#117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning

Sheldon Solomon is a social psychologist, a philosopher, co-developer of Terror Management Theory, co-author of The Worm at the Core. Please support this channel by supporting our sponsors: – Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex – ExpressVPN at https://www.expressvpn.com/lexpod – Cash App: download app & use code “LexPodcast” Episode links: Sheldon’s Website: https://www.skidmore.edu/psychology/faculty/solomon.php The Worm at the Core (book): https://amzn.to/31hQAXH Denial of Death (book): https://amzn.to/329Zxl4 If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/podcast or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter https://twitter.com/lexfridman, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman/, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman, Medium https://medium.com/@lexfridman, or YouTube https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/artificial-intelligence/id1434243584, follow on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/2MAi0BvDc6GTFvKFPXnkCL, or support it on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. OUTLINE: 00:00 – Introduction 05:34 – Role of death in life 22:57 – Jordan Peterson 53:02 – Humans are both selfish and cooperative 56:57 – Civilization collapse 1:10:07 – Meditating on your mortality 1:16:10 – Kierkegaard and Heidegger 1:33:25 – Elon Musk 1:36:56 – Thinking deeply about death 1:45:53 – Religion 1:56:59 – Consciousness 2:03:39 – Why is Ernest Becker not better known 2:07:09 – AI and mortality 2:21:07 – Academia should welcome renegade thinkers 2:36:33 – Book recommendations 2:43:23 – Advice for young people 2:48:17 – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  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 in Life. He further carries the ideas of Ernest Becker that I 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

• 0:41Lex Fridman?

  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,

• 1:22Lex Fridman?

  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

• 2:07Lex Fridman?

  do, and see everyone who disagrees with you as delusional, I ask that you unsubscribe and don't listen to these conversations, because my hope is to go beyond that kind of divisive thinking. I think we can only make progress toward truth through deep and pathetic thinking and conversation. And as always, love.

• 2:29Lex Fridman?

  If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps so you can skip. But please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This episode is supported by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Get it at blinkist.com/lex for a seven day free trial and 25% off after. Blinkist takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to.

• 3:15Lex Fridman?

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• 3:57Lex Fridman?

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• 4:42Lex Fridman?

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• 5:24Lex Fridman?

  to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Sheldon Solomon.

• 5:52Lex Fridman?

  What is the role of death and fear of death in life?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:17Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  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 the 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.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  And so you hear the word soul and you're like, "Well, all right, that's the non-physical part of me that's potentially detachable from my corporal container when I'm no longer here." But Aristotle's, who coined the word psyche, I think, he was not a dualist. He was a monist. He thought that the soul was inextricably connected to the body. And he defined soul as the essence of a natural body that is alive. And then he goes on and he says, "All right, let me give you an example.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  If, 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.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Universally accepted conception of the essence of our humanity. All right, Aristotle, you know, gives us the idea of humans as rational animals. You know, we're Homo sapiens.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  But not the only game in town. You got Joseph Heusenger, an anthropologist in the 20th century. He called us Homo ludens, that were basically fundamentally playful creatures. And I think it was Hannah Arendt, Homo faber, we're tool making creatures. Another woman, Ellen Disenayake, wrote a book called Homo aestheticus. And following Aristotle and his poetic, she's like, well, we're not only rational animals. We're also aesthetic creatures that appreciate beauty. There's another take on humans. I think they call us Homo narratans. We're all, we're storytelling creatures.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  And I, I think all of those 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. And in a book called Dreamthorpe, I think it's written in the 1860s. He just says, right in the middle of an essay, it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human. And I remember reading that and I'm in my gut, I was like, oh, man. I don't like that, but I think you're on to something.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  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 allusion to the story of Genesis back in the proverbial old days in the Garden of Eden. Everything was going tremendously well until the serpent tempts Eve to take a chop out of the apple of the tree of knowledge and Adam partakes also. And this

• 11:03Speaker 01

  is according to the Bible, what brings death into the world. And from our vantage point, the story of Genesis is a remarkable allegorical recount of the origin of consciousness where we get to the point where by virtue of our vast intelligence, we come to realize the inevitability of death. And so, 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 I was a young professor at Skidmore College in 1980.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  My PhD is in experimental social psychology, and I mainly did studies with clinical psychologists evaluating the efficacy of non pharmacological interventions to reduce stress. And that was good work, and I found it interesting. But in my first week as a professor at Skidmore, I'm just walking up and down the shelves of the library, saw some books by a guy I had never heard of, Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist, recently deceased. He died in 1974. After weeks before, actually, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize

• 12:31Speaker 01

  in nonfiction for his book, The Denial of Death. And that was his last book? It was. It's actually his next to last book. I don't know how you pull this off, but he had one more after he died called Escape from Evil. And evidently, it was supposed to, originally, The Denial of Death was supposed to be this giant thousand-page book that was both. And they split it up, and what became Escape from Evil, his wife, Marie Becker, finished. Well, be that as it may, in it is in the denial of death where Becker just says in

• 13:09Speaker 01

  the first paragraph, I believe that the terror of death and the way that human beings respond to it or decline to respond to it is primarily responsible for almost everything we do, whether we're aware of it or not, and mostly we're not. And so I read that first paragraph, Lex, and I was like, wow, okay, this dude's

• 13:37Lex Fridman?

  You're onto something.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  You're onto something.

• 13:39Lex Fridman?

  It's the same thing.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  It's the same thing. And then it reminded me, I think, not to play psychologist, 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 twenties. I got Ernest Becker's book in my hand. And the next thing I know, I'm remembering when I'm eight years old, the day that my grandmother died. And, you know, the day before, my mom said, oh, say goodbye to grandma. She's not well. And, okay, so I was like, okay, grandma. And I knew she wasn't well, but I didn't really

• 14:22Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  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 twenties, 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

• 15:43Speaker 01

  long, and I'll shut up Lex, but what grabbed me about Becker, and this is in part because I read a lot of his other books. There's another book, The Birth and Death of Meaning, which is framed in from an evolutionary perspective. And then the denial of death is really more framed from an existential psychodynamic vantage point. And as a young academic, I was really taken by what I found to be a very potent juxtaposition that you

• 16:22Speaker 01

  really don't see that often. Yet usually evolutionary types are eager to dismiss the psychodynamic types and vice versa. And maybe only John Bowlby, you know, there's other folks, but the attachment theorist, John Bowlby, was really one of the first serious academics to say these, these ways of thinking about things are quite compatible.

• 16:51Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's a fine question. Well, for the evolutionary types in general are interested in how it is and why it is that we have adapted to our surroundings in the service of persisting over time and being represented in the gene pool thereafter.

• 17:25Lex Fridman?

  You used to be a fish.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:27Lex Fridman?

  We used to be a fish and I'll, yeah. Talking on a podcast, how we came to be that way.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  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. They, you know, they'll just say, these guys are talking shit, if you'll pardon the expression. And of course, you can turn right around and say the same about the evolutionary types. They are often and rightfully criticized evolutionary psychologists for what are called

• 18:15Speaker 01

  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 intrinsic antithesis between these viewpoints. I just found them dialectically compatible and very powerful when combined.

• 18:44Lex Fridman?

  So one question I would ask here is about a science being speculative. You know, we understand so little about the human mind. You said you picked up Becker's book and, you know, it felt like he was on to something. That's the same thing I felt when I picked up Becker's book, probably also in my early twenties. You know, I read a lot of philosophy, but it felt like the question of the meaning of life kind of, you know, this seemed to be the most, the closest to the truth somehow. It was on to something. So I guess the question I want to ask also is like, how speculative is psychology? How, like, all of your lives work?

• 19:28Lex Fridman?

  How do you feel, how confident do you feel about the whole thing? About understanding our mind?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  I feel confidently unconfident to have it both ways.

• 19:43Lex Fridman?

  Like, what do we make of psychology? What do we make, starting with Freud's, you know, starting just, just our, or even just philosophy? Even the aspects of the sciences, like, you know, my, my field of artificial intelligence, but also physics, you know? It, it often feels like, man, we don't really understand most of what's going on here. And certainly that's true with the human mind.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, to me, that's the proper epistemological stance.

• 20:15Lex Fridman?

  I don't know anything.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Well, it's the Socratic, 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, not that I have a PhD in the philosophy of science, but I, I believe that the Thomas Koons 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

• 20:59Speaker 01

  when if you wanted to fly, you put on some wax wings and jumped off a mountain. On the other hand, I think it's quite arrogant when scientists, I'll just speak about psychological scientists, when they have the audacity to mistake statistical precision for knowledge and insight. And when they make the mistake, in my estimation, that Einstein bemoaned, and that's this idea that the mere accumulation of data will necessarily result in conceptual breakthroughs.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  And so, I, I like the, 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. They brought us into a room and on one side of the board was a quote by Kurt Lewin or Levine, famous German social psychologist. And it 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 a German physicist. His name eludes me. And it was, all theories are wrong. And I'm like, which is it? And of course, the point is that it's both. Our theories are, I believe,

• 22:27Speaker 01

  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

• 23:07Speaker 01

  in the corroboration of the theory, the rejection of it, or the modification thereafter.

• 23:15Lex Fridman?

  If we look at the existentialists, or even like, modern philosopher psychologist types like Jordan Peterson, I'm not sure if you're familiar with.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  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 basically saying our work is nonsense.

• 23:46Lex Fridman?

  Let's get into this. I'm sure I'll talk to Jordan eventually on this thing. Going through some rough times right now.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. And I, and I wish him well. Jordan was working on his Maps of Meaning, and we were publishing our work. And I think Jordan, at the time,

• 24:07Speaker 01

  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 there are certain kinds of meanings that are more important. Let's say religious types and that we didn't pay sufficient attention to that in our early days.

• 24:43Lex Fridman?

  So can you try to elucidate like what his worldview is? Cause he's also a religious man. So what, what was this, what was some of the interesting aspects of the disagreements that then?

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, back in the day, I just said, you know, Jordan was a young punk. We were young punks. He was just kind of flailing in an animated way at some conferences saying that we.

