Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #117
the following is a conversation with sheldon solomon a social psychologist a philosopher co-developer of terror management theory and co-author of the warm at the core on the role of death and life he further carried the ideas of ernest becker that can crudely summarize as the idea that our fear of death is at the core of the human condition and the driver of most of the creations of human civilization quick summary of the sponsors blinkist expressvpn and cash app click the links in the description to get a discount it really is the best way to support this podcast let me say as a side note that ernest becker's book denial of death had a big impact on my thinking about human cognition consciousness and the deep ocean currents of our mind that are behind the surface behaviors we observe many people have told me that they think about death or don't think about death fear death or don't fear death but i think not many people think about this topic deeply rigorously in the way that nietzsche suggested this topic like many that lead to deep personal self-reflection frankly is dangerous for the mind as all first principles thinking about the human condition is if you gaze long into the abyss like nietzsche said the abyss will gaze back into you i've been recently reading a lot about world war ii stalin and hitler it feels to me that there's some fundamental truth there to be discovered in the moments of history that changed everything the suffering the triumphs if i bring up donald trump or vladimir putin in these conversations it is never through a political lens i'm not left nor right i think for myself deeply and often question everything changing my mind as often as is needed i ask for your patience empathy and rigorous thinking if you arrive to this podcast from a place of partisanship if you hate trump or love trump or any other political leader no matter what he or they do and see everyone who disagrees with you as delusional i ask that you unsubscribe and 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advance robotics and stem education for young people around the world and now here's my conversation with sheldon solomon what is the role of death and fear of death and life well from our perspective the uniquely human awareness of death and our unwillingness to accept that fact we would argue is the primary motivational impetus for almost everything that people do whether they're aware of it or not so that's kind of been your life work your view of the human condition is that death you've written the book warm with the core that death is at the core of our consciousness of everything of how we see the world of what drives us maybe can you can you elaborate like what how you see death fitting in what does it mean to be at the core of our being so i think that's a great question and you know to be pedantic i usually start you know my psychology classes and i say to the students okay you know let's define our terms and the ology part they get right away you know it's the study of and then we get to the psyche part and understandably you know the students are like oh that means mind and i'm like well no that's a modern interpretation but in a in ancient greek it means soul but not in the cartesian dualistic sense that most of us in the west think when that word comes to mind and so you hear the word soul and you're like well all right that's the non-physical part of me that's potentially detachable from my corporal container when i'm no longer here but aristotle's who coined the word psyche i think um he was uh not a dualist he was a monist he thought that the soul was inextricably connected to the body and he defined soul as the essence of a natural body that is alive and then he goes on and he says all right but let me give you an example if um if an axe was alive the soul of an axe would be to chop and if you can pluck your eyeball out of your head and it was still functioning then the soul of the eyeball would be to see you know and then he's like all right the soul of a grasshopper is to hop the soul of a woodpecker is to peck which raises the question of course what is the essence of what it means to be human and here of course there is no one universally accepted conception of the essence of our humanity all right aristotle uh you know gives us the idea of humans as rational animals you know we're homo sapiens but not the only game in town got joseph hoisinger an anthropologist in the 20th century he called us homo ludens that were basically fundamentally playful creatures and i think it was hannah arendt uh homo faber we're tool making creatures uh another woman ellen dizzinayake wrote a book called homo aestheticus and following aristotle and his poetics she's like well we're not only rational animals we're also aesthetic creatures that appreciate beauty there's another take on humans i think they call us homo naratans we're all we're storytelling creatures and i i think all of those uh designations of what it means to be human are quite useful heuristically and certainly worthy of our collective cogitation but what what garnered my attention when i was a young punk was just a single line in an essay by a scottish guy it was alexander smith in in a book called dreamthwarp i think it's written in the 1860s he just says right in the middle of an essay it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human and i remember reading that and i in my gut i was like oh man i don't like that but i think you're on to something and then william james the the great harvard philosopher and arguably the first academic psychologist he referred to death as the worm at the core of the human condition so that's where the worm at the core idea comes in and that's just an illusion to the story of genesis back in the proverbial old days in the garden of eden uh everything was going tremendously well until the serpent tempts eve to take a chop out of the apple of the tree of knowledge and adam partakes also and this is according to the bible what brings death into the world and from our vantage point the story of genesis is a remarkable allegorical uh recount of the origin of consciousness where we get to the point where by virtue of our vast intelligence we come to realize the inevitability of death and so uh you know the apple is beautiful and it's tasty but when you get right into the middle of it there's that ugly reality which is our finitude and then fast forward a bit and uh i was a young professor at skidmore college in 1980 um my phd is in experimental social psychology and i i mainly did studies with clinical psychologists evaluating the efficacy of non-pharmacological interventions to reduce stress and that was good work and i found it interesting but in my first week as a professor at skidmore i i'm just walking up and down the shelves of the library saw some books by a guy i had never heard of ernest becker a cultural anthropologist recently deceased he died in 1974 after um weeks before actually he was posthumously uh awarded the pulitzer prize and non-fiction for his book the denial of death and and that was his last book it's actually his next to last book i don't know how you pulled this off but he had one more after he died called escape from evil and evidently it was supposed to originally the denial of death was supposed to be this giant thousand page book that was both and they split it up and the what became escape from evil uh his wife marie becker finished well be that as it may in it is in the denial of death where becker just says it in the first paragraph i i i believe uh that the terror of death and the way that human beings respond to it or decline to respond to it is primarily responsible for almost everything we do whether we're aware of it or not and mostly we're not and so i read that first paragraph lex and i was like wow okay this dude you're on to something you're on to something it's the same thing it's the same thing and then it reminded me i think um not to play psychologists but you know let's face it i believe there's a reason why we end up drifting where we ultimately come to so i'm in my mid-20s i got ernest becker's book in my hand and the next thing i know i'm remembering uh when i'm eight years old the day that my grandmother died and you know the day before my mom said oh say goodbye to grandma she's not well and okay so i was like okay grandma and i knew she wasn't well but i didn't really appreciate the magnitude of her illness well she dies the next day and it's in the evening and i'm just sitting there looking at my stamp collection and i'm like wow i'm gonna miss my grandmother and then i'm like no wait a minute that means my mother's gonna die and after she gets old and that's even worse after all who's gonna make me dinner and that bothered me for a while but then i'm looking at the stamps all the dead american presidents and i'm like there's george washington he's dead there's thomas jefferson he's dead my mom's gonna be dead oh i'm gonna get old and be dead someday and at eight years old that was my first explicit existential crisis i remember it being you know one of these blood curdling realizations that i tried my best to ignore for the most of the time i was subsequently growing up but fast forward back to skidmore college mid-20s you know reading becker's book in the 1980s thinking to myself wow one of the reasons why i'm finding this so compelling is that it squares with my own personal experience and then to make a short story long and i'll i'll shut up lex but what what grabbed me about becker and this is in part uh because i read a lot of his other books um there's another book the birth and death of meaning uh which is framed um in from an evolutionary perspective and and then the denial of death is really more framed from an existential psychodynamic vantage point and as a a young um academic uh i was really taken by what i found to be a very potent juxtaposition that you really don't see that often yet usually evolutionary types are eager to dismiss the psychodynamic types and vice versa and maybe only john bolby you know there's there's other folks but the attachment theorist john bolby was really one of the first serious academics to say these um these ways of thinking about things are quite compatible and can you comment on what's what a psychodynamics view of the world is versus an evolutionary view of the world just in case people are not oh yeah absolutely that's that's a fine question well for the evolutionary types um in general are interested in um how it is and why it is that we have adapted to our surroundings in the service of persisting over time and being represented in the gene pool thereafter you used to be a fish yes we used to be a fish and also yeah and i ended up uh talking on a podcast yeah how we came to be that way how we came to be that way and so whereas the existential psychodynamic types i would say are more interested in development across a single lifespan and but but the evolutionary types dismiss the psychodynamic types as overly speculative and devoid of empirical support for their views well they um you know they'll just say these guys are talking shit if you'll pardon the expression and of course uh you can turn right around and say the same about the evolutionary types that they are often and rightfully criticized evolutionary psychologists for what are called the just so stories where it's like oh this is probably why fill in the blank is potentially adaptive and my thought again early on was i didn't see any um intrinsic antithesis between these viewpoints i just found them dialectically compatible and uh very powerful when combined so one question i would ask here is um about a science being speculative you know we understand so a little about the human mind you said you picked up becker's book and you know it felt like it was onto something that's the same thing i felt when i picked up becker's book uh probably also in my early 20s uh you know i read a lot of philosophy but it felt like the question of the meaning of life kind of you know this seemed to be the most uh the closest to the truth somehow it was on to something so i i guess the question that i want to ask also is like how speculative is psychology how like all of your lives work um how do you feel how confident do you feel about the whole thing about understanding our mind i feel confidently unconfident to have it both ways like what do we make of psychology you want to make starting with freud's you know starting um just just our or even just philosophy uh even uh the aspects of uh the sciences like uh you know my field of artificial intelligence but also physics you know it often feels like man we don't really understand most of what's going on here and certainly that's true with uh the human mind yeah well to me that's the proper epistemological stance i don't know anything well uh it's the socratic uh i know that i don't know which is the first step on the path to wisdom i i would argue forcefully that we know a lot more than we used to i would argue equally forcefully uh not that i have a phd in the philosophy of science but i i believe that the thomas coons of the world are right when they point out that change is not necessarily progress and so on the one hand i i do think we know a lot more than we did back in the day when if you wanted to fly you put on some wax wings and jumped off a mountain yeah on the other hand i think it's quite arrogant when scientists i'll just speak about psychological scientists um when they have the audacity to mistake statistical precision for knowledge and insight and when they make the mistake in my estimation that einstein bemoaned and that's this idea that the mere accumulation of data uh will necessarily result in conceptual breakthroughs and so i i like the um well we're all i hope appreciative of the people who trained us but i remember my first day in graduate school at the university of kansas uh they brought us into a room and on one side of the board was a quote by kurt lewin or levine famous german uh social psychologist and there was nothing and the quote is there's nothing more useful than a good theory and then on the other side was another quote by german physicist his name eludes me and it was all theories are wrong and i'm like uh which is it and of course the point is that it's both our theories are i believe powerful ways to direct our attention to aspects of human affairs that might render us better able to understand ourselves in the world around us now i also as an experimental psychologist i adhere to the view that theories are essentially hypothesis generating devices and that at its best science is a dialectical interplay where you have theoretical assertions that yield testable hypotheses and that either results in the corroboration of the theory the rejection of it or the modification thereafter if we look at the existentialists or even like uh modern philosopher psychology types like jordan peterson i'm not sure if you're familiar with it i know jordan pretty well we go way back actually if he were here with us today we would he would be jumping in and i believe very interesting and important ways but yeah we go back 30 years ago he was uh basically saying our work is nonsense let's get into this i'm sure i'll talk to jordan uh eventually on this thing yeah going through some rough times right now oh absolutely and i and i wish him well um jordan was working on his maps of meaning and we were publishing our work and i i think jordan at the time um was concerned about our vague claims to the