Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning - Lex Fridman 知识图谱

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people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Sheldon Solomon.

Lex Fridman (05:34.720)

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

Sheldon Solomon (05:38.320)

Well, from our perspective, the uniquely human awareness of death and our unwillingness to accept

Sheldon Solomon (05:48.960)

that fact, we would argue, is the primary motivational impetus for almost everything

Sheldon Solomon (05:56.160)

that people do, whether they're aware of it or not.

Lex Fridman (05:59.920)

So that's kind of been your life work. Your view of the human condition is that death,

Sheldon Solomon (06:06.080)

you've written the book Warm at the Core, that death is at the core of our

Sheldon Solomon (06:09.840)

consciousness of everything, of how we see the world, of what drives us. Maybe can you,

Lex Fridman (06:14.560)

can you elaborate how you see death fitting in? What does it mean to be at the core of our being?

Lex Fridman (06:22.400)

So I think that's a great question. And, you know, to be pedantic, I usually start,

Sheldon Solomon (06:29.360)

you know, my psychology classes and I say to the students, okay, you know, let's define our terms.

Lex Fridman (06:35.760)

And the ology part, they get right away. You know, it's the study of, and then we get to the psyche

Sheldon Solomon (06:42.240)

part. And understandably, you know, the students are like, oh, that means mind. And I'm like,

Sheldon Solomon (06:49.440)

well, no, that's a modern interpretation. But in ancient Greek, it means soul, but not in the

Sheldon Solomon (06:59.360)

Cartesian dualistic sense that most of us in the West think when that word comes to mind.

Lex Fridman (07:05.760)

And so you hear the word soul and you're like, well, all right, that's the nonphysical part of

Sheldon Solomon (07:14.000)

me that's potentially detachable from my corporal container when I'm no longer here. But Aristotle's

Sheldon Solomon (07:22.320)

who coined the word psyche, I think, he was not a dualist. He was a monist. He thought that the soul

Sheldon Solomon (07:31.840)

was inextricably connected to the body. And he defined soul as the essence of a natural body

Sheldon Solomon (07:40.320)

that is alive. And then he goes on and he says, all right, let me give you an example. If an

Sheldon Solomon (07:50.560)

axe was alive, the soul of an axe would be to chop. And if you can pluck your eyeball out of

Sheldon Solomon (07:58.400)

your head and it was still functioning, then the soul of the eyeball would be to see, you know,

Lex Fridman (08:07.040)

and then he's like, all right, the soul of a grasshopper is to hop. The soul of a woodpecker

Lex Fridman (08:12.640)

is to pack, which raises the question, of course, what is the essence of what it means to be human?

Lex Fridman (08:20.080)

And here, of course, there is no one universally accepted conception of the essence of our humanity.

Sheldon Solomon (08:29.440)

All right, Aristotle, you know, gives us the idea of humans as rational animals. You know, we're

Sheldon Solomon (08:34.880)

homo sapiens. But not the only game in town got Joseph Heusinger, an anthropologist in the 20th

Sheldon Solomon (08:42.800)

century. He called us homo ludens that were basically fundamentally playful creatures. And

Sheldon Solomon (08:50.000)

I think it was Hannah Arendt, homo faber, were tool making creatures. Another woman,

Sheldon Solomon (08:57.200)

Ellen Dizanayake, wrote a book called Homo Aestheticus. And following Aristotle and his

Sheldon Solomon (09:03.200)

poetics, she's like, well, we're not only rational animals, we're also aesthetic creatures that

Sheldon Solomon (09:08.880)

appreciate beauty. There's another take on humans. I think they call us homo narratans.

Sheldon Solomon (09:16.480)

We're storytelling creatures. And I think all of those designations of what it means to be human

Sheldon Solomon (09:24.880)

are quite useful heuristically and certainly worthy of our collective cogitation. But what

Sheldon Solomon (09:30.720)

garnered my attention when I was a young punk was just a single line in an essay by a Scottish guy,

Sheldon Solomon (09:39.200)

who was Alexander Smith, in a book called Dreamthwarp. I think it's written in the 1860s.

Sheldon Solomon (09:47.680)

He just says right in the middle of an essay, it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes

Sheldon Solomon (09:53.360)

us human. And I remember reading that. And in my gut, I was like, oh, man, I don't like that. But

Sheldon Solomon (10:01.920)

I think you're onto something. And then William James, the great Harvard philosopher and arguably

Sheldon Solomon (10:08.720)

the first academic psychologist, he referred to death as the worm at the core of the human

Sheldon Solomon (10:16.880)

condition. So that's where the worm at the core idea comes in. And that's just an allusion to

Sheldon Solomon (10:24.000)

the story of Genesis back in the proverbial old days in the Garden of Eden. Everything was going

Sheldon Solomon (10:32.240)

tremendously well until the serpent tempts Eve to take a chop out of the apple of the tree of

Sheldon Solomon (10:39.200)

knowledge, and Adam partakes also. And this is, according to the Bible, what brings death into

Sheldon Solomon (10:47.680)

the world. And from our vantage point, the story of Genesis is a remarkable allegorical recount of

Sheldon Solomon (10:58.320)

the origin of consciousness, where we get to the point where, by virtue of our vast intelligence,

Sheldon Solomon (11:05.920)

we come to realize the inevitability of death. And so, you know, the apple is beautiful and it's

Sheldon Solomon (11:12.640)

tasty. But when you get right into the middle of it, there's that ugly reality, which is our

Sheldon Solomon (11:19.280)

finitude. And then fast forward a bit, and I was a young professor at Skidmore College in 1980.

Sheldon Solomon (11:28.000)

My PhD is in experimental social psychology, and I mainly did studies for the study of the

Sheldon Solomon (11:34.560)

world. I mainly did studies with clinical psychologists evaluating the efficacy of

Sheldon Solomon (11:41.360)

nonpharmacological interventions to reduce stress. And that was good work, and I found it

Sheldon Solomon (11:47.200)

interesting. But in my first week as a professor at Skidmore, I'm just walking up and down the

Sheldon Solomon (11:54.080)

shelves of the library, saw some books by a guy I had never heard of, Ernest Becker, a cultural

Sheldon Solomon (12:01.600)

scientist, recently deceased. He died in 1974. After weeks before, actually, he was posthumously

Lex Fridman (12:12.480)

awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction for his book, The Denial of Death.

Lex Fridman (12:17.680)

And that was his last book?

Sheldon Solomon (12:19.760)

It's actually his next to last book. I don't know how you pull this off, but he had one more

Sheldon Solomon (12:24.640)

after he died called Escape from Evil. And evidently, it was supposed to... Originally,

Sheldon Solomon (12:30.640)

The Denial of Death was supposed to be this giant thousand page book that was both,

Lex Fridman (12:36.560)

and they split it up, and what became Escape from Evil, his wife, Marie Becker, finished.

Sheldon Solomon (12:45.120)

Well, be that as it may, it is in The Denial of Death where Becker just says in the first paragraph,

Sheldon Solomon (12:53.520)

I believe that the terror of death and the way that human beings respond to it or decline

Sheldon Solomon (13:02.880)

to respond to it is primarily responsible for almost everything we do, whether we're aware of

Sheldon Solomon (13:10.080)

it or not, and mostly we're not. And so I read that first paragraph, Lex, and I was like, wow,

Lex Fridman (13:19.680)

okay, this dude's...

Sheldon Solomon (13:20.480)

You're onto something.

Lex Fridman (13:21.280)

You're onto something.

Sheldon Solomon (13:22.240)

It's the same thing here.

Sheldon Solomon (13:23.120)

It's the same thing. And then it reminded me, I think, not to play psychologist, but

Sheldon Solomon (13:31.920)

let's face it, I believe there's a reason why we end up drifting where we ultimately come to. So

Sheldon Solomon (13:40.080)

I'm in my mid 20s. I got Ernest Becker's book in my hand. And the next thing I know, I'm remembering

Sheldon Solomon (13:47.360)

that when I'm eight years old, the day that my grandmother died. And the day before, my mom said,

Sheldon Solomon (13:55.760)

oh, say goodbye to grandma. She's not well. And so I was like, okay, grandma. And I knew she wasn't

Sheldon Solomon (14:04.320)

well, but I didn't really appreciate the magnitude of her illness. Well, she dies the next day.

Lex Fridman (14:10.800)

And it's in the evening and I'm just sitting there looking at my stamp collection. And I'm

Sheldon Solomon (14:17.200)

like, wow, I'm going to miss my grandmother. And then I'm like, no, wait a minute. That means my

Sheldon Solomon (14:22.640)

mother's going to die after she gets old. And that's even worse. After all, who's going to make

Sheldon Solomon (14:29.040)

me dinner? And that bothered me for a while. But then I'm looking at the stamps, all the dead

Sheldon Solomon (14:34.800)

American presidents. And I'm like, there's George Washington. He's dead. There's Thomas Jefferson.

Sheldon Solomon (14:39.840)

He's dead. My mom's going to be dead. Oh, I'm going to get old and be dead someday. And at

Sheldon Solomon (14:48.240)

eight years old, that was my first explicit existential crisis. I remember it being,

Sheldon Solomon (14:54.240)

you know, one of these blood curdling realizations that I tried my best to ignore for the most of the

Sheldon Solomon (15:03.280)

time I was subsequently growing up. But fast forward back to Skidmore College, mid twenties,

Sheldon Solomon (15:10.160)

you know, reading Becker's book in the 1980s, thinking to myself, wow, one of the reasons

Lex Fridman (15:18.160)

why I'm finding this so compelling is that it squares with my own personal experience.

Lex Fridman (15:23.520)

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

Lex Fridman (15:31.360)

and this is in part because I read a lot of his other books, there's another book, The Birth and

Sheldon Solomon (15:37.680)

Death of Meaning, which is framed in from an evolutionary perspective. And then The Denial

Sheldon Solomon (15:45.280)

of Death is really more framed from an existential psychodynamic vantage point. And as a young

Sheldon Solomon (15:54.480)

academic, I was really taken by what I found to be a very potent juxtaposition that you really don't

Sheldon Solomon (16:06.240)

see that often. Yet usually evolutionary types are eager to dismiss the psychodynamic types

Lex Fridman (16:14.720)

and vice versa. And maybe only John Bowlby, you know, there's there's other folks. But

Sheldon Solomon (16:20.160)

the attachment theorist, John Bowlby, was really one of the first serious academics to say these

Sheldon Solomon (16:27.920)

these ways of thinking about things are quite compatible.

Lex Fridman (16:33.440)

And can you comment on what's what a psychodynamics view of the world is versus an evolutionary view

Lex Fridman (16:39.200)

of the world, just in case people are not?

Sheldon Solomon (16:40.640)

Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's that's a fine question. Well, for the evolutionary types

Sheldon Solomon (16:45.520)

in general are interested in how it is and why it is that we have adapted to our surroundings

Sheldon Solomon (16:59.440)

in the service of persisting over time and being represented in the gene pool thereafter.

Sheldon Solomon (17:06.640)

You used to be a fish. Yeah, we used to be a fish. And I'll end up talking on a podcast.

Lex Fridman (17:13.280)

Yeah. How we came to be that way.

Lex Fridman (17:16.160)

How we came to be that way. And so whereas the existential psychodynamic types, I would say,

Sheldon Solomon (17:22.560)

are more interested in development across a single lifespan. And but but the evolutionary

Sheldon Solomon (17:30.960)

types dismiss the psychodynamic types as overly speculative and devoid of empirical support for

Sheldon Solomon (17:38.400)

their views. They, you know, they'll just say these guys are talking shit, if you'll pardon

Sheldon Solomon (17:44.880)

the expression. And of course, you can turn right around and say the same about the evolutionary

Sheldon Solomon (17:51.680)

types that they are often and rightfully criticized evolutionary psychologists for what are called the

Sheldon Solomon (17:58.480)

just so stories that where it's like, oh, this is probably why fill in the blank is potentially

Sheldon Solomon (18:07.760)

adaptive. And my thought again early on was I didn't see any intrinsic antithesis between

Sheldon Solomon (18:20.000)

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

Lex Fridman (18:27.200)

So one question I would ask here is about a science being speculative. You know,

Sheldon Solomon (18:33.680)

we understand a little about the human mind. You said you picked up Becker's book and, you know,

Sheldon Solomon (18:38.800)

it felt like it was onto something. That's the same thing I felt when I picked up Becker's book,

Sheldon Solomon (18:45.120)

probably also in my early 20s. You know, I read a lot of philosophy, but it felt like the question

Sheldon Solomon (18:50.960)

of the meaning of life kind of, you know, this seemed to be the most the closest to the truth

Sheldon Solomon (18:58.480)

somehow. It was onto something. So I guess the question I want to ask also is like how speculative

Sheldon Solomon (19:06.240)

is psychology? How like all of your life's work? How do you feel? How confident do you feel about

Sheldon Solomon (19:14.960)

the whole thing? About understanding our mind? I feel confidently unconfident to have both ways.