• 25:07Lex Fridman?

  You're still both kind of punks.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, we are both 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 the Ontario Shakespeare Festival where we were asked to be on a Canadian broadcast system program. I think we were talking about Macbeth from a psychodynamic perspective. And I hadn't seen him in a ton of years and we spent two days together, had a great time. You know, we had just written our book, The Worm at the Core. And he's like, you know, you, you're, you're missing a big opportunity. Every time you say something, you have to have your phone and you have to film yourself and then you have to put it on YouTube.

• 25:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, he was on to something that, you know, that just as a small tangent.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:55Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's almost sad to look at Jordan Peterson and 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, I mean it with love, are a little bit like punks.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:15Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:27Lex Fridman?

  And then the interesting ones kind of go on their own and there's not a smartphone.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  No, no, that's, that's.

• 26:32Lex Fridman?

  And it'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.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:47Lex Fridman?

  So ma- maybe we can try to get back to.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:51Lex Fridman?

  You're both brilliant people and I'd love to get some interesting disagreements earlier and later about i- in your psychological work, in your worldviews.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Well, our disagreements today would be, uh,

• 27:07Speaker 01

  along two dimensions. Uh, one is he is, and again, I wish he was here to correct me.

• 27:14Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Um, when I say that he is more committed, uh, to the virtues of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

• 27:25Lex Fridman?

  I see.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Uh, particularly Christianity. And in a sense is a contemporary Kirkegaard 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.

• 27:56Lex Fridman?

  What's his worm at the core? What is, like, uh, so we're talking about a little bit of a higher level of discovering meaning.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:03Lex Fridman?

  What's his, uh, what does he make of death?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  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, um, he said something along the lines that there is no, uh, 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, um, is, uh, ultimately.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Political slash economics. 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 Are Both Beside the Point. And my argument was going to be, and it is going to be, that both liberal and political, not liberal and conservative political philosophy are each intellectually and morally bankrupt because they're both framed in terms of assumptions about human nature that are demonstrably false. And Jordan didn't mind me knocking liberal political philosophy on those grounds.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  That would basically be like Steven 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

• 30:14Speaker 01

  amounts of property, which is ultimately the justification for neoliberal economics.

• 30:22Lex Fridman?

  Can you linger on that a little bit? What's the, can you describe his philosophy again, his view of the world?

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 30:31Lex Fridman?

  And what neoliberal economics is?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, let me translate it in English. So basically, all these days, anybody who says I'm a conservative, free market type, you're following John Locke and Adam Smith, whether you're aware of it or not. So here's John Locke, who, by the way, all of these guys are great. So for me to appear to criticize any of these folks. It is with the highest regard. And also, we need to understand, in my estimation, how important their ideas are. Locke is working in a time where all rule was top-down by divine right.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  And in the service of survival, they have the right to acquire and preserve the fruits of their own labor. And but his point is, and it's actually a good one, you know, he's following Hobbes here. He's like, "Well, the problem with that is that people are assholes." And if they would let each other alone, then we would still be living in a state of nature, everybody just doing what they did to get by each day. But it's a whole lot easier, you know, if I see like an apple tree a mile away. Well, I can go over and pick an apple.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  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 Locke 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

• 33:44Speaker 01

  and that the sole function of government is to keep domestic tranquility and to ward off foreign invasion in order to protect our right to property. Alright, so now here's the property thing. Alright, so Locke says, if you look in the Bible and in nature, there is no private property. And but Locke says, well, surely you, if there's anything that you own, it's your body. And surely you have a right by nature to stay alive. And then by extension, anything that you do where you exert effort or labor,

• 34:29Speaker 01

  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. 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. Alright, so far, so good. Yep. And then he says, well, okay. In the early days.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  You could only eat so many apples. Or you could only trade so many apples with somebody else. So he was like, well, if you put a fence around a bunch of apple trees, those become your apples. That's your property. If somebody else wants to put a fence around Nebraska, that's their property. And everybody can have as much property as they want because 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.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  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, oh, 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 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?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  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 Locke is natural and beneficial for everyone.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  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 based, and then you have Adam Smith, you know, in the next century with the invisible hand, where Adam Smith says, everyone pursuing their own selfish, that's not necessarily pejorative, if everyone pursues their own selfish interests, we will all be better off as a result.

• 38:02Lex Fridman?

  And what do you think is the flawed in that way of thinking?

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Well, there's two flaws. One is, is that, 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 an asocial species.

• 38:22Lex Fridman?

  In a sense, you don't feel like that there's a, this emphasis of individual autonomy is a flawed premise, like where there's a, there's something fundamentally deeply interconnected between us.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  I do. I think that Plato and Socrates, you know, in the Crito, were closer to the truth when they started with the assumption that we were interdependent, then they derived individual autonomy as a manifestation of a functional social system.

• 38:54Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  So when Margaret Thatcher, you're too young, you know, in the 1980s, she said, societies? There's no such thing as societies. There's just individuals pursuing their self-interest.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  So, 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. 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 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.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  He's certainly wrong today, in, in my opinion. Also wrong is the claim that the unlimited pursuit of personal wealth does not harm those around us. There, there is no doubt 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, and have a place to be, poverty's not as challenging as being, having the impoverished in close proximity to those who are obscenely wealthy.

• 40:39Lex Fridman?

  So the, it's not the absolute measure of your well-being, it's the inequality of that well-being.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  That's quite right.

• 40:45Lex Fridman?

  It's painful. So maybe just to linger on the Jordan Peterson thing in, in terms of your disagreement in his worldview. So he went through quite a bit, you know, there's been quite a bit of fire, right? In, in his.

• 41:02Lex Fridman?

  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, cer- certain groups.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:14Lex Fridman?

  Measurably having an outcome that's different than other groups. And then drawing conclusions about fundamental unfairness, injustice, inequality in the system. So like systematic racism, systematic sexism, systematic anything else that creates inequality. And he's been kind of saying pretty simple things to say that, you know, the system for the most part is not broken or flawed.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:46Lex Fridman?

  That the inequalities part, the, um, the inequality of outcomes is part of our world. What we should strive for is the, uh, you know, equality of opportunity.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 42:23Lex Fridman?

  Let's, let's get into, so he, he just seems to really not like, um, uh, socialism, Marxism, communism.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:30Lex Fridman?

  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 not, he'll eventually be here to defend himself. John Locke unfortunately not here to defend himself.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 42:43Lex Fridman?

  But what's, what's your sense, uh, about Marxism and, and, um, the, uh, the way Jordan talks about it, the way you think about it, from the economics, from the philosophical perspective?

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I, I, i- 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.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  But he saw in the eighteen, whenever he was writing, that inevitably capitalism would lead to massive inequity, that it was ultimately based on the need to denigrate and dehumanize labor, to render them, in his language, a fleshy cog in a giant machine. And 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 Piketty guy who writes about capital

• 44:26Speaker 01

  and just makes the point that return on investment will always be greater than wages. That means the people with money are gonna have a lot more. That means there's gonna come a point where the economic house of cards falls apart. Now, the Joseph Schumpers 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 twenty or whatever depressions and big recessions in the last several hundred years.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  And when that happens, half of the population or whatever is catastrophically inconvenienced. But that's the price that we pay for progress. Other people would argue, and I would agree with them, that I will happily sacrifice the rate of progress in order to flatten the curve of economic destruction. To put that in plainer English, I

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Would direct our attention to the social democracies that forgetting for the moment of whether it's possible to do this on a scale in a country as big as ours, on all of the things that really matter, you know, gross, domestic GDP or whatever, that's just an abstraction. But when you look at whatever the United Nations says, how we measure quality of life, 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

• 46:23Speaker 01

  economies that have high tax rates in exchange for the provision of services that come as a right for citizens.

• 46:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so I mean, I guess the question is, you've kind of mentioned that, you know, like as Marx described, capitalism with a slippery slope. Eventually, things go awry in some kind of way. So that's the question is, when you have, when you implement a system, how does it go wrong eventually? You know, eventually we'll all be dead.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. No, no, so look, that's, no, that's right.

• 47:00Lex Fridman?

  So, and then the criticism, I mean, I think these days, unfortunately, Marxism as like, is a dirty word. I say unfortunately, because even if you disagree with a philosophy, it should, you should, like, calling somebody a Marxist should not be a thing that shuts down all conversation.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  No, that's right. And then the fact is, is I'm sympathetic with Jordan's dismissal of the folks in popular, the talking heads these days who spew Marxist words. To me, it's like fashionable nonsense. Do you know that book that the physicist wrote mocking, you're too young. So in the 20 or so years ago.

• 47:45Lex Fridman?

  We're all pretty young.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. But there, I think there were these NYU physicists, they wrote a paper just mocking the kind of literary, postmodern types.

• 47:56Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, those kinds of, yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it was just nonsense. And of course, it was made the lead article. And, you know, my point is Marx wouldn't be a Marxist.

• 48:08Lex Fridman?

  True. I have read and listened to some of the work of Richard Wolff. He speaks pretty eloquently about Marxism.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  I like him.

• 48:16Lex Fridman?

  He's one of the only, you know, one of the only people speaking about, a lot about Marxism in the way we are now, in a serious way, in a sort of saying, you know, what are the flaws of capitalism? Not saying like, yeah, basically sounding very different. People should check out his work.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  No, I

• 48:36Lex Fridman?

  Because all this kind of work, this kind of outrage mob culture of sort of demanding equality of outcome, that's not Marxism.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  It is not Marxism. 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.

• 48:59Lex Fridman?

  So the question is the implementation, like

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 49:02Lex Fridman?

  Humans are messy, so how does it go wrong?

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Like It is messy. There you go.

• 49:07Lex Fridman?

