Does A Fear Of Death Drive Everything We Do? | Sheldon Solomon | Modern Wisdom Podcast 240

Sheldon Solomon is a social psychologist at Skidmore College and an author. Humans are a unique animal in that we are aware of our own mortality. One day we will die, and we know it. This fact has a huge impact on how we live our lives, perhaps it's the most important fact we know. Expect to learn how Sheldon's experiments have proven that death anxiety is a crucial driver of behaviour, why we can hate somebody for the shape of their nose, how death anxiety causes people to be tribal, what would happen if a child grew up without any human contact and much more... Sponsor: Get a 21 Day Free Trial to a supercharged calendar at http://bit.ly/wovenwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy The Worm At The Core - https://amzn.to/31VQtRn Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #ernestbecker #denialofdeath #chriswilliamson - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Hello friends, welcome back. My guest today is Sheldon Solomon. I heard him on Lex Friedman's show and fell in love, reached out to him and he very graciously decided to join me today. We're talking about The Denial of Death, a seminal book by Ernest Becker, and then the subsequent work which has taken up most of Sheldon's life. You might not be aware of it, but death drives an awful lot that we do. Humans are a unique animal in that we are aware of our own mortality. One day we will die and we know it. And that fact has a huge impact on how we live our lives. Perhaps it's the most important fact that we know. So today, expect to learn how Sheldon's experiments have proven that death anxiety is a crucial driver of behaviour, why we can hate somebody for the shape of their nose,

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  how death anxiety causes people to be tribal, what would happen if a child grew up without any human contact, and much more. Very calm existential conversation today. Definitely a multiple listener. I adored this and I'm definitely getting Sheldon back on. We only scratched the surface of how deep and weird I think me and him can go today.

• 1:09Chris Williamson?

  But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Sheldon Solomon.

• 1:30Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Sheldon Solomon. Sheldon, welcome to the show.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here, Chris.

• 1:39Chris Williamson?

  Really, really happy to have you on. Are we going to talk about death today?

• 1:45Speaker 01

  I believe that we will. Hopefully not for the sake of death per se, but in the interest of enhancing life.

• 1:54Chris Williamson?

  How does death enhance life?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Well, at our best, the existentialists tell us since time immemorial, it is necessary to come to terms with the most basic fact of human existence, and that is that we, like all living creatures, are of finite duration. And theologians, philosophers, you know, people just sitting on a rock back in antiquity, have wrestled, frankly, with this idea. You know, every other form of life is unperturbed by the reality of finitude,

• 2:42Speaker 01

  but we necessarily are. And the claim, very simply, is that whether we're aware of it or not, death anxiety pervades every aspect of our existence. And malignant manifestations of death anxiety are arguably responsible, directly or indirectly, for a considerable proportion of human foibles. And so the claim is that both for the benefit of ourselves as individuals to get the most out of life, as well as for the benefit of society in general, it is necessary, both individually and collectively, to come to terms with our mortality.

• 3:27Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the manifestations of how they can malignantly manifest?

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Yes, so great question. I'll back up a little bit, just to give folks some detail. The work that we do is derived from a cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker, who in the 1970s won a Pulitzer Prize for a book called "The Denial of Death." And what Becker argued, you know, very simply, is that, yeah, humans are like all other living things, you know, Darwinian-wise, that we are biologically... predisposed to want to survive in the interest of self-preservation and for reproduction. And yet, we're different than other creatures.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  And without being overly arrogant, the claim is that our huge forebrain gives us the capacity to think abstractly and symbolically, to the point where we can even imagine stuff that doesn't yet exist and then have the audacity to take our dreams and render them real. And that could not be more uplifting to me. I like Otto Rahnk, Freud's boy, who said, "Humans make the unreal real." And we don't want to lose track of the fact that all other creatures have to accept the world in the form in which they encounter it. You know, I get it, spiders make webs, beavers make dams, bees make hives, and they've been

• 5:03Speaker 01

  doing it quite well for hundreds of millions of years. Yeah, but they don't imagine a flying machine like Da Vinci in the 1500s or 1400s. And then actually, centuries later, we're flying around in what was originated in somebody's imagination. All right, all great so far, until, and still great, when Ernest Becker says, "Okay, let's now move to Kierkegaard, the Danish existential philosopher, who said, 'You know, people are so smart that we realize that we're here.'" And of course, humans, we take this for granted.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  You know, you wake up every day and you're like, "Here I am, I woke up." Or, you know, you're walking down the street, you're like, "Here I am, walking down the street." Or it can get even crazier than that. "Here I am, walking down the street, thinking about that I'm walking down the street." So, you know, you could be, "Wow, now I'm thinking about that, I'm thinking about that I'm walking down the street," until you have to turn into the nearest pub to extricate yourself from this perseverating cycle of annoying self-focus. Well, so what? You know, Kierkegaard said, "If you're smart enough to know that you're here," which he insisted requires a sophisticated cognitive apparatus to render yourself the object of

• 6:29Speaker 01

  your own subjective inquiry, then you're going to experience two uniquely human emotions, awe and dread. And Kierkegaard's like, wait a minute, it's awesome to be alive and to know it. That's just great. That's why if you get to choose between being a person and a potato, or a person and a potted plant, you make your own choice. But I want to be, I want to be a person. And so like that, that is awesome. And I always want to emphasize, just to cheer myself up and also to make an important point, all silliness aside.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  I don't think it is good for us or for humanity to lose track of the fact that in our finest moments, it is just the sheer joy of being alive, the spontaneous exuberance of wallowing in just the mystery of life that I think is what makes life most worthwhile. But Kierkegaard says, yeah, but it's also dreadful to be alive and to know it. Because unless you're a child or cognitively impaired, if you're smart enough to know that you're here, you're also smart enough to know that like all living things, you too will someday die.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  And Ernest Becker's point is that that unwelcome realization, the worm at the core of the human experience, as William James put it, that that was the most significant psychodynamic event in the history of the human species. It was a quite unintended byproduct of consciousness, which is otherwise, you know, quite frankly tremendously uplifting and adaptive. But it doesn't end there. So, you know, psychological kick in the groin, number one is you're going to die someday. Uh, number two, um, is that not only will you die someday, but you can die at any time for reasons that you could never anticipate or control.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  It'd be bad enough if I knew I was gonna die, you know, in some vaguely unspecified future moment with all of my friends and family, uh, you know, linked arm in arm, chanting kumbaya into the afterlife. That would be maybe okay, uh, but I know I can walk outside and get smote by a comic, uh, comet or a pandemic. Uh, and then on top of that, uh, Becker says, wow, uh, humans, we don't welcome the idea that we're gonna die. And we certainly are discombobulated by the fact that death is always potentially imminent.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  And then on top of all of that, uh, borrowing from Freud, we chafe at the idea that we're embodied animals, uh, respiring pieces of defecating meat, uh, no more significant or enduring, uh, than barnacles or armadillos. And all that Becker says is, look, if that's the only thing that you were thinking about, uh, you know, I'm gonna die someday, uh, I could get hit by a comet, you know, I'm a breathing piece of, uh, meat, uh, you, you would not be able to stand up in the morning. You, you would be crippled by overwhelming existential terror that according to Becker,