Sheldon Solomon (19:25.680)

Like what do we make of psychology? What do we make starting with Freud, you know,

Sheldon Solomon (19:30.000)

starting just our, or even just philosophy, even the aspects of the sciences, like, you know,

Sheldon Solomon (19:40.640)

my field of artificial intelligence, but also physics, you know, it often feels like, man,

Sheldon Solomon (19:47.200)

we don't really understand most of what's going on here. And certainly that's true with the human

Sheldon Solomon (19:53.520)

mind. Yeah. Well, to me, that's the proper epistemological stance. I don't know anything.

Sheldon Solomon (19:59.200)

Well, it's the Socratic I know that I don't know, which is the first step on the path to wisdom.

Sheldon Solomon (1:00:05.760)

pandemic that's happening now. And Lex, you make a, I think a really profoundly important point,

Sheldon Solomon (1:00:12.400)

you know, back to our work for a bit or Ernest Becker rather, you know, his point is, is that

Sheldon Solomon (1:00:18.480)

the way that we manage existential terror is to embrace culturally constructed belief systems

Sheldon Solomon (1:00:25.680)

that give us a sense that life has meaning and we have value. And in the form of self esteem,

Sheldon Solomon (1:00:34.400)

which we get from perceiving that we meet or exceed the expectations associated with the role

Sheldon Solomon (1:00:40.800)

that we play in society. Well, here we are right now in a world where first of all, if you have

Sheldon Solomon (1:00:47.600)

nothing, you are nothing. And secondly, as you were saying before we got started today,

Sheldon Solomon (1:00:53.440)

a lot of jobs are gone and they're not coming back. And that's the, where the self esteem,

Sheldon Solomon (1:01:00.560)

that's where the self esteem and identity come in with people. It's not only that you don't have

Sheldon Solomon (1:01:04.800)

anything to eat. You don't even have a self anymore to speak of because the, we typically

Sheldon Solomon (1:01:11.440)

define ourselves, you know, as Marx put it, you are what you do. And now who are you when your way

Lex Fridman (1:01:20.160)

of life, as well as your way of earning a living is no longer available?

Sheldon Solomon (1:01:24.720)

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

Sheldon Solomon (1:01:29.520)

because you about defining self esteem is quite interesting. The more I've read Warm at the Core

Lex Fridman (1:01:36.800)

and just in general, your thinking, it made me realize I haven't thought enough about the idea

Sheldon Solomon (1:01:43.360)

of self esteem. But the thing I want to say is, it feels like when you lose your self esteem,

Sheldon Solomon (1:01:49.200)

it feels like when you lose your job, then it's easy to find, it's tempting to find that self

Sheldon Solomon (1:01:58.320)

esteem in a tribe that's not somehow often positive. It's like a tribe that defines itself

Lex Fridman (1:02:07.600)

on the hatred of somebody else.

Lex Fridman (1:02:09.360)

So that's brilliant. And this is what John Gray, the philosopher in the 1990s,

Sheldon Solomon (1:02:15.680)

predicted what's happening today. He wrote a book about globalism. And actually Hannah Arendt in

Sheldon Solomon (1:02:22.800)

the 1950s said the same thing in her book about totalitarianism. When she said that, you know,

Sheldon Solomon (1:02:31.040)

that economics has reached the point where most money is made, not by actually making stuff,

Sheldon Solomon (1:02:39.040)

you know, you use money to make money. And therefore, what happens is money chases money

Sheldon Solomon (1:02:48.640)

across national boundaries. Ultimately, governments become subordinate to the corporate

Sheldon Solomon (1:02:57.680)

entities whose sole function is to generate money. And what John Gray said is that that will

Sheldon Solomon (1:03:06.080)

inevitably produce economic upheaval in local areas, which will not be attributed to the

Sheldon Solomon (1:03:17.360)

economic order. It will be misattributed to whoever the scapegoat du jour is, and the anger

Lex Fridman (1:03:26.320)

and the distress associated with that uncertainty will be picked up on by ideological demagogues

Sheldon Solomon (1:03:37.840)

who will transform that into rage. So both Hannah Arendt as well as John Gray, they just said,

Sheldon Solomon (1:03:46.240)

watch out, we're gonna have right wingish populist movements where demagogues who are the alchemists

Sheldon Solomon (1:03:57.040)

of hate, what makes them brilliant is they don't, the hate's already there, but they take the fears

Lex Fridman (1:04:07.360)

and they expertly redirect them to who it is that I need to hate and kill in order to feel

Sheldon Solomon (1:04:15.520)

good about myself. So back to your point, Lex, that's right. So the self regard that used to come

Sheldon Solomon (1:04:23.520)

from having a job and doing it well, and as a result of that, having adequate resources to

Lex Fridman (1:04:30.720)

provide a decent life for your family, well, those opportunities are gone. And yeah, what's left?

Lex Fridman (1:04:39.200)

So Max Weber, German sociologist at the beginning of the 20th century, he said in times of historical

Sheldon Solomon (1:04:47.200)

upheaval, we are apt to embrace, he was the one who coined the term charismatic leader, seemingly

Sheldon Solomon (1:04:54.320)

larger than life individuals who often believe or their followers believe are divinely ordained to

Sheldon Solomon (1:05:02.720)

rid the world of evil. All right, now, Ernest Becker, he used Weber's ideas in order to account

Sheldon Solomon (1:05:11.680)

for the rise of Hitler. Hitler was elected, and he was elected when Germans were in an extraordinary

Sheldon Solomon (1:05:19.600)

state of existential distress, and he said, I'm gonna make Germany great again. All right, now,

Lex Fridman (1:05:28.000)

what Becker adds to the equation is his claim that what underlies our affection for charismatic

Sheldon Solomon (1:05:37.520)

populist leaders, good and bad, is death anxiety. All right, now, here's where we come in,

Sheldon Solomon (1:05:45.520)

we're egghead experimental researchers. Becker wrote this book, The Denial of Death, and he

Sheldon Solomon (1:05:52.480)

couldn't get a job. People just dismiss these ideas as fanciful speculation for which there's

Sheldon Solomon (1:06:00.000)

no evidence. And you've done some good experiments. Yeah, here's where I can be more cavalier,

Lex Fridman (1:06:07.440)

and where what I would urge people, like what you said, Lex, is ignore my histrionic and polemic

Sheldon Solomon (1:06:15.040)

language, if possible, and step back, if you can, myself included, and let's just consider

Sheldon Solomon (1:06:23.360)

the research findings. Because in September 11, 2001, people that are old enough to remember that

Sheldon Solomon (1:06:34.000)

horrible day, two days before, George W. Bush had the lowest approval rating in the history of

Sheldon Solomon (1:06:42.800)

presidential polling. All right, three weeks later, after he said, we will rid the world of the

Sheldon Solomon (1:06:48.560)

evildoers, and then a week or two after that, he said in a cover story on Time magazine that he

Sheldon Solomon (1:06:55.440)

believed that God had chosen him to lead the world during this, to lead the country, rather, during

Lex Fridman (1:07:01.200)

this perilous time, he had the highest approval rating. And so we're like, well, what happened?

Lex Fridman (1:07:07.600)

You know, what happened to Americans that their approval of President Bush got so high so fast?

Sheldon Solomon (1:07:16.400)

Well, our view, following Becker, is that 2001 was like a giant death reminder. The people dying,

Sheldon Solomon (1:07:25.440)

plus the symbols of American greatness, World Trade Center and the Pentagon. So we did a bunch

Sheldon Solomon (1:07:33.120)

of experiments, and most of our experiments are disarmingly simple. We have one group of

Sheldon Solomon (1:07:37.440)

people, and we just remind them that they're going to die. We say, hey, write your thoughts

Lex Fridman (1:07:42.800)

and feelings about dying. Or in other cases, we stop them outside, either in front of a funeral

Sheldon Solomon (1:07:48.320)

home or 100 meters to either side. Our thought being that if we stop you in front of a funeral

Sheldon Solomon (1:07:55.120)

home, then death is on your mind, even if you don't know it. And then there's other studies,

Sheldon Solomon (1:07:59.760)

they're even more subtle, where we bring people into the lab, and they read stuff on a computer,

Lex Fridman (1:08:05.920)

and while they're doing that, we flash the word death for 28 milliseconds. It's so fast,

Sheldon Solomon (1:08:11.920)

you don't see anything. And then we just measure people's reactions or behavior thereafter. So what

Sheldon Solomon (1:08:19.760)

we found in 2003, leading up to the election of 2004, was that Americans did not care for President

Sheldon Solomon (1:08:29.280)

Bush or his policies in Iraq in controlled conditions. But if we reminded them of their

Sheldon Solomon (1:08:37.440)

mortality first, they liked Bush a lot more. So in every study that we did, Americans liked John

Sheldon Solomon (1:08:45.120)

Kerry, who was running against Bush, they liked Kerry more than Bush.

Lex Fridman (1:08:49.760)

Policy wise, in a controlled...

Sheldon Solomon (1:08:52.240)

In a controlled condition. But if they were reminded of death first, then they liked Bush

Lex Fridman (1:09:00.880)

a lot more.

Lex Fridman (1:09:01.760)

So by the way, just a small pause, you said they're discerningly simple experiments.

Sheldon Solomon (1:09:06.080)

I think that's, and people should read Warm at the Core for some other description,

Sheldon Solomon (1:09:11.040)

you have a lot of different experiments of this nature. I think it's a brilliant experiment

Sheldon Solomon (1:09:16.320)

connected to the Stoics, perhaps, of how your worldview on anything and how delicious that

Sheldon Solomon (1:09:22.640)

water tastes after you're reminded of your own mortality. It's such a fascinating experiment

Sheldon Solomon (1:09:28.560)

that you could probably keep doing like millions of them to draw insight about the way we see the

Sheldon Solomon (1:09:36.720)

world.

Sheldon Solomon (1:09:37.040)

No, that's right, Lex. And I appreciate the compliment, not because we did anything,

Lex Fridman (1:09:42.320)

but because what these studies, many of which are now done by other people around the world

Sheldon Solomon (1:09:49.600)

in labs that we're not connected with, what I'm most proud about our work. I am proud

Sheldon Solomon (1:09:54.000)

of the experiments that we've done. But it's not science until somebody else can replicate

Lex Fridman (1:09:59.680)

your findings and independent researchers are interested in pursuing them.

Sheldon Solomon (1:10:05.280)

It's such a fascinating idea. I don't... I have to think about

Sheldon Solomon (1:10:08.880)

a lot about the experiments you've done and that you've inspired, about the fact that death

Sheldon Solomon (1:10:14.160)

changes the way you see a bunch of different things. I think the Stoics talked about the,

Sheldon Solomon (1:10:21.680)

I mean, in general, just memento mori, like just thinking about death and meditating on death is a

Sheldon Solomon (1:10:28.400)

really positive, not a positive, it's an enlightening way to live life. So what do you

Sheldon Solomon (1:10:37.040)

think about that at the individual level? Like, what is the role about being, bringing that terror

Lex Fridman (1:10:45.040)

of death, fear of death to the surface and being cognizant of it?

Lex Fridman (1:10:48.960)

For us, that's the ball game. So what I'm trying to say is that

Lex Fridman (1:10:56.960)

so what we write in our book and here we're just paying homage to the philosophers and

Sheldon Solomon (1:11:06.480)

theologians that come before us is to point out that literally since antiquity, there has been

Sheldon Solomon (1:11:17.520)

a consensus that to lead a full life requires, Albert Camus said, come to terms with death,

Sheldon Solomon (1:11:28.320)

thereafter anything is possible. And so you've got the Stoics and you've got the Epicureans and

Sheldon Solomon (1:11:37.920)

then you've got the Tibetan Book of the Dead and then you've got like the medieval monks that,

Sheldon Solomon (1:11:43.760)

you know, worked with like a skull on their desk. And the whole idea, I should back up a bit because

Lex Fridman (1:11:52.720)

and just remind folks that our studies, you know, when we remind people that they're going to die

Lex Fridman (1:11:59.280)

and we find that, yeah, they drink more water if a famous person is, you know, advertising it,

Lex Fridman (1:12:08.720)

but they eat more cookies. They want more fancy clothes. They sit closer to people that look like

Sheldon Solomon (1:12:16.720)

them. It changes who they vote for. But all of those things, those are very subtle death reminders.