  It's messy.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Brilliant. It's messy. And this gets back to my rant about the book that I want to try if I don't stroke out. Why left and right are both beside the point. You know, the people, 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, 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.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  On the other hand, when conservatives say that people are innately selfish.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  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, that if someone hands them a toy and then wants something in return, babies, before they can walk and talk, will reciprocate. All right, fine.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  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 drop the bottle, so the baby doesn't get what she or he wanted. When given a chance to reciprocate, little babies will reciprocate because they're aware of and are responding to intention. Similarly, if they see somebody behaving unfairly to someone, they will not help that person in return.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  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 we will reciprocate on the basis of intentions above and beyond what actually happens.

• 51:49Lex Fridman?

  How close, so, I mean, your, your work is on the fundamental... Role of the fear of mortality in ourselves. How fundamental is this reciprocation, this human connection to other humans?

• 52:04Speaker 01

  I think it's really innate. Yeah, I think it's because, yeah, bats reciprocate, not by intention, but you know, this, I'm going here from Richard Dawkins, the selfish gene, you know, to, I love the early Dawkins, I'm less enamored.

• 52:21Lex Fridman?

  Like the early Beatles.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, again, I say this with great respect, but you know, Dawkins just points out that, you know, reciprocation is just fundamental. Cooperation is fundamental. You know, it is, it's a one-sided view of evolutionary takes on things when we see it solely in terms of individual competition.

• 52:49Lex Fridman?

  It's almost, from a game theoretic perspective too, it's just easier to see the world that way. It's easier to, I don't know, I mean, you see this in physics, there's a whole field of folks like complexity that kind of embrace the fact that it's all an intricately connected mess and it's just very difficult to do anything with that kind of science, but it seems to be much closer to actually representing what the world is like.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  So like you put it earlier, Lex, it's messy.

• 53:19Lex Fridman?

  So left and right, you mentioned, you're thinking of maybe actually putting it down on paper or something?

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would like to because what I would, what I would like to point out, again, and in admiration of all of the people that I will then try and have the gall to criticize is, look, these are all geniuses. Locke, genius. Adam Smith, genius when he uses the notion that we're bartering creatures. So he uses that reciprocation idea.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  As the basis of his way of thinking about things.

• 53:52Lex Fridman?

  But that's not at the core.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  No.

• 53:54Lex Fridman?

  The bartering is not at the core of human nature.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  It's not at, well, he says it is. He says we're fundamentally bartering creatures.

• 54:01Lex Fridman?

  Well, that doesn't even make sense then, because then what, how, how can we then be autonomous individuals?

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Well, because we're gonna barter with an eye on.

• 54:10Lex Fridman?

  On, on for self.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  For ourselves.

• 54:12Lex Fridman?

  Self-interest.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, all right, so, but back to Adam Smith for a second, Lex, he's 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 the 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 gonna behave with integrity. And he understood that one role of government is to maintain a proverbial, you know, even playing field.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  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,

• 55:38Speaker 01

  whi- which is that we are both selfish and tend to cooperate. And we also can be heroically.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  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, how do we maximize individual autonomy in a way?

• 56:29Speaker 01

  That fosters creativity and innovation and the self regard that comes from creative expression? While engaging our more cooperative and reciprocal tendencies? In order to come up with a system that is potentially stable over time? Because the other thing about all capital based systems.

• 56:56Lex Fridman?

  The stability is fundamentally unstable.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's based on infinite growth and, you know, it's a positive feedback loop. To be silly, infinite growth is only good for malignant cancer cells and compound interest. Otherwise, you know, we want to seek a steady state. And that would be, you know, so when Steven 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.

• 57:32Lex Fridman?

  So your sense is the world? Sort of in disagreement with Steven Pinker that the world is? Like facing a potential catastrophic collapse in multiple directions?

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:46Lex Fridman?

  And the fact that there are certain like the the rate of violence in aggregates decreasing, the? 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 in the, in the, in the next century.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  So I'm with Jared Diamond, you know, in the book Collapse, where he points out, studying the collapse of major civilizations, that it often happens right after things appear to never have been better. And in that regard, I mean, there are more known voices that have taken issue with Dr. Pinker. I'm thinking of John Gray, who's a British philosopher and here in the States, I don't know where he is these days, but Robert J. Lifton, the psycho historian. Yeah, they're both of my view and which I hope is, by the way, wrong.

• 58:50Lex Fridman?

  Me too.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, but, but, you know, between, you know, ongoing ethnic tensions, environmental degradation, economic instability, and the fact that, you know, the world has become a Petri dish of psychopathology.

• 59:10Lex Fridman?

  Like what really worries me is the, the quiet economic pain that people are going through, the businesses that are closed, 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 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.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 59:47Lex Fridman?

  You start to find the other, whether it's other European nations that mistreated you, whether it's other groups that mistreated you.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 59:55Lex Fridman?

  It always ends up being the Jews somehow, somehow are fault here.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:00:02Lex Fridman?

  That's what worries me is where this. Quiet anger and pain goes in 2021, 2022, 2030. If you look, sorry to see the parallels.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 1:00:16Lex Fridman?

  Rise and fall of the Third Reich, but you know, what happens 10, 15 years from now from what's because of the COVID pandemic.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Lex Fridman?

  That's happening now.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  And Lex, you make a, I think a really profoundly important point, you know, back to our work for a bit, or 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 and 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, in a world where first of all, if you have nothing, you are nothing.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  And secondly, as you were saying before we got started today, a lot of jobs are gone and they're not coming back.

• 1:01:18Lex Fridman?

  And that's the, where the self-esteem.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:01:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And it feels like that yearning for self-esteem, though we could talk a little bit more because

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:01:49Lex Fridman?

  you, about defining self-esteem is quite interesting. What, the more I've read, sort of warmed the core and just in general, your thinking, it made me realize I haven't thought enough about the idea of self-esteem. But the thing I want to say is, it feels like when you lose your job.

• 1:02:10Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  That's exactly.

• 1:02:22Lex Fridman?

  It's like a tribe that defines itself on the hatred of somebody else.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  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, um, you know, that economics has reached the point where most money is made not by actually making stuff. You know, you use money to make money. And therefore, what happens is money chases money across national boundaries.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Ultimately, governments become subordinate to the corporate entities whose sole function is to generate money. And what John Gray said is that that will inevitably produce economic upheaval in local areas, which will not be attributed to the economic order. It will be misattributed to whoever the scapegoat de jour is. And the anger, what, and the distress

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  associated with that uncertainty will be picked up on by ideological demagogues who will transform that into rage. So both Hannah Arendt, as well as John Gray, they, they just said, uh, watch out. We're gonna have right wingish populist movements where demagogues who are the alchemists of hate, what makes them brilliant is they don't, they don't, uh, the hate's already there.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  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, he said, "In times of historical upheaval, we are apt

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  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."

• 1:05:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  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 in an extraordinary state of existential distress. And he said, "I'm gonna 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

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  where we come in. We're egghead experimental researchers. You know, Becker wrote this book, The Denial of Death, and he couldn't get a job. People just dismiss these ideas as fanciful speculation for which there's no evidence.

• 1:06:18Lex Fridman?

  And you've done some good experiments.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and here's where I can be more cavalier, and where what I would urge people, like what you said, Lex, is ignore my histrionic... And polemic language, if possible. And step back, if you can, myself included. And let's just consider the, the research findings. Because in September 11th, 2001, people that are old enough to remember that horrible day. Two days before, George W. Bush had the lowest approval rating in the history of presidential polling.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  All right, three weeks later, after he said, we will rid the world of the evil doers. And then a week or two after that, he said in a cover story on Time Magazine. That he believed that God had chosen him to lead the world during 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.

• 1:07:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  The people dying plus the symbols of American greatness, World Trade Center and, and the Pentagon. So we did a bunch of experiments and most of our experiments are disarmingly simple. We have one group of people and we just remind them that they're gonna die. We say, hey, write your thoughts and feelings about dying. Or in other cases, we stop them outside, either in front of a funeral home. Or a hundred meters to either side. Our thought being that if we stop you in front of a funeral home, then death is on your mind, even if you don't know it. And then there's other studies, they're even more subtle, where we bring people into the lab. And they read stuff on a computer.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  And while they're doing that, we flash the word death for 28 milliseconds. It's so fast, you don't see anything. And then we just measure people's reactions or behavior thereafter. So what we found in 2003, leading up to the election of 2004, was that Americans did not care for President Bush or his policies in Iraq in control conditions. But if we reminded them of their mortality first, they like Bush a lot more. So in every study that we did, Americans like John Kerry, who was running against Bush. They like Kerry more than Bush.

• 1:09:08Lex Fridman?

  Policy wise, in a control.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  In a control condition. And but if if they were reminded of death first, then they like Bush a lot more.

• 1:09:19Lex Fridman?

  So by the way, just a small pause. You said, "The summarily simple experiments." I think that's, and people should read Warm at the Core for some other descriptions. You have a lot of different experiments of this nature. I think it's a brilliant experiment, connected to the Stoics, perhaps, of how your worldview on anything, on how delicious that water tastes.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:43Lex Fridman?

  After you're reminded of your own mortality. It's such a fascinating experiment that you could probably keep doing like millions of them to draw insight about the way we see the world.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:10:25Lex Fridman?

  It's such a fascinating idea. I don't, I have to think about a lot about the experiments you've done and that you've inspired, about the fact that death changes the way you see a bunch of different things. I think the Stoics talked about, 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 live life. So what do you think about that at the, at the individual level? Like, what is the role about being, bringing that terror of death, fear of death to the surface?

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:11:08Lex Fridman?

  And being cognizant of it?

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  For us, that's the, that's the ballgame. So what we write in our book, and here we're just paying homage to the philosophers and theologians that come before us, is to point out that literally since antiquity, there has been a consensus that to lead a full life requires, Albert Camus had come to terms with death, thereafter, anything is possible.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  And so you've got the Stoics, and you've got the Epicureans, and then you've got the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and then you've got like the medieval monks that, you know, worked with like a skull 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 gonna die, and we find that, yeah, they drink more water if a famous person is, is, you know, advertising it. They eat more cookies. They want more fancy clothes. They sit closer

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  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

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  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

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  time entertaining the reality of the human condition, which is that you too will pass, to get to the point where there is, to lapse into a cliche, the capacity for personal transformation and growth.