• 9:58Speaker 01

  human beings manage, uh, by embracing what he calls cultural worldviews, humanly constructed beliefs about reality, uh, that we share with the people in our group, uh, that reduces death anxiety by giving us a sense that life has meaning and we have value.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Basically, um, that's the essence of Becker's um, the way of thinking about things. We're smart enough to know that we're here. That makes us aware of the fact that we are finite and vulnerable embodied creatures. That raises the possibility of being flattened by debilitating terror that we manage by embracing a belief system that allows us to feel like life has meaning and we have value. And moreover, if you're lucky enough to believe that you're a person of value in a world of meaning, that's what Becker calls self-esteem.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  And then he says, well, whether we're aware of it or not, we spend most of our waking moments and perhaps many of our dreaming ones, trying to maintain confidence in our cultural worldviews and a sense that we are people of value in the context of them. Right, having said all of that, Chris, now back to your fine question, which is, okay, let's now think about the implications of that fact for non-optimal outcomes. Because what a lot of people said to Becker is, well, look, so what?

• 11:47Speaker 01

  You know, let's say that you're right, my beliefs about reality serve to diminish death anxiety, and it does so by making me feel like life has meaning and I have value. Well, you know, if it's not broke, don't fix it. You know, some people just said, well, maybe that's what's happening.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  To which Becker replies, um, yes, um, that is what's happening. And we now need to consider some of the, uh, less than desirable outcomes as a result. And so, for example, um, where we got interested in these ideas, Chris, my buddies Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pazinsky and I, uh, we've spent almost the last 40 years, we're egghead experimental psychologists. And so, uh, Becker, you know, writes this book, he gets a Pulitzer Prize. He couldn't get a job when he was alive, uh, and we couldn't get any of these ideas published when we first were attracted to them in the 1980s because people said, there's

• 12:58Speaker 01

  no evidence, uh, for any of these ideas, nor is it possible to collect any evidence. And so, we're like, okay, uh, let's see if we can do that. And what we were interested in at the time, uh, was how come people can't get along with other people who don't share their beliefs in reality? You know, why is it that, uh, since minute one, you know, uh, if you, even the most benign, uh, look at human history, uh, reveals what I think is a grotesque and ugly picture, an ongoing succession of genocidal atrocities juxtaposed with the brutal subjugation of designated in-house inferiors.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  And, um, and, and, and we are now at the point in human history where of course, uh, it's a cliche, uh, but we possess the kind of weapons that could reduce the earth to rubble. Uh, and so this longstanding problem, as Robert J. Lifton, a psycho historian who I'm fond of in a book called Destroying the World to Save It, uh, he's like, wow, we may be the first form of life to be responsible for our own extinction because of our inability to get along with folks who are different than ourselves. And, uh, Becker's account is disarmingly simple, uh, and he has two points.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  One is, he says, well, if my beliefs about reality help me reduce death anxiety, then whenever I run into somebody who... Different. I've got a problem whether I'm aware of it or not. If I believe God created the earth in six days and then I run into somebody in the Fulane tribe in Mali and they think that the earth was created out of a giant drop of milk. Well, if they're right, then I've got to be wrong. And so, one point that Becker makes is that the mere existence of people with alternative belief systems is fundamentally threatening. Alright, so that's point number one.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Point number two, in a book called Escape from Evil, which is after The Denial of Death, Becker says, here's the other problem. Our culturally constructed beliefs are very potent, but they're still symbolic, whereas death is a very real biological fact. And there's no symbol that is potent enough to completely eliminate death anxiety. Therefore, in psychobabble, there's residual anxiety that is repressed. And I love Becker's language. He says, "Look, there's gonna be death anxiety.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  There's gonna be a panic rumbling beneath the surface of consciousness." And that panic is so unpleasant that what we do psychodynamically is we project it and we basically lay it on to other people or groups of people that we just declare to be the all-encompassing repositories of evil. And so, the point here is that even if there weren't people who were different around, we would create those differences. We would need to, Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, she just says, "If necessary,

• 16:32Speaker 01

  we'll hate somebody for the shape of their nose and for the color of their shirt." Because we can't help it. We've gotta have a way of offloading our insecurities. Right? Either way, what Becker argues is that what we do when we bump into folks who are different or declare people to be different is we denigrate them, we badger them to abandon their beliefs and adopt ours instead, or we just kill them, thus demonstrating the superiority of our beliefs after all. And our experiments show that this is very much the case. So our

• 17:14Speaker 01

  studies are very simple. They involve reminding some people that they're gonna die, and other people are asked to think about something unpleasant but not fatal. Like, you're getting a root canal without anesthetic, you've been in a car accident and they have to chop off one of your legs. All painful, but beats being dead. And sometimes we remind people they're gonna die by stopping them outdoors in front of a funeral parlor as opposed to 100 meters on either side. Yeah, that's a good one. And sometimes we bring people into the lab, and we have them read stuff on the computer while we flash the word "death"

• 17:55Speaker 01

  for 48 milliseconds, so fast that you can't see anything. And so, when we do that, what we find, for example, is that if you remind Christians that they're gonna die, they love Christians more and they hate Jewish people. And it has nothing to do with Christianity. If you remind Israelis that they're gonna die, they love Israelis and they hate Arabs. And ditto all over the world. But it's not only about attitudes. Germans reminded that they're gonna die, they sit closer to people who look German, further away from people who look like immigrants. You remind Iranians that they're gonna die, and they become more