Sheldon Solomon (1:12:23.120)

You don't even know that death is on your mind. And so our point is that, and this is kind of

Sheldon Solomon (1:12:29.520)

counterintuitive, and that is that the most problematic and unsavory human reactions to death

Sheldon Solomon (1:12:38.480)

anxiety are malignant manifestations of repressed death anxiety. You know, we try and bury it under

Sheldon Solomon (1:12:45.760)

the psychological bushes and then it comes back to bear bitter fruit. But what the theologians and

Sheldon Solomon (1:12:52.560)

the philosophers of the world are saying is it behooves each of us to spend considerable time.

Sheldon Solomon (1:13:02.480)

You don't have to be a goth death rocker, you know, wallowing in death imagery to spend enough

Sheldon Solomon (1:13:11.600)

time entertaining the reality of the human condition, which is that you too will pass

Sheldon Solomon (1:13:18.720)

to get to the point where there is, to lapse into a cliche, the capacity for personal transformation

Lex Fridman (1:13:31.520)

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

Lex Fridman (1:13:41.280)

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

Sheldon Solomon (1:13:49.200)

escape from your own mortality. Absolutely. So you got it. And like, if you figure out death,

Sheldon Solomon (1:13:55.520)

somehow you won't die. So no, no. So my my colleagues and good friends, Jeff Greenberg

Lex Fridman (1:14:01.120)

and Tom Posinski, you know, we met in graduate school in the 1970s. We've been doing this work

Sheldon Solomon (1:14:06.480)

for 40 years. And we cheerfully admit, even though it doesn't reflect well on us as humans,

Sheldon Solomon (1:14:16.000)

that I should just speak for myself. But I feel like there's a real sense in which doing these

Sheldon Solomon (1:14:23.360)

studies and writing books and lecturing has been my way of avoiding directly confronting my anxiety.

Sheldon Solomon (1:14:34.000)

Directly confronting my anxieties by turning it into an intellectual exercise. And every once

Sheldon Solomon (1:14:43.280)

in a while, therefore, when I think that I'm making some progress as a human, I have to remind

Sheldon Solomon (1:14:48.880)

myself that that is probably not the case. And I have at times, like all humans, been more

Sheldon Solomon (1:14:59.680)

preoccupied with the implications of these ideas for my self esteem as like, oh, we're going to

Sheldon Solomon (1:15:05.600)

write a book and maybe we'll get to go on TV or something. Well, no, that's not the same as to

Lex Fridman (1:15:15.200)

actually think about it in a way that you feel it rather than just think it.

Sheldon Solomon (1:15:23.120)

Yeah, like you did when you were eight. Exactly right. So when I first read The Denial of Death,

Sheldon Solomon (1:15:30.240)

I was so literally flabbergasted by it that I took a leave of absence for a year

Lex Fridman (1:15:37.520)

and just like did what would be considered menial jobs. I did construction work. I worked in a

Sheldon Solomon (1:15:43.920)

restaurant. And I was just like, well, wait a minute. If I understand what this guy is saying,

Sheldon Solomon (1:15:54.720)

then I'm just a culturally constructed meat puppet doing things for reasons that I know not

Lex Fridman (1:16:04.080)

in order to assuage death anxiety. And I was like, that's not acceptable.

Sheldon Solomon (1:16:10.560)

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

Lex Fridman (1:16:16.480)

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

Sheldon Solomon (1:16:24.960)

I think so. So interesting to me is Becker also from a Jewish family, claimed to be

Sheldon Solomon (1:16:35.200)

the atheistic, did not identify ultimately as Jewish. I believe he converted to Christianity,

Lex Fridman (1:16:47.840)

but was himself a religious person. And he said he became religious when his first child was born.

Sheldon Solomon (1:16:55.760)

Now religious, what does that mean? Does he have a faith? Well, let's talk more. Most importantly,

Sheldon Solomon (1:17:03.360)

is the afterlife. What's his view on the afterlife? He was agnostic on that, but he did.

Sheldon Solomon (1:17:11.120)

Now the denial of death is, there's a chapter devoted to Kierkegaard. And he talks about

Sheldon Solomon (1:17:23.040)

for Kierkegaard, if you want to become a mature individual, if you want to learn something,

Sheldon Solomon (1:17:30.080)

you go to the university. If you want to become a more mature individual, according to Kierkegaard,

Sheldon Solomon (1:17:36.560)

you got to go to the school of anxiety. And what Kierkegaard said is that we have to let this vague

Sheldon Solomon (1:17:45.120)

dis ease, put a hyphen between dis and ease about death. Kierkegaard's point is you have to really

Sheldon Solomon (1:17:54.400)

think about that. You have to think about it and feel it. You got to let it seek in or seep into

Sheldon Solomon (1:18:03.760)

your mind. At which point, according to Kierkegaard, basically you realize that your

Sheldon Solomon (1:18:14.160)

present identity is fundamentally a cultural construction. You didn't choose the time and

Sheldon Solomon (1:18:19.760)

place of your birth. You didn't choose your name. You didn't choose necessarily even the social

Sheldon Solomon (1:18:27.200)

role that you occupy. You might've chosen from what's available in your culture, but not from

Sheldon Solomon (1:18:32.800)

the full palette of human opportunities. And so what Kierkegaard said is that we need to realize

Sheldon Solomon (1:18:40.240)

that we've been living a lie of sorts. Becker calls it a necessary lie. And we have to momentarily

Sheldon Solomon (1:18:51.920)

dispose of that. And so now Kierkegaard says, well, here I am. I have shrugged off all of the

Lex Fridman (1:19:00.640)

all of the cultural accoutrements that I have used to define myself. And now what am I or who am I?

Sheldon Solomon (1:19:11.120)

This is like the ancient Greek tragedy where the worst thing was to be no one or no thing. At this

Sheldon Solomon (1:19:19.840)

point, Kierkegaard said, you're really dangling on the precipice of oblivion. And some people

Sheldon Solomon (1:19:26.880)

tumble into that abyss and never come out. On the other hand, Kierkegaard said that

Lex Fridman (1:19:34.240)

what you can now do metaphorically and literally is to rebuild yourself from the ground up. And

Sheldon Solomon (1:19:40.640)

there's a, in the new Testament, there's something you have to die in order to be reborn. And

Sheldon Solomon (1:19:46.160)

Kierkegaard's view though, is that there's only one way to do that. This is his proverbial leap

Sheldon Solomon (1:19:51.920)

into faith. And in Kierkegaard's case, it was faith in Christianity, that you can't have unbridled

Sheldon Solomon (1:20:01.600)

faith in cultural constructions. The only thing that you can have unequivocal faith in is some

Sheldon Solomon (1:20:09.680)

kind of transcendent power. All right. But of course, this raises the question of, well, is that

Sheldon Solomon (1:20:17.600)

just another death denying belief system? And at the end of the denial of death, Becker admits

Sheldon Solomon (1:20:26.160)

that there's no way to tell while still advocating for what is ultimately a religious stance. Now,

Sheldon Solomon (1:20:35.840)

one of the things that I don't understand, and Becker has been the most singularly potent

Sheldon Solomon (1:20:41.760)

influence in my academic and personal life, but a year or two ago, I started reading Martin

Sheldon Solomon (1:20:50.560)

Heidegger. I'm reading Being and Time. And what I now wonder is why Becker, who refers to Heidegger

Sheldon Solomon (1:21:02.560)

from time to time in his work, why he didn't take Heidegger more seriously. Because Heidegger

Sheldon Solomon (1:21:08.000)

is like a secular Kierkegaard. He has the same thing, which is death anxiety. Oh, and I should

Sheldon Solomon (1:21:16.800)

have pointed out that what Kierkegaard says is that death anxiety, most people don't go to the

Sheldon Solomon (1:21:22.800)

school of anxiety. They flee from death anxiety by embracing their cultural beliefs. Kierkegaard

Sheldon Solomon (1:21:32.800)

says they then tranquilize themselves with the trivial. And I love that phrase. It's a beautiful

Sheldon Solomon (1:21:39.360)

phrase because at the end of the denial of death, Becker's like, look, the average American is

Sheldon Solomon (1:21:44.160)

either drinking or shopping or watching television, and they're all the same thing, right? Heidegger

Sheldon Solomon (1:21:50.400)

says the same thing. He says, look, and he acknowledges Kierkegaard. He says, what makes us

Sheldon Solomon (1:21:56.480)

feel unsettled? And evidently, that's an English translation of angst, that we don't feel at home

Sheldon Solomon (1:22:06.080)

in the world. Heidegger says that's death anxiety. And one direction is the Kierkegaard one.

Sheldon Solomon (1:22:14.880)

Heidegger calls it a flight from death. You just unself reflexively cling to your cultural

Sheldon Solomon (1:22:21.520)

constructions. And Heidegger borrows the term tranquilized, but he points out that he doesn't

Sheldon Solomon (1:22:30.720)

care for that term because tranquilized sounds like you're subdued. When in fact, what most

Sheldon Solomon (1:22:38.000)

culturally constructed meat puppets do is to be frenetically engaged with their surroundings to

Sheldon Solomon (1:22:44.240)

ensure that they never sit still long enough to actually think about anything consequential.

Sheldon Solomon (1:22:49.840)

Heidegger says there's another way, though. He's like, yo, what you can do is to come to terms with

Sheldon Solomon (1:22:57.360)

that death anxiety in the following way. Thing number one is to realize that not only are you

Sheldon Solomon (1:23:06.400)

going to die, but your death can happen at any given moment. So for Heidegger, if you say, I know

Sheldon Solomon (1:23:15.840)

I'm going to die in some vaguely unspecified future moment, that's still death denial because you're

Sheldon Solomon (1:23:22.320)

saying, yeah, not me, not now. Heidegger's point is you need to get to the point where you need to

Sheldon Solomon (1:23:31.600)

realize that I need to realize that I can walk outside and get smote by a comet, or I can stop

Sheldon Solomon (1:23:41.760)

for gas on the way home and catch the virus and be dead in two days, or any number of potentially

Lex Fridman (1:23:48.640)

unanticipated and uncontrollable fatal outcomes.

Sheldon Solomon (1:23:51.840)

That's brilliant, by the way. Sorry. To bring it to the now.

Sheldon Solomon (1:23:57.440)

Yeah, it is brilliant. I agree, Lex, and that's just why I'm wondering why didn't Becker notice

Sheldon Solomon (1:24:03.040)

this? Because that's the being and time thing, is it's got to be now. And then he says, so okay,

Lex Fridman (1:24:09.600)

so now I've dealt somewhat with the death part. And now he says, now you've got to deal with what he

Sheldon Solomon (1:24:20.240)

calls existential guilt. And he says, well, all right, you have to realize that like it or not,

Sheldon Solomon (1:24:31.280)

you have to make choices. This is Jean Paul Sartre, we are condemned by virtue of consciousness to

Sheldon Solomon (1:24:37.840)

choosing. But Heidegger is a little bit more precise. He's like, look, as I was saying earlier,

Sheldon Solomon (1:24:45.520)

you're in reality, you're an insignificant speck of respiring carbon based dust born into a time

Lex Fridman (1:24:55.120)

and place not of your choosing when you're here for a microscopic amount of time after which you

Sheldon Solomon (1:25:02.240)

are not. And for Heidegger, you have to realize that, like I said, I didn't choose to be born a

Sheldon Solomon (1:25:13.920)

male or Jewish or in America, the offspring of working class people. And Heidegger, what he says

Sheldon Solomon (1:25:24.480)

is, yeah, but you still have to make choices and accept responsibility for those choices,

Sheldon Solomon (1:25:34.080)

even though you didn't choose any of the parameters that ultimately limit what's available

Sheldon Solomon (1:25:39.280)

to you. And moreover, you're going to not always make good choices. So now you're guilty for your

Sheldon Solomon (1:25:51.520)

choices. And then he uses the poet Rilke, he has a phrase, Becker uses it in The Denial of Death,

Sheldon Solomon (1:26:03.680)

the guilt of unlived life. I just love that. You have to accept that you have already diminished

Lex Fridman (1:26:14.400)

and in many ways amputated your own possibilities by virtue of choices that you've made or just as

Sheldon Solomon (1:26:23.120)

often have declined to make because you are reluctant to accept responsibility for the

Sheldon Solomon (1:26:33.920)

opportunities that you are now able to create by virtue of seeing the possibilities that lay before

Sheldon Solomon (1:26:42.960)

you. So anyway, Heidegger then says, look, OK, so, you know, I'm a professor and I live in America

Sheldon Solomon (1:26:52.320)

in the 21st century. Well, if I was in the third century living in a year in Mongolia, I'm not

Sheldon Solomon (1:27:00.640)

going to have an opportunity to be a professor. But what he submits is that there is some aspects

Sheldon Solomon (1:27:10.160)

of whatever I am that are independent of my cultural and historical circumstances. In other

Sheldon Solomon (1:27:19.120)

words, there is a me of sorts. Heidegger would take vigorous issue and so would Heidegger's

Sheldon Solomon (1:27:23.760)

scholars because I'm not claiming to understand him. This is my classic comic book rendering.