effect that all meaning is arbitrary he takes a more jungian as well as evolutionary view that i don't think is wrong by the way which is that um there are certain kinds of meanings that are more important let's say religious types and that we didn't pay sufficient attention to that um in our early days so uh can you try to uh lose a day like what his world view is because he's also a religious man uh so what uh what was this what was uh some of the interesting aspects of the disagreements that then yeah well back in the day i just said you know jordan was a young punk uh we were young punks he was just kind of flailing in an animated way at some conferences saying that um we you're still both kind of punks yeah we are kind of punks so i saw him three or four years ago we spoke on a it was an awesome day we were in canada at uh the ontario shakespeare festival where we were asked to be on a canadian broadcast system program i think we were talking about macbeth from a psychodynamic perspective and i hadn't seen him in a ton of years and we spent two days together had a great time you know we had just written our book uh the worm at the core and he's like you know you you you're missing a big opportunity every time you say something you have to have your phone yeah and you have to film yourself and then you have to put it on youtube yeah uh he was onto something that uh you know that just as a small tangent yeah uh it's it's almost sad to look at jordan peterson somebody like yourself after having done this podcast i've realized that there is really brilliant people in this world and oftentimes especially like when they're um i mean it would love are a little bit like punks that's right they they kind of do their own thing and like the world doesn't know they exist as much as they should and it's so interesting because most people are kind of boring and then the interesting ones kind of go on their own and there's not a smartphone that's that's so interesting he was on to something that um i mean it's interesting that he i don't think he was thinking from a money perspective but he was probably thinking of like connecting with people or sharing his knowledge but uh people don't often think that way that's right so maybe we can try to get back to you're both brilliant people and i'd love to get some interesting disagreements earlier and later about in your psychological work in your world views well our disagreements today would be uh along two dimensions uh one is he is and again i wish he was here to correct me yes um when i say that he is more committed to the virtues of the judeo-christian tradition particularly christianity and in a sense is a contemporary kierkegaard of sorts when he's saying there's only one way to leap into faith and i would take ardent issue with that claim on the grounds that that is one but by no means not the only way uh to find meaning and value in life and so and i see his what's his warm at the core what is like uh so we're talking about a little bit of a higher level of discovering meaning yeah what's his uh what does he make of death oh i don't know and this is where it would be nice to uh have him here he has you know from a distance criticized our work as misguided having said that though when we were together he said something along the lines that there is no theoretical body of work in academic psychology right now for which there is more empirical evidence and so i i appreciated that he's a great uh researcher he's a good clinician the other thing that we will agree to disagree about uh rather vociferously is ultimately political slash economic so i remember being at dinner with him telling him that the next book that i wanted to write was going to be called why left and right or both beside the point and my argument was going to be and it is going to be that both liberal and political liberal and conservative political philosophy are each intellectually and morally bankrupt because they're both framed in terms of assumptions about human nature that are demonstrably false and jordan didn't mind me uh knocking liberal political philosophy on those grounds that would basically be like stephen pinker's blank slate but he took issue when i pointed out that actually it's conservative political philosophy which starts with john locke's assumption that in a state of nature there are no societies just autonomous individuals who are striving for survival that's one of the most obviously patently wrong assertions in the history of intellectual thought and locke uses that to justify his claims about the individual right to acquire unlimited amounts of property which is ultimately uh the justification for neo-liberal economics and can you look around a little bit uh what's the uh can you describe his philosophy again as view of the world sure and what uh uh neoliberal economics is yeah let me translate it in english so basically all all these days anybody who says i'm a i i'm a conservative free-market type you're following john locke and adam smith whether you're aware of it or not so here's john locke who by the way all of these guys are great so for me to appear to criticize any of these folks it is with the highest regard and also we need to understand in my estimation how important their ideas are lock is working in a time where all rule was top down by divine right and he's trying desperately to come up with a philosophical justification to shift power and autonomy to individuals and he starts in his second treatise on government 1690 or so he he just he says okay let's start with a state of nature and he's like in a state of nature there's no societies there's just individuals and in a perfect universe there wouldn't be any societies there would just be individuals who by the law of nature have a right to survive and uh in the service of survival they have the right to acquire and preserve the fruits of their own labor uh um but his point is and it's actually a good one you know he's following hobbs here he's like well the problem with that is that people are assholes and um if they would let each other alone then we would still be living in a state of nature everybody just doing what they did to get by each day but it's a whole lot easier you know if i see like an apple tree a mile away well i can go over and pick an apple but if you're 10 meters away with an apple in your hand it's a lot easier if i pick up a rock and crack your head and take the apple and his point was that the problem is that people can't be counted on to behave they will they will take each other's property moreover he argued if someone takes your property you have the right to you have the right to retribution in proportion to the degree of the magnitude of the transgression english translation if i take your apple you have the right to take an apple back you don't have the right to kill my firstborn but people being people they're apt to escalate retaliatory behavior thus creating what law called a state of war so he said in order to avoid a state of war people reluctantly give up their freedom in exchange for security they agree to obey the law and that the sole function of government is to keep domestic tranquility and to ward off foreign evasion in order to protect our right to property all right so now here's the okay property thing all right so uh lock says if you look in the bible and in nature there is no private property um but lock says well surely you if there's anything that you own it's your body and surely you have a right by nature to stay alive and then by extension anything that you do where you exert effort or labor that becomes your private property so back to the apple tree if i walk over to an apple tree that's everybody's apples until i pick one and the minute i do that is my apple right and then he says you can have as many apples as you want as long as you don't waste them and as long as you don't impinge on somebody else's right to get apples right so far so good yep and then he says well okay in the early days you you could only eat so many apples and or you could only trade so many apples with somebody else so he was like well if you put a fence around a bunch of apple trees those become your apples that's your property if somebody else wants to put a fence around nebraska that's their property and everybody can have as much property as they want because the world is so big that there is no limit to what you can have if you pursue it by virtue of your own effort but then he says money came into the picture and this is important because it's a he noticed long before anybody before the freud's of the world that money is funky because it has no intrinsic value he's like ooh look at that shiny piece of metal that actually has if you're hungry and you have a choice between a carrot and a lump of gold in the desert most people are going to go for the carrot but his point is is that uh the allure of money is that it's basically a concentrated symbol of wealth but because it doesn't spoil locke said you're entitled to have as much money as you're able to garner right then he says well the reality is is that some people are more the word that he used was industrious he said some people more industrious than others all right today we would say smarter less lazy more ambitious he just said that's natural it's also true therefore he argued uh over time some people are gonna have a whole lot of property and other people not much at all inequality for luck is natural and beneficial for everyone his argument was that you know the rising tide lifts all boats and that the truly creative and innovative are entitled to relatively unlimited worth because we're all better off as a result so the point very simply is that well that's basically and then you have adam smith the you know in the next century with the invisible hand where adam smith says everyone pursuing their own selfish that's not necessarily pejorative if everyone pursues their own selfish interests we will all be better off as a result and what do you think is the flawed in that way well there's two flaws one is is that um well one flaw is first of all that that it is based on an erroneous assumption to begin with which is that there never was a time in human history when we were in a social species in a sense you don't feel like that where there's uh this emphasis of uh individual autonomy is a flawed premise like where there's a there's something fundamentally deeply uh interconnected between us i do i think that plato and socrates uh you know in the crito were closer to the truth uh when they started with the assumption that we were interdependent and they derived individual autonomy as a manifestation of a functional social system that's fascinating so when margaret thatcher you're too young uh you know in the 1980s she said societies there's no such thing as societies there's just individuals pursuing their self-interest so uh so that's one point where i would take issue respectfully with john locke point number two is when locke says in 1690 well england's filled up um so if you want some land just go to america it's empty or maybe there's a few savages there just kill them so and and melville does the same thing in moby dick where he he thinks about will there ever come a time where we run out of whales and he says no but we have run out of whales and so locke was right maybe in 1690 that the world was large and had infinite resources he's certainly wronged today in in my opinion also wrong is the claim uh that the unlimited pursuit of personal wealth does not harm those around us there is no doubt uh that radical inequality is tragic psychologically and physically it's poverty is not that terrible it's easy for me to say because i have a place to stay and something to eat but as long as you're not starving and have a place to be poverty's not as challenging as being having the impoverished and close proximity to those who are obscenely wealthy so it's not the any absolute measure of your well-being it's the inequality of that well-being is quite frantically painful um so maybe just to uh link on the jordan peterson thing in terms of your uh disagreement on his worldview so he went through quite a bit it you know there's been quite a bit of fire right in in his defense or maybe his opposition of the idea of equality of outcomes so looking at the inequality that's in our world looking at you know certain groups measurably having an outcome that's different than other groups and then drawing conclusions about fundamental uh unfairness injustice inequality in the system so like systematic racism systematic sexism systematic anything else that creates inequality and he's been kind of uh saying pretty simple things uh to say that uh you know the system for the most part is not broken or flawed yeah that the inequalities part the um the inequality of outcomes as part of our world what we should strive for is the uh you know equality of opportunity yeah and i i do not dispute that as an abstraction but again to back up for a second i i do take issue with jordan's uh fervent devotion to the free market and his cavalier dismissal of marxist ideas which he has uh in my estimation uh mischaracterized in his public depictions let's get into it so he he just seems to really not like um uh socialism marxism communism yeah uh historically speaking sort of uh i mean how would i characterize it i'm not exactly sure i don't want to again he's yeah he'll eventually be here to defend himself john locke unfortunately not here to defend exactly but what's what's your sense uh about marxism and and uh the uh the way jordan talks about the way you think about it from the economics from the philosophical perspective yeah well like if we were all here together i'd say we need to start with marx's economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 before marx became more of a polemicist and i would argue that marx's political philosophy he's a crappy economist i don't dispute that but his arguments about human nature his arguments about the inevitably catastrophic psychological and environmental and economic effects of capitalism i would argue every one of those has proven quite right marx maybe did not have the answer but he saw in the 18 whenever he was writing um that inevitably capitalism um would lead to massive inequity that it was ultimately based on uh the need to denigrate and dehumanize labor to render them in his language a fleshy cog in a giant machine and that it would create a tension and conflict between those who own things and those who made things that over time would always you know the thomas pickerty guy who writes about capital and just makes the point that return on investment will always be greater than wages that means the people with money are going to have a lot more that means there's going to come a point where the economic house of cards falls apart now the joseph shumpters of the world they're like that's creative destruction bring it that's great so i think it's niles ferguson he was he's a historian he may be at stanford now he was at harvard you know he writes about the history of money and he's like yeah there's been 20 or whatever depressions and big recessions uh in the last several hundred years and when that happens half of the population or whatever is catastrophically inconvenienced but that's the price that we pay for progress other people would argue and i would agree with them that i will happily sacrifice the rate of progress in order to flatten the curve of economic destruction to put that in plainer english um i would um direct our attention to the social democracies that