course, that gets back to your point earlier, Lex, where you're like, yeah,

02:48:11.060 | but when you step out of that, it's extraordinarily discombobulating.

02:48:17.940 | So what, I think you talked about an axe of chopping wood and soul from Socrates.

02:48:27.620 | What is your soul, what is the essence of Sheldon?

02:48:35.460 | Wow.

02:48:36.460 | That was like, awesome.

02:48:39.620 | Like when God, when you show up at the end of this thing, He kind of looks at you, He's

02:48:45.420 | like, "Oh, yeah, I remember you."

02:48:48.820 | Well, you know, to be honest, what I muse about is to me, when people are, I told you,

02:49:05.580 | we have two kids, late 20s, early 30s, and over the years, when we meet people that know

02:49:17.420 | our kids and they're like, "Oh, your kids are kind and decent."

02:49:23.700 | And I'd be like, that's what I would like to be.

02:49:29.140 | Because I think intelligence is vastly overrated.

02:49:32.300 | You know, the Unabomber was a smart guy.

02:49:34.940 | And I do admire intelligence and I do venerate education and I find that to be tremendously

02:49:44.100 | important.

02:49:46.060 | But if I had to pay the ultimate homage to myself, it would be to be known as somebody

02:49:53.860 | who takes himself too seriously to take myself too seriously.

02:49:58.380 | Again, as corny as it sounds, I like to leave the world a tad better than I found it, or

02:50:07.460 | at least do no harm.

02:50:10.940 | And I think you did all right in that regard.

02:50:17.100 | I love that question, Alex.

02:50:18.580 | That's a good one.

02:50:19.580 | I think everyone should be asked that.

02:50:21.700 | What is your soul?

02:50:24.060 | Do you have maybe just a few lingering questions around it?

02:50:31.860 | So I mean, on the point of the soul, you've talked about the meaning of life.

02:50:38.300 | Do you have, on a personal level, do you have an answer to the meaning of your life, of

02:50:50.580 | something that brought you meaning, happiness, some sense of sense?

02:51:05.300 | Yeah.

02:51:08.300 | No, I mean, yes and no.

02:51:11.780 | I mean, I'm 66, so I'm in the kind of not ready to wrap it up, literally or metaphorically,

02:51:23.580 | but I look back and just really with a sense of awe and wonder, gratitude.

02:51:35.260 | Is there memories that stand out to you from childhood, from earlier, that stand out as

02:51:42.300 | something you're really proud of or just happy to have been on this earth?

02:51:49.700 | Does that stuff happen?

02:51:51.540 | Mainly, yeah, that.

02:51:53.380 | My family, also a chunk, my folks, my grandparents are from Eastern Europe, Russia, Austria.

02:52:04.980 | As far as we know, some of them never made it out.

02:52:08.180 | I consider myself very fortunate to have been a so-called product of the American dream.

02:52:22.300 | My grandparents were basically peasants.

02:52:26.340 | My parents, my dad worked two full-time jobs when I was growing up, and I would see him

02:52:33.980 | on the weekends, I'd be like, "Why are you working all the time?"

02:52:36.900 | He'd be like, "So you won't have to."

02:52:41.380 | He said, "Look, the world does not owe you a living, and so your first responsibility

02:52:47.460 | is to take care of yourself, and then your next responsibility is to take care of other

02:52:55.620 | people."

02:52:56.620 | I think you did a pretty good job of that.

02:53:00.060 | I don't know, but those are the things that I'm proud of.

02:53:08.940 | It's funny, you've talked about just yourself as a human being, but you've also contributed

02:53:17.420 | some really important ideas for your ideas and also integrating and maybe even popularizing

02:53:29.060 | the work of Ernest Becker, of connecting it, of making it legitimate scientifically.

02:53:37.620 | As a human, of course, you want your ripple to be one that makes the world a better place,

02:53:44.340 | but also I think in the span of time, I think it's of great value what you've contributed

02:53:51.980 | in terms of how we think about the human condition, how we think about ourselves, assuming as

02:53:58.980 | finite beings in this world.

02:54:01.580 | I hope also in our technology of engineering intelligence, I think, at least for me, and

02:54:08.740 | I'm sure there's a lot of other people like me that your work has been a gift for.

02:54:14.460 | - Oh, well, thank you.

02:54:16.380 | I like that.

02:54:18.060 | We have described ourselves as giant interneurons.

02:54:21.540 | I'm like, we have had no original ideas, and maybe that's the only thing that's original

02:54:28.780 | about our work is we don't claim to be original.

02:54:31.380 | What we claim to have done is to integrate, to connect these disparate and superficially

02:54:42.020 | unconnected discourses.

02:54:44.260 | So existentialists, they'd be like, "Evidence?

02:54:47.100 | What's that?"

02:54:49.180 | And yeah, there's now a branch of psychology, experimental existential psychology that I

02:54:54.460 | think we could take credit for having encouraged the formation of, and that in turn has gotten

02:55:05.740 | these ideas in circulation in academic communities where they may not have otherwise gotten.

02:55:13.860 | So I think that's good.

02:55:14.860 | - Well, Sheldon, it's a huge honor.

02:55:17.220 | I can't believe you came down here.

02:55:19.860 | I've been a fan of your work.

02:55:22.820 | I hope we get to talk again.

02:55:24.860 | Huge honor to talk to you.

02:55:25.860 | Thank you so much for talking today.

02:55:26.860 | - Thanks, Lex.

02:55:27.860 | We'll do it again soon, I hope.

02:55:28.860 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sheldon Solomon, and thank you to our

02:55:33.140 | sponsors, Blinkist, ExpressVPN, and Cash App.

02:55:37.700 | Click the links in the description to get a discount.

02:55:40.100 | It's the best way to support this podcast.

02:55:42.060 | If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Star Snapper Podcast,

02:55:46.900 | follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter @LexFriedman.

02:55:52.780 | And now let me leave you with some words from Vladimir Nabokov that Sheldon uses in his

02:55:57.340 | book "Warm at the Core."

02:56:00.540 | The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a

02:56:05.900 | brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

02:56:11.500 | Thanks for listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:56:14.300 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #117

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