Lex Fridman (1:27:29.200)

But Heidegger's point is that you get to the point where you're able to say, OK,

Sheldon Solomon (1:27:34.560)

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

Sheldon Solomon (1:27:44.480)

you know, if I was transported a thousand years in the past in Asia, I'd be in the same situation.

Sheldon Solomon (1:27:52.160)

I would still be conditioned by time and place. I would still have choices that I could make

Sheldon Solomon (1:27:58.640)

within the confines of what opportunities are afforded to me. And then Heidegger says,

Sheldon Solomon (1:28:06.160)

if I can get that far in this is his language. He says that there is a transformation and he

Sheldon Solomon (1:28:14.640)

literally he calls it a turning. You're turning away from a flight from death and you are allowed

Sheldon Solomon (1:28:22.000)

you therefore you see a horizon is his word of opportunity that makes you in a state of

Sheldon Solomon (1:28:33.040)

anticipatory resoluteness with solicitous regard for others that makes your life seem like an

Sheldon Solomon (1:28:44.000)

adventure perfused with unshakable joy. Let me unpack those things. It is beautiful. It is. I

Sheldon Solomon (1:28:54.240)

love, Lex, that you're resonating to the time thing. So he's like, OK, we already talked about

Sheldon Solomon (1:28:59.440)

now. Anticipatory is is already hopeful because it's looking forward to be resolute. It means to

Sheldon Solomon (1:29:09.360)

trust and to just have confidence in what you're doing moving forward. All right. Solicitous. I

Sheldon Solomon (1:29:19.680)

had to look up all these words, by the way. It just means that you are concerned about your

Sheldon Solomon (1:29:25.840)

fellow human beings. And but I love the idea, even if it seems allegorical, I don't mind that

Sheldon Solomon (1:29:34.720)

at all. This idea you said love earlier. And I think that when Heidegger is talking about being

Sheldon Solomon (1:29:41.520)

solicitous, that's as close as he can get. There's an Italian. Yes. So what was that line again with

Sheldon Solomon (1:29:49.920)

the solicitous of the whole thing of turning away from death? And all the words you said are just

Sheldon Solomon (1:29:56.000)

beautiful. I love those words. Yeah. Anticipatory resoluteness that is accompanied with solicitous

Sheldon Solomon (1:30:02.880)

regard to our fellow humans, which makes life appear to us to be an ongoing adventure that is

Sheldon Solomon (1:30:12.560)

permeated by unshakable joy. Now, again, Heidegger is not Mary Poppins. This I just got a tattoo.

Sheldon Solomon (1:30:20.640)

I know. This is great. I just love that exact quote. No, I'm piecing together. These are his

Sheldon Solomon (1:30:28.080)

exact words that and I spent the last two years reading almost everything that I can find because

Sheldon Solomon (1:30:35.200)

I want to. I'm sick of death. You said it. So I want to second what you say, Lex. So it's not

Sheldon Solomon (1:30:42.240)

about death. It's the Sherwood Anderson guy. He's a novelist that I like about. He wrote a book

Sheldon Solomon (1:30:49.920)

in Lyonsburg, Ohio. And now I'm going to forget what he said on his tombstone. But, you know, it

Sheldon Solomon (1:30:57.920)

was something to the effect. Oh, he said life, not death is the great adventure. The point being is

Sheldon Solomon (1:31:05.360)

that, you know, to consider that we must die and the existential implications of that, really,

Sheldon Solomon (1:31:15.200)

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

Sheldon Solomon (1:31:26.720)

a way of thinking about things that moves us more in that direction. And so that's kind of my

Sheldon Solomon (1:31:34.480)

current preoccupation is to take what I just said to you and to talk about it with my colleagues

Lex Fridman (1:31:44.560)

and other academic psychologists, because the way we started with Ernest Becker,

Sheldon Solomon (1:31:50.400)

remember I said earlier, I wasn't trained in any of these things. I'm an egghead

Sheldon Solomon (1:31:56.160)

researcher that was doing experiments about biofeedback. And, you know, then we read these

Sheldon Solomon (1:32:02.880)

Becker books, and I thought they were so interesting that for the first few years,

Sheldon Solomon (1:32:08.480)

we didn't have any studies. I just would travel around and I'd be like, here's what this Becker

Sheldon Solomon (1:32:13.600)

guy says. I think this is cool. Well, my present view is I'm like, here's what this Heidegger guy

Sheldon Solomon (1:32:20.480)

says. I think these ideas are consistent with what Becker is saying because they are anchored in

Sheldon Solomon (1:32:30.240)

death anxiety. But I like that direction as an alternative to the Kierkegaardian insistence that

Sheldon Solomon (1:32:41.600)

the only psychologically tenable way to extricate ourselves from maladaptive reactions to death

Sheldon Solomon (1:32:51.600)

anxiety is through faith in the traditional sense. Yeah, I always kind of saw Kierkegaard unfairly,

Sheldon Solomon (1:33:00.640)

like you said, in a comic book sense of the word faith as a non traditional sense. I kind of like

Sheldon Solomon (1:33:06.560)

the idea of leap of faith. Oh, I love that idea. And so what I've been babbling about with, you

Sheldon Solomon (1:33:11.600)

know, Heidegger, I'm like, yeah, Kierkegaard is a leap of faith in God. Heidegger is a leap of faith

Sheldon Solomon (1:33:21.280)

in life. And I just like it. I found the leap of faith really interesting in the technological

Sheldon Solomon (1:33:29.600)

space. So I've talked to on this thing with Elon Musk, but I think he's also just in general for

Sheldon Solomon (1:33:37.280)

our culture, a really important figure. Oh, absolutely. That takes, I mean, sometimes a

Sheldon Solomon (1:33:43.040)

little bit insane on social media and just in life. When I met him, it was kind of interesting

Sheldon Solomon (1:33:51.280)

that, of course, there's, I mean, he's a legit engineer, so he's fun to talk to about the

Sheldon Solomon (1:33:56.720)

technical things, but he also just the way the humor and the way he sees life, it just like

Sheldon Solomon (1:34:05.200)

refuses to be conventional. So it's a constant leap into the unknown. And one of the things

Sheldon Solomon (1:34:14.480)

that he does, and this isn't even like fake. A lot of people say, cause he's a CEO,

Sheldon Solomon (1:34:20.800)

there's a business owner. So he's trying to make money. No, I think I looked him in his eyes. I

Sheldon Solomon (1:34:27.680)

mean, this is real, is a lot of the things he believes that are going to be accomplished that

Sheldon Solomon (1:34:33.840)

a lot of others are saying are impossible, like autonomous vehicles. He truly believes it. To me,

Sheldon Solomon (1:34:39.520)

that is the leap of faith of I'm almost going like, we're like the entirety of our experience

Sheldon Solomon (1:34:45.440)

is shrouded in mystery. We don't know what the hell's going to happen. We don't know what we're

Sheldon Solomon (1:34:50.240)

actually capable of as human beings. And he just takes the leap. He fully believes that we can,

Sheldon Solomon (1:34:56.160)

you know, we can go to, we can colonize Mars. I mean, how, how crazy is it to just believe and

Sheldon Solomon (1:35:04.480)

dream and actually be taking steps towards it to colonizing Mars when most people are like,

Sheldon Solomon (1:35:10.720)

that's the stupidest idea ever. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm in agreement with you on that. You know,

Sheldon Solomon (1:35:16.000)

two things, you know, one is it reminds me of Ben Franklin who in his autobiography,

Sheldon Solomon (1:35:21.440)

you know, has a similarly childish in the best sense of the word, unbridled imagination for what

Sheldon Solomon (1:35:31.120)

might become, you know, Ben Franklin's like, yeah, I got electricity. That's cool, but we'll be

Sheldon Solomon (1:35:37.760)

levitating soon. And I, we can't even begin to imagine what we are capable of. And of course,

Sheldon Solomon (1:35:45.200)

people are like, dude, that's crazy. And there's a guy with it's FCS Schiller, some humanistic guy

Sheldon Solomon (1:35:53.120)

at the beginning of the 20th century. He's like, you know, lots of things that people think about

Sheldon Solomon (1:36:05.760)

may appear to be absurd to the point of obscene. But the reality is historically

Sheldon Solomon (1:36:13.280)

every fantastic innovation has generally been initiated by someone who was condemned

Sheldon Solomon (1:36:22.320)

for being a lunatic. And it's not that anything is possible, but surely things that we don't try

Sheldon Solomon (1:36:31.360)

will never manifest as possibilities. Yeah. And that's, that's that there's something beautiful

Sheldon Solomon (1:36:38.800)

to that. That's the embracing the abyss. And again, it's like the, it's the embracing the

Sheldon Solomon (1:36:46.160)

fear of death, the reality of death and then turning and to look at all the opportunities.

Sheldon Solomon (1:36:54.160)

That's right. Let me ask you, whenever I bring up Ernest Becker's work, which I do and yours

Sheldon Solomon (1:36:59.680)

is quite a bit, I find it surprising how that it's not a lot more popular in a sense that,

Sheldon Solomon (1:37:11.680)

no, we're not, I don't mean just your book. That's well written. People should read it,

Sheldon Solomon (1:37:16.560)

should buy it, whatever. I think it has the same kind of qualities that are useful to think about

Sheldon Solomon (1:37:23.360)

as like Jordan Peterson's work and stuff like that. But I just mean like why people are not,

Sheldon Solomon (1:37:32.400)

don't think of that as a compelling description of the core of the human condition. Like,

Sheldon Solomon (1:37:42.000)

I think what you mentioned about Heidegger is quite, connects with me quite well. So I ask

Sheldon Solomon (1:37:47.520)

on this podcast, I often ask people if they're afraid of death. That's like almost every single

Sheldon Solomon (1:37:52.720)

part. I almost always get criticized for asking world class people, scientists and technologists

Sheldon Solomon (1:38:00.080)

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

Sheldon Solomon (1:38:09.040)

like don't say anything interesting. What I mean by that is they haven't thought deeply about it.