forgetting for the moment of whether it's possible to do this on a scale in a country as big as ours on all of the things that really matter you know gross domestic gdp or whatever that's just an abstraction but when you look at whatever the united nations says how we measure quality of life uh you know life expectancy education you know rates of alcoholism suicide and so on the countries that do better are the mixed economies they're market economies that have high tax rates in exchange for the provision of services that come as a right for citizens yeah so i mean i guess the question is you've kind of mentioned that uh you know like as marx described a capitalism with a slippery slope eventually things go awry in some kind of way so that's the question is when you have when you implement a system yeah how does it go wrong eventually you know the you know eventually we'll all be dead that's exactly right no no no that's right so and then the criticism i mean i think these days uh unfortunately marxism as like is a dirty word i i say unfortunately because even if you disagree with the philosophy it should you should uh like calling somebody a marxist yeah should not be a thing that uh shuts down all conversation no that's right and and the fact is i'm sympathetic with uh jordan's dismissal of the folks and popular the talking heads these days who spew marxist words um to me it's like fashionable nonsense do you know that book that the physicist wrote mocking uh you're too young so in the uh 20 or so years we're all pretty young really yeah that's right but they're i think they're with these nyu physicists they wrote a paper just mocking the uh kind of literary uh post-modern types you know yes oh those kinds of yeah yeah it was just nonsense and of course it was made the lead article um and and you know my poor is marx wouldn't be a marxist true i've read and listened to some of the work of uh richard wolff he speaks pretty eloquently about marxism i like him uh he's uh one of the only uh you know one of the only people speaking about a lot about marxism and the way we are now in in a serious way in it in a sort of saying you know uh what are the flaws of capitalism not saying like yeah basically sounding very different and people should check out his work no i it's all this kind of work this kind of outrage mob culture of uh sort of demanding equality equality of outcome that's not marxism it is not marxism he he didn't say that you know he literally said each what was it like each according to their needs and each according to their abilities or something like that so the question is the implementation like absolutely humans are messy so how does it go wrong like it just met there you go brilliant it's messy and this gets back to my rant about the book that i want to try if i don't stroke out why left and right are both beside the point you know the the people conservatives are right when they condemn liberals for being simple-minded by assuming that a modification of external conditions will yield changes in human nature you know you know again that's where marx and skinner are odd bedfellows you know here they are just saying oh let's change the surroundings and things will inevitably get better on the other hand when um conservatives say that people are innately selfish and they use that as the justification for glorifying the unbridled pursuit of wealth well they're only half right because it turns out that we can be innately selfish but we are also innately generous and reciprocating creatures there's remarkable studies i think they've been done at yale of you know babies 14 month old babies um if someone hands them a toy and then wants something in return babies before they can walk and talk will reciprocate all right fine if someone if they want a toy let's say or a bottle of water baby wants a bottle of water and i look like i'm trying to give it to the baby but i dropped the bottle so the baby doesn't get what she or he wanted when given a chance to reciprocate little babies will reciprocate because they're aware of and are responding to intention similarly if they see somebody um behaving unfairly to to someone they will not help that person in return so so my point is is yeah we are selfish creatures at times but we are also simultaneously uber social creatures who are eager to reciprocate and in fact we're congenitally prepared to be reciprocators to the point where uh we will reciprocate on the basis of intentions above and beyond what actually happened how so i mean your work is on the fundamental role of the fear of mortality yeah in ourselves how fundamental is this reciprocation this human connection to other humans well i think it's really innate yeah i think it's because yeah bats reciprocate uh not by intention but uh you know this i'm going here from richard dawkins uh the selfish gene you know to i love the early dawkins i'm less enamored like the early beat yeah no no again i say this with great respect but uh you know dawkins just points out that uh you know reciprocation is just fundamental cooperation is fundamental you know it is the it's a one-sided view of evolutionary takes on thanks when we see it solely in terms of individual competition it's it's almost from a game theoretic perspective too it's just easier to see the world that way it's it's easier to i don't know i i mean you see this in physics uh there's a whole field of folks like complexity yeah that kind of embrace the fact that it's all an intricately connected mess and it's just very difficult to do anything uh with that kind of science but it seems to be much closer to actually representing what the world is like so like you put it earlier lex it's messy so yeah left and right you mentioned you're thinking of maybe actually putting it down on paper or something yeah i would like to because what i would what i would like to point out again in admiration of all the people that i will then try and have the gall to criticize this look these are all geniuses um lock genius adam smith genius when he uses the notion that we're bartering creatures so he uses that reciprocation idea as the basis of his way of thinking about things but that's not at the core the murdering is not at the core of human nature it's not a well he says it is he says we're fundamentally bartering creatures well that doesn't even make sense then because then what how how can we then be autonomous individuals well because we're going to barter with an eye on on on for self for ourselves self yeah but all right so but back to adam smith for a second lex is like adam smith here's he's got the invisible hand and my conservative friends i'm like you need to read his books because he is a big fan of the free market and this is my other uh gripe with folks who support just unbridled markets adam smith understood that there was a role for government for two reasons one is is that just like locke people are not going to behave with integrity and he understood that one role of government is to maintain a proverbial you know even playing field and then the other thing smith said was that there's some things that can't be done well for a profit and i believe he talked about education and public health and infrastructure as things that are best done by governments uh because you can't you can make a profit but that doesn't mean that the institutions themselves will be maximally beneficial yeah so i i would uh i'm just eager to engage people by saying let's start with our most contemporary understanding of human nature which is that we are both selfish and tend to cooperate and we also can be heroically helpful to folks in our own tribe and of course how you define one's tribe becomes critically important but what some people say is look we let what would then be what kind of political institutions and what kind of economic organization can we think about to kind of hit that sweet spot and that that would be in my opinion uh how do we maximize individual autonomy in a way that fosters uh creativity and innovation and the self-regard that comes from creative expression while engaging our more cooperative and reciprocal tendencies in order to come up with a system that is potentially stable over time because the other thing about all capital-based systems is the stability is it fundamentally and unstable yeah because it's based on infinite growth and you know it's a positive feedback loop uh to be silly infinite growth is only good for malignant cancer cells and compound interest otherwise uh you know we want to seek a steady state and um that would be you know so when stephen pinker writes for example again great scholar but i'm gonna disagree when he says the world has never been better and all we need to do is keep making stuff and buying stuff so your sense is the world sort of in disagreement with stephen pinker that the world is um like facing a potential catastrophic collapse in multiple directions yes and the fact that there are certain like the the rate of violence and aggregate is decreasing the death you know the quality of life all those kinds of measures that you can plot across centuries that it's improving that doesn't capture the fact that our world might be this we might destroy ourselves in very painful ways uh in the in the in the next century so i'm with jared diamond you know in the book collapse where he points out studying um the collapse of major civilizations that it often happens right after things appear to never have been better and in that regard i mean there are more uh known voices that have taken issue uh with uh dr pinker i'm thinking of john gray who's a british philosopher and here in the states i don't know where he is these days but robert j lifton the psycho historian yeah they're both of my view and which i hope is by the way wrong uh me too yeah no but you know between um you know ongoing ethnic tensions environmental degradation economic instability and the fact that you know the world has become a petri dish of psychopathology like what what really worries me is the the quiet economic pain that people are going through the businesses that are closed your dreams that are broken because you can no longer do the thing that you've wanted to do and how i mentioned to you off camera that i've been reading uh the the rise and fall of the third reich and i mean the amount of anger and hatred and on the flip side of that sort of nationalist pride that can arise from deep economic pain like what happens with economic pain is you become bitter yeah you start to find the other whether it's other european nations that mistreated you whether it's other groups that mistreated you it always ends up being the jews uh somehow somehow our fault here yep that's what worries me is where this quiet anger and pain goes in 2021 2022 2030. if you look no sorry i'm sorry to see the parallels no no no rise and fall the third reich but you know what happens 10 15 years from now from what's because of the coved pandemic yeah that's happening now and lex you make a i think a really profoundly important point you know back to our work for a bitter ernest becker rather you know his point is is that the way that we manage existential terror is to embrace culturally constructed belief systems that give us a sense that life has meaning that we have value and in the form of self-esteem which we get from perceiving that we meet or exceed the expectations associated with the role that we play in society well here we are right now in a world where first of all if you have nothing you are nothing and secondly as you were saying before we got started today a lot of jobs are gone and they're not coming back and that's the where the self-esteem that's where the self-esteem and identity come in where people it's not only that you don't have anything to eat you don't even have a self anymore to speak of because the we typically define ourselves you know as marx put it you are what you do and now who are you when your way of life as well as your way of earning a living is no longer available yeah and it feels like that uh yearning for self-esteem that we could talk a little bit more because sure you about defining self-esteem is quite interesting the more i've read so warm with the core and just in general you're thinking it made me realize i haven't thought enough about the idea of self-esteem but the thing i want to say is uh it feels like when you lose your job then it's easy to find it's it's tempting to find that self-esteem in a tribe that's not somehow often positive that's exactly it's like a tribe that defines itself on the hatred of somebody else so that's brilliant and and this is what john gray the philosopher in the 1990s he predicted what's happening today he wrote a book about globalism and actually hannah arendt in the 1950s said the same thing in her book about totalitarianism when she said that you know that economics has reached the point where most money is made not by actually making stuff you know you use money to make money and that uh therefore what happens is money chases money across national boundaries ultimately governments become subordinate to the corporate entities whose sole function is to generate money and what john gray said is that that will inevitably produce economic upheaval in local areas which will not be attributed to the economic order it will be misattributed to who whoever the scapegoat du jour is and the anger what and the distress associated with that uncertainty uh will be picked up on by ideological demagogues who will transform that into rage so both hannah aren't as well as john gray they they just said uh watch out we're gonna have right-wingish populist movements uh where demagogues who are the alchemists of hate what makes them brilliant is they don't they don't the hate's already there but they take the fears and they expertly redirect them to who it is that i need to hate and kill in order to feel good about myself so back to your point lex that's right so the self-regard that used to come from having a job and doing it well and as a result of that having adequate resources to provide a decent life for your family well those opportunities are gone and yeah what's left so max weber german sociologist at the beginning of the 20th century um he said in times of historical upheaval um we are apt to embrace he was the one who coined the term charismatic leader right seemingly larger than life individuals who often believe or their followers believe are divinely ordained to rid the world of evil yeah all right now ernest becker he used weber's ideas in order to account for the rise of hitler hitler was elected and he was elected when germans were an extraordinary state of existential distress and he said i'm going to make germany great again all right now what becker adds to the equation is his claim that what underlies our affection for charismatic populist leaders good and bad is death anxiety all right now here's where we come in where egghead experimental researchers you know becker wrote this book the denial of death and he couldn't get a job people just dismissed these ideas as fanciful speculation for which there's no evidence and and you've done some good experiments yeah and here's where here's where i can be more cavalier and where what i would urge people i like what you said lex is ignore my histrionic and polemic language if possible and step back if you can myself included and let's just consider the the research findings because uh in september 11 2001 people that are old enough to remember that horrible day two days before um george w bush had the lowest approval rating in