• 1:13:53Lex Fridman?

  Let's go personal for a second. Are you yourself afraid of death?

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:01Lex Fridman?

  And how much do you meditate on that thought? Like, maybe your own study of it is a kind of escape from your own mortality.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  It is absolutely, Lex. So you've got it.

• 1:14:14Lex Fridman?

  Like if you figure out death somehow, you won't die.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  So, no, no. So 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 feel like there's a real sense in which doing these studies and writing books and lecturing has been my way of avoiding directly confronting my anxieties by turning it into an intellectual exercise.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  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 that is probably not the case and that I have at times, like all humans, been more preoccupied with the implications of these ideas for my self-esteem. It's like, oh, we're gonna 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.

• 1:15:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, like you did when you were eight.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  Exactly, that's exactly right. So when I first read The Denial of Death, I was so literally flabbergasted by it that I took a leave of absence for a year and just like did what would be considered menial jobs. I did construction work, I worked in a restaurant. And I was just like, wait a minute. If I, if I understand what this guy is saying, then I'm just a culturally constructed meat puppet, doing things for reasons that I know not in order to assuage death anxiety. And I was like, that, that's not acceptable.

• 1:16:27Lex Fridman?

  Maybe another interesting person to talk about is Ernest Becker himself.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:16:33Lex Fridman?

  So how did he face his death? Is there something interesting, personal?

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  I think so. So interesting to me is Becker, also from a Jewish family, claimed to be atheistic, did not identify.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Ultimately is 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.

• 1:17:13Lex Fridman?

  Now, religious, what does that mean? Does he have a faith? And well, let's talk more, most importantly is the afterlife.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  He was.

• 1:17:22Lex Fridman?

  What's his view on the afterlife?

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  He was agnostic on that, but he did, no, the denial of death is,

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  there's a chapter devoted to Kierkegaard. And he talks about, for Kierkegaard, 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 gotta go to the uni, you gotta 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

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  think about that. You have to think about it and feel it. You gotta let it seek in or seep into your mind, at which point, according to Kierkegaard, basically, you realize that your present identity is fundamentally a cultural construction. You didn't choose the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your name. You know, you didn't choose necessarily even the social role that you occupy. You might have chosen from what's available in your culture, but not from the full palette of human opportunities. And so what Kierkegaard said is that we need to realize

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  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 have shrugged off all of the cultural accoutrements that I have used to define myself.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  This is his proverbial leap into faith. And in Kierkegaard's case, it was faith in Christianity, that you can't have unbridled faith in 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?

• 1:20:38Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  And at the end of the denial of death, Becker admits that there's no way to tell, while still advocating for what is ultimately a religious stance. No, one of the things that I don't understand, and Becker has been the most singularly potent influence in my academic and personal life, but a year or two ago, I started reading Martin Heidegger. I'm reading Being and Time. And what I now wonder is why?

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  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. Beautiful. It's a beautiful phrase because at the end of the denial of death,

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  Becker's 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 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.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:23:19Speaker 01

  Thing number one is to realize that not only are you going to die, but your death can happen.

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  At any given moment. So for Heidegger, if you say, I know I'm gonna die in some vaguely unspecified future moment, that's still death denial, because you're saying, yeah, not me, not now.

• 1:23:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  Heidegger's point is, you need to get to the point where you need to realize that, 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. Or any number of potentially unanticipated and uncontrollable fatal outcomes, but.

• 1:24:10Lex Fridman?

  Brilliant, by the way. Sorry. To bring you into the now.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is brilliant. I agree, Lex. And this is why I'm wondering, why didn't Becker notice this? Because that's the being and time thing, is it's gotta be now. And then he says, so, okay, so now I've dealt somewhat with 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.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  But Heidegger's 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, born into a time and place not of your choosing, when you're here for a microscopic amount of time, after which you are not. And for Heidegger.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  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 gonna not always make good choices. So now you're guilty for your choices.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  And then he uses the poet Rilke. 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 because you are reluctant to accept responsibility for the opportunities that you are now able to create

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  by virtue of seeing the possibilities that lay before you. So anyway, Heidegger then says, look, okay, so, you know, I'm a professor and I live in America in the 21st century. Well, if I was in the 3rd century, living in a yurt in Mongolia, I'm not gonna have an opportunity to be a professor. But what he submits is that there is some aspects of whatever I am that are independent of my cultural and historical circumstances. In other words, there is a me of sorts. Heidegger would take vigorous issue, and so would Heidegger's scholars,

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  I am a contingent historical and cultural artifact. But so what? You know, if I was, you know, 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, and 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.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  And you are allowed, you therefore, you see a horizon, is 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.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  All right, to be resolute, it, 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. It is, it just means that you are concerned about your fellow human beings. And but I love the idea, even if it seems allegorical, I don't mind that at all. This idea, you said love earlier, and I think that when Heidegger is talking about being solicitous, that's as close as he can get. There's an Italian. Yes, such in trouble. So what was that line again with the solicitous of the?

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  Okay. I mean, the whole thing of turning away from death and the. Yeah. I mean, 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 unshakable joy. Now, again, Heidegger's not Mary Poppins. This, I just got a tattoo. No, I. This is great. I just love. Wait, that exact quote? No, I'm piecing together, these are his exact words that, and I spent the last two years

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  reading almost everything that I can find because I want to, I'm sick of death. You said it, so I want to second what you say, Lex. So it's not about death. It's the Sherwood Anderson guy. He's a novelist that I like about, he wrote a book called Weinsberg, Ohio. And 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 point being is that, you know, to consider that we must die and the existential implications of that.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Really, the goal, the way I see it, is getting from hate to love. Yeah. And I feel like Heidegger has.

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  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 from maladaptive reactions to death

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  anxiety is through faith in the traditional sense.

• 1:33:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I, I always kind of saw Kierkegaard unfairly, like you said, in a comic book sense of the word faith is a non-traditional sense. I kind of like the idea of leap of faith.

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  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's a leap of faith in life. And I, I just, I like it.

• 1:33:42Lex Fridman?

  I found the leap of faith really interesting in the, so in the technological space, so of.

• 1:33:50Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:33:57Lex Fridman?

  That takes, I mean, he's sometimes a little bit insane on social media and just in life. When I met him, it was kind of interesting that, of course, there's, I mean, he's a legit engineer, so he's fun to talk to about the technical things.

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:15Lex Fridman?

  But he also just, just the way, the humor and the way he sees life, it just like refuses to be conventional.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:25Lex Fridman?

  So it's a constant leap into the unknown. And one of the things that he does, and this isn't even, this isn't even like fake. A lot of people say, because he's a CEO, this is a business owner, so he's trying to make money. No, I think this is, I looked him in his eyes, I mean, this is real, is a lot of the things he believes that are going to be accomplished, that a lot of others are saying are impossible, like autonomous vehicles, he truly believes it. To me, that is the leap of faith of, on what was going like, we're like, the entirety of our experience is shrouded in mystery.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:04Lex Fridman?

  We don't know what the hell's gonna happen. 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.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:16Lex Fridman?

  I mean, how, how crazy is it to just believe and dream and actually be taking steps towards it?

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:25Lex Fridman?

  To colonizing Mars, when most people are like, that's the stupidest idea ever.

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

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

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:36:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and that's, that's, uh, there's something beautiful to that. That's the embracing the abyss. And again, it's like the, uh, it's the embracing the fear of death, the, the, the, the reality of death, and then turning, uh, and to look at all the opportunities.

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  I like, yeah, that's right.

• 1:37:12Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask you, whenever I bring up Ernest Becker's work, which I do, and yours quite a bit, I find it surprising how, that it's not a lot more popular in a sense that, uh, no, we're not, I don't mean just your book.

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:32Lex Fridman?

  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, um, are not, don't think of that as a compelling description of, um, the core of the human condition. Like, I think what you mentioned about Heidegger is quite, connects with me quite well. So I ask, uh, on this podcast, I often ask people if they're afraid of death. That's like, almost every single, I almost always get criticized for asking world-class

• 1:38:13Lex Fridman?

  people, scientists and technologists and about the fear of death and the meaning of life. And on the fear of death, they often...

• 1:38:26Lex Fridman?

  Like, don't say anything interesting. What I mean by that is, they haven't thought deeply about it. Like, you kind of brought this up a few times of really letting it sink in. They kind of say this thing about what, exactly what you said, which is like, uh, it's something that happens, not today. Like, I'm aware that it's something that happens.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:48Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:38:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:56Lex Fridman?

  And what, 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.

• 1:39:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:23Lex Fridman?

  By more people.

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  Well, that's a tough one. Uh, you know, I could tell you what not to do. You know, so when we are young and annoying.

• 1:39:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  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, 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 worldview from which you derive self-esteem. And that has, it's spared you the existential excruciations that would otherwise arise. But that's like Freud. You know, you're repressing, so you're either agree with me, in which case I'm right.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  Or you disagree with me, in which case you're repressing and I'm right.

• 1:40:21Lex Fridman?

  Well, so that, that's the, the, the Nietzsche thing. I, I, what I've felt, when I've, there've 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 at eight, maybe I'm traumatizing or romanticizing it, but, uh... I feel like it's, uh, conservatives call it popular like, or the movie Matrix call it the red pill.

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:49Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  You are.

• 1:41:01Lex Fridman?

  And I'm taking a step out and, uh, it feels, it's this, this feeling like you're basically drowning. I mean, it's, it's not a good feeling.

• 1:41:13Speaker 01

  It is not, but this gets back to the Heidegger Kierkegaard school of anxiety. You are stepping out.

• 1:41:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  And, and you are momentarily shrugging off the, the, again, the culturally constructed psychological accoutrements that allow you to stand up in the morning. And

• 1:41:31Lex Fridman?

  But so, I, I mean, if that, in that sense, it feels like,

• 1:41:38Lex Fridman?

  I mean, uh, what do you, uh, how do you have that conversation? Because I guess I, I, I'm, I'm dancing around a, a, 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.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:01Lex Fridman?