Sheldon Solomon (1:38:16.480)

Like you kind of brought this up a few times of really letting it sink in. They kind of say this

Sheldon Solomon (1:38:22.240)

thing about what exactly you said, which is like, it's something that happens not today. Like I'm

Sheldon Solomon (1:38:29.120)

aware that it's something that happens. And I'm not, the thing they usually say is I'm not afraid

Sheldon Solomon (1:38:34.160)

of death. I just want to live a good life kind of thing. And what I'm trying to express is like when

Sheldon Solomon (1:38:42.320)

I look in their eyes and the kind of the core of the conversation, it looks like they haven't

Sheldon Solomon (1:38:47.360)

really become, like they haven't really meditated on death. I guess the question is, what do I say

Sheldon Solomon (1:38:54.800)

to people that there's something to really think about here? Like there's some demons, some realities

Sheldon Solomon (1:39:04.160)

that need to be faced by more people. Well, that's a tough one. You know, I could tell you what not to

Sheldon Solomon (1:39:10.400)

do. So when we are young and annoying, a lot of famous people, mostly psychologists because that's

Sheldon Solomon (1:39:19.840)

who we intersected with, we would lay out these ideas and they would be, well, I don't think

Sheldon Solomon (1:39:29.440)

about death like that. So these ideas must be wrong. And we would say, well, you don't think

Sheldon Solomon (1:39:37.840)

about death because you're lucky enough to be comfortably ensconced in a cultural worldview

Sheldon Solomon (1:39:44.080)

from which you derive self esteem. And that has spared you the existential excruciations that

Sheldon Solomon (1:39:50.880)

would otherwise arise. But that's like Freud. You know, you're repressing, so you either agree with

Sheldon Solomon (1:39:57.680)

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

Sheldon Solomon (1:40:04.480)

Well, so that's the Nietzsche thing. What I felt when I've, there've been moments in my life

Sheldon Solomon (1:40:11.840)

when I really thought about death. I mean, there's not too many. Like really, really thought about it

Lex Fridman (1:40:17.200)

and feel the thing when you felt that eight, maybe I'm traumatizing or romanticizing it. But

Sheldon Solomon (1:40:23.920)

I feel like it's, the conservatives call it popularly like, or the movie Matrix call it the

Sheldon Solomon (1:40:31.360)

red pill moment. I feel like it's a dangerous thought because I feel like I'm taking a step

Sheldon Solomon (1:40:39.920)

out of a society. Like there's a nice narrative that we've all constructed and I'm taking a step

Sheldon Solomon (1:40:45.520)

out. And it feels, there's this feeling like you're basically drowning. I mean, it's not a

Sheldon Solomon (1:40:55.040)

good feeling. It is not. But this gets back to the Heidegger Kierkegaard school of anxiety. You are

Sheldon Solomon (1:41:00.480)

stepping out and you are momentarily shrugging off, again, the culturally constructed psychological

Sheldon Solomon (1:41:09.120)

accoutrements that allow you to stand up in the morning. And so, I mean, in that sense, it feels

Sheldon Solomon (1:41:18.240)

like, I mean, how do you have that conversation? Because I guess I'm dancing around a set of

Sheldon Solomon (1:41:29.760)

questions, which is like, I guess I'm disappointed that people don't, are not as willing to step

Sheldon Solomon (1:41:37.680)

outside. Like even just, even any kind of thought experiment. Forget denial of death. Like

Sheldon Solomon (1:41:48.320)

there's not a community of people. Let's take an easy one that I think is scientifically

Sheldon Solomon (1:41:53.680)

ridiculous, which is, there's a community of people that believe that the earth is flat. Or

Sheldon Solomon (1:41:59.840)

actually even better, the space is fake. Like what I find surprising is that a lot of people I talk

Sheldon Solomon (1:42:09.760)

to are not willing to be like, imagine if it is, like imagine the earth is flat. Like think about

Sheldon Solomon (1:42:18.640)

it. Like a lot of people are just like, no, the earth is round. They're like scientists too. They're

Sheldon Solomon (1:42:25.520)

like, yeah, well actually, wait, have you actually like thought about it? Like imagine like a thought

Sheldon Solomon (1:42:31.760)

experiment that like basically step outside the little narrative that we are comfortable with. Now

Sheldon Solomon (1:42:38.800)

that one in particular is, has really strong evidence and scientific validation. So it's

Sheldon Solomon (1:42:48.240)

pretty simple thing to show that it at least is not flat. But just the willingness to take a step

Sheldon Solomon (1:42:56.800)

outside of the stories that bring us comfort, it's been disappointing that people are not willing to

Sheldon Solomon (1:43:03.440)

do that. And I think the philosophy that you've constructed and that Ernest Becker is constructing,

Sheldon Solomon (1:43:09.040)

you've tested, I think is really compelling. And the fact that people aren't often willing to take

Sheldon Solomon (1:43:14.800)

that step. It's disappointing. Well, yes, but perhaps understandable. I mean, one of this is

Sheldon Solomon (1:43:21.200)

an anecdote, of course, but when we were trying to get a publisher for our book, we had a meeting

Sheldon Solomon (1:43:30.000)

with a publisher who published some Malcolm Gladwell books. And she said, I'm very interested

Sheldon Solomon (1:43:41.520)

in your book, but can you write it without mentioning death? Because people don't like death.

Lex Fridman (1:43:47.840)

And we're like, no, it's really kind of central. And I think that's part of it. I think, again,

Sheldon Solomon (1:43:56.960)

if these ideas have merit, and I actually like the way that you put it, Lex, it's that to step away

Sheldon Solomon (1:44:06.320)

is to momentarily expose yourself to all of the anxiety that our identity and our beliefs

Sheldon Solomon (1:44:20.960)

typically enable us to manage. I think it's as simple as that.

Sheldon Solomon (1:44:24.160)

Yeah, I had this experience in college with my best friend who got really high. And he forgot,

Sheldon Solomon (1:44:36.880)

it was in the winter, it was really freezing. It was memorable to me. I think it's an analogy,

Sheldon Solomon (1:44:41.440)

it's very useful. So he went to get some pizza. And he left me outside and said,

Sheldon Solomon (1:44:53.200)

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

Sheldon Solomon (1:44:59.280)

I was in shorts, it was freezing winter. And I remember standing outside, it's a dorm,

Lex Fridman (1:45:05.840)

and I'm looking from the outside in, it's a light and it's warm. And I'm just standing there frozen,

Sheldon Solomon (1:45:12.480)

I think for an hour or more. And that's how I think about it. I don't give a damn about the

Sheldon Solomon (1:45:19.600)

stupid winter. I'm drawn to be back to the warm. And that's how I feel about thinking about death.

Sheldon Solomon (1:45:29.760)

At a certain point, it's too much. It's like that cold. I wanna be back into the warm.

Sheldon Solomon (1:45:37.760)

Getting back to Heidegger for a moment. He uses a lot the idea of feeling at home,

Lex Fridman (1:45:46.880)

not as like in your house, but just feeling like you're comfortably situated.

Sheldon Solomon (1:45:52.240)

Maybe you could talk about, like I had a conversation about this with my dad a little bit.

Lex Fridman (1:45:58.320)

How does religion relate to this?

Sheldon Solomon (1:46:01.520)

I see it as the disease and the cure. In a sense, a few things. One is that I think a case could be

Sheldon Solomon (1:46:18.640)

made that humans are innately religious. So now we're gonna get into territory where there's gonna

Lex Fridman (1:46:26.720)

be a lot of disputes. And what do you mean by religious?

Lex Fridman (1:46:33.120)

Religion is an evolutionary adaptation.

Lex Fridman (1:46:36.560)

And religion is like a belief in something outside of yourself kind of thing?

Sheldon Solomon (1:46:42.080)

Not necessarily. So here we gotta be a little bit more careful. And again, I'm not a scholar.

Lex Fridman (1:46:50.160)

How about I'm a well intentioned dilettante in this regard? Because what I have read is that

Sheldon Solomon (1:47:00.240)

religion evolved very early on, long before our ancestors were conscious and the issue of death

Sheldon Solomon (1:47:11.520)

arose. And the word religion evidently is from a Latin word, regatear. We can look it up. And it

Sheldon Solomon (1:47:22.880)

means to bind. And Emile Durkheim, the dead French sociologist, he said, you know, originally

Sheldon Solomon (1:47:31.200)

religion is Darce Lassing, who's a dead novelist. She calls it the substance of we feeling that it's

Sheldon Solomon (1:47:40.320)

literally that it arose because we're uber social creatures who from time to time took comfort in

Sheldon Solomon (1:47:51.040)

just being in physical proximity with our fellow humans. And that there is this kind of sense of

Sheldon Solomon (1:48:03.200)

transcendent exuberance, just back to the unshakable joy that Heidegger alludes to.

Lex Fridman (1:48:11.280)

And that the original function of religion was to foster social cohesion and coordination. And that

Sheldon Solomon (1:48:21.760)

it was only subsequently some claim that a burgeoning level of consciousness made it such that

Sheldon Solomon (1:48:30.720)

religious belief systems that included the hope of some kind of

Sheldon Solomon (1:48:37.340)

immortality were just naturally selected thereafter. So there are some people. So

Sheldon Solomon (1:48:46.760)

it's David Sloan Wilson wrote a book called Darwin's Cathedral. And he said,

Sheldon Solomon (1:48:53.560)

religion has nothing to do with death. It's evolved to make groups viable. He's actually

Sheldon Solomon (1:49:00.200)

a group selection guy. What's group selection? The idea that it's the group that is selected

Sheldon Solomon (1:49:07.480)

for rather than the individual. Yeah, so people have vigorous disagreements about that. But I

Sheldon Solomon (1:49:12.360)

guess our point would be, we see religion as being inextricably connected, ultimately, to assuaging

Sheldon Solomon (1:49:21.640)

concerns about death. Well, I guess another question to ask around this, like, what does

Sheldon Solomon (1:49:30.200)

the world look like without religion? Will we, if it's inextricably connected to our fears of death,

Lex Fridman (1:49:41.000)

do you think it always returns in some kind of shape? Maybe it's not called religion, but whatever,

Sheldon Solomon (1:49:47.160)

it just keeps returning? Yeah, who knows? So that's a great question, Lex. So there's a woman named

Sheldon Solomon (1:49:51.880)

Karen Armstrong. She was a nun turned historian. And she's, I can't remember the name of the book,

Lex Fridman (1:50:02.920)

but no matter. She, we could look that up, but... If you want, I can look it up, but I can also,

Lex Fridman (1:50:08.520)

I'll just add it in post. Yeah, her point, it says God in the title, of course.

Lex Fridman (1:50:13.400)

But she's like, look, all religions are generally fairly right minded in that they advocate the

Sheldon Solomon (1:50:23.560)

golden rule. And all religions, at their best, do seem to foster pro social behavior towards the

Sheldon Solomon (1:50:35.880)

in group. And that confers both psychological as well as physical benefits. That's the good news.

Lex Fridman (1:50:44.200)

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

Sheldon Solomon (1:50:54.520)

who declares that, you know, they're the ones in sole possession of the world.

Lex Fridman (1:51:02.760)

Sole possession of the liturgical practices or whatever they call them.

Lex Fridman (1:51:10.280)

And they're the ones that turn, you know, religion at its best into your crusades and holocausts.

Sheldon Solomon (1:51:19.480)

Yeah. My view, not that it should matter for much, but I grew up just skeptical of religion

Sheldon Solomon (1:51:32.920)

because I'm like, as a kid, I'm like, well, if we didn't have these beliefs,

Sheldon Solomon (1:51:39.160)

we wouldn't be killing each other because of them. And I'd be like to my parents,

Sheldon Solomon (1:51:45.240)

well, you're telling me that all people should be judged on the merits of their character,

Lex Fridman (1:51:51.560)

but don't come home if you don't marry a Jewish woman. Right. Which is implying that if you're

Sheldon Solomon (1:51:58.120)

not Jewish, you're an inferior form of life. Yeah. That's what tribes always do.

Lex Fridman (1:52:02.280)

And there's the tribal thing. And so there's a guy named Amin Malouf, a Lebanese guy who writes

Sheldon Solomon (1:52:08.200)

in French in the 1990s, I think wrote a book called In the Name of Identity, Violence and

Sheldon Solomon (1:52:17.720)

the Need to Belong. And that was his point is unless we can overcome this tribal mentality,

Sheldon Solomon (1:52:29.800)

this will not end well. But you said earlier something, Lex, that I think is profound and

Sheldon Solomon (1:52:35.640)

profoundly important. And that is you did not recoil in horror when I mentioned Kierkegaard's

Sheldon Solomon (1:52:44.520)

use of the term faith. And so I'm a big fan of faith and I'm not sure what that implies.