the history of presidential polling right three weeks later after he said we will rid the world of the evildoers and then a week or two after that he said in a cover story on time magazine that he believed that god had chosen him to lead the world during this to lead the country rather during this perilous time he had the highest approval rating and so we're like well what happened you know is what happened to americans that their approval of president bush got so high so fast well our view following becker is that 2001 was like a giant death reminder yeah the people dying plus the symbols of american greatness world trade center and and the the pentagon so we did a bunch of experiments and most of our experiments are disarmingly simple we have one group of people and we just remind them that they're going to die we say hey write your thoughts and feelings about dying or in other cases we stop them outside either in front of a funeral home or a hundred meters to either side our thought being that if we stop you in front of a funeral home then death is on your mind even if you don't know it and then there's other studies that are even more subtle where we bring people into the lab and they read stuff on a computer and while they're doing that we flash the word death for 28 milliseconds it's so fast you don't see anything and then we just measure people's reactions or behavior thereafter so what we found in 2003 leading up to the election of 2004 was that americans did not care for president bush or his policies in iraq in controlled conditions but if we reminded them of their mortality first they like bush a lot more so in every study that we did americans like john kerry who was running against bush they like carrie more than bush in a control condition yeah and but if if they were reminded of death first then they like bush a lot more so by the way just a small pause you said they're disseminally simple experiments i think that's um and people should read uh warm at the core for some other descriptions you have a lot of different experiences of this nature i think it's a brilliant experiment um connected to the stoics perhaps of uh how your world view on anything and how delicious that water tastes yes after you're reminded of your own mortality it's such a fascinating experiment that you could probably keep doing like millions of them to uh draw insight about the way we see the world no that's right lex and i appreciate the compliment not because we did anything but because what these studies many of which are now done by other people around the world in labs that we're not connected with what i'm most proud about our work i am proud of the experiments that we've done but it's not science until somebody else can replicate your findings and independent researchers are interested in in pursuing them i it's such a fascinating idea i don't have to think about a lot about the experiments you've done and that you've inspired about the fact that death changes the way you see a bunch of different things uh the i think the stoics talked about the uh i mean in general just memento mori like just thinking about death and meditating on death is a really positive not a positive it's an enlightening way to uh live life so what do you think about that at the uh and the individual level like what is the role about being bringing that terror of death fear of death to the surface and being cognizant of it for us that's the that's the ball game um so what we write in our book and here we're just um paying homage to the philosophers and theologians that come before us is to point out that literally since antiquity um there has been a consensus that to lead a full life requires um albert camus said come to terms with death thereafter anything is possible and so you've got the the stoics and you got the epicureans and then you got the tibetan book of the dead and then you got like the medieval monks that you know worked with like a skull uh on their desk and the whole idea i should back up a bit because and just remind folks that our studies you know when we remind people that they're going to die and we find that yeah they drink more water if a famous person um is is you know advertising it uh they eat more cookies they want more fancy clothes they sit closer to people that look like them it changes who they vote for but all of those things those are very subtle death reminders you don't even know that death is on your mind and so our point is is that and this is kind of counterintuitive and that is that the most problematic and unsavory human reactions to death anxiety are malignant manifestations of repressed death anxiety you know we try and bury it under the psychological bushes and then it comes back to bear bitter fruit but what the theologians and the philosophers of the world are saying is it behooves each of us to spend considerable time you don't have to be a goth death rocker you know wallowing in death imagery to spend enough time entertaining the reality of the human condition which is that you too will pass to get to the point well where there is to lapse into a cliche the capacity for personal transformation and growth let's go personal for a second uh are you yourself afraid of death yeah um i mean and how much do you meditate on that thought like uh maybe your own study of it is a kind of escape from your own mortality absolutely lex so you got it and like if you figure out death somehow you won't die so no no uh so my my colleagues and good friends jeff greenberg and tom pozinski you know we met in graduate school in the 1970s we've been doing this work for 40 years and we cheerfully admit even though it doesn't reflect well on us as humans that i should just speak for myself but i i feel like there's a real sense in which doing these studies and writing books and and lecturing has been my way of avoiding directly confronting my anxieties by turning it into an intellectual exercise and um and every once in a while therefore when i think that i'm making some progress as a human i have to remind myself that uh that is probably not the case um and that i have at times like all humans been more preoccupied with the implications of these ideas for my self-esteem uh it's like oh we're going to write a book and maybe we'll get to go on tv or something well no that's not the same as to actually think about it in a way that you feel it rather than just think it yeah no you did when you were eight that's exactly right so when i first read the denial of death i i was so literally flabbergasted by it that i took a leave of absence for a year and just like did what would be considered menial jobs i i did construction work i worked in a restaurant and i i was just like wait a minute if if i if i understand what this guy is saying then i'm just a culturally constructed meat puppet doing things for reasons that i know not yeah in order to assuage death anxiety and that's like that that that's not acceptable maybe another interesting person to talk about is ernest becker himself sure so how did he face his death is there something interesting personal i think so so interesting to me is becker also from a jewish family claimed to be atheistic did not identify ultimately as jewish i believe he converted to christianity but was himself a religious person and he said he became religious when his first child was born now religious what does that mean does he have a faith and well let's talk more most importantly is the afterlife he was his view on the afterlife he was uh agnostic on that but he did um now the denial of death is um there's a chapter devoted to kierkegaard and he talks about for kierkegaard um if you want to become a mature individual you know if you want to learn something you go to the university if you want to become a more mature individual according to kierkegaard you got to go to the unit you got to go to the school of anxiety and what kierkegaard said is that we have to let this vague dis ease put a hyphen between dis and ease about death kierkegaard's point is you have to really think about that you have to think about it and feel it you got to let it seek in or seep into your mind at which point according to kierkegaard basically you realize that your present identity is fundamentally a cultural construction you didn't choose the time and place of your birth you didn't choose your name uh you know you didn't choose necessarily even the social role that you occupy you might have chosen from what's available in your culture but not from the full palette of human opportunities and so what kierkegaard said is that we need to realize that we've been living a lie of sorts becker calls it a necessary lie and and we have to momentarily dispose of that and so now kierkegaard says well here i am i i have shrugged off all of the cultural accoutrements that i have used uh to define myself and now what am i or who am i this is like the ancient greek tragedy where the worst thing was to be no one or no thing all right at this point kierkegaard said you're really dangling on the precipice of oblivion and some people tumble into that abyss and never come out on the other hand kierkegaard said that what you can now do metaphorically and literally is to rebuild yourself from the ground up and there's a in the new testament there's something you have to die in order to be reborn and kierkegaard's view though is that there's only one way to do that this is his proverbial leap into faith and in kierkegaard's case it was faith and christianity that you can't have unbridled faith and cultural constructions the only thing that you can have unequivocal faith in is some kind of transcendent power all right but of course this raises the question of well is that just another death-denying belief system right and at the end of the denial of death becker admits that there's no way to tell while still advocating for what is ultimately a religious stance now one of the things that i don't understand and i becker has been the the most singularly potent influence in my academic and personal life but a year or two ago i i started reading uh martin heidegger i'm reading being in time and what i now wonder is why um why becker who refers to heidegger from time to time in his work why he didn't take heidegger more seriously because heidegger has this is like a secular kierkegaard he's he has the same thing which is death anxiety oh and i should have pointed out that what kierkegaard says is that death anxiety most people don't go to the school of anxiety they flee from death anxiety by embracing their cultural beliefs kierkegaard says they then tranquilize themselves with the trivial and i love that phrase it's a beautiful phrase because at the end of the denial of death backers like look the average american is either drinking or shopping or watching television and they're all the same thing right heidegger says the same thing he says look and he acknowledges kierkegaard he says what makes us feel unsettled and evidently that's an english translation of angst that that it's we don't feel at home in the world heidegger says that's death anxiety and one direction is the the kierkegaard one he heidegger calls it a flight from death you just unself reflexively cling to your cultural constructions and heidegger borrows the term tranquilized but he points out that he doesn't care for that term because tranquilized sounds like you're subdued when in fact what most culturally constructed meat puppets do is to be frenetically engaged with their surroundings to ensure that they never sit still long enough to actually think about anything consequential heidegger says there's another way though he's like yo what you can do is to come to terms with that death anxiety in the following way thing number one is to realize that not only are you going to die but your death can happen at any given moment so for heidegger if you say i know i'm going to die in some vaguely unspecified future moment that's still death denial because you're saying yeah not me not now yeah heidegger's point is you need to get to the point where you need to realize that uh you know i need to realize that i can walk outside and get smote by a comet or i can stop for gas on the way home and catch the virus and be dead in two days there were any number of potentially unanticipated and uncontrollable fatal outcomes but by the way sorry uh uh to bring into the now yeah it is brilliant i agree lex and this is why i'm i'm i'm wondering why didn't becker notice this because that's the being and time thing is it's got to be now right and then he says so okay so now i've dealt somewhat uh with the the death part and now he says now you've got to deal with what he calls existential guilt and he says well all right what you have to you have to realize that like it or not you have to make choices you know this is jean-paul sartre we are condemned by virtue of consciousness to choosing but heidegger is a little bit more precise he's like look as i was saying earlier you're in reality you're an insignificant speck of respiring carbon-based dust borne into a time and place not of your choosing when you're here for a microscopic amount of time after which you are not and for heidegger you have to realize that like i said i didn't choose to be born a male or jewish or in america the offspring of working class people and heidegger what he says is yeah but you still have to make choices and accept responsibility for those choices even though you didn't choose any of the parameters that ultimately limit what's available to you and moreover you're going to not always make good choices so now you're you're guilty for your choices and then he uses the the poet uh rilka he has a phrase becker uses it in the denial of death the guilt of unlived life i just love that you have to accept that you have already diminished and in many ways amputated your own possibilities by virtue of choices that you've made or just as often have declined to make uh because you are reluctant to accept responsibility for uh for the opportunities that you are now able to create by virtue of seeing the possibilities that lay before you so anyway heidegger then says look okay so uh you know i'm a professor and i live in america in the 21st century well if i was in the third century living in a year in mongolia i'm not going to have an opportunity to be a professor but what he submits is that there is some aspects of whatever i am that are independent of my cultural and historical circumstances in other words there is a me of sorts heidegger would take vigorous issues so would heidegger scholars because i'm not claiming to understand him this is my classic comic book rendering but heidegger's point is that you get to the point where you're able to say okay i am a contingent historical and cultural artifact but so what you know if i was you know now if i was transported a thousand years in the past in asia i'd be in the same situation i would still be conditioned by time and place i would still have choices that i could make within the confines of what opportunities are afforded to me and then heidegger says if i can get that far in this is his language he says that there is a transformation and he literally he calls it a turning you're turning away from a flight from death and you are allowed you therefore you see a horizon as his word of opportunity that makes you in a state of anticipatory resoluteness with solicitous regard for others that makes your life seem like an adventure perfused with unshakable joy all right let me unpack those things it is beautiful it is i love lex that you're resonating to the