• 18:38Speaker 01

  willing to blow themselves up. They become more willing to become suicide bombers. You remind Americans they're gonna die, and they become more supportive of using biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons against countries who pose no direct threat to us. Right? So one malignant manifestation. Of death anxiety is that it increases, it amplifies the hostility and disdain that we have towards people who are different. And if I could remember it, I always loved George Bernard Shaw on your side of the pond a century ago in a heartbreak house, one of my favorite plays.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  He says, "When the angel of death sounds his trumpet, the pretenses of civilization are blown from men's heads into the mud like hats in a gust of wind." So that's one possibility. I can babble about a few more, I will, and then you'll shut me off. But anyway, another thing that we are really interested in, and I think is very pertinent right now, both here and on your side of the world, is the extent to which existential anxieties impel us to embrace certain kinds of political leaders. Max Weber, dead German sociologist at the beginning of the 20th century, he said in

• 20:02Speaker 01

  times of historical upheaval, when existential uncertainties are apt to prevail, that people are prone to become attached to and supportive of a particular kind of leader. He coined the term charismatic that we're now all familiar with, seemingly larger-than-life individuals that are often believed to be divinely ordained to rid the world of evil. And Becker uses Weber's analysis to understand how Hitler came to power in Germany. You know, the Germans had been humiliated after World War I, the economy was decimated.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  And here comes Hitler saying, "I can make Germany great again. Only I can do it." And he gave the Germans, it was a tremendously uplifting psychological vote of confidence to restore meaning and value in a very psychologically tenuous time. And I'm not saying that this ended well, but in fact, the point is that it rarely does. We became interested... In this, in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, when President George W. Bush, in a three-week period, went from having the lowest support in the history of presidential

• 21:32Speaker 01

  pollings, to three weeks after 9/11, he had the highest. And we're like, wow, maybe, um, maybe intimations of mortality had something to do with it. Maybe September 11th was like a giant death reminder. Of course it was. You had the people dying and jumping off the World Trade Center. Terrorists are evil, but they choose their targets wisely. They, they didn't target random buildings. They targeted the Pentagon. Symbols. And the World Trade Center. That's right. And they did it with airplanes from American and United Airlines or US Air. They knew what they were doing.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  And so we did a lot of studies, uh, prior to the 2004 election, where we showed that reminding people of death increased their support for President Bush. And in fact, in the absence of a death reminder, our participants liked Senator John Kerry, who was the Democratic challenger in that election, much more than President Bush. All right, so fast forward to 2015, uh, we got Donald Trump, uh, saying, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make America great again. Uh, I am the only one that can keep you safe from the rapists and the drug dealers, the

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Negrotinus hordes storming the borders, uh, the terrorists that are parachuting into America to rape our daughters and eat our chicken and wings, and the Chinese, uh, that are threatening our economy. Uh, and, uh, and, um, it worked. Uh, and so, uh, President Trump, now President Trump, uh, despite the fact that in the eyes of more than 60 million Americans.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  They're like, wait a minute, um, uh, it's really a bad idea to have a vulgar, sadistic, vindictive, pathologically narcissistic, sociopathic, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, functionally illiterate, twittering Mussolini, pussy grabbing, cheese doodle impersonator. That would be a bad idea, uh, to have someone like that, uh, in office. Uh, and, uh, moreover, uh, psychiatrists and psychologists said, it's really a bad idea to, that, that, that now President Trump, uh, has a unique combination of toxic psychological disorders, that being malignant narcissism, sociopathy, uh, lack of empathy, touch of

• 24:11Speaker 01

  paranoia. When you have somebody with a massive ego who is congenitally incapable of ever admitting that they're wrong, uh, that's gonna be a problem, particularly i-if any crisis arises, uh, because there's no way a person with that particular set of affectations will be capable of acting in anyone's interest but their own. All right, be that as it may, we then did studies, um, that demonstrated the same thing, uh, specifically, uh, that in America, support for President Trump is magnified, uh, by intimations of mortality.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Uh, in a controlled condition, uh, Americans liked, uh, Hillary Clinton more than they did Donald Trump. But if they were reminded of their mortality first, they now like Donald Trump a lot more. So that's another area, uh, where death anxiety, uh, has potent effects that I believe to have serious implications for the future of democracy. And this is not only on the US side of things. I think a lot of the things that are happening, uh, in the UK, um, uh, you know, to be silly and at the risk of annoying people, we have orange Hitler over here, you've got yellow

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Hitler, and there's a bunch of other, uh, Hitlers, uh, you know, right wing populist movements that parlay death anxiety. Into support because it is well known, a woman I like Hannah Arendt in a book called The Origin of Totalitarianism, after written in the 1950s, she just points out that, you know, it's pretty much the same playbook. Another guy I like a lot, Eric Hoffer, wrote a book called The True Believer, and what all these kind of leaders do, they're like alchemists of hate. They are very good at akeidoing existential anxieties. They convert

• 26:16Speaker 01

  fear into hate because they take the internal anxiety and they tell their followers who it is that they're supposed to hate. Anyway, that doesn't bode well for democracy. Another area of inquiry is just studies that show that death anxiety makes us uncomfortable with the fact that we're embodied animals, makes us uncomfortable with nature, makes us more likely to engage in behaviors vis a vis nature that undermine the preservation of nonrenewable resources. And so, basically, death anxiety has demonstrably negative effects

• 27:00Speaker 01

  on environmental concerns. It has the opposite effect on our seeming insatiable desire for money and stuff. And so, on the one hand, when death is on our minds, it really makes us distance ourselves from nature. On the other hand, when death is on our minds, it makes us run to the television, to the pub, and to the shopping mall. And this is an idea that also goes back quite a bit. In fact, who's it, John Locke, in his second treatise