Lex Fridman (1:52:56.440)

And by the way, this is just a peripheral comment, but I find less resistance to Becker's ideas in

Sheldon Solomon (1:53:04.360)

our work when I'm in Jesuit schools. It's the Americans, the secular humanists who

Sheldon Solomon (1:53:14.440)

are most disinclined to accept these ideas. It's an important side comment because I think it's

Sheldon Solomon (1:53:21.240)

mostly because they don't think philosophically. I speak with a lot of scientists and I think that's

Sheldon Solomon (1:53:27.640)

my main criticism. I mean, that's the problem with science is it's so comforting to focus in

Sheldon Solomon (1:53:37.080)

on the details that you can escape thinking about the mystery of it all, the big picture things,

Sheldon Solomon (1:53:43.480)

the philosophical, like the fact that you don't actually know shit at all. So in terms of Jesuit,

Sheldon Solomon (1:53:52.600)

like that's the beauty of the experience of faith and so on is like, wherever that journey takes you

Sheldon Solomon (1:54:01.000)

is you actually explore the biggest questions of our world. So I don't see religion going away

Sheldon Solomon (1:54:07.160)

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

Sheldon Solomon (1:54:19.240)

then everyone from the Pope to Elon Musk will acknowledge that it is a world that is unfathomably

Sheldon Solomon (1:54:29.640)

mysterious. And like it or not, in the absence of beliefs, here I'm Charles Peirce, the pragmatic

Sheldon Solomon (1:54:38.680)

philosopher, he just said beliefs are the basis of action. If you don't have any beliefs, you're

Sheldon Solomon (1:54:44.200)

paralyzed with indecision, whether we're aware of it or not, whether we like it or not, in order to

Sheldon Solomon (1:54:50.600)

stand up in the morning, you have to subscribe to beliefs that can never be unequivocally proven

Sheldon Solomon (1:54:59.480)

right or wrong. Well, then why do you maintain them? Well, ultimately it's because of some form

Sheldon Solomon (1:55:07.080)

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

Sheldon Solomon (1:55:17.400)

I guess the problem with science or with religion is you can sort of all of a sudden

Sheldon Solomon (1:55:25.240)

take a step into a place where you're super confident that you know the absolute truth of

Sheldon Solomon (1:55:30.680)

things. There you go. And again, back to Socrates, Plato, back in the cave. At Skidmore, where I

Sheldon Solomon (1:55:37.800)

work, that's what I have the students read in their first week. And Plato's like, oh, look at

Sheldon Solomon (1:55:44.120)

all those poor bastards. They're in the cave, but they don't know it. And then they are freed from

Sheldon Solomon (1:55:51.560)

their chains. And they have to be dragged out of the cave, by the way, which is another interesting

Sheldon Solomon (1:55:56.200)

point. They don't run out. But that gets back to why people don't like to be divested of their

Sheldon Solomon (1:56:02.840)

comfortable illusions. But anyway, they get dragged out of the cave into the sunlight,

Sheldon Solomon (1:56:07.000)

which he claims is a representation of truth and beauty. And I say to the students, well,

Sheldon Solomon (1:56:13.080)

what's wrong with that? And they're like, nothing. That's like awesome. And then I'm like, yo, dudes,

Sheldon Solomon (1:56:21.400)

you're out of the cave, but how do you know that you're not in another cave? The illumination may

Sheldon Solomon (1:56:29.320)

be better. But the minute you think you're at the end of the proverbial intellectual slash

Sheldon Solomon (1:56:41.560)

epistemological trail, then you have already succumbed to either laziness or dogmatism or

Sheldon Solomon (1:56:50.840)

both. That's really well put. That's both terrifying and exciting that there's always

Sheldon Solomon (1:56:57.000)

a bigger cave. A little bit of an out there question, but I think some of the interesting

Sheldon Solomon (1:57:03.000)

qualities of the human mind is the ideas of intelligence and consciousness. So what do you

Sheldon Solomon (1:57:11.640)

make of consciousness? So do you think death creates consciousness, like the fear of death,

Sheldon Solomon (1:57:19.560)

the terror of death creates consciousness and consciousness in turn magnifies the terror of

Sheldon Solomon (1:57:29.320)

death? I do. Like what is consciousness to you? Don't ask me that. So now if I could answer that,

Sheldon Solomon (1:57:37.480)

you know, I'd be chugging rum out of a coconut with my Nobel prize that, you know, it's literally,

Sheldon Solomon (1:57:43.960)

you know, Steven Pinker, I do agree with his claim and I think how the mind works, that it is the

Sheldon Solomon (1:57:51.400)

key question for the psychological sciences broadly defined in the 21st century.

Lex Fridman (1:58:01.320)

What is consciousness?

Sheldon Solomon (1:58:02.040)

Yeah, what is consciousness? And I don't think it's an epiphenomenological afterthought. So a

Sheldon Solomon (1:58:09.800)

lot of people, I think Dan Wagner at Harvard, a lot of folks consider it just the ass end of a

Sheldon Solomon (1:58:19.000)

process that by the time we are aware of what it is, it's just basically an integrated rendering

Sheldon Solomon (1:58:30.520)

of something that's already happened. You know, evidently there's a half second delay between

Lex Fridman (1:58:37.480)

when something happens, you know, those studies and our awareness of it.

Lex Fridman (1:58:43.320)

And that's where like ideas of free will will step in. You can explain away a lot of stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:58:47.960)

And I think those are all important and interesting questions. I'm of the persuasion.

Sheldon Solomon (1:58:55.160)

I mean, even, not even, but Dawkins and the selfish gene is very thoughtful. Actually,

Sheldon Solomon (1:59:05.960)

in a lot of, it's actually more in notes than in the text of the book, but he's just like,

Sheldon Solomon (1:59:11.880)

it's hard for me to imagine that consciousness doesn't have some sort of important and highly

Sheldon Solomon (1:59:23.000)

adaptive function. And what Dawkins says is he thought about it in terms of just that we could

Sheldon Solomon (1:59:30.680)

do mental simulations, that one possibly extraordinary product of consciousness is to

Sheldon Solomon (1:59:40.120)

rather than find out often by adverse consequences through trying something would be to run mental

Sheldon Solomon (1:59:50.280)

simulations. And so one possibility is that consciousness is highly adaptive.

Sheldon Solomon (1:59:55.800)

Another possibility is Nicholas Humphrey, a British dude who wrote a book about, I think it's

Sheldon Solomon (20:08.400)

I would argue forcefully that we know a lot more than we used to. I would argue equally forcefully,

Lex Fridman (20:20.240)

but not that I have a PhD in the philosophy of science, but I believe that the Thomas

Sheldon Solomon (20:26.400)

Kuhns of the world are right when they point out that change is not necessarily progress.

Lex Fridman (20:34.960)

And so on the one hand, I do think we know a lot more than we did back in the day when if you

Sheldon Solomon (20:42.320)

wanted to fly, you put on some wax wings and jumped off a mountain. On the other hand, I think

Sheldon Solomon (20:49.120)

it's quite arrogant when scientists, I'll just speak about psychological scientists, when they

Sheldon Solomon (20:59.280)

have the audacity to mistake statistical precision for knowledge and insight. And when they make the

Sheldon Solomon (21:11.200)

mistake, in my estimation, that Einstein bemoaned, and that's this idea that the mere accumulation

Sheldon Solomon (21:19.840)

of data will necessarily result in conceptual breakthroughs. And so I like the, well, we're all,

Sheldon Solomon (21:29.520)

I hope, appreciative of the people who trained us. But I remember my first day in graduate school at

Sheldon Solomon (21:35.200)

the University of Kansas, they brought us into a room and on one side of the board was a quote by

Lex Fridman (21:40.560)

Kurt Lewin or Levine, famous German social psychologist. And the quote is,

Sheldon Solomon (21:48.080)

there's nothing more useful than a good theory. And then on the other side was another quote by

Sheldon Solomon (21:53.280)

a German physicist, his name eludes me, and it was all theories are wrong. And I'm like,

Sheldon Solomon (22:00.640)

which is it? And of course, the point is that it's both. Our theories are, I believe,

Sheldon Solomon (22:09.760)

powerful ways to direct our attention to aspects of human affairs that might render us better able

Sheldon Solomon (22:21.440)

to understand ourselves in the world around us. Now, I also, as an experimental psychologist,

Sheldon Solomon (22:30.000)

I adhere to the view that theories are essentially hypothesis generating devices.

Lex Fridman (22:38.000)

And that at its best, science is a dialectical interplay where you have theoretical assertions

Sheldon Solomon (22:44.080)

that yield testable hypotheses and that either results in the corroboration of the theory,

Sheldon Solomon (22:52.160)

the rejection of it or the modification thereafter. If we look at the existentialists

Sheldon Solomon (23:01.280)

or even like modern philosopher, psychologist types like Jordan Peterson, I'm not sure if

Sheldon Solomon (23:07.200)

you're familiar with Jordan pretty well. We go way back. Actually, if he were here with us today,

Sheldon Solomon (23:14.000)

we would he would be jumping in and I believe very interesting and important ways. But yeah,

Sheldon Solomon (23:22.080)

we go back 30 years ago. He was basically saying our work is nonsense. Let's get into this. I'll

Sheldon Solomon (23:30.480)

talk to Jordan eventually on this thing. Yeah, there's some rough times right now. Oh, absolutely.

Lex Fridman (23:35.600)

And I and I wish him well. Jordan was working on his maps of meaning and we were publishing our

Sheldon Solomon (23:44.160)

work. And I think Jordan at the time was concerned about our vague claims to the effect that all

Sheldon Solomon (23:56.080)

meaning is arbitrary. He takes a more Jungian as well as evolutionary view that I don't think is

Sheldon Solomon (24:05.120)

wrong, by the way, which is that there are certain kinds of meanings that are more important,

Sheldon Solomon (24:16.320)

let's say religious types, and that we didn't pay sufficient attention to that in our early days.

Lex Fridman (24:25.840)

So can you try to elucidate like what his worldview is? Because he's also a religious man.

Lex Fridman (24:31.600)

And so what what was this? What was some of the interesting aspects of the disagreements

Sheldon Solomon (24:37.680)

that then? Yeah, well, back in the day, I just said, you know, Jordan was a young punk. We were

Sheldon Solomon (24:42.480)

young punks. He was just kind of flailing in an animated way at some conferences saying that

Sheldon Solomon (24:49.200)

we you're still both kind of punks. Yeah, we are kind of punk. So I saw him three or four years

Sheldon Solomon (24:53.840)

ago. We spoke on a it was an awesome day. We're in Canada at the Ontario Shakespeare Festival,

Sheldon Solomon (25:00.160)

where we were asked to be on a Canadian broadcast system program. I think we were talking about

Sheldon Solomon (25:06.800)

Macbeth from a psychodynamic perspective. And I hadn't seen him in a ton of years. And we spent

Sheldon Solomon (25:14.880)

two days together, had a great time. You know, we had just written our book, The Worm at the Core.

Lex Fridman (25:20.880)

And he's like, you know, you're you're missing a big opportunity. Every time you say something,

Sheldon Solomon (25:26.720)

you have to have your phone and you have to film yourself and then you have to put it on YouTube.

Sheldon Solomon (25:32.720)

Yeah, he was onto something that, you know, that just as a small tangent. Yeah. It's it's almost

Sheldon Solomon (25:40.000)

sad to look at Jordan Peterson and somebody like yourself. After having done this podcast,

Sheldon Solomon (25:44.960)

I've realized that there is really brilliant people in this world. And oftentimes, especially

Sheldon Solomon (25:51.520)

like when they're, I mean, it would love are a little bit like punks. That's right. They kind

Sheldon Solomon (25:58.320)

of do their own thing and make the world doesn't know they exist as much as they should. And it's

Lex Fridman (26:03.840)

so interesting because most people are kind of boring. Yes. And then the interesting ones kind

Sheldon Solomon (26:11.360)

of go on their own. And there's not a smartphone. No, that's that's so interesting. He was onto

Sheldon Solomon (26:16.240)

something that I mean, it's interesting that I don't think he was thinking from a money perspective,

Lex Fridman (26:22.880)

but he was probably thinking of like connecting with people or sharing his knowledge.

Lex Fridman (26:27.600)

But people don't often think that way. That's right. So maybe we can try to get back to you're

Sheldon Solomon (26:33.760)

both brilliant people. And I'd love to get some interesting disagreements earlier and later about

Sheldon Solomon (26:39.840)

in your psychological work and your world views. Well, our disagreements today would be

Sheldon Solomon (26:50.000)

along two dimensions. One is he is and again, I wish he was here to correct me. Yes. When I say

Sheldon Solomon (26:59.520)

that he is more committed to the virtues of the Judeo Christian tradition, I see particularly

Sheldon Solomon (27:09.680)

Christianity and in a sense is a contemporary Kierkegaard of sorts when he's saying there's only

Sheldon Solomon (27:17.840)

one way to leap into faith. And I would take ardent issue with that claim on the grounds that

Sheldon Solomon (27:26.320)

that is one, but by no means not the only way to find meaning and value in life. And so and I see

Sheldon Solomon (27:37.600)

his. What's his warm at the core? What is like? So we're talking about a little bit of a higher

Sheldon Solomon (27:43.840)

level of discovering meaning. Yeah. What's his? What does he make of death? Oh, I don't know.