time thing so he's like okay we already talked about now anticipatory is is already hopeful because it's looking forward yeah right to be resolute it it means to be steadfast and and to just have confidence in what you're doing moving forward all right solicitous i had to look up all these words by the way is it just means that you are concerned about your fellow human beings and but i love the idea uh even if it seems allegorical i don't mind that at all this idea you said love earlier and i think that when heidegger is talking about being solicitous that's as close as he can get uh there's an italian yes uh sergeant job well so what was that line again with the solicitors of that okay all the words you said are just beautiful i love those words yeah anticipatory resoluteness that is accompanied with solicitous regard to our fellow humans which makes life appear to us to be an ongoing adventure that is permeated by unshakeable joy now again heidegger is not mary poppins this guy's got a tattoo uh no this is great i i just love that exact quote no i'm piecing together these are his exact words that and i spent the last two years reading almost everything that i can find because i want to i'm sick of death you said it so i want to second what you say lex so it's not about death it's the sherwood anderson guy he's a novelist that i like about uh he wrote a book called winesburg ohio and uh now i'm going to forget what he said on his tombstone but you know it was something to the effect oh he said life not death is the great adventure the the point being is that you know to consider that we must die and the existential implications of that really the goal the way i see it is getting from hate to to love yeah and i feel like heidegger has a way of thinking about things that moves us more in that direction and so that's kind of my current preoccupation is to take what i just said to you and to talk about it with my colleagues and other academic psychologists because the way we started with ernest becker remember i said earlier i wasn't trained in any of these things i'm an egghead researcher that was doing experiments about biofeedback and you know then we read these becker books and i thought they were so interesting that for the first few years we didn't have any studies i just would travel around and i'd be like here's what this becker guy says i think this is cool well my my present view is i'm like here's what this heidegger guy says i i think these ideas are consistent with what becker is saying because they are anchored in death anxiety but i like that direction as an alternative to the kierkegaardian insistence that the only psychologically tenable way to extricate ourselves uh from uh maladaptive reactions to death anxiety is through faith in the traditional sense yeah i i always kind of uh saw kierkegaard unfairly like you said in a comic book sense uh of the word faith as a non-traditional sense i kind of like the idea of leap of faith oh i love that idea and so what i've been babbling about with you know kierkegaard or heidegger you know i'm like yeah kierkegaard is a leap of faith in god heidegger is a leap of faith in life and i i just yeah i like it i found the leap of faith really interesting and so in the technological space so of um i've i've talked to on this thing with elon musk but i think he's also just in general for our culture a really important figure oh absolutely that takes uh i mean he's sometimes a little bit insane on on social media and just in life when i met him was kind of interesting that uh of course there's a i mean he's a legit engineer so he's fun to talk to about the technical things yeah but he also just just the way the humor and the way he sees life it just like refuses to be conventional yeah so it's a constant uh leap into the unknown and one of the things that he does and this doesn't even this isn't even like fake a lot of people say because he's a ceo there's a business owner so he's trying to make money no i think this is this is as i looked him in in his eyes i mean this is real is a lot of the things he believes that are going to be accomplished that a lot of others are saying are impossible like autonomous vehicles he truly believes it to me that is the leap of faith of on what was going like we're like the the entirety of our experience is shrouded in mystery yeah we don't know what the hell's gonna happen what you don't know what we're actually capable of as human beings and he just takes the leap he fully believes that we can you know we can go to we can colonize mars i mean how could how crazy is it to just believe and dream and actually be taking steps towards it yeah um to colonizing mars when most people are like that's the stupidest idea ever yeah well i'm i'm in agreement with you on that um you know two things you know one is it reminds me of ben franklin who in his autobiography you know has a similarly childish in the best sense of the word um unbridled imagination for what might become you know ben franklin's like yeah i i got electricity that's cool but we'll be levitating soon and i we can't even begin to imagine uh what we are capable of and of course people are like dude that's crazy and there's a guy let's it's fcs schiller some humanistic guy at the beginning of the 20th century he's like you know um lots of things that people think about may appear to be absurd to the point of obscene but the reality is historically every fantastic innovation has generally been initiated by someone who was condemned for being a lunatic and it's not that anything is possible but surely things that we don't try will never manifest as possibilities yeah and that's that's uh that there's something beautiful to that that's the uh embracing the abyss and again it's like the uh it's the uh embracing the fear of death the the the reality of death and then turning and to look at all the opportunities that's right let me ask you whenever i bring up ernest becker's work which i do and yours quite a bit i find it surprising how that it's not a lot more popular in the sense that uh no not i don't mean just your book yeah uh that's well written people should read it should buy it whatever uh i think it has the same kind of qualities that are useful to think about as like jordan peterson's work and stuff like that but i i just mean like why people uh are not don't think of that as a compelling description of uh the core of the human condition like i think what you mentioned about heidegger is quite connects with me quite well so i ask on this podcast i often ask people if they're afraid of death that's like almost every single part i almost always get criticized for asking world-class people scientists and technologists and about fear of death and the meaning of life and on the fear of death they often like don't say anything interesting what i mean by that is they haven't thought deeply about it like what yeah you kind of brought this up a few times of really letting it sink in yeah they kind of say this thing about what exactly you said which is like uh it's something that happens not today like i'm aware that it's something that happens yeah and i'm not the the thing they usually say is i'm not afraid of death i just want to live a good life kind of thing yeah and what i'm trying to express is like when i look in their eyes and the kind of the the core of the conversation it looks like they haven't really become like they haven't really meditated on death i guess the question is um what do i say to people that there's something to really think about here like there's some demons some realities that need to be faced yeah by more people well that's a tough one you know i could tell you what not to do you know so when we are young and annoying yeah um a lot of famous people mostly psychologists because that's who we intersected with that you know we would lay out these ideas and they would be well i don't think about death like that so these ideas must be wrong and we would say well you don't think about death because you're lucky enough to be comfortably ensconced in a cultural world view from which you derive self-esteem and that has it's spared you the existential excruciations that would otherwise arise but that's like freud you know you're repressing so you either agree with me in which case i'm right or you disagree with me in which case you're repressing and i'm right well so that that's the the the nietzsche thing i what i felt when i've there'd been a moment in my life moments in my life when i really thought about death i mean there's not too many like really really thought about it and feel the thing when you felt that eight maybe i'm traumatizing or romanticizing it but uh i feel like it's uh uh the conservatives call it popular like or the movie matrix call it the red pill yeah moment uh i feel like it's a dangerous thought because um i feel like i'm taking a step out of a society like there's a nice narrative that we've all constructed you are and i'm taking a step out and uh it feels there's this feeling like you're basically droughting i mean it's not a good feeling it is not but this gets back to the heidegger kierkegaard school of anxiety you are stepping out yeah and you are momentarily shrugging off the the again the culturally constructed psychological accoutrements that allow you to stand up in the morning and so i mean if that in that sense it feels like i mean uh what do you uh how do you have that conversation because i guess i i i'm dancing around a set of questions which is like i guess i'm disappointed that people don't are not uh as willing to step outside like uh even just uh even any kind of thought experiment yeah let's just forget uh denial death like um there's there's not a community of people let's to take an easy one that i think is scientifically ridiculous which is there's a community people that believe that uh the earth is flat yeah or actually even even better the space is fake yeah uh like what i find surprising is that a lot of people i talk to are not willing to uh be like imagine if it is like imagine the earth is flat like think about it right a lot of people just like no the earth is round they they're like uh like scientists yeah too they're like yes well actually wait have you actually like thought about it like imagine like a thought experiment that like basically step outside the little narrative that we are comfortable with now that one in particular is has a really strong uh evidence uh and scientific validation so on it's pretty simple thing to show that it at least is not flat uh but just the willingness to take a step outside of the stories that bring us comfort it's uh been disappointing that people are not willing to do that yeah and i think uh the philosophy that you've constructed and that ernest beck is constructed and you've tested i think it's really compelling and the fact that people aren't often willing to take that step yeah disappointing well yes but perhaps understandable i mean one of this is an anecdote of course but when we were trying to get a publisher for our book um i had him we had a meeting with um a publisher who published some malcolm gladwell books yeah and she said i'm very interested in your book but can you write it without mentioning death because people don't like death and we're like now it's really kind of central um and i think that's part of it i think again if these ideas have merit and i actually like the way that you put it lex it's that to step away is to momentarily expose yourself to all of the anxiety yeah that our identity and our beliefs typically enable us to manage i think it's as simple as that yeah i i had this experience um in college with my best friend uh who got really high uh and he forgot it was uh in the winter it was really freezing it was memorable to me i think it's an analogy very useful uh so he went to get some pizza and of course and uh he so i and he left me outside and said i'll be back in five minutes and he forgot that he left me outside and i remember it was i was in like shorts yeah it was freezing winter wow and i remember standing outside it's a dorm and i'm looking from the outside in it's a light and it's warm and i'm just standing there frozen i think for an hour or more and i that's how i think about it like i just i don't give a damn about the stupid winter or any i just want to i'd like it's like a i'm drawn to be back to the warm yeah and that's how i feel about thinking about like death it's like yeah at a certain point it's like it's too much it's like that cold i like i want to be back into the warmth back you know getting back to heidegger for a moment i i like the yeah he uses a lot the idea of feeling at home uh not as like in your house but just feeling like you're comfortably situated maybe you could talk about like i had a conversation about this with my dad a little bit um how does uh religion relate to this i see it as the the disease and the cure um in in a sense um a few things um one is that i think a case could be made that humans are innately religious uh so now we're going to get into territory where there's going to be a lot of disputes um and by what do you mean by religious the religion is an evolutionary adaptation and religion is like a belief in something outside of yourself kind of thing not necessarily so here we got to be a little bit more careful um and again i'm not a scholar how about i'm a well-intentioned dilettante in this in this regard yeah because what what i have read is that religion um evolved very early on long before our ancestors were conscious and the issue of death arose um and that um the word religion evidently is from a latin word regatta we can look it up but and it means to bind and emil durkheim the dead french sociologist he said you know originally religion is a darce lassen who's a dead novelist she calls it the substance of we feeling that it's literally that it arose because we're uber social creatures who from time to time took comfort in just being in physical proximity with our fellow humans and that there is this kind of sense of transcendent exuberance just back to the unshakable joy that heidegger alludes to and that the original function of religion was to foster social cohesion and coordination and that it was only subsequently some claim that a burgeoning level of consciousness made it such that religious belief systems that included the hope of some kind of immortality were just naturally selected thereafter so there are some people so it's david sloane wilson wrote a book called darwin's cathedral and he said religion has nothing to do with death it's a it evolved to make groups viable he's actually a group selection guy what's group selection um the idea that um it's the group that is selected for rather than individual yeah so people have vigorous disagreements about that but i guess our point would be we see religion as being inextricable inextricably connected ultimately to assuaging concerns about death well i guess another question to ask around this uh like what what does the world look like without religion will we if it's uh an extrapolate inextricably connected uh to our fears of death do you think it always returns in some kind of shape maybe it's not called religion but whatever it just keeps returning yeah who knows so that's a that's a great question alex so this woman named karen armstrong she was a non-turned historian and she's i can't remember the name of the book but no matter she we could look that up but if you want i can look it up but i can also i'll just yeah add it to me okay yeah her point it has god in the title of course