• 27:41Speaker 01

  on government, what is it, 1690, he said, "Look, anything that really matters, anything that is real, there's an upper limit to how much you can want." And so, and he explained that, he said, "That's because anything in nature is of finite duration." So if you like apples, well, that's great, but after like 10 apples, you're like, "Oh, I've had enough." But, but, and if you like pizza, alright, I've had a, you know, a whole pizza, that's enough. I like beer after eight pints, no, maybe 10, that's, that's enough. You know, just fill in the blank. Well, but what's the one thing that people can't get enough of?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Well, there's never enough money, a- and there's never enough stupid shit, if you'll pardon the expression. A consumer society would collapse in a matter of hours if people bought only what they genuinely needed. So, anyway, um, uh, what Becker says is, look, whenever there's insatiable desires, you can assume that death anxiety underlies them. Uh, and sure enough, if we remind people they're gonna die, uh, they say they need more money to feel wealthy. Uh, they're more eager to buy things that are luxury items. They'll even pay more money to have a star named after them, uh, in the galaxy.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Uh, and then I'll say one more thing, and, and then back to you, Chris, and I appreciate the time just to belt these out, because I, I do think that one of the things that i- is, I find compelling about these ideas i- is how pervasive they apply to a range of superficially disparate human affectations. The idea, uh, that death anxiety influences, you know, who you hate, uh, who you voted for, how you feel about being outside and so on, uh, whether or not, uh, you like a certain kind of car. I, I find that quite astonishing.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  But the last thing that, um, that I would note is just that, uh, death anxiety amplifies all existing forms of psychological disorders. Uh, and, uh, so if you're depressed and you're reminded of death, you become more depressed. If you're afraid of spiders, you become more a- afraid of spiders, and, and, and...

• 30:14Speaker 01

  And so on and so forth. And so, yeah, the basic argument here, you know, and it sounds kind of corny, but when we write about this, we use a phrase from a guy, a British author, I like Thomas Hardy, a novelist, who says, "If a way to the better there be, it comes from taking a close look at the worst." And, you know, that is humanity at its worst, right? Hateful proto-fascists, you know, kind of raping the earth in our effort to maximize the accumulation, you know, of money and stuff in a perpetual, you know, alcohol pill-infused

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Facebook, Twittering stupor. And so that's, that's not great, of course. And, but it doesn't follow from that, you know, just getting back to where we started the conversation, it doesn't follow from that that we can't use these same ideas more productively. Because I think what we have to note is that everything that I've talked about so far is, is in response to really subtle, even unconscious reminders of death. And so when you asked me when we began to talk a half an hour ago, when you said, "All right, you know, what is, why is

• 31:41Speaker 01

  it so important that we come to terms with death?" I like Albert Camus, "Come to terms with death thereafter, anything is possible." This is really a plea to not leave our death anxiety buried under the psychological bushes, you know, where it comes back to bear bitter fruit. This is rather a plea, you know, not to wallow in concerns about mortality. That's not the point. If you want to do that, you start a goth punk rock band, and that might be pretty good. But rather, you know, to courageously and, and, you know, with diligence,

• 32:23Speaker 01

  to embrace the lifelong task of coming to terms with the reality of death in a very self-conscious way, because that can produce outcomes that are of a distinctly more favorable kind.

• 32:39Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I love that. I absolutely love that. I've got a million different doorways to hell open in my mind at the moment, so I'm going to try and close a couple of them. One of the questions I had was, you mentioned that the denial of death is innate and is essentially fixed by culture, or one of the particular tools we use to try and dampen that down is culture. Presumably, evolutionarily, our current brain manifestation and thus awareness of death would have arisen before we had culture to be able to deal with it. What do you think ancient man would have done?

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, wow. All right. Chris, I'm sorry we lost our video, so I can't smile at you. That's like an awesome question. And if I could answer that, you know, I'd be chugging rum in a coconut with my Nobel Prize on the beach. No, that, because as a lot of folks have noted, as we have pondered for quite some time, you know, the apes and the chimps from which we presumably evolved, you know, are unaware of death and don't appear thereby

• 33:58Speaker 01

  to deny it. We most assuredly are. And you're raising an important question, which is phylogenetically, how did that happen? And the argument that we make, and this is necessarily speculative, of course, but there are other scholars who have independently come up with similar ones. The argument is that humans were almost certainly, back in the day, engaged in ritualistic behaviour.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Of a religious nature. And this is long before of the awareness of death arose, even if it was vague. And it's long before even gods arose. So Emile Durkheim, a French sociologist. He points out, and David Sloan Wilson, who's an evolutionary biologist. They argue that that that religion arose basically as social glue. A way to foster social cohesion and coordination.

• 35:14Chris Williamson?

  What's the, sorry to interject there Sheldon, what's the Latin word for religion? Is it rego?

• 35:21Speaker 01

  You know, I should have looked that up. Yeah, it means to bind.

• 35:24Chris Williamson?

  To bind, yeah, that's it.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Or to tie.

• 35:27Chris Williamson?

  Yes, so social glue is a very apt term for it.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, thanks, Chris. And please jump in here because I do think that this is important. The idea is that, you know, we are uber social creatures. And and and for Durkheim, there's an emotional component to this binding. He just said that there is something tremendously uplifting about being in the company of our fellow humans in moments that can only be described as, you know, just ones that are are are. They are described as moments of like transcendental joy.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Where, you know, you're back in the day. It's a beautiful day. The hunt has gone well. Life is good. Everybody's hanging around. And there's just this collective effervescence, which for Durkheim has a lot to do with what underlies the appeal of religion. But anyway, back to our story. The the argument is that there already was a primitive, in the non pejorative sense, early forms of ritualistic behavior that served a religious function. And this is before the origin of the mythical narratives that eventually came to correspond to the behavior.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  And so the argument is that the rituals came first and then the narrative account of why we're engaged in them. Came subsequently. And one possibility is that all of this is happening while human beings are reaching a threshold of self-awareness. Both Nietzsche, as well as Otto Rahnk, probably based on Nietzsche, they hypothesized that self-awareness just kind of gradually increased. But then it gets to a point where there's kind of a tipping point where you become explicitly

• 37:39Speaker 01

  aware of the prospect of mortality, at which point the argument is that different, there were probably different mythological accounts of the world that existed at the time. And that just through the process of natural selection, that the ones that tended to offer existential comfort in the form of promises of either literal or symbolic immortality, were probably those that were most appealing and therefore persisted over time. So I don't know if that makes any sense.