  Let's, let's forget, uh, denial of death. Like, um, uh, there's, there's not a community of people. Let's take an easy one that I think is scientifically ridiculous, which is, is a community of people that believe that, uh, the earth is flat.

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16Lex Fridman?

  Uh, or actually even, even better, uh, that space is fake.

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:22Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:36Lex Fridman?

  Like, a lot of people are just like, no, the earth is round.

• 1:42:40Lex Fridman?

  They they're like, like scientists too. They're like, yes, well, actually, wait, have you actually like, thought about it? Like, imagine like, as a thought experiment, that like, basically step outside the little narrative that we are comfortable with. Now, that one in particular is, has really strong evidence and scientific validation. So it's a pretty simple thing to show that it at least is not flat. But just the willingness to take a step outside of the stories that bring us comfort has been disappointing that people are not willing to do that. And I think the philosophy that you've constructed and that

• 1:43:25Lex Fridman?

  Ernst Beck is constructing, you've tested, I think is really compelling. And the fact that people aren't often willing to take that step. It's disappointing.

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  Well, yes, but perhaps understandable. I mean, one of this is an anecdote, of course, but when we were trying to get a publisher for our book, I had, we had a meeting with

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

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

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  The anxiety.

• 1:44:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  That our identity and our beliefs typically enable us to manage. I think it's as simple as that.

• 1:44:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I had this experience in college with my best friend who got really high. And he forgot it was in the winter. It was really freezing. It was memorable to me. I think it's an analogy, very useful. So he went to get some pizza.

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:45:06Lex Fridman?

  And he, so I, and he left me outside and said, I'll be back in five minutes. And he forgot that he left me outside. And I remember it was, I was in like shorts.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:18Lex Fridman?

  It was freezing winter.

• 1:45:19Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:45:20Lex Fridman?

  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 that's how I think about it. Like, I just, I don't give a damn about the stupid winter or anything. I just wanna, I'd like, it's like, I'm drawn to be back to the warm.

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:45:44Lex Fridman?

  And that's how I feel about thinking about like death. It's like.

• 1:45:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:47Lex Fridman?

  At a certain point, it's like, it's too much. It's like that cold.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  I like.

• 1:45:52Lex Fridman?

  I wanna be back into the warm.

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  And getting back to Heidegger for a moment, I like the, yeah, he uses a lot, the idea of feeling at home, not as like in your house, but just feeling like you're comfortably situated.

• 1:46:11Lex Fridman?

  Maybe you could talk about, like, I had a conversation about this with my dad a little bit. How does religion relate to this?

• 1:46:21Speaker 01

  I see it as the, the disease and the cure, in a sense, a few things.

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  One is that, oh, I think a case could be made that humans are innately religious. So now we're going to get into territory where there's going to be a lot of disputes. And by, what do you mean by religious? That 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. And again, I'm not a scholar. How about I'm a well-intentioned dilettante in this, in this regard? Yeah.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  Because what, what I have read is that religion evolved very early on, long before our ancestors were conscious and the issue of death arose. And the word religion evidently is from a Latin word, regatia, we can look it up, but, and it means to bind. And Emile Durkheim, the dead French sociologist, he said, you know, originally, religion is a Darcy Lessing, who's a dead novelist, she calls it the substance of we feeling, that

• 1:48:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:49:04Speaker 01

  So there are some people, so it's David Sloan Wilson, wrote a book called Darwin's Cathedral. And he said, religion has nothing to do with death. It evolved to make groups viable. He's actually a group selection guy.

• 1:49:23Lex Fridman?

  What's group selection?

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  The idea that it's the group that is selected for, rather than the individual.

• 1:49:30Lex Fridman?

  The individual.

• 1:49:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so people have vigorous disagreements about that. But I guess our point would be, we see religion as being inextricably connected ultimately to assuaging concerns about death.

• 1:49:45Lex Fridman?

  Well, I guess another question to ask around this, like, what does the world look like without religion? Will we, if it's inextricably connected to our fears of death, do you think it always returns in some kind of shape? Maybe it's not called religion, but whatever, it just keeps returning?

• 1:50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, who knows? So that's a, that's a great question, Lex. So this woman named Karen Armstrong, she was a nun turned historian.

• 1:50:20Speaker 01

  And jeez, 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 add it. Okay, yeah, her point, it has gotten the title, of course, but you know, she's like, look, all religions are generally fairly right minded in that they advocate the golden rule. And all religions at their best do seem to foster pro-social behavior towards the in-group. And that confers both psychological as well as physical benefits. That's the good news.

• 1:51:05Speaker 01

  And the bad news is historically, all religions are subject to being hijacked by a lunatic fringe. 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.

• 1:51:50Speaker 01

  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. And there's the tribal thing. And so there's a guy named Amin Malouf, a Lebanese guy who writes in French, in the 1990s, I think,

• 1:52:29Speaker 01

  wrote a book called, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. And that was his point is.

• 1:52:41Speaker 01

  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, I have, and by the way, this is just a, a peripheral comment, but I find less resistance to Becker's ideas in our work when I'm in like Jesuit schools.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  You know, it's the Americans that, you know, the secular humanists who are most disinclined to accept these ideas.

• 1:53:35Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:53:51Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:53:51Lex Fridman?

  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 the, that, uh, that, that, yeah. So the, the, in terms of Jesuit, like that's,

• 1:54:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:10Lex Fridman?

  That's the beauty of, uh, the experience of faith and so on is like, uh, well, how, wherever that journey takes you is you, you actually explore the biggest questions of our world.

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:22Speaker 01

  So I don't see religion going away because I don't see humans as capable of surviving without faith and hope. And.

• 1:54:38Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  Well, ultimately, it's because of some form of faith.

• 1:55:26Lex Fridman?

  But also, also faith shouldn't be a dogmatic thing that you should always be leaping.

• 1:55:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:55:34Lex Fridman?

  I guess the problem with science or with religion is you could sort of

• 1:55:40Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:55:41Lex Fridman?

  All of a sudden, take a step into a place where you're super confident that you know the absolute truth of things.

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  There you go. And again, back to Socrates, Plato, back in the cave, 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, 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?

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  And they're like, nothing. That's like, awesome. And then I'm like, yo dudes, you added the cave, but how do you know that you're not in another cave? The illumination may be better.

• 1:56:47Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

  But the minute you think you're at the end of the proverbial

• 1:56:55Speaker 01

  Intellectual slash epistemological trail, then you have already succumbed to either laziness or dogmatism or both. That's really well put.

• 1:57:09Lex Fridman?

  Ah, that's both terrifying and exciting that that we're always it's there's always a bigger cave. A little bit of an out there question, but I think some of the interesting qualities of the human mind is the ideas of intelligence and consciousness. So what do you make of consciousness? So do you think death creates consciousness? Like the fear of death, the terror of death creates consciousness?

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  And consciousness in turn magnifies the terror of death. I do.

• 1:57:48Lex Fridman?

  Like, what is consciousness to you?

• 1:57:50Speaker 01

  Oh, don't ask me that. So now, because that if I could answer that, you know, I'd be chugging rum out of a coconut with my Nobel Prize. That, you know, it's literally, you know, Steven 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.

• 1:58:18Lex Fridman?

  What is conscious?

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, what is consciousness? And I don't think it's an epiphenomenological afterthought. So a lot of people, I think Dan Wagner at Harvard, a lot of folks consider it just the ass end of a process that by the time we are aware of what it is, it's just basically an integrated rendering of something that's already happened. You know, evidently the there's a half second delay between when something happens. You know, those studies and our awareness of it.

• 1:59:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and then that's where like ideas of free will will step in. Yeah. You can explain away a lot of stuff.

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  And I think those are all important and interesting questions. I'm of the persuasion, I mean, even, not even, but the Dawkins and the selfish gene.

• 1:59:20Speaker 01

  Is very thoughtful, actually in a lot of, it's actually more in notes than in the text of the book, but he's just like, it's hard for me to imagine that consciousness doesn't have some sort of important and highly adaptive function. And what Dawkins says is, he thought about it in terms of just that we could do mental simulations, that one possibly extraordinary product of consciousness is to, rather than

• 1:59:58Speaker 01

  find out, often by adverse consequences through trying something, would be to run mental simulations. And so, one possibility is that consciousness is highly adaptive. Another possibility is Nicholas Humphrey, a British dude who wrote a book about, I think it's called Regaining Consciousness. And he hypothesized, I think this is 1980s, maybe even earlier, that consciousness arose as a way to better predict the behavior of others in social settings, that by knowing

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  how I feel, makes me better able to know how you may be feeling. This is like the rudiments of a theory of mind. And it really may not have had anything to do with intelligence, so much as social intelligence.

• 2:00:56Lex Fridman?

  So, so in that sense, consciousness is a social construct?

• 2:01:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:01:02Lex Fridman?

  It's just a useful thing for interacting with other humans?

• 2:01:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:06Lex Fridman?

  I don't know, but there seems to be something about realizing your own mortality that's somehow intricately connected to the idea of consciousness.

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  Well, I think so also. So, this is where, and Nietzsche, he said a solitary creature would not need consciousness.

• 2:01:29Lex Fridman?

  What do you think?

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:01:42Lex Fridman?

  Relax.

• 2:01:46Lex Fridman?

  But so what if you, I mean, say you were on an island alone and you saw a reflection of yourself in the water, like if you were alone your whole life.

• 2:01:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:02:09Lex Fridman?

  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, another notion, like, you know, there's these visualizations of a death in a cloak. Like, I always felt like I am a living thing. And then there's another thing that is the end of me. And I'm having like a conversation with that. So in this sense, that's, that's the way I construct my, the fact that I am a thing

• 2:02:49Lex Fridman?

  is because there's somebody else that tells me, well, you won't be a thing eventually.

• 2:02:56Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:02:57Lex Fridman?

  So it feels like a conversation, perhaps, but that's, 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.