Lex Fridman (27:49.840)

And this is where it would be nice to have him here. He has, you know, from a distance criticized

Sheldon Solomon (27:59.280)

our work as misguided. Having said that, though, when we were together, he said something along

Sheldon Solomon (28:06.240)

the lines that there is no theoretical body of work in academic psychology right now for which

Sheldon Solomon (28:15.280)

there is more empirical evidence. And so I appreciated that. He's a great researcher. He's

Sheldon Solomon (28:22.160)

a good clinician. The other thing that we will agree to disagree about rather vociferously is

Sheldon Solomon (28:30.240)

his ultimately political slash economic. So I remember being at dinner with him,

Sheldon Solomon (28:39.040)

telling him that the next book that I wanted to write was going to be called Why Left and Right

Sheldon Solomon (28:44.480)

are Both Beside the Point. And my argument was going to be and it is going to be that both

Sheldon Solomon (28:50.960)

liberal and political liberal and conservative political philosophy are each intellectually and

Sheldon Solomon (28:59.040)

morally bankrupt because they're both framed in terms of assumptions about human nature that are

Sheldon Solomon (29:05.040)

demonstrably false. And Jordan didn't mind me knocking liberal political philosophy on those

Sheldon Solomon (29:14.000)

grounds. That would basically be like Steven Pinker's blank slate. But he took issue when

Sheldon Solomon (29:21.120)

I pointed out that actually it's conservative political philosophy, which starts with John

Sheldon Solomon (29:29.200)

Locke's assumption that in a state of nature, there are no societies, just autonomous individuals

Sheldon Solomon (29:36.080)

who are striving for survival. That's one of the most obviously patently wrong assertions in the

Sheldon Solomon (29:45.760)

history of intellectual thought. And Locke uses that to justify his claims about the individual

Sheldon Solomon (29:55.040)

right to acquire unlimited amounts of property, which is ultimately the justification for

Sheldon Solomon (2:00:01.960)

called Regaining Consciousness. And he hypothesized, I think this is 1980s, maybe even earlier,

Sheldon Solomon (2:00:09.560)

that consciousness arose as a way to better predict the behavior of others in social settings,

Sheldon Solomon (2:00:18.840)

that by knowing how I feel makes me better able to know how you may be feeling. This is like the

Sheldon Solomon (2:00:27.320)

rudiments of a theory of mind. And it really may not have had anything to do with intelligence,

Lex Fridman (2:00:35.960)

so much as social intelligence.

Lex Fridman (2:00:37.880)

So in that sense, consciousness is a social construct. It's just a useful thing for interacting

Sheldon Solomon (2:00:46.680)

with other humans. I don't know, but there seems to be something about realizing your own mortality

Lex Fridman (2:00:56.280)

that's somehow intricately connected to the idea of consciousness.

Sheldon Solomon (2:00:59.480)

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

Lex Fridman (2:01:08.120)

need consciousness.

Lex Fridman (2:01:10.120)

What do you think?

Sheldon Solomon (2:01:12.120)

Well, I don't know what I think about that. And then he goes on to say that consciousness

Sheldon Solomon (2:01:18.200)

is the most calamitous stupidity by which we shall someday perish. And wow, I was like, dude.

Lex Fridman (2:01:25.720)

Relax.

Sheldon Solomon (2:01:31.160)

Say you were on an island alone, and you saw a reflection of yourself in the water.

Lex Fridman (2:01:39.560)

If you were alone your whole life.

Sheldon Solomon (2:01:40.840)

Yeah, great question. Nietzsche's view would be that your thoughts of yourself would never

Lex Fridman (2:01:48.200)

come to mind. I don't know how I feel about that, though.

Sheldon Solomon (2:01:52.520)

In a sense, this sounds weird, but in a sense, I feel like my mental conversation has always

Sheldon Solomon (2:02:00.680)

been with death. It's almost like another notion, like these visualizations of a death

Sheldon Solomon (2:02:12.040)

in the cloak. I always felt like I am a living thing, and then there's an other thing that

Sheldon Solomon (2:02:19.560)

is the end of me. And I'm having a conversation with that. So in a sense, that's the way I

Sheldon Solomon (2:02:27.720)

construct the fact that I am a thing is because there's somebody else that tells me, well,

Sheldon Solomon (2:02:36.280)

you won't be a thing eventually. So this feels like a conversation, perhaps, but that might

Sheldon Solomon (2:02:44.360)

be kind of this mental stimulation kind of idea. It's a conversation with yourself, essentially.

Lex Fridman (2:02:51.640)

Sure.

Sheldon Solomon (2:02:52.140)

Yeah, I don't know how I feel about that, but I tend to be in agreement with you when

Sheldon Solomon (2:03:00.620)

we're talking about economics more so that we're deeply social beings. It just feels

Sheldon Solomon (2:03:11.820)

like we're humans. I'm with Harari with the sapiens. We seem to construct ideas on top

Lex Fridman (2:03:20.220)

of each other, and that's fundamentally a social process.

Sheldon Solomon (2:03:23.420)

Absolutely. I think that's a fine book. It overlaps considerably with our take on these

Sheldon Solomon (2:03:30.860)

matters, and the fact that we get to these points, drawing on different sources, I think

Sheldon Solomon (2:03:37.260)

makes me more confident.

Sheldon Solomon (2:03:39.020)

It's so fascinating, just like reading your book, sorry, on a small tangent, that Sapiens

Sheldon Solomon (2:03:46.220)

is one of the most popular books in the world. And just reading your book is like, well,

Lex Fridman (2:03:54.940)

this sounds... I don't know what makes a popular book.

Sheldon Solomon (2:04:01.580)

Well, if you want me to be petty and stupid, I will tell you that from time to time, we

Sheldon Solomon (2:04:07.740)

also wonder why our book... Like all books, people can take issue with it, but we thought

Sheldon Solomon (2:04:20.060)

it would be a bigger hit, that it would be more widely read.

Sheldon Solomon (2:04:24.220)

It's funny because I've... I don't know if I have good examples because I forgot already,

Lex Fridman (2:04:31.020)

but I'm often saddened by Franz Kafka. I think he wasn't known in his life, but I

Sheldon Solomon (2:04:37.660)

always wonder these great... Some of the greatest books ever written are completely unknown

Sheldon Solomon (2:04:46.220)

during the author's lifetime. And it's like, man, for some reason, it's again, it's that

Lex Fridman (2:04:53.100)

identity thing. I think, man, that sucks.

Sheldon Solomon (2:04:56.220)

Well, I'm comforted by that. So Van Gogh sold one painting in his life, and evidently Thoreau

Lex Fridman (2:05:04.060)

sold like 75 copies of Walden. Nietzsche's books did not sell well.

Lex Fridman (2:05:12.700)

And how did Ernest Becker sell? His books are published by the free press

Lex Fridman (2:05:19.340)

and have sold more than any other books that they have published.

Lex Fridman (2:05:26.060)

So what does that mean? It's a lot? I don't know if it's like Jordan Peterson

Sheldon Solomon (2:05:30.300)

Millions, but it's hundreds of thousands. Was he respected? I just don't see him...

Sheldon Solomon (2:05:37.180)

Okay. I don't see him brought up as like in the top 10 philosophers of...

Lex Fridman (2:05:43.740)

No, not at all. So how far away is he? Is he in the top 100

Sheldon Solomon (2:05:49.660)

for people? I don't think so.

Lex Fridman (2:05:51.180)

He's not brought up that often. Because again...

Sheldon Solomon (2:05:53.740)

Like your work is brought up more often. Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:05:55.980)

I think he's one of the great philosophers of the 20th century.

Lex Fridman (2:06:03.420)

So what we say, Lex, is that our goal, certainly when we first started and now

Sheldon Solomon (2:06:10.540)

just as much actually, but what I say at all my talks is, look, if these ideas have

Sheldon Solomon (2:06:16.140)

interest you enough to go read Ernest Becker, then this has been good. I consider him to be

Sheldon Solomon (2:06:22.460)

one of the most important voices of the 20th century who does not get the attention that

Sheldon Solomon (2:06:30.940)

he deserves. Similarly, our work I believe to be important because point by point we provide

Sheldon Solomon (2:06:40.380)

empirical corroboration for all of the claims. So that's literally the students that read

Sheldon Solomon (2:06:51.900)

The Denial of Death and then Escape from Evil. They're like, yeah, wow, every chapter of the

Sheldon Solomon (2:06:57.660)

book, you have studies. And I'm like, yeah, because for 40 years, if a Skidmore student said,

Sheldon Solomon (2:07:04.220)

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

Lex Fridman (2:07:08.700)

Let's do a study. And my own dreams are in creating

Sheldon Solomon (2:07:14.140)

robots and artificial intelligence systems that a human can love. And I think there's something

Sheldon Solomon (2:07:20.700)

about mortality and fear mortality that is essential for implementing in our AI systems.

Lex Fridman (2:07:26.620)

And so maybe can you comment on that? So this is a different perspective on your work,

Lex Fridman (2:07:38.780)

which is like, how do we engineer a human?

Sheldon Solomon (2:07:41.340)

Yeah, so, no, this is awesome, Lex. I'm delighted that you said that. First of all,

Lex Fridman (2:07:45.580)

and I may have mentioned this to you, and I can't remember because I am seeing now, when you first

Sheldon Solomon (2:07:50.700)

contacted me, I had just been told I have to learn more about your work because I'm working with some

Sheldon Solomon (2:07:59.900)

very talented people in New York and they're writing a screenplay for a movie about an artificial

Sheldon Solomon (2:08:12.860)

intelligence. It's a female AI set in like 30 years in the future. And basically the little

Sheldon Solomon (2:08:24.220)

twist, this is how I had to read Heidegger. So these people call me and they're like,

Sheldon Solomon (2:08:29.980)

we're making a movie. It's based on Becker and your work and Heidegger and this other

Sheldon Solomon (2:08:38.380)

philosopher, Levinas, and then another philosopher, Silvia Benzo, who's an Italian philosopher.

Lex Fridman (2:08:45.420)

And the long short story is the movie is about supposedly the most advanced artificial

Lex Fridman (2:08:53.260)

intelligence entity, an embodied one, and who…

Lex Fridman (2:09:02.060)

Human form?

Sheldon Solomon (2:09:03.020)

Human form, who finds out, who is having essentially existential anxieties. And I think

Sheldon Solomon (2:09:15.100)

the project is called A Dinner with Her or something, and it doesn't really matter, but the

Sheldon Solomon (2:09:19.740)

punchline is that she finds out that her creator has made her mortal. And so the question is what

Sheldon Solomon (2:09:34.460)

happens phenomenologically and behaviorally to an artificial intelligence who now knows that it's

Sheldon Solomon (2:09:47.580)

mortal? And it's actually the same question that you're posing. And that is, is that necessary

Lex Fridman (2:09:57.420)

in order for an AI to approximate humanity?

Sheldon Solomon (2:10:03.340)

Yeah, I think, yeah. So the intuition, again, it's unknown, but I think it's absolutely,

Sheldon Solomon (2:10:08.780)

I think it's absolutely necessary. A lot of people, the same kind of shallow thinking that people

Sheldon Solomon (2:10:17.580)

have about our own end of life, our own death, is the same way people think of, I think, about

Sheldon Solomon (2:10:23.420)

artificial intelligence. It's like, well, okay, so yeah, so within the system, there's a terminal

Sheldon Solomon (2:10:30.380)

position where there's a point at which it ends, the program ends, there's a goal state, there's a,

Sheldon Solomon (2:10:38.700)

you reached an end point. But the thing is, making that end a thing that's also within the program,

Sheldon Solomon (2:10:49.900)

like making the thing, and then it's also the mystery of it. So the thing is, we don't know

Lex Fridman (2:10:57.500)

what the hell this death thing is. I mean, it's not like we, I mean, the program doesn't give

Sheldon Solomon (2:11:06.140)

us information about the meaning of it all. And that's where the terror is. And it feels like,

Sheldon Solomon (2:11:13.740)

I mean, in the language that you would think about is the terror of this death, or like

Sheldon Solomon (2:11:21.020)

anticipation of it, or thinking about it, is the creative force that builds everything.

Sheldon Solomon (2:11:24.860)

Right. And that feels like, you know, that feels really important to implement. Again,

Sheldon Solomon (2:11:32.380)

it's very difficult to know how to do technically, currently, but it's important to think about.

Lex Fridman (2:11:37.820)

What I find is, you mentioned like screenplays and so on, is sci fi folks and philosophers are the

Sheldon Solomon (2:11:45.980)

the only ones thinking about it currently. And that's what these folks have convinced me.