• 38:20Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely, absolutely does. Do you think, God, man, Sheldon, I've got, I've got about 50 questions that I need to ask, ask at the same time. First one, is that tipping point of stepping out of the bicameral mind and into something above that?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:38Chris Williamson?

  Right. That's, that's, that's what I wanted to know.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And this, so you know the Julian Jayne stuff?

• 38:45Chris Williamson?

  No, please tell us.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  So you said bicameral mind. This is awesome. I'm enjoying this immensely, selfishly. It's not about me being entertained, Chris, but there's a guy in 1975, you're too young.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. And so to answer your question, and that's one of my favorite books, and I how I got interested in this, because Jaynes's point is that for much of human history, we were kind of automatons, and that it's only recently that we've gotten into full death denial mode. And that is a reflection of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, leaving us starkly aware of the reality of our condition. That's why Nietzsche said that consciousness is

• 39:42Speaker 01

  the most calamitous stupidity by which we shall someday perish, or perish someday.

• 39:48Chris Williamson?

  That's a beautiful quote. Yeah, you it's really interesting to think about what it would have been like to not know that you, well, I mean, you're technically not your own thoughts, but you were at least aware that they're coming from somewhere within you as opposed to being bestowed on you by a god, someone who's essentially sort of speaking words in your ear. Yeah, that, I mean, whoever the first human was that decided to cross whatever threshold of consciousness it is, that's a it's a very uncomfortable frontier to be the first person to get to step on.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  No, absolutely, Chris. And I wish I had the skills to like do science fiction, because, you know, the argument, and I think it's quite plausible, is it might have happened a shit ton of times over history. You know, so imagine you're the one self-aware person, you know, in antiquity. It must have been quite a ride.

• 40:42Chris Williamson?

  Definitely would have been. No one else would have been able to understand you.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 40:46Chris Williamson?

  Right. Next question is, what, actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna diverge again and just open up another branch. What is your view, I know you're not an evolutionary psychologist, an evolutionary biologist, but I'm going to ask you it anyway. What is your view of the reason why consciousness exists?

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Wow. Yeah, again, another Nobel Prize winning one.

• 41:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, just small questions today, shall we? Is it the simple ones, the real easy ones for you?

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm happy to talk again if you want to save the trivial pursuits to next time round.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  You know, always depends on who you ask, you know, the, uh, and, you know, so Steven Pinker, you know, Harvard, smart guy, he said, the problem of consciousness is the central issue of, uh, you know, psychological discourse for the 21st century. And he's probably right. Um, and, um, and so as you know, there are some people who think that consciousness is epiphenomenal. It's just really like an ethereal mist given off as an irrelevant afterthought. It's just a byproduct of other processes. And I find that extraordinarily unconvincing

• 42:05Speaker 01

  for a variety of reasons. And even folks like, um, oh, selfish gene, Richard Dawkins, um, he writes in the 1970s that he finds it inconceivable that consciousness has no functional value. Nicholas Humphrey, who's a British guy, he wrote a book called Consciousness Regained, I think in the 1980s. And I favor his view, which is that consciousness may have evolved in social settings, that it's not actually an individual psychological attribute,

• 42:51Speaker 01

  but rather that in a complex setting, knowing how you're feeling was probably a good way to figure out how other people are feeling. And being able to know that, that's like theory of mind in psychobabble, makes it so much easier to negotiate your relationships with fellow human beings. And so one possibility is that consciousness arose in order to facilitate social interaction.

• 43:26Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting that one of the common threads that we've gone through today, and this is, this ties really nicely back to a question to do with death that's been sort of lurking in the back of my head since you started talking. Death is inherently an individual phenomenon. I know that we're all going to die, but the fear of death is something that we all, a burden that we all bear on our own. And yet, for some reason, our favourite antidote to this particular fear of death is to tribalise, is to somehow use other people that are the us and other people also that are the them, to try and fix a problem which is inherently individualistic. And what have we found again here, there's a couple of other interesting theories of consciousness

• 44:10Chris Williamson?

  is reason for being here that I've stumbled upon recently that I really enjoy. But that one, the one that you've just proposed there, which you think you've got a fair bit of support for, which again, is that humans have this conscious process so that we can better understand what other people are thinking. It means we can either deceive or cooperate or do a million other things with them more accurately. Like, it's so, I find it so interesting, perhaps particularly fascinating because I'm an only child, that our most important elements, perhaps the thing which underlies, which you're proposing, underlies all of our behaviour,

• 44:52Chris Williamson?

  and the thing which facilitates that underlying being made conscious, both of those things have an inherently social aspect to them.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Yes. Again, really well put, and really, in my estimation, important. And also in my estimation, Chris, it counts for a lot of the difficulties that I find we're now having in the world in terms of just political difficulties. But I don't mean this to, I don't mean this as a political diatribe, but it's ironic, is it not, that the US and the UK are the most individualistic cultures in the history of Earth. We're the richest and most technologically adroit.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  For the moment, and in part because, you know, we've got this John Locke idea that there's no such thing as society, that there's just individuals. And that's quite psychotic. It's never been true. And yet we carry on as if it is. But when in fact, as you noted, our entire evolutionary past is based on our Uber social nature, ultimately in the service of fostering cooperation.

• 46:22Chris Williamson?

  I can see, I can, in a, in a modern society that's hyper convenient and where we feel incredibly detached from our own animal nature and from the natural world at large. I can see, I'm a red blooded, meritocracy loving capitalist through and through, as much, as much as it can get.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 46:44Chris Williamson?

  And yet, I can also, I, I, I understand why people don't have this sense of connectedness to wider. And I also mentioned, as I said, only child, which gives you a particularly unique view on solitude, I think.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:58Chris Williamson?

  So yeah, I, I, I get it. You know, I see why the meritocratic, 21st century, hyper convenient, detached from the natural world worldview, that viewpoint, I, I understand how it can create that.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Yes. Or, and, but just to put in a caveat, I share your view. I, in principle, I, I believe in meritocracy and individual initiative embedded in a communal setting with the stipulation that in principle, there's enough to go around so that anybody who exerted sufficient effort would have a reasonable chance of there being a decent outcome. And, you know, that's where the proverbial devil's in the details. But anyway, yes, very good point.