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:03:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But, yeah, I don't know how I feel about that, but I tend to be in agreement with you when we're talking about economics more, so. That that we're deeply social beings, like everything, the way it just feels like we're humans. I'm with Harari with the Sapiens, we're kind of, we seem to construct ideas on top of each other and that's fundamentally a social process.

• 2:03:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:03:56Lex Fridman?

  It's so fascinating, just like reading your book, I'm sorry, on a small tangent, that Sapiens is like one of the most popular books in the world.

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:10Lex Fridman?

  And just reading your book is like, well, this sounds, I mean, like, I don't know, I don't know what makes a popular book.

• 2:04:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, if you want me to be petty and stupid, I will tell you that from time to time, we also wonder why our book, you know, like all books, people can take issue with it, but we thought it would be.

• 2:04:38Lex Fridman?

  A bigger hit.

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  That it would be more widely read.

• 2:04:41Lex Fridman?

  And it's funny because I, I've, 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.

• 2:04:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:55Lex Fridman?

  But I always wonder like, these great, like, some of the greatest books ever written are completely unknown during the author's lifetime. And it's like, man, for some reason that it's again, it's that identity thing. I think. Man, that sucks.

• 2:05:13Speaker 01

  Well, I'm comforted by that. So Van Gogh sold one painting in his life. And evidently, Thoreau sold like seventy-five copies of Walden. Nietzsche's books did not sell well.

• 2:05:30Lex Fridman?

  And how did Ernest Becker sell?

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  He is the, his books are published by the Free Press and have sold more than any other books. Um, that they have published, so.

• 2:05:43Lex Fridman?

  So what's that mean? That's a lot?

• 2:05:45Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's like Jordan Peterson millions, but it's hundreds of thousands.

• 2:05:50Lex Fridman?

  Was he respected? I just don't see him. Okay.

• 2:05:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:55Lex Fridman?

  Uh, I don't see him brought up as a, like in the top ten philosophers of.

• 2:06:01Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 2:06:02Lex Fridman?

  Of, so. How far away is he? Is he in the top hundred for people?

• 2:06:07Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 2:06:08Lex Fridman?

  Like, he doesn't, he's not brought up that often.

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  Because again.

• 2:06:11Lex Fridman?

  Like, your work is brought up more often.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:13Lex Fridman?

  Like, terribly, like, because I think he got, yeah, I mean, I think he's one of the great philosophers of the 20th century.

• 2:06:20Speaker 01

  So what we say, Lex, is that our goal, certainly when we first started and now, just as much, actually. But what I say at all my talks is, look, if these ideas have interest you enough to go read Ernest 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. 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,

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  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 Skidmore student said, oh, that's gotta be bullshit. I'm like, well, let's do a study.

• 2:07:26Lex Fridman?

  Let's do a study. And my, my own dreams are in creating uh, robots and artificial intelligence systems that a human can love. And I think there's something about mortality and fear mortality that is essential for implementing in our AI systems.

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:46Lex Fridman?

  And so, oh, ma- maybe can you comment on that, like?

• 2:07:49Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:07:50Lex Fridman?

  Uh, on, uh, so this is, uh, this is a different perspective on, on your work.

• 2:07:57Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:07:57Lex Fridman?

  Which is like, how do we engineer a human?

• 2:07:59Speaker 01

  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 am seeing out. When you first contacted me.

• 2:08:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:11Speaker 01

  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 AI. And 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.

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  And this other philosopher, Levinas. And then another philosopher, Sylvia Benzo, 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.

• 2:09:21Lex Fridman?

  Human form?

• 2:09:22Speaker 01

  Human form.

• 2:09:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:23Speaker 01

  Who finds out who is having.

• 2:09:28Speaker 01

  Having essentially existential anxieties. And the, I think the project is called a dinner with her or something. And it doesn't really matter, but the punchline is that she finds out that her creator has made her mortal. And so the question is, what happens phenomenologically and behaviorally to an artificial intelligence who now knows that it's mortal? And it's actually the same question that you're posing.

• 2:10:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:12Speaker 01

  And that is, is that necessary? In order for an AI to approximate humanity?

• 2:10:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think, yeah, so the intuition, again, it's, it's unknown, but I think it's absolutely, I think it's absolutely necessary. A lot of people, the same kind of shallow thinking that people have about our own end of life, our own death, is the same way people think up, 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 at which it ends. He's just, the program ends. Uh, there's a goal state, there's a, you reached an end point.

• 2:11:00Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:11:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:11:29Lex Fridman?

  And that's where the terror is. And it feels like, I mean, in the language you would think about is is the terror of this death or like anticipation of it or thinking about it is the creative force that builds everything.

• 2:11:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:11:45Lex Fridman?

  And that feels like, 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 philosophers are the the only ones thinking about it currently.

• 2:12:08Speaker 01

  And that's what these folks have convinced me.

• 2:12:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and engineers aren't, which is, I get.

• 2:12:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, most of the, most of the things I talk about, I get kind of

• 2:12:22Lex Fridman?

  people roll their eyes from the engineer perspective.

• 2:12:24Speaker 01

  Not these folks. They're like, because again, I saw your name and they're like, wait a minute, I've just seen that. They're like, here's someone.

• 2:12:33Lex Fridman?

  You should check out.

• 2:12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this was a delightful conference.

• 2:12:37Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:12:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:12:58Lex Fridman?

  And I think some of these things of fear mortality are essential. 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.

• 2:13:19Speaker 01

  What's your view, not to make me the interviewer, but what's your view about machine ethics? Can you imagine an ethical AI without some semblance of

• 2:13:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:35Speaker 01

  of finitude, let's say?

• 2:13:37Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think ethics is a

• 2:13:41Lex Fridman?

  it's a, you know, there's a, there's a trolley problem that's often used in the work that I've done.

• 2:13:46Speaker 01

  Joshua Green.

• 2:13:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, with autonomous vehicles in particular.

• 2:13:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:52Lex Fridman?

  That people.

• 2:13:55Lex Fridman?

  I think they all flow to ask like, how would a machine deal with an ethical situation? That they themselves, humans, don't know how to deal with. Exactly. And so I don't know if a machine is able to do a better job on difficult ethical questions. But I certainly think to behave properly and effectively in this world, it needs to be, have a fear of mortality and like be able to even dance. Cause I don't think you can solve ethical problems, but you have to, I think like ethics is like a dance floor. You have to just, you have to dance properly with the rest of the humans. Like if people are dancing tango, you have to dance in the same kind of way.

• 2:14:39Lex Fridman?

  And for that, you have to have a fear of mortality. Like I think of more practically speaking, I said autonomous vehicles, like the way you interact with pedestrians. Fundamentally has to have a sense of mortality. So when pedestrians cross the road, now I've watched, well, certainly a hundred plus hours of pedestrian videos. There's a kind of social contract where you walk in front of a car and you're putting your life in the hands of another human being. That's right.

• 2:15:18Lex Fridman?

  And like death is, is in the car, in the game that's being played, death is right there. It's part of the calculus. It's not, but it's not like a simple calculus, not a simple equation. It's a, it's an, it's a, I mean, I don't know what it is, but it's, it's in the, it's in there. And 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, right. Estimating the trajectory, like treating everything like it's billiard balls. As opposed to like being able to construct an effective model, the world model of what the person.

• 2:16:04Lex Fridman?

  Thinking, what they're going to do, what are the different possibilities of how this scene might evolve? I think requires having some sense of, yeah, fear of fear of mortality, of mortality. I don't, see, the the thing is, I think it's really important to think about. I could be honest enough to say that it's, I haven't been able to figure out how to engineer any of these things.

• 2:16:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:16:31Lex Fridman?

  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've, Roombas is a robot that does, um, vacuums the floor and I've had them, um, make different sounds, like I had them scream in pain and it, it, uh, it, uh, you immediately anthropomorphize.

• 2:16:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:16:58Lex Fridman?

  And it creates a, I don't know, knowing that they can feel pain. See, I'm, I'm speaking like knowing, uh, that I immediately imagine that they can feel pain and it immediately draws me closer to them.

• 2:17:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:17:14Lex Fridman?

  At the human experience and that there's, there's something in that that should be engineered in, in our, in our systems, it feels like.

• 2:17:23Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:17:31Speaker 01

  Oh, I think it's, yeah, it's already there.

• 2:17:36Lex Fridman?

  No, there's a certain kind of deep connection with technology. Yeah. In a real, like you would choose to marry, um.

• 2:17:43Speaker 01

  I mean, again, it sounds, uh, 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.

• 2:17:59Speaker 01

  But it turned into a relationship of enduring significance that the woman who wrote the book is not willing to dismiss as a perversion.

• 2:18:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's what, you know, people kind of joke about sex robots, which is funny. Like, it's a funny, I mean, there's a lot of stuff about robots that's just kind of fun to talk about that is not necessarily connected to reality. People joke about sex robots, but if you actually look how sex robots, which are pretty rare these days, are used, they're not used by people who want sex.

• 2:18:35Speaker 01

  Precisely.

• 2:18:36Lex Fridman?

  They're actually.

• 2:18:37Speaker 01

  They're companions.

• 2:18:38Lex Fridman?

  They're companions, they become companions.

• 2:18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:41Lex Fridman?

  They, it's, 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 seek companionships. We're deeply lonely. I mean, that was the other sense I have that I don't know if I can articulate clearly, you can probably do a better job, but I have a sense that there's a deep loneliness within all of us.

• 2:19:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:19:03Lex Fridman?

  In the face of death, it feels like we're alone.

• 2:19:05Speaker 01

  So, you know, the, what drew me to the existential take on things, Lex, was the,

• 2:19:17Speaker 01

  who is it, Rollo May and Erwin Yalom, 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.

• 2:20:02Speaker 01

  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, in a book called Escape from Freedom, he's like, look, you're smart enough to know that the most direct way that we typically communicate with our fellow human beings is through language. But you also know that language is a pale shadow of the totality of our interior phenomenological

• 2:20:45Speaker 01

  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. So you can be desperately lonely in a house where you live with 10 people in the middle of Tokyo where there's millions.

• 2:21:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's the Great Gatsby.