but you know she's like look all religions are generally fairly right-minded in that they advocate the golden rule and all religions at their best do seem to foster pro-social behavior towards the in-group and that confers both psychological as well as physical benefits that's the good news and the bad news is historically all religions are subject to being hijacked by a lunatic french who declares that you know they're the ones in sole possession of the liturgical practices or whatever they call them and they're the ones that turn you know religion at its best into your crusades and holocausts my view not that it should matter for much but i i'm i grew up just skeptical of religion because i'm like as a kid i'm like well if we didn't have these beliefs we wouldn't be killing each other right because of them and i'd be like to my parents well you're telling me that all people should be judged on the merits of their character but don't come home if you don't marry a jewish woman right which is implying that if you're not jewish you're an inferior form of life yeah that's what tribes always do yeah and there's the tribal thing and so there's a guy named amin malouf a lebanese guy who writes in french who in the 1990s i think wrote a book called in the name of identity violence and the need to belong and that was his point is unless we can overcome this tribal mentality this will not end well but but you said earlier something lex that i think is profound and profoundly important and that is you did not recoil in horror when i mentioned kierkegaard's use of the term faith and so i'm a big fan of faith and i'm not sure what that implies i i have and by the way this is just a peripheral comment but i find less resistance to becker's ideas and our work when i'm in like jesuit schools you know it's the americans that you know the secular humanists who are most disinclined to accept these ideas it's an important side comment because uh i think it's mostly because they don't think philosophically that's i mean i speak with a lot of scientists and um i think that's my main uh criticism is is you don't i mean that's the problem with science exactly is it's so comforting to focus in on the details that you can escape thinking about the mystery of it all the big picture things the philosophical like the fact that you don't actually know shit at all like that that uh that that yeah so that in terms of jesuit like that's yeah that's the beauty of uh the experience of faith and so on is like uh how wherever that journey takes you is you you actually explore the biggest questions of our world yeah yeah so i don't see religion going away because i don't see humans as capable of surviving without faith and hope and everyone from the pope to elon musk will acknowledge that it is a world that is unfathomably mysterious and like it or not in the absence of beliefs here i'm charles purse the pragmatic philosopher he just said beliefs are the basis of action if you don't have any beliefs you're paralyzed with indecision whether we're aware of it or not whether we like it or not in order to stand up in the morning you have to subscribe to beliefs that can never be unequivocally proven right or wrong well then why do you maintain them well ultimately it's because of some form of faith but also also faith shouldn't be a dogmatic thing that uh you should always be leaping yeah i guess uh the problem with science or with religion is uh you could sort of uh all of a sudden take a step into a place where you're super confident that you know the absolute truth of things there you go and again back to socrates plato back in the cave uh you know at skidmore where i work that's what i have the students read in their first week you know and plato's like oh look at all those poor bastards you know they're in the cave but they don't know it you know and then they are freed from their chains and they have to be dragged out of the cave by the way which is another interesting point they don't run out uh but that gets back to why people don't like to be divested of their comfortable illusions but anyway they get dragged out of the cave into the sunlight which he claims is a representation of truth and beauty and i say to the students well what's wrong with that and they're like nothing that's like awesome and then i'm like yo dudes you out of the cave but how do you know that you're not in another cave the illumination may be better right but the minute you think you're at the end of the proverbial intellectual slash epistemological trail then you have already succumbed to either laziness or dogmatism or both that's really well put that's both terrifying and exciting that we're always it's uh there's always a bigger cave a little bit of an outdoor question but i think some of the interesting qualities of the human mind is the ideas of intelligence and consciousness so what do you make of consciousness so do you think death creates consciousness like the fear of death the terror of death creates consciousness and um consciousness in turn magnifies the terror of death i do um i i think what is consciousness to you oh don't ask me that so now if i could answer that you know i'd be chugging rum out of a coconut with my nobel prize that um you know it's literally you know stephen pinker i do agree with his claim and i think how the mind works that it is the key question for the psychological sciences broadly defined in the 21st century what is conscious yeah what is consciousness and i don't think it's an epi phenomenological afterthought so a lot of people i think dan wagner at harvard uh a lot of folks consider it just the ass end of a process that by the time we are aware of what it is it's just basically an integrated rendering of something that's already happened you know evidently the there's a half-second delay between when something happens you know those studies and our awareness of it um um yeah and that's where like ideas of free will will step in yeah you can explain away a lot of stuff and i think those are all important and interesting questions uh i'm of the persuasion i mean even not even but the dawkins in the selfish gene um is very thoughtful actually in a lot of it's actually more in notes than in the text of the book but he's just like it's hard for me to imagine that consciousness doesn't have some sort of important and highly adaptive function and what dawkins says is he thought about it in terms of just the that we can do mental simulations that uh one possibly extraordinary product of consciousness is to rather than find out often um by adverse consequences through trying something would be to run mental simulations and so one possibility is that consciousness is highly adaptive another possibility is uh nicholas humphrey a british dude who wrote a book about i think it's called regaining consciousness and he hypothesized i think this 1980s maybe even earlier the consciousness arose as a way to better predict the behavior of others in social settings that by knowing how i feel makes me better able to know how you may be feeling this like the rudiments of a theory of mind and that it really may not have had anything to do with intelligence so much as social intelligence right so so in that sense consciousness is a social construct like yes it's just a useful thing for us interacting with other humans yeah i don't know so but there seems to be something um about realizing your own mortality that's somehow intricately connected to the idea of consciousness well i think so also so this is where um and and nietzsche um he said a solitary creature would not need consciousness oh what do you think well i don't know what i think about that but what i do and then he goes on to say that consciousness is the most calamitous stupidity by which we shall someday perish and wow i was like dude relax [Laughter] but so what if you say you were on an island alone and you saw a reflection of yourself in in the water uh like if you were alone your whole life yeah great question his view nietzsche's view would be that your thoughts of yourself would never come to mind i don't know how i feel about that though in a sense this sounds weird but in a sense i feel like my mental conversation has always been with death it's almost like another you know um another notion like um you know there's these visualizations of yeah of a death in the cloak like i always felt like i am a living thing and then there's an other thing that is the end of me and i'm having like a conversation with that so in the sense that's uh that's the way i construct my the fact that i am a thing is because there's somebody else that tells me well you won't be a thing uh eventually wow so it feels like a conversation uh perhaps but that's uh that might be kind of this mental stimulation kind of idea that you're you're kind of it's not really it's a conversation with yourself essentially sure yeah but yeah i don't know how i feel about that but i i tend to be in agreement with you when we're talking about economics more so that uh that we're deeply social beings like everything the way it just feels like we're humans i'm i'm with uh a harare with the sapiens that we're kind of we seem to construct ideas on top of each other and that's a fundamentally a social process absolutely i think that's a fine book it overlaps considerably with our take on these matters and the fact that we get to these points drawing on different sources i think makes me more confident that it's so it's so fascinating just like reading your book i'm sorry on a small tangent uh that sapiens is like one of the most popular books in the world like yeah and it's reading your book it's like well this sounds yeah i mean like i don't know i don't know what makes a popular book yeah well if you want me to be petty and stupid i will tell you that from time to time um we also wonder um why our book you know like all books people um can take issue with it but we thought it would be a bigger hit that would be more widely read it's funny because i i've um i don't know if i have good examples because i forgot already but i'm often saddened by like franz kafka i think he wasn't known in his life yeah but i always wonder like these great yep like some of the greatest books ever written are completely unknown during the other lifetime and it's like man for some reason that it's again this that identity thing i think oh man that sucks well i'm comforted by that so van gogh sold one painting in his life and evidently uh thoreau sold like 75 copies of walden uh nietzsche's books did not sell well and how did ernest beck herself he he is the uh his books are published by the free press and have sold more than any other books um that they have published so so what does that mean it's a lot i i don't know if it's like jordan peterson millions but it's hundreds of thousands was he respected i just don't see him i okay yeah uh i don't see him brought up as a like in the top 10 philosophers of no not at all so how far away is he is he in the top 100 for people i don't think so like he doesn't he's not brought up that often because again like your work is brought up more often yeah like term like because i think it gotten yeah yeah i mean i think he's one of the great philosophers of the 20th century so what what we say lex is that our goal certainly when we first started and now just as much actually but what i say at all my talks is look if these ideas have interest you enough to go read ernest becker then this has been good i consider him to be one of the most important voices of the 20th century who does not get the attention that he deserves all right similarly our work i believe to be important because point by point we provide empirical corroboration for all of the claims if you know when um that so that's literally the students that read the denial of death and then escape from evil they're like yeah wow every chapter of the book you have studies and i'm like yeah because for 40 years if a skimmer student said oh that's got to be bullshit i'm like well let's do a study let's do a study and my own dreams are in creating uh robots and artificial intelligence systems that a human can love and i think there's something about uh mortality and fear mortality that is essential for implementing in our ai systems yeah and so maybe can you comment on that like well uh on uh so this is this is a different perspective on on your work sure which is like how do we engineer a human yeah so no this is awesome lex i'm delighted that you said that first of all and i may mention this to you and i don't i can't remember because i'm seen out when you first contacted me yeah i had just been told i have to learn more about your work because i'm working with some very talented people in new york and they're they're writing a screenplay uh for a movie about an artificial intelligence it's a female a.i set in like 30 years in the future and basically the little twist this is how i had to read heidegger so these people call me and they're like we're making a movie it's based on becker and your work and heidegger and this other philosopher levinos and then another philosopher sylvia benso who's an italian philosopher and the long short story is the movie is about supposedly the most advanced artificial intelligence entity an embodied one and who human form human form who finds out who is having uh having essentially existential anxieties and the i think the project is called a dinner with her or something and it doesn't really matter but the punch line is that she finds out that her creator has made her mortal and so the question is what happens phenomenologically and behaviorally to an artificial intelligence who now knows that it's mortal and it's actually the same question that you're posing yeah and that is is that necessary in order for an ai to approximate humanity yeah i think yeah so the intuition again it's uh it's unknown but i think it's absolutely i think it's absolutely necessary um a lot of people this the same kind of shallow thinking that people have about our own end of life our own death is the same way people think of i think about artificial intelligence it's like well okay so yeah so within the system there's a there's a terminal position where like there's there's a there's a point which it ends you just the program ends uh there's a goal state there's a you reach the end point but the thing is uh making that end a thing that's also within the program like like the making the thing like and then it's also the mystery of it so the thing is we don't know what the hell this death thing is i mean it's not like um it's not like we i mean the program doesn't give us information about the meaning of it all exactly and the that's where the terror is i and and i it feels like i mean uh in the language that you you would think about is um is the terror of this death or like anticipation of it or thinking about it is the creative force that builds everything right and that feels like uh you know that feels really important to implement again very difficult to know how to do technically currently but it's important to think about what i find is you mentioned like screenplays and so on is sci-fi folks and uh philosophers are the the only ones thinking about it currently and that's what these folks have convinced me yeah and engineers aren't which is uh i get yeah most of the most most of the things i talk about i get kind of um people roll their eyes from the engineering person not these folks that they're like because like again i saw your name and they're like wait a minute i've just seen that they're like here's someone