• 47:49Chris Williamson?

  Cool. Um, next thing, I'm still closing doors to hell. Oh, by the way, Sheldon, have you got, when's your next appointment? Or what else have you got on today?

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Oh, it's 2:15. And again, I'm happy to talk again if you find it.

• 48:02Chris Williamson?

  I don't know what time it is for you. What time is it now?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm sorry. I'm, I'm at 1:51. I've got, let's say, 20 minutes or so.

• 48:10Chris Williamson?

  Cool. Right. I am going to, I'm going to move on.

• 48:15Chris Williamson?

  What do you think happens if we defeat death one day? Have you considered that? I had David Pearce, one of the foremost thinkers behind the transhumanism movement on. He's talking about extending life, whether we have whole brain emulation, integrating with machines. We use pharmaceuticals to extend our life. We do all sorts of other different things. What happens if we defeat death one day?

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, great. Again, another great question. It's one that goes back to antiquity. You know, in ancient Greeks, the gods were immortal and their lives were miserable and banal. And one philosophical notion is that it would be terrible to live in a world where one existed in perpetuity. I like American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who just points out if there was no such thing as death,

• 49:20Speaker 01

  then the very meaning of something being meaningful becomes meaningless. You know, there's nothing consequential. What does it mean to say somebody has courage or somebody's generous? If like a video game, you know, if something bad happens, you just re-up your avatar and hit the trail again. So that's one possibility is that it would be boring to a degree that would make most legal tones seem uplifting by comparison. Another possibility is that, and this is one that Ernest Becker considers in The Denial of Death,

• 50:02Speaker 01

  is that rather counter-intuitively, it might make us more anxious. And his argument is by example. He just says, well, let's say that you're climbing up a mountain. You're 10 years old and your life expectancy is 80 years. And you fall into the bottom of the Grand Canyon and you die. Well, that's a downer because you just lost 70 years of life. Now, let's say you're climbing up a mountain. And you expect to live half a million years or forever. And you fall down the mountain. And his point is, is you can banish death, but you can never banish chance.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  You don't know that you're gonna, you might get smoked by a comet and your body might be vaporized. You don't know that maybe you've abandoned your body and you put yourself on a cloud somewhere. Yeah, but when the power goes down, there's not going to be any cloud. In other words, you can banish death, but you can't banish chance. And therefore Becker argues that death anxiety might increase. And our defensive reactions, therefore, or thereafter, might also increase commensurately.

• 51:23Chris Williamson?

  That would be, that would be an awful side effect. Right, guys, we can live forever, but we're all going to be so unbelievably afraid. That we're not, we're not prepared to do anything because the potential downside of it going wrong, the asymmetry starts to lean. I suppose that, you know, the, the, the nice thing about only living 80 years is if you, you know, die before you've reached middle age at kind of 35, well, I nearly got 50% of the way there. Like, it's not that long. So, yeah, bizarrely, our short lives actually assuage the fear of death to some, some way or another, which is, which is very interesting.

• 52:04Chris Williamson?

  What insight about our minds do you wish more people knew?

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  What a disarmingly great question.

• 52:18Chris Williamson?

  Sheldon, you just continue with the flattery today. In fact, if I can, if I can bring you on to just flatter me during other episodes with, you know, if a guest's being difficult and you can just say something nice about me, that would be, that would be fun.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, you know, I mean this sincerely and you can edit it out, Chris. I, I'm, I'm not any world famous entity. And I do talk to a lot of people and it's often excruciating and this has been just. Delightful. Honestly, so, all right, so back to the mind.

• 52:55Chris Williamson?

  What insights, what insights do you wish that?

• 52:57Speaker 01

  One insight would be to please abandon the, your affection for whether you're aware of it or not, the Cartesian dualism that pervades Western society that sees the mind and the body as separate and dissociated, either in principle or in practice. So I would urge people to put the mind back in their brain and back in their body and to view ourselves more holistically, not as minds that happen to be situated in a physical carcass, but

• 53:41Speaker 01

  rather to view ourselves as physical carcasses that happen to be lucky enough to be imbued with a kind of mindedness that is a fantastic opportunity to have a great life and even make the world a bit better in the process of living it. So that would be one thing I would. I say some of these things, Chris, to remind myself. And another thing I would say at the risk of maybe sounding a little silly is that people, no, this is not silly,

• 54:21Speaker 01

  I mean this earnestly. There's a wide body of research that suggests that a lot of people see a phenomenon associated with mind as essential in the sense that you're born with a mind, you have certain capacities, and that's all there is to it. And the fact of the matter is, is that even viewing our minds that way lobotomizes us. We should view the mind more as a muscle that can be used in a variety of ways and can be developed over time vis a vis effort. This doesn't mean we can all be Einstein or Beethoven, but we

• 55:02Speaker 01

  can all be a lot more who we are destined to become than we give ourselves credit for.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  And my last piece of advice is that you don't have to be great at everything. So I put in a plea for the average and the mundane. You know, we, I think we tend to think, oh, I have a mind, so I gotta write a novel. I gotta get a Nobel Prize. And those things are good, but so is being a decent human, enjoying the fact that you happen to be alive on a beautiful day when you've had enough to eat and a place to stay. And so I, I think the mind can be deployed for a much wider variety of essential functions tied to intellect, emotion and intuition than we often give it credit for.

• 55:58Chris Williamson?

  I love that. I love that. So I'm going to give you a thought experiment to do. Have you seen the film Mother?

• 56:06Speaker 01

  I have not, although it's on my list.

• 56:08Chris Williamson?

  Cool. You, do you know the premise?

• 56:10Speaker 01

  No, I don't.

• 56:10Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so a baby is born inside of a factory where it is raised by a robot. And then later on, some, some complications happen. I won't spoil it for you.

• 56:25Chris Williamson?

  The, my, my end goal question is, is there a me outside of my cultural influence? And the thought experiment is a baby is born. We have managed to come up with a very, very clever way to program a robot to be able to keep said human alive.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:43Chris Williamson?

  Whilst not, or whilst minimizing, or if possible, giving zero cultural influences. What would that person be like?