• 2:21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:22Lex Fridman?

  Could be alone at a big party.

• 2:21:23Speaker 01

  Precisely. Exactly.

• 2:21:25Lex Fridman?

  Maybe this is a small tangent, but let me ask you, on the topic of academia, you're kind of, we talked about Jordan Peterson, there's a lot of sort of renegade type of thinkers, certainly in psychology, but it applies in all disciplines. What are your thoughts about academia being a place to harbor people like yourself? That, you know, people who think deeply about things, who are not constrained by sort of the, I don't think you're quite controversial.

• 2:22:05Speaker 01

  No, not really.

• 2:22:06Lex Fridman?

  But you are a person who thinks deeply about things. And it feels like academia can sometimes stifle that.

• 2:22:15Speaker 01

  I think so. So my concern right now, Lex, for young scholars, is that.

• 2:22:25Speaker 01

  The restrictions and expectations are such that it's highly unlikely that anybody will do anything

• 2:22:36Speaker 01

  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 forty years ago and they're like, what are you gonna do? If we give you a job and I'm like, I don't know, I wanna think about it and read and

• 2:23:05Speaker 01

  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. He's like, this guy looks like Charles Manson and Jesus, but

• 2:23:26Speaker 01

  the expectation is that you come to a post, you know, you start publishing so that you can get grants.

• 2:23:37Lex Fridman?

  That's certainly true, but there's also kind of a behavioral thing. You said like long hair. There's a there's a certain style of the way you're supposed to behave. For example, like I'm wearing a suit. It sounds, it sounds weird, but I feel comfortable in this. I, you know, I wore it like when I was teaching at MIT, I wore it.

• 2:23:56Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:23:56Lex Fridman?

  I wore it to meetings and so on, the different, 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.

• 2:24:09Speaker 01

  No, that's right.

• 2:24:10Lex Fridman?

  And there's a pressure to behave, to have a hair thing.

• 2:24:13Speaker 01

  No, that's right.

• 2:24:14Lex Fridman?

  The way you wear your hair, the way you, this isn't like a liberal or anything, it's just in tribes.

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:24:22Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:37Lex Fridman?

  Should welcome, just should welcome, you know, people that don't fit in.

• 2:24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, no.

• 2:24:44Lex Fridman?

  That sounds weird, but I could just imagine an interview with, at Princeton. You know, I can imagine, why aren't people, why aren't you at Harvard, for example, or MIT?

• 2:24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so that, look, I would love to, you know, I haven't lectured at MIT, but I've lectured at Harvard. I've gotten to lecture at almost every place that wouldn't consider me for a job.

• 2:25:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:12Speaker 01

  And I, well, a few things, I'm lucky because I, you know, I go to Princeton, 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 offer me a job later that day, which I declined for months because of the extraordinary pressure of my mentors who right-mindedly felt that I wouldn't get much done there. And, but what they told me at 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 about it.

• 2:25:55Lex Fridman?

  That was the negotiation.

• 2:25:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I negotiated, I drove a hard bargain. But, but honestly, Lex, that's, I feel I'm very committed to Skidmore because 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 was very lucky to be given the latitude and to be encouraged.

• 2:26:38Speaker 01

  I took classes at Skidmore, that's how I learned all this stuff. I graduated, I got a PhD unscathed by knowledge. We were great statisticians and methodologists, but we didn't have any substance. You know, 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

• 2:27:16Speaker 01

  My view is that this is how I comported myself. Other people, the guy I learned the most from at Skidmore is now dead, a history professor, Ted Karoda, 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.

• 2:27:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:28:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:06Speaker 01

  Well, they're wrong.

• 2:28:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:08Speaker 01

  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, as in my twenties, they assumed I was housekeeping. I always felt that was important, that the students learn not to judge an idea by the appearance of the person who purvey's it.

• 2:28:30Lex Fridman?

  And yeah, I mean, that's, 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.

• 2:28:43Speaker 01

  I do too.

• 2:28:44Lex Fridman?

  And great ideas.

• 2:28:45Speaker 01

  I love hearing you say that. I still, and it's one of the reasons why I'm really apprehensive about the future of education right now, in the context of the pandemic.

• 2:28:58Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:29:00Speaker 01

  Is that a lot of folks, and a lot of these are Google type people who I don't, you know, they're geniuses also, but I don't like this idea that all learning can be virtual and that much could happen. I'm big on embodied environments with actual humans interacting.

• 2:29:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's, I mean, there's, there's so much to the university education, but I think the key part that I, is the mentorship that occurs somehow and at the human level. Like I've gotten a lot of flack, like this conversation, we're in person now and.

• 2:29:40Lex Fridman?

  I've even with Edward Snowden, who done all interviews remote. I'm a stickler to in person. It has to be in person. Like, and a lot of people just don't get it. They're like, well, why can't, this is so much easier. Like, why go through the pain? Like, I've traveled, I'm traveling in the next month to Paris for a single stupid conversation, nobody cares about, just to be in person.

• 2:30:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's important to me. I, I, honestly, I was like, this.

• 2:30:16Lex Fridman?

  And thank you for coming down today.

• 2:30:17Speaker 01

  It's my pleasure, but again, it's very self-serving. I've enjoyed this. I knew I was going to, but it's not about our enjoyment per se. Again, at the risk of sounding cavalier, there are a host of factors beyond verbal.

• 2:30:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:38Speaker 01

  That I don't believe can be adequately captured. I don't care how much the acuity is decent on a Zoom conversation. I feel, again, I felt within five minutes that this was 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.

• 2:31:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I tend to. Well, I'm hopeful, I agree with you on the current technology, but I am hopeful on like some others, on the technology eventually being able to create that kind of experience.

• 2:31:18Speaker 01

  Oh, I think it's.

• 2:31:19Lex Fridman?

  Or quite far away from that, but it might be able, my hope is, you know, I'm hopeful.

• 2:31:26Speaker 01

  I was at Microsoft in Seattle, and I can't remember why. And, no, I can't, I, that's how, I'm in my early Mr. Magoo phase and.

• 2:31:40Speaker 01

  And somebody there was showing us like a virtual wall where the entire wall, you know, when you're talking to somebody. So it's life size and they were beginning to get the appearance of motion and stuff. It looked pretty.

• 2:32:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, with virtual reality too. I don't know if you've ever been inside a virtual world.

• 2:32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:04Lex Fridman?

  It's to me, it's I can just I can see the future. It's it's it's quite real.

• 2:32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:12Lex Fridman?

  In terms of like a terror of death, I'm afraid of heights.

• 2:32:16Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 2:32:16Lex Fridman?

  And there's I don't know if you've ever tried, you should if you haven't, there's a virtual reality experience where you can walk a plank.

• 2:32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:24Lex Fridman?

  You can look down and man, I was on the ground like I was like, I was afraid, deeply afraid. I was is it was it was as real as.

• 2:32:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:32:37Lex Fridman?

  As anything else could be. And I mean, these are very early days of that technology, relatively speaking. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know what to do with that. Same with like crossing the street. We did these experiments crossing the street in front of a car. And you know, it's being run over by a car. It's terrifying.

• 2:32:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:00Lex Fridman?

  It's just that, yeah, so there is a rich experience to be created there. We're not there yet, but I yeah, and I've seen a lot of people try, like you said, the Google folks, Silicon Valley folks tried to create a virtual online education. I don't know. I think they've raised really important questions about like, what makes the education experience fulfilling? What makes it effective?

• 2:33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, these are important questions.

• 2:33:31Lex Fridman?

  And I think what they highlight is we have no clue. Like, there's.

• 2:33:39Lex Fridman?

  Thomas Sowell wrote a book about, a recent book on charter schools.

• 2:33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would like to talk to him.

• 2:33:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, he's an interesting guy.

• 2:33:51Speaker 01

  We will disagree about a lot, but respectfully.

• 2:33:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, such a powerful mind.

• 2:33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:57Lex Fridman?

  But he, I, I need to read, I've only heard him talk about the book. 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.

• 2:34:42Lex Fridman?

  And in his usual way, a, as you know, just is very eloquent in arguing his points.

• 2:34:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:49Lex Fridman?

  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

• 2:34:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:56Lex Fridman?

  in our civilization and we're doing a shitty job of it.

• 2:34:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:02Lex Fridman?

  In academia, in, uh, in university education and, you know, younger education.

• 2:35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:09Lex Fridman?

  The whole thing.

• 2:35:10Speaker 01

  The whole thing. And yet, um, we value, um,

• 2:35:18Speaker 01

  just about anyone or anything more than educators. You know, part of it is just the relatively low regard that Americans have.

• 2:35:30Lex Fridman?

  For teachers.

• 2:35:31Speaker 01

  For teachers.

• 2:35:32Lex Fridman?

  Also similarly, like, um,

• 2:35:35Lex Fridman?

  Just people of service. I think great teachers are the greatest thing in our society. And I would say now in a controversial note, like Black Lives Matter, you know, great police officers is the greatest thing in our society also. Like all people that do service, we undervalue cops severely. Like this whole defund the police is missing the point.

• 2:36:02Speaker 01

  And it's a stupid word. I'm with you on that, Lex. Our neighbors to one side of our house are three generations of police. Our neighbors across the street are police. They know my, you know, political predilections. And we've gotten along fine for 30 years. And I go out and tell them every day, you know, when you go in today, you tell the people on the force that I appreciate what they're doing.

• 2:36:42Speaker 01

  I think it's really important to not tribalize those concerns.

• 2:36:51Lex Fridman?

  I mean, we mentioned so many brilliant books and philosophers. But it'd be nice to 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

• 2:37:10Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 2:37:12Lex Fridman?

  This is the worst question. Had a big impact in your life and you would recommend.

• 2:37:16Speaker 01

  Spent four hours driving here perseverating about that. I didn't, everything else you sent me.

• 2:37:22Lex Fridman?

  That's fine.

• 2:37:23Speaker 01

  And I actually skimmed it and I'm like, I don't want to look at it because I want, I want us to talk.