you should check out yeah so this was a delightful confluence yeah i was a huge fan of um your work and ernest becker and um it's funny that not enough people are uh talking about it yeah i don't know what to do with that i think that there's a possibility to create real deep meaningful connections between ai systems and humans absolutely and um i think some of these things the fear mortality are essential that are essential for the element of human experience i don't i don't think it might be essential to create general intelligence like very intelligent machines but to create a machine that connects to a human in some deep way what's your view not to make me the interviewer but what's your view about um machine ethics can you imagine an ethical ai without some semblance of yeah that's a finitude let's say well i i think ethics uh it's a you know there's a there's a trolley problem that's often used in the work that i've done my team yeah with uh with autonomous vehicles in particular oh yeah yeah uh that people i think they offload they ask like how would a machine deal with an ethical situation that they themselves humans don't know how to deal exactly and so i don't know if a machine is able to uh do a better job on difficult ethical questions but i certainly think to behave properly and effectively in this world it needs to be uh have a fear of mortality and like be able to even dance because i don't think you can solve ethical problems but you have to uh i think like ethics is like a dance floor you have to just you have to uh dance properly with the rest of the humans like if people are dancing tango you have to dance in the same kind of way and for that you have to have a fear of mortality like i think of uh more practically speaking like i said autonomous vehicles like the way you interact with pedestrians fundamentally has to have a sense of mortality so uh when pedestrians crossed the road and now i've watched well certainly 100 plus hours of pedestrian videos there's a kind of social uh contract where you walk in front of a car and you're putting your life in the hands of another human being that's right and like death is is uh is in the car in the game that's being played death is right there uh it's part of the calculus it's not but it's not like a simple calculator it's not a simple equation it's uh it's an s it's a i mean i don't know what it is but it's it's in the it's in there and uh it has to be part of the optimization problem like it's not as simple as so from the computer vision from the artificial intelligence perspective it's detecting there's a human estimating right estimating the trajectory like treating everything like it's a billiard balls as opposed to like being able to construct an effective model the world model of the what the person's thinking what they're going to do what are the different possibilities of how the scene might evolve i think requires having some sense of yeah fear of fear of mortality of mortality i don't see the thing is i think it's really important to think about i i can be honest enough to say that it's i haven't been able to figure out how to engineer any of these things right uh but i do think it's really really important like i have uh so i have a bunch of roombas here i can show it to you after uh that i have roombas as a robot that has um vacuums the floor and i've had them um make different sounds like i had them scream in pain and it it it you immediately anthropomorphized absolutely and it creates uh i don't know knowing that they can feel pain but see i'm i'm speaking like knowing uh that i immediately imagine that they can feel pain and it means it immediately draws me closer to them yes at the human experience and that there's there's something in that that should be engineered in our in our systems it feels like i i believe personally i don't know what you think but uh i believe it's possible for a robot and a human to fall in love for example in the in the future oh i think it's yeah it's already there no there's a certain kind of deep connection with technology yeah in a real like you would choose to marry um i mean again it sounds uh i'll find a book title and i'll send it to you and it's a serious consideration of people who started out with these sex dolls but it turned into a relationship of enduring significance that the woman who wrote the book is not willing to dismiss as a perversion yeah that's what uh you know people kind of joke about sex robots which is funny uh like it's a it's a funny i mean there's a lot of stuff about robots it's just kind of fun to talk about that is it's not necessarily connected to reality uh people joke about sex robots but if you actually look how sex robots which are pretty rare these days are used they're not used by people who want sex especially they're actually uh they're companions they're compared they become companions yeah baby it's uh yeah it's fascinating and they're just we're not even talking about any kind of intelligence we're talking about just i mean human beings see companionships we're deeply lonely i mean that's the other sense i have that i don't know if i can articulate clearly you can probably do a better job but i have a sense that there's a deep loneliness within all of us absolutely in the face of death it feels like we're alone so you know the what drew me to the existential take on things lex was the uh who is it rallo may and irwin yalum right about existentialism and they're like look it what there's different flavors of existentialism but they all have in common what is it four universal concerns the overriding one is about death and that next is choice and responsibility the next one is existential isolation and they're like that's one of the things about consciousness that and the last one is meaninglessness but the existential isolation point is you know we are by virtue of consciousness able to apprehend that unless you're a siamese twin you are fundamentally alone and because it is claimed it's eric fromm uh in a book called escape from freedom he's like look you you're smart enough to know that the most direct way that we typically communicate with our fellow human beings is through language but you also know that language is a pale shadow of the totality of our interior phenomenological existence therefore there's always going to be times in our lives where even under the best of circumstances you could be trying desperately to convey your thoughts and feelings and somebody listening could be like yeah i get it i get it i get it and you're like you have no fucking idea what i'm talking about yeah so you can be desperately lonely in a house where you live with 10 people in the middle of tokyo where there's millions yeah yeah it's the great gatsby yeah you could be alone precisely exactly maybe this is a small tangent but let me ask you on the topic of academia you're kind of uh we talked about jordan peterson there's a lot of sort of renegade type of thinkers uh certainly in psychology but it applies in all disciplines of what are your thoughts about academia being a place to uh harbor people like yourself that you know people who think deeply about things who are not constrained by sort of the who i don't think you're quite controversial no not really but you are a person who thinks deeply about things and it feels like academia can sometimes stifle that i think so so my concern right now lex for young scholars is that um the restrictions and expectations are such that it's highly unlikely that anybody will do anything of great value or innovation except for and this is not a bad thing but stepwise improvement of existing paradigms so the you know in simple english you know i went to princeton for a job interview 40 years ago and they're like what are you gonna do if we give you a job and i'm like i don't know i want to think about it and read and um and i i saw that that interview was over the window of opportunity shut in my face and they actually called my mentors and they're like what are you doing tell this guy to buy some pants i had hair down to my waist also it's like this guy looks like charles manson of jesus but the expectation is that you come to a post you know you start publishing so that you can get grants that's certainly true but there's also kind of a behavioral thing you said like long hair there's uh there's a certain style of the way you're supposed to behave for example like i'm wearing a suit it sounds con it sounds weird but i feel comfortable in this you know i wore it like when i was teaching at mit i wore it sure uh warranty meetings and so on the different uh sometimes a blue and red tie but like that was an outsider thing to do at mit so like there was a strong pressure to not wear a suit no that's right it's and there's a pressure to behave to have a hair thing no that's right the way you wear your hair the way you uh this isn't like a liberal or a level anything he's just the pr in tribes that's right and academia to me or a place any place that dreams of having like renegade free thinkers like really deep thinkers should in fact like glorify the outsider right yeah should welcome just should welcome uh you know uh people that don't fit in yeah no that sounds weird but i don't know i could just imagine an interview with at princeton you know like i imagine why aren't people why aren't you at uh harvard for example or mit um yeah well so that look i would love to uh you know i i haven't lectured at mit but i've lectured at harvard i i i've gotten to lecture at almost every place that wouldn't consider me for a job yeah and i um well a few things i'm lucky because i you know i go to princeton and i'm like i don't know what i want to do and then two days later i go to skidmore and i'm like i don't know what i want to do and they offered me a job later that day which i declined for months because of the extraordinary pressure of my mentors who right-mindedly felt that i wouldn't get much done there and but what they told me at skidmore was take your time you know show up for your classes and don't molest barnyard animals and you'll probably get tenure and i'm like i'll show up for my classes we'll talk it was that was the negotiation yeah i negotiated i drove a hard bargain but but honestly lex that's i feel i'm very committed to skidmore because i i was given tenure when our first terror management paper wasn't published it took eight years to publish it was rejected at every journal and i submitted it as like a purple ditto sheet thing i'm like here's what i've been doing here's the reviews here's why i think this is still a pretty good idea and i don't know that this would happen even at skidmore anymore but i i was very lucky to be given the latitude and to be encouraged i i took classes at skidmore that's how i learned all this stuff i i graduated i got a phd unscathed by knowledge we were great statisticians and methodologists but we didn't have any substance you know i and i don't mean this cynically but we were trained in a method in search of a question so i appreciate having five years at skidmore basically to read books and i also appreciate that i look like this 40 years ago and my view is that this is how i comported myself other people might the guy i learned the most from at skidmore is now dead a history professor ted kuroda he wore a bow tie and there's another guy darnell rucker who taught me about philosophy and he was very proper and he had like his jacket with like the leather patches but these guys weren't pompous at all they were this is the way i am and i always felt that that's important that somebody who looks at you and says oh what a stiff he's probably an mba yeah well they're wrong yeah and someone who looks at me when i first got to skidmore other professors would ask when i'd be coming to their office to empty the garbage they just assumed you know i was in my 20s they assumed i was housekeeping i always felt that was important that the students learned not to judge an idea by the appearance of the person who pervades it and yeah i mean that's uh i i guess this is such a high concern now because i personally still have faith that academia is where the great geniuses will come from i do too and great ideas i love hearing you say that i i still and it's one of the reasons why um really apprehensive about the future of education right now in the context of the pandemic i um oh yeah is that a lot of folks i need a lot of these are google type people who i don't you know they're geniuses also but i don't like this idea that all learning can be virtual and that much could happen i'm big on embodied environments with actual humans yeah they're interacting i mean there's there's so much to the university education but i think the key part that i is the the mentorship that occurs somehow and at the human level like i've gotten a lot of flack like this conversation we're in in person now and i've uh even with edward snow snowden who done all interviews remote i'm a stickler to in person it has to be in person like and a lot of people just don't get it they're like well why can't this is so much easier like why go through the pain like i've traveled i'm traveling in the next month to paris for a single stupid conversation nobody cares about just to be in person well it's important to me i i honestly i was like this and thank you for coming down today well it's my pleasure but again very self-serving i've enjoyed this i knew i was going to but it's not about our enjoyment per se again at the risk of sounding cavalier there are a host of factors beyond verbal yeah that i don't believe can be adequately captured i don't care how much the acuity is decent on a zoom conversation i i feel again i i felt within five minutes that this was gonna be for me easy in the sense that i could speak freely i just don't see that happening so easily from a distance yeah i i tend to well i'm hopeful uh i agree with you on the current technology but i am hopeful unlike some others on the technology eventually being able to create that kind of experience oh i think we're quite far away from that but yeah it might be able my hope is i'm you know i'm i'm hopeful i was at microsoft in seattle and i can't remember why and no i i can't i i that's how i'm in my early mr magoo phase and and somebody there was showing us like a virtual wall where the entire wall you know when you're talking to somebody so it's life-size and they were beginning the get the appearance of motion and stuff it looked pretty yeah with virtual reality too i don't know if you've ever been inside a virtual world yeah it's to me it's uh i can just i can see the future it's uh it's it's quite real yeah in terms of like a terror of death uh i'm afraid of heights me too and there's i don't know if you've ever tried uh you should if you haven't there's a virtual reality experience where you can walk a plank yeah you can look down and oh man i was on the ground like i was like i was afraid i was deeply afraid i was is it was it was as real as uh yep as anything else could be in i mean these are very early days of that technology relatively speaking so um yeah i mean i don't know what to do with that same with like crossing the street we did these experiments across the street in front of a car and uh you know it's being run over by a car uh it's terrifying yeah it's just that uh yeah so there is a rich experience to be created there we're not there yet but uh uh i yeah and i've seen a lot of people try like you said the google folks uh uh silicon valley folks try to create a virtual online education i don't know i think they've raised really