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Wow. Awesome. Uh, yeah, go get your Nobel Prize for question asking. All right, all right, depends who you ask. So again, and I'm agnostic on this. These are like the questions of my youth when we dabbled far too often in hallucinogens. I love thinking about, because you know, so you got the, you, you got like the Nietzsche or even John Locke blank slate.

• 57:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Which is that you would be not much different than a respiring pincushion under those conditions. And, um.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  So that's one possibility. The alternative

• 57:41Speaker 01

  is that there's gotta be, this goes back again to the ancient Greeks, but it's also Piaget. A lot of folks thought, no, there's gotta be something, because you can't, in order to understand, Piaget claimed, anything, you have to be able to connect it to something that you quote already know. So if there's not at least some implicit knowledge, including knowledge of ourselves, then there'd be nothing upon which to construct a self or phenomenological view of the world. So I'm dodging your question.

• 58:24Chris Williamson?

  Very diplomatic answer.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, because I think I could see it both ways, and some of the people that I've been struggling with, philosophers, like I've been trying to understand Martin Heidegger for the past couple of years. And I think these guys do a great job, better than me, of obfuscating and dodging those questions with thousand-page books, not just two minutes of verbal gymnastics. No, that is actually one of the finest questions. I would say, though, just based on some of the things that I've been reading lately,

• 59:10Speaker 01

  there's a book by a famous guy, he's a primatologist, Michael Tommasello, at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. It's called Becoming Human. And I think that a human being raised under those conditions would be pretty much like a great ape. And that is that would be able to learn from experience and might even be able to learn from observing somebody else doing something. But the way that Tommasello puts it is that in the absence of the capacity to have joint attention with another human, which the robot couldn't do,

• 59:54Speaker 01

  that you can't get to the next step.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Which he claims is the prerequisite for the kind of awareness that ultimately distinguishes us as human.

• 1:00:07Chris Williamson?

  So the denial of death, the awareness of death, as you said at the beginning, I love that kind of spectrum that we had of awe at one end and dread at the other. I didn't realize until this conversation that that was the way it works, but it totally is. The ability for us to see beauty, to look at the night sky, feel insignificant, you know, go on a walk and pick up a leaf and sort of marvel at its beauty is matched only by our ability to be completely terrified at the fact that one day it's all going to end. That's that the poet Rilke walking with, who was he walking with? And he starts crying.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  I will.

• 1:00:42Chris Williamson?

  Not Nietzsche, Jung. Jung. Yes.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:45Chris Williamson?

  He's walking with Jung and he starts crying because he's terrified. He's terrified of the fact that this is all going to end.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Yes, but you can't have it both ways. So, you know, it, you know, you have to be able to accept the dread side in order to maximally appreciate the awe.

• 1:01:02Chris Williamson?

  Yes. So the denial of death or the awareness of death is inbuilt into us as humans. And yet, if I was baby with robot and I never saw anyone die, would I know that I could die? Would I be fearful of death?

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, no. So that you would be indifferent in the only situation one might claim would be in the immediate proximity to mortal danger, in which case you'd have the same fight and flight reaction of an antelope being attacked by a lion.

• 1:01:40Chris Williamson?

  So there's some, there's some things that are so hardwired into us, but

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:01:45Chris Williamson?

  What we're talking about here, especially with death, is the ability to consciously rearrange that innate, that innate sympathetic response and then create persona and narrative and, you know, all of the, all of the ridiculous extraneous stuff that we do that we, that we totally don't need.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  No, you got, that's it. You got it.

• 1:02:14Chris Williamson?

  Oh my goodness. Okay, dude, we're gonna have to do this again sometime, mate, because I've just got a million different things and the audience is gonna have them as well. Before we finish up, couple of quick, quickfire ones. What does tranquilize yourself with the trivial mean?

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  I love that. So that's a Kierkegaard phrase that Heidegger also picks up on. And his point is that the average individual, and Heidegger is quite clear when he says that this is not meant pejoratively, even though it sounds like it. Because the argument is that we all do this sometimes. But what Heidegger said is that in response to death anxiety, most people just unconsciously and unself-reflectively, they just literally desperately embrace the social role

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  that is afforded to them in the context of their culture. And they essentially become culturally constructed meat puppets who live their lives as caricatures of a stereotype of their particular social role. And Kierkegaard's point is that when you do that, you just tranquilize yourself with the trivial. The most popular event in the United States every year is the Super Bowl. And so, you know, watching football, the stupid kind of football,

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  and eating chicken wings and shopping. More people go shopping in the US after Thanksgiving, the day after Thanksgiving than who vote. In presidential elections. And so it's crazy. And so shocking. And so that's why Frank Zappa, dead musician, he says the average American treats intelligent behavior as if it was some kind of hideous physical deformity. And he's right. And so and then Heidegger comes along, and he's like, Yeah, okay, that's one kind of tranquilizing, you know, where you're sitting

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  at home, you know, just pounding beer and watching the telly. But there's another kind of tranquilization, and that's just frenetic activity, where you just keep yourself so busy, superficially engaged in the vagaries of life, that you appear to be, there's a veneer of things going well, but you're actually an empty husk, desperately keeping busy so you don't sit still long enough to think about the fact that you might not be fully satisfied. Do you know Woody Allen's film Annie Hall?

• 1:05:16Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Okay, so you're too young. And so I won't go there because there's a scene that makes reference to the denial of death that illustrates that point. But so those are the two kinds of being tranquilized, you know, just being passive, you know, and being surrounded by trivia and stuff, or, you know, being active in one's pursuit of the uninspired and unimportant.

• 1:05:47Chris Williamson?