• 2:37:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:29Speaker 01

  The ones in blue, I'm like, all right. And, you know.

• 2:37:35Speaker 01

  I've already said that I've found Becker's work and I've put The Denial of Death out there.

• 2:37:43Lex Fridman?

  Is that his best, sorry, a small tangent, is there other books that of his?

• 2:37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, see, if I could have this count as one, that The Birth and Death of Meaning, The Denial of Death, and Escape from Evil are three books of Ernest Becker's that I believe to all be profound.

• 2:38:03Lex Fridman?

  In a, in a little sort of brief dance around topics, I've only read Denial of Death. Like, how do those books connect in your?

• 2:38:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, nice. So The Birth and Death of Meaning is where Becker situates his thinking in more of an evolutionary foundation. So I like that for that reason. Escape from Evil is where he applies the ideas in The Denial of Death more directly to economic matters and to inequality. And also to our inability to peacefully coexist with other folks who don't share our beliefs. So I would put Ernest Becker out there as one. I also like novels a lot.

• 2:38:56Speaker 01

  And here I was like, god damn it, no matter what I say, I'm gonna be like, yes, but.

• 2:39:03Lex Fridman?

  But the existentialists, you like all those folks, Camus? You like that literary existentialism?

• 2:39:09Speaker 01

  I do, but I mean, you know, I've read all those books. I will tell you the last line of The Plague, "We learn in times of pestilence that there is more to admire in men than to despise." And I love that.

• 2:39:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, Plague's such a, I don't know, I find The Plague is a brilliant book. Before, before The Plague has come to us in 2020, it was just such a good book.

• 2:39:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 2:39:36Lex Fridman?

  A book about love, about.

• 2:39:38Speaker 01

  But I'll toss a one that may be less known to folks. 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.

• 2:39:58Lex Fridman?

  Fiction?

• 2:39:59Speaker 01

  Fiction, yeah.

• 2:40:00Lex Fridman?

  What's, uh, what kind of ideas are we talking about?

• 2:40:02Speaker 01

  Uh, it, it, all of the existential ideas that we have encountered today, but in the context of a story of someone who finds out that he is terminally ill. It's set in the South in the, um, heyday of like segregation. So there's a lot of social issues, a lot of existential issues. But it's basically a fictional account of someone who finds out that they're terminally ill and who reacts originally as, um, you might expect

• 2:40:40Speaker 01

  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 with his own mortality, um, it ends lovingly. And I, back to your idea of about, you know, love being incredibly potent.

• 2:41:10Lex Fridman?

  That's the, the nice thing, as you mentioned, uh, before with, with Heidegger. I, I really liked 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.

• 2:41:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:41:29Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:41:37Speaker 01

  Now.

• 2:41:38Lex Fridman?

  Now.

• 2:41:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:39Lex Fridman?

  It, that's a really useful, I don't, I don't even know. I think I've been too afraid to even think about that. Like,

• 2:41:47Speaker 01

  I have.

• 2:41:47Lex Fridman?

  Like, like, sit here and think like in five minutes,

• 2:41:52Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:41:53Lex Fridman?

  it's over.

• 2:41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:57Lex Fridman?

  This is it. In five minutes, it's over.

• 2:41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that would be my most recent addition, as I really am struck by Heidegger.

• 2:42:07Lex Fridman?

  So would you recommend?

• 2:42:08Speaker 01

  Well, okay, well, if you have a few years.

• 2:42:10Lex Fridman?

  I remember I tuned out Being in Time. I was like, I tried to read it. I was like, that's it.

• 2:42:14Speaker 01

  It's a 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.

• 2:42:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:27Speaker 01

  And.

• 2:42:28Lex Fridman?

  Well, I took a James Joyce course in college, so I've, I even, I guess, read parts of Finning his Wake.

• 2:42:36Speaker 01

  No way.

• 2:42:38Lex Fridman?

  But like, there's a difference between reading and like,

• 2:42:43Lex Fridman?

  I don't think I understood anything. I like his short stories, The Dead, The Dead, yeah.

• 2:42:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that. And I like Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom is a, is a fine book.

• 2:42:55Lex Fridman?

  But would you, is there something Heidegger connected in a book you would recommend or no?

• 2:43:01Speaker 01

  No, so maybe I got to abandon him. I mean, I mean, Being in Time is awesome.

• 2:43:08Speaker 01

  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, you know, a turning. And philosophers don't like that. And I'm like, this is where he's starting to.

• 2:43:34Lex Fridman?

  Really shine.

• 2:43:35Speaker 01

  To really shine for me, so.

• 2:43:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:43:38Lex Fridman?

  All right, that's a beautiful set of books. So what advice would you give to a young person today about their career, about life, about how to survive in this world full of suffering?

• 2:43:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Yeah.

• 2:43:58Speaker 01

  My advice is to get competent advice. That's what I tell my students. It's different.

• 2:44:03Lex Fridman?

  Don't listen to me.

• 2:44:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't listen to me. Well, you know, I think.

• 2:44:10Speaker 01

  My, my big piece of advice these days is, you know, again, it's at the risk of 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,

• 2:44:55Speaker 01

  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, um, Decline of the West. And he says that the philosopher, the German philosopher Goethe, he says, the purpose of life is to live. And I, that's, so that's one of my pieces of advice.

• 2:45:24Lex Fridman?

  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, when, when young folks talk to me, especially these days, uh, is there swimming in a sea of possibilities?

• 2:45:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so this, 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 now 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.

• 2:46:27Speaker 01

  The best option is to do something, as silly as it sounds. And then if that doesn't work, do something else. Which just sounds like my mom torturing me when I was young. But you know, part of the thing that I find myself singularly ill-equipped is that we're at the, I may be at the tail end of the last generation of Americans, where you 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.

• 2:47:08Speaker 01

  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 may, you know, I consider myself a professor, but what happens if most of the schools go out of business? Somebody else may consider themselves a restaurateur, but what happens if there's no more restaurants?

• 2:47:51Speaker 01

  So what I, this is negative advice, but I tell folks, don't define yourself as a social caricature. Yeah. But 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 see. 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.

• 2:48:35Lex Fridman?

  So what, I think you talked about an axe of chopping wood.

• 2:48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48:40Lex Fridman?

  And soul from Socrates.

• 2:48:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48:44Lex Fridman?

  What is your soul? What is the, the essence of Sheldon?

• 2:48:53Speaker 01

  Wow, that was like awesome.

• 2:48:56Lex Fridman?

  Like when God, when you, when you show up at the end of this thing, he kind of looks at you. He's like, oh yeah.

• 2:49:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:04Lex Fridman?

  I remember you.

• 2:49:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, to be honest, what I muse about

• 2:49:14Speaker 01

  is to me, the, when,

• 2:49:19Speaker 01

  when people are, I told you, I have, we have two kids, late twenties, early thirties. 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 a smart guy. And I do admire intelligence and I do venerate education and I find that to be

• 2:50:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:50:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:50:29Lex Fridman?

  I think you, I think you did all right on that, in that regard.

• 2:50:34Speaker 01

  I love that question, Alex. That's a good one. I think everyone should be asked that. What is your soul?

• 2:50:40Lex Fridman?

  Do you have maybe just a few lingering questions around it?

• 2:50:48Lex Fridman?

  So, I mean, on, on the, on the point of the soul, you've talked about the, the meaning of life. Do you have?

• 2:51:00Lex Fridman?

  On a personal level, do you have

• 2:51:04Lex Fridman?

  an answer to the meaning of your life of something that brought you meaning, happiness,

• 2:51:17Lex Fridman?

  some, some sense of, sense?

• 2:51:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:26Speaker 01

  No, I mean, yes, yes, and no, I mean, I, you know, I'm sixty-six, so I'm in the kinda

• 2:51:36Speaker 01

  not ready to wrap it up, literally or metaphorically, but you look, I look back and just really with a sense of awe and wonder, gratitude, and

• 2:51:52Lex Fridman?

  Is there memories that stand out to you from childhood, from earlier, that like, is like, you know, stand out as something you're really proud of, or

• 2:52:03Lex Fridman?

  just happy to have been on this earth?

• 2:52:07Speaker 01

  Mainly

• 2:52:07Lex Fridman?

  Just that stuff happen?

• 2:52:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, I mean, you know, my family, also a chunk, were, my folks, so my grandparents are from Eastern Europe, you know, Russia, Austria.

• 2:52:22Speaker 01

  As far as we know, some of them never made it out. I consider

• 2:52:28Speaker 01

  myself

• 2:52:31Speaker 01

  very fortunate to have

• 2:52:35Speaker 01

  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

• 2:52:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:52:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:53:15Lex Fridman?

  I think you did a pretty good job of that.

• 2:53:17Speaker 01

  I don't know, but I, I, I had, so that, those are the things that I'm proud of.

• 2:53:25Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's funny, you, you've been, you've, you've talked about just yourself as a human being. But you've also contributed some really important ideas for your ideas and also kind of integrating and maybe even popularizing the work of Ernest Becker, of connecting it, of making it legitimate scientifically. I mean, you know, as a human, of course, you want to be, you, 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.

• 2:54:08Lex Fridman?

  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 like me that your work has been a gift for, so.

• 2:54:32Speaker 01

  Oh, well, thank you. Oh, I, I like that. And then we have described ourselves as giant interneurons. I'm like, 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.

• 2:54:56Speaker 01

  These disparate and superficially unconnected discourses, you know, so existentialists, they'd be like, evidence? What's that? And yeah, there's now a branch of psychology, experimental existential psychology that I think we could take credit for having encouraged the formation of. And that in turn has gotten these ideas in circulation in academic communities where they may not have otherwise gotten. So I think that's good.

• 2:55:32Lex Fridman?

  Well, Sheldon, it's a huge honor. I can't believe you came down here. I've been a fan of your work. I hope we get to talk again. Huge honor to talk to you. Thank you so much for talking today.

• 2:55:44Speaker 01

  Thanks, Lex. We'll do it again soon, I hope.

• 2:55:46Lex Fridman?

  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 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. 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 an 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.