important questions absolutely what makes uh the education experience fulfilling what makes it effective yeah these are important questions and i think what they highlight is we have no clue like uh there's a thomas soul uh wrote a book about uh recent book on um charter schools yeah i would like to talk to him yeah he's an interesting guy we will disagree about a lot but respectfully yeah such a powerful mind yeah uh but he i i need to read i've only heard him talk about the book uh but he argues quite seemingly effectively that that um that the public education system is broken that we blame he basically says that we kind of blame uh like the conditions or the the environment but uh the upbringing of people like parenting blah blah blah like the uh the set of opportunities but okay putting that aside it seems like charter schools no matter who it is that attends them does much better than in in public schools and he puts a bunch of data behind it and in his usual way as you know just is very eloquent in arguing his points yep so that to me just highlights man we don't education is like one of the most important the it's probably the most important thing in our civilization and we're doing a shitty job of it yeah in academia in uh uh in university education and you know younger education the whole thing the whole thing and yet we value um just about anyone or anything more than educators you know part of it is just the relatively low regard that americans have for teachers for teachers so also similarly like um just people people of service i think great teachers uh are the greatest thing in our society and i would say now on a controversial note like black lives matter uh you know great police officers is the greatest thing in our society also like all people that do service we undervalue cops severe like this whole defund the police is missing the point and it's a stupid word uh i'm i'm with you on that one our um neighbors to one side of our house or three generations of police our neighbors across the street our police they know my uh you know political predilections and we've gotten along fine for 30 years and i go out and tell them every day you know when you go in today you tell the people on the force that i appreciate what they're doing i i think it's really important to not tribalize those concerns i mean we mentioned so many brilliant books and philosophers but it'd be nice sort of in a focused way try to see if we can get some recommendations from you so what three books technical or fiction or philosophical had a oh man that's the worst question what had a big impact in your life and you were recommending i spent four hours driving here perseverating about that i didn't i everything else you sent me that's fine and i actually i skimmed it and i'm like i don't want to look at it because i want i want us to talk yeah the ones in blue i'm like all right and you know i've already said that i've found becker's work and i've put the denial of death out there um is that his best sorry i don't have a small tangent is there other books of his yeah see if i could have this count as one that the the birth and death of meaning the denial of death and escape from evil are three books of ernest becker's that i believe to all the profound in a in a little sort of brief dance around topics uh i've only read denial death like how do those books connect in your yeah nice so the the birth and death of meaning is where becker situates his thinking in more of an evolutionary foundation so i like that for that reason escape from evil is where he applies the ideas in the denial of death more directly to economic matters and to inequality and also to our inability to peacefully co-exist with other folks who don't share our beliefs so i would put ernest becker out there as one um i also like novels a lot and here i was like god damn it no matter what i say i'm gonna be like yes but but the existentialist do you like all those folks camus you like that literary existence i i i do but i i mean you know i i've read all those books i i will tell you the last line of the plague we learn in times of pestilence that there's more to admire in men than to despise and i love that yeah um plagues such a i don't know i i find the plague is a brilliant me too before before uh the plague has come to us in 2020 it was just yeah yeah so a book about love about but i'll toss a one that may be less known to folks i i'm enamored with a novel by a woman named carson mccullers written in 1953 called clock without hands and i find it a brilliant literary depiction of many of the ideas that we have spoken about fiction fiction yeah what's uh what kind of ideas are we talking about all of the existential ideas that we have encountered today but in the context of a story of someone who finds out that he is terminally ill it's set in the south in the um heyday of like segregation so there's a lot of social issues a lot of existential issues but it's basically a nov a fictional account of someone who finds out that they're terminally ill and who reacts originally as um you might expect anyone uh becomes more um hostile to people who are different like petty and stupid denies that anything's happening but as the book goes on and he comes more to terms um with his own mortality um it ends lovingly and back to your idea about you know love being incredibly potent that's the the nice thing as you mentioned uh before with with heidegger i really like that idea and i've seen that in people who are terminally ill is they bring you know the idea of death becomes uh current yes it becomes like a thing you know i could die i really like that idea i i can die not just tomorrow but like now now now yeah that's a really useful i don't even know i think i've been too afraid to even think about that like i have like like sit here and think like in five minutes it's over yeah this is it it's five minutes it's over yeah so that would be my most recent addition as i i really am struck by heidegger or would you recommend that well okay well if you have a few years i remember i tuned out being in time i was like i tried to read it i was like that's it look it took me 40 years to read ulysses i could not get past the first five pages and it took me 40 years to read being in time it's a slog yeah and i took a james joyce course in college so i've uh i i i even uh i i guess read parts of finnegan's wake no way but like re there's a difference between reading and like [Laughter] i don't think i understood anything i i like his uh short stories the dead yeah yeah and um i like faulkner absalom absalom is is a fine book but would you uh is there something heidegger connected in a book you would recommend or no no so maybe i got to abandon him i mean i mean being in time is awesome um but here's an interesting thing and not to get all academic-y but you know it's there's two parts to it and most of the most philosophers are preoccupied with the first part it's in the second part where he gets into all the flight from death stuff and this idea of uh you know a turning and philosophers don't like that and i'm like this is where he's starting to really shine to really shine before me so yeah yeah all right that's a beautiful set of books so what um advice would you give to a young person today about their career about life about uh how to survive in this world full of suffering yeah great um yeah my advice is to get confident advice when i tell my students it's like don't listen to me don't listen to me well you know i think um my my big piece of advice these days is you know again it's that the risk is sounding like a simpleton but it's to emphasize a few things one is um you know so one of your questions i think was you know what's the meaning of life and of course the existentialists say life has no meaning but it doesn't follow from that that it's intrinsic that it's meaningless you know what the existential point is not that life is meaningless so much as it doesn't have one inevitable and intrinsic meaning you know which then it opens up you know i think it was kierkegaard who said consciousness gives us the possibility of possibilities and but there's another lunatic oswald spangler who wrote a book called decline of the west and he says that the philosopher the german philosopher guerta he says the purpose of life is to live and i let that's so that's one of my pieces of advice so the the possibility of possibilities it's interesting so what do you do with this kind of sea of possibilities like well this is one of the one when young folks talk to me especially these days uh is there swimming in a sea of possibilities yeah well so this is it's great and so that's another existential point which is that we yearn for freedom we react vigorously when we perceive that our choices have been curtailed and then we're paralyzed by indecision in the wake of seemingly unlimited possibilities because we're not choking on choice and and i'm not sure if this is helpful advice or not but what i say to folks is that the fact of the matter is is that you know for most people choice is a first world problem and sometimes the best option is to do something as silly as it sounds and then if that doesn't work do something else which just sounds like my mom torturing me when i was young but you know part of the thing that i i find myself singularly ill-equipped is that we're at the i may be at the tail end of the last generation of americans where you like picked something and that's what you did like i've been at a job for 40 years where you can expect to do better than your parents because those days are gone and where you can make a comfortable inference that the world in a decade or two will have any remote similarity to the one that we now inhabit and so but still you recommend just do yeah and to do so i'm again i'm this is i'm so back to the heidegger guy because all right i mean you know i consider myself a professor but what happens if most of the schools go out of business somebody else may consider themselves a restaurant tour but what happens if there's no more restaurants so what i this is negative advice but i tell folks don't define yourself as a social caricature yeah don't don't limit how you feel about yourself by through identification with a host of variables that may be uncertain maybe temporary and temporary what uh let's say no but of course that gets back to your point earlier lex where you're like yeah but when you step out of that it's extraordinarily discombobulating so what uh i think you talked about an axe of chopping wood yeah uh and seoul uh from socrates yeah what is your soul what is the uh the essence of sheldon wow that was like awesome like when god uh when you show up at the end of this thing he kind of looks at you he's like oh yeah yeah i remember you yeah well you know i to be honest what i muse about is to me the when when people are i told you i have to we have two kids uh late 20s early 30s and over the years when people when we meet people that know our kids and they're like oh your kids are kind and decent and i'd be like that's what i would like to be because i think intelligence is vastly overrated you know the unabomber was the smart guy yeah and i do admire intelligence and i do venerate education and i i find that to be tremendously important but if i had to pay the ultimate homage to myself it would be to be known as somebody who takes himself too seriously to take myself too seriously again as corny as it sounds i'd like to leave the world a tad better than i found it or at least do no harm and um i think you i think you did all right and that uh yeah in that regard i love that question alex that's a good one i think everyone should be asked that what is your soul do you have um maybe just a few lingering questions uh around it so you i mean on the on the point of the soul you've talked about the the meaning of life do you have um on a personal level do you have uh an answer to the meaning of your life of something that brought you meaning uh happiness some some sense of uh sense yeah no i i mean yes yes and no i mean i uh a bit you know i'm 66 so i'm in the kind of not ready to wrap it up literally or metaphorically but you look i look back and just really with a sense of uh awe and wonder gratitude and is there memories that stand out to you from childhood from earlier that like it's like you know stand out as something you're really proud of or um just happy to have been on this earth mainly that stuff happened yeah that i mean you know my family um also a chunk uh we're my folks so my grandparents are from eastern europe you know russia austria um as far as we know some of them never made it out uh i consider um myself um very fortunate to have been a so-called product of the american dream you know my grandparents are were basically peasants my parents my dad worked two full-time jobs um when i was growing up and i would see him on the weekends i'd be like why are you working all the time he'd be like so you won't have to and he said look the world does not owe you a living and so your first responsibility is to take care of yourself and then your next responsibility is to take care of other people and um i think you did a pretty good job of that well i don't know but i i i so those are the things that i'm proud of was it's funny you've been if you've talked about just yourself as a human being but uh you've also contributed some really important ideas for your ideas and also kind of integrating and maybe even popularizing the work of ernest becker of connecting it uh of making it legitimate scientifically i mean you know as a human of course you want to be uh you you want your ripple to be one that makes the world a better place but also i think in the span of time i think it's of great value you've contributed in terms of how we think about the human condition how we think about ourselves assuming as finite beings in this world and i hope also in our technology of engineering intelligence i think at least at least for me and i'm sure there's a lot of other people uh like me that your work has been a gift for so oh well thank you oh no i like that and we have described ourselves as giant interneurons unlike we have had no original ideas and and maybe that's the only thing that's original about our work is we don't claim to be original what we claim to have done is to integrate to connect these disparate and superficially unconnected discourses you know so existentialists they'd be like evidence what's that and yeah there's now a branches psychology experimental existential psychology that i think we could take credit for having encouraged the formation of and that in turn has gotten these ideas in circulation and academic communities where they may not have otherwise gotten so i think that's good well sheldon is a huge honor i can't believe you came down here i've been a fan of your work uh i hope we get to talk again huge honor to talk to you thank you so much for talking today thanks lex we'll do it again soon i hope thanks for listening to this conversation with sheldon solomon and thank you to our sponsors blinkist expressvpn and cash app click the links in the description to get a discount it's the best way to support this podcast if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five star snapple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now let me leave you with some words from vladimir nabokov that sheldon uses in his book warm at the core the cradle rocks above and abyss and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness thanks for listening and hope to see you next time