  I think I've been playing around with these ideas for a little while. One thing I've noticed, and I'm a massive advocate for people being as weird as they can possibly be, i.e. compromising as little of themselves for society as as is possible, because I think what that leads to is you not actually being able to work out what your own truth is. I wonder whether or not the fact that most people, the broad cross section of society, People that they can fit into easily defined archetypal roles is because those people don't force them to step out of that particular, that's the geek, that's the nerd, that's the maiden,

• 1:06:28Chris Williamson?

  that's the redeemed, that's the villain, that's the whatever. I wonder whether that plays into what you're talking about. And I also think that the current self-development movement, this kind of, you know, I'm contributing to it, although I hope that I'm doing it in a slightly more virtuous way. But the motivational speaker, you can become anything you want movement at the moment, I think also is the 21st century, much more cerebral manifestation of just what would have been the industry of religious speakers back in the day, that this is you being able to transcend what is going on, but it's repurposed and repackaged into words that have a para

• 1:07:13Chris Williamson?

  scientific, a peri scientific sort of tinge to them, which removes the criticism, the easy sort of low hanging fruit criticism and the ickiness that religion has had and theology has kind of gotten now in a scientific society, but still serves exactly the same reason that you can become anything you want, you can be more productive, do more in your day. Well, why do you want to do more in your day? Well, if I do more in my day, I get more life before it... inevitably ends.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  There you go. There's an African proverb that I like. It's just give us life, life, more life. And I love how you put it. And I also love the distinction that you just made between trying to help people make the most of themselves in a virtuous sense, which you surely are.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  And becoming a 21st century, essentially guru of sorts, who is no different than a charismatic political leader to the extent that you're exploiting people's anxieties and insecurities for your own personal gain.

• 1:08:28Chris Williamson?

  It's weaponizing it, isn't it? And commodifying it. That's the reason for it.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  It is. And so I think we're... For what it's worth, I think what you and like-minded compatriots are doing is honestly the way of the world. I mean, I'm an egghead researcher. I'm proud of the work that I do. I've written books. I write journal articles that are non-pharmacological interventions for insomnia. You know, we write stuff and maybe 12 people on earth partake of it. You said that you learned of my ideas from talking to Lex, and I enjoyed talking to him immensely.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  There have been more people who I have exchanged ideas with in the last six weeks than I have in the last six years for two reasons. One is that this is a much more effective medium for the dissemination of ideas. And the second is, we are uber-social creatures who come to know ourselves in the context of sincere conversations with others. That's one of the things that I like about Heidegger, even though he was a Nazi, is that he emphasized the incredibly important role of language and discourse.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  And if there's a hope for humankind, the way I see it, it's going to be a proliferation of people that are doing what you're doing in the various manifestations or incarnations. I think it gives me great hope.

• 1:10:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, me too. I think that...

• 1:10:25Chris Williamson?

  What's interesting is a lot of people, I think, are drawn to these sort of longer-form, reflective, introspective conversations because maybe they're hungry for them elsewhere. They don't, they can't talk to their brother or sister or friends about it because that doesn't feel very natural. And the bizarre thing is that upon us now having a platform and a communications network which permits us to do this globally, you realize that the solitude and the weirdness that you thought was a personal affliction your whole life is actually very commonplace and you're an incredibly good company.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  There you go. But again, you just made a, you made an earth-shattering point and a guy named C. Wright Mills, in a book called The Power Elite, written in the 1950s, he made the same point. And that's that most of us, and Hannah Arendt made this point in her book about fascism, and that is that what, that what makes a society ripe for fascism is that if everybody feels isolated and, and has a sense or that nobody shares their problems. And there's nothing more uplifting, even if it's painful, than to recognize that

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  what you might have been attributed to yourself as your own personal malady is A, more common than you think, and B, may not be due to your own weaknesses as an individual, but rather as the inevitable result of structural inequalities built into, you know, macro-institutional systems. And so I think there's a lot to be gained from these kinds of pursuits.

• 1:12:06Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. And the other thing as well is that weirdness and uniqueness is your competitive advantage. Even, you know, if I need to say again to the people who are listening, it might not feel like it, but you should view the particular quirks that you have as competitive advantages in the same way as as soon as you can flip a workout from when it hurts, this is bad, to when it hurts, I lean into discomfort because that's what I'm here for. If you view your weirdness, your uniqueness, the particular peculiarities that you have, the lisp, the slight, the the the offset hips, the pain in your back, the, you know, the good looks, the bad looks, the traumas, all of that stuff. If you purpose them toward, okay, that makes me more interesting.

• 1:12:51Chris Williamson?

  That makes me more unique. That makes me less of the archetypal stereotypical caricature that I could be. If I decide to nerf the edges and round off the corners of my life, that's not the way it is. And I can say from personal experience that upon embracing all of the weird, weird and wonderful elements of my life that I have, my life has got linearly or exponentially better from then until now. And Sheldon, I know that you have to dash off, mate. Um, I, I feel that we could go on for much longer and I really keen to get you back. Um, if people want to find out more about yourself, where should they go?

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Uh, they should, uh, go to, uh, the internet and, uh, look me up at Skidmore College, uh, which is in Saratoga Springs, New York, or just email me S. Solomon, S S O L O M O N at skidmore.edu. So I'm kind of third world. I don't have a website or Twitter. Uh, but I do answer email and I welcome, uh, questions and love exchanging ideas. And, uh, I do appreciate all of this, Chris. And so I, I sincerely hope that this is the beginning of an ongoing exchange of ideas. I thought this was great.

• 1:14:07Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. Me too. Final, final, final question. Let's say someone wants to get into some of the stuff that we've spoken about today. You must have name dropped 20 plus authors. Who is an accessible? What is an accessible book that someone can get into?

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  Okay, at the risk of, uh, being self promoting.

• 1:14:26Chris Williamson?

  Get it out there, Sheldon. Get it out there.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  I would say, uh, that Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death or another book called The Birth and Death of Meaning are where we got our ideas from, uh, but a lot of folks, uh, find that to be difficult. Um, we wrote a book called The Worm at the Core, um, uh, on the role of death in life. And it was our desire to present these ideas in a conversational manner. And so anybody that might want to just get introduced to these notions, I would suggest that. And I don't like selling things.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  If you happen to go buy our book, that's fine. If five more people buy it, I'll be able to buy shoes. Anybody that wants to see our book, if you just email me, I'd be happy to send you a PDF file of the book. So I don't want to appear to be shelling for anything.

• 1:15:28Chris Williamson?

  The people that are listening, if they've enjoyed today, the Amazon link to Worm in the Call will be in the show notes below. Go and check it out. Let us say, Sheldon, I'm really, really excited to get you back on. Hopefully this is the beginning of a burgeoning friendship between us. But for now, mate, thank you so much.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  Very much so for me too. And thanks, Chris, and we'll talk again soon.

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:16:25Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:16:27Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a middle without parent.