Sheldon Solomon (2:11:50.700)

Yeah. And engineers aren't, which is, I get, yeah, most of the things I talk about, I get kind of

Lex Fridman (2:12:01.740)

people roll their eyes from the engineer perspective.

Sheldon Solomon (2:12:03.980)

Not these folks. They're like, because again, I saw your name and they're like,

Lex Fridman (2:12:08.620)

wait a minute, I've just seen that. They're like, here's someone.

Sheldon Solomon (2:12:13.020)

You should check out.

Lex Fridman (2:12:14.220)

Yeah. So this was a delightful conference.

Sheldon Solomon (2:12:17.420)

Yeah.

Sheldon Solomon (2:12:17.980)

I was a huge fan of your work and Ernest Becker. And it's funny that not enough people are

Sheldon Solomon (2:12:27.900)

talking about it. I don't know what to do with that. I think that there's a possibility to create

Lex Fridman (2:12:33.340)

real deep, meaningful connections between AI systems and humans.

Sheldon Solomon (2:12:37.500)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (2:12:38.060)

And I think some of these things of fear mortality are essential, are essential for

Sheldon Solomon (2:12:44.300)

the element of human experience. I don't, I don't think it might be essential to create

Sheldon Solomon (2:12:49.820)

general intelligence, like very intelligent machines, but to create a machine that connects

Sheldon Solomon (2:12:55.500)

to human in some deep way.

Sheldon Solomon (2:12:57.580)

What's your view, not to make me the interviewer, but what's your view about machine ethics? Can

Lex Fridman (2:13:07.340)

you imagine an ethical AI without some semblance of finitude, let's say?

Sheldon Solomon (2:13:16.940)

Well, I think ethics is a, there's a trolley problem that's often used in the work that

Sheldon Solomon (2:13:26.220)

I've done at MIT with autonomous vehicles in particular.

Lex Fridman (2:13:30.540)

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Sheldon Solomon (2:13:31.740)

That people, I think they offload, they ask, like, how would a machine deal with an ethical

Lex Fridman (2:13:38.860)

situation that they themselves, the humans don't know how to deal with?

Sheldon Solomon (2:13:43.740)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (2:13:44.380)

And so I don't know if a machine is able to do a better job on difficult ethical questions,

Lex Fridman (2:13:53.820)

but I certainly think to behave properly and effectively in this world is a very important

Sheldon Solomon (2:14:00.300)

thing. Effectively in this world, it needs to be, have a fear of mortality and like be

Sheldon Solomon (2:14:06.140)

able to even dance. Because I don't think you can solve ethical problems, but you have

Sheldon Solomon (2:14:10.940)

to, I think like ethics is like a dance floor. You have to just, you have to dance properly

Sheldon Solomon (2:14:17.740)

with the rest of the humans. Like if people are dancing tango, you have to dance in the

Sheldon Solomon (2:14:21.180)

same kind of way. And for that, you have to have a fear of mortality. Like I think of,

Sheldon Solomon (2:14:27.180)

more practically speaking, as I said, autonomous vehicles, like the way you interact with pedestrians

Sheldon Solomon (2:14:33.820)

fundamentally has to have a sense of mortality. So when pedestrians cross the road,

Sheldon Solomon (2:14:42.940)

now I've watched, well, certainly 100 plus hours of pedestrian videos.

Sheldon Solomon (2:14:48.780)

There's a kind of social contract where you walk in front of a car and you're putting

Sheldon Solomon (2:14:56.780)

your life in the hands of another human being.

Lex Fridman (2:14:58.860)

Yes, that's right.

Lex Fridman (2:14:59.820)

And like death is in the car, in the game that's being played, death is right there.

Sheldon Solomon (2:15:07.180)

It's part of the calculus. It's not, but it's not like a simple calculus. It's not a simple

Sheldon Solomon (2:15:11.820)

equation. I mean, I don't know what it is, but it's in there and it has to be part of

Sheldon Solomon (2:15:20.780)

the optimization problem. Like it's not as simple as, so from the computer vision, from

Sheldon Solomon (2:15:25.900)

the artificial intelligence perspective, it's detecting there's a human estimating the trajectory,

Sheldon Solomon (2:15:34.060)

like treating everything like it's a billiard balls, as opposed to like being able to calculate

Sheldon Solomon (2:15:40.780)

it, being able to construct an effective model, the world model of what the person's thinking,

Lex Fridman (2:15:47.580)

what they're going to do, what are the different possibilities of how the scene might evolve,

Sheldon Solomon (2:15:52.300)

I think requires having some sense of, yeah, fear of fear of mortality, of mortality.

Sheldon Solomon (2:16:00.060)

I don't see the, the thing is, I think it's really important to think about, I can be

Sheldon Solomon (2:16:05.820)

honest enough to say that it's, I haven't been able to figure out how to engineer any

Sheldon Solomon (2:16:12.620)

of these things. But I do think it's really, really important. Like I have, so I have a

Sheldon Solomon (2:16:17.660)

bunch of Roombas here. I can show it to you after that. Roombas is a robot that does

Sheldon Solomon (2:16:25.740)

vacuums the floor and I've had them make different sounds. Like I had them scream in pain

Lex Fridman (2:16:32.540)

and it, you immediately anthropomorphize and it creates, I don't know, knowing that they

Sheldon Solomon (2:16:45.980)

can feel pain. See, I'm speaking, like knowing that I immediately imagine that they can feel

Sheldon Solomon (2:16:52.860)

pain and it immediately draws me closer to them, the human experience. And that there's

Sheldon Solomon (2:16:59.660)

something in that that should be engineered in our systems, it feels like. I believe,

Sheldon Solomon (2:17:06.380)

personally, I don't know what you think, but I believe it's possible for a robot and a

Lex Fridman (2:17:11.500)

human to fall in love, for example, in the future.

Sheldon Solomon (2:17:14.380)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:17:18.780)

No, there's a certain kind of deep connection with technology. I mean, a real, like you

Sheldon Solomon (2:17:23.740)

would choose to marry.

Sheldon Solomon (2:17:24.700)

I mean, again, it sounds, I'll find a book title and I'll send it to you. And it's a

Sheldon Solomon (2:17:30.140)

serious consideration of people who started out with these sex dolls, but it turned into

Sheldon Solomon (2:17:41.820)

a relationship of enduring significance that the woman who wrote the book is not willing

Sheldon Solomon (2:17:48.220)

to dismiss as a perversion.

Sheldon Solomon (2:17:50.220)

Yeah, that's what, you know, people kind of joke about sex robots, which is funny. Like,

Sheldon Solomon (2:17:56.860)

it's a funny, I mean, there's a lot of stuff about robots. It's just kind of fun to talk

Sheldon Solomon (2:18:00.460)

about that is not necessarily connected to reality. People joke about sex robots, but

Sheldon Solomon (2:18:06.700)

if you actually look how sex robots, which are pretty rare these days, are used, they're

Lex Fridman (2:18:12.220)

not used by people who want sex.

Sheldon Solomon (2:18:16.060)

Precisely.

Lex Fridman (2:18:16.860)

They're actually,

Sheldon Solomon (2:18:17.820)

They're kind of,

Lex Fridman (2:18:18.780)

They're actually,

Sheldon Solomon (2:18:20.460)

They're companions.

Lex Fridman (2:18:21.420)

They become companions.

Sheldon Solomon (2:18:22.620)

Yeah.

Sheldon Solomon (2:18:24.380)

It's, yeah, it's fascinating. And they're just, we're not even talking about any kind

Sheldon Solomon (2:18:29.340)

of intelligence. We're talking about just, I mean, human beings seek companionships.

Sheldon Solomon (2:18:33.500)

We're deeply lonely. I mean, that was the other sense I have that I don't know if I

Sheldon Solomon (2:18:37.740)

can articulate clearly. You can probably do a better job, but I have a sense that there's

Lex Fridman (2:18:42.380)

a deep loneliness within all of us.

Sheldon Solomon (2:18:44.620)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (2:18:45.740)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:18:48.540)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:19:00.460)

who is it, Rollo May and Erwin Yallem write about existentialism and they're like, look,

Sheldon Solomon (2:19:09.820)

what, there's different flavors of existentialism, but they all have in common, what is it,

Sheldon Solomon (2:19:16.380)

four universal concerns. The overriding one is about death. And that next is choice and

Sheldon Solomon (2:19:26.620)

responsibility. The next one is existential isolation. And they're like, that's one of the

Sheldon Solomon (2:19:35.420)

things about consciousness that, and the last one is meaninglessness, but the existential

Sheldon Solomon (2:19:41.020)

isolation point is, you know, we are by virtue of consciousness able to apprehend that unless

Sheldon Solomon (2:19:55.100)

you're a Siamese twin, you are fundamentally alone. And because it is claimed, it's Eric

Sheldon Solomon (2:20:03.660)

Fromm in a book called Escape from Freedom. He's like, look, you're smart enough to know that the

Sheldon Solomon (2:20:11.900)

most direct way that we typically communicate with our fellow human beings is through language.

Lex Fridman (2:20:18.140)

But you also know that language is a pale shadow of the totality of our interior

Sheldon Solomon (2:20:25.900)

phenomenological existence. Therefore, there's always going to be times in our lives where even

Sheldon Solomon (2:20:33.980)

under the best of circumstances, you could be trying desperately to convey your thoughts and

Sheldon Solomon (2:20:40.620)

feelings and somebody listening could be like, yeah, I get it, I get it, I get it. And you're

Sheldon Solomon (2:20:47.100)

like, you have no fucking idea what I'm talking about. So you can be desperately lonely in a house

Lex Fridman (2:20:55.420)

where you live with 10 people in the middle of Tokyo where there's millions.

Sheldon Solomon (2:21:02.940)

Yeah, it's the Great Gatsby. You could be alone in a big party.

Lex Fridman (2:21:06.540)

Exactly.

Sheldon Solomon (2:21:07.820)

Maybe this is a small tangent, but let me ask you on the topic of academia,

Sheldon Solomon (2:21:13.900)

you're kind of, we talked about Jordan Peterson, there's a lot of sort of renegade type of thinkers,

Sheldon Solomon (2:21:20.860)

certainly in psychology, but it applies in all disciplines. What are your thoughts about academia

Sheldon Solomon (2:21:29.580)

being a place to harbor people like yourself? People who think deeply about things, who are

Sheldon Solomon (2:21:40.940)

not constrained by sort of the, I don't think you're quite controversial.

Lex Fridman (2:21:46.780)

No, not really.

Lex Fridman (2:21:47.580)

But you are a person who thinks deeply about things and it feels like academia can sometimes

Lex Fridman (2:21:55.660)

stifle that.

Sheldon Solomon (2:21:56.700)

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

Lex Fridman (2:22:09.420)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:22:18.860)

of great value or innovation except for, and this is not a bad thing, but stepwise improvement

Sheldon Solomon (2:22:29.740)

of existing paradigms. So in simple English, I went to Princeton for a job interview 40 years

Sheldon Solomon (2:22:38.300)

ago and they're like, what are you going to do if we give you a job? And I'm like, I don't know,

Sheldon Solomon (2:22:42.940)

I want to think about it and read. And I saw that that interview was over, the window of

Sheldon Solomon (2:22:52.380)

opportunity shut in my face and they actually called my mentors and they're like, what are

Sheldon Solomon (2:22:59.660)

you doing? Tell this guy to buy some pants. I had hair down to my waist also. He's like,

Sheldon Solomon (2:23:03.740)

this guy looks like Charles Manson in Jesus. But the expectation is that you come to a

Lex Fridman (2:23:12.620)

post, you start publishing so that you can get grants.

Sheldon Solomon (2:23:20.060)

That's certainly true. But there's also kind of a behavioral thing. You said like long hair.

Sheldon Solomon (2:23:24.060)

There's a certain style of the way you're supposed to behave. For example, I'm wearing

Sheldon Solomon (2:23:30.220)

a suit. It sounds weird, but I feel comfortable in this. I wore it when I was teaching at MIT,

Sheldon Solomon (2:23:38.300)

I wore it to meetings and so on, the different, sometimes a blue and red tie, but that was an

Sheldon Solomon (2:23:47.500)

outsider thing to do at MIT. So there was a strong pressure to not wear a suit.

Lex Fridman (2:23:52.220)

No, that's right.

Lex Fridman (2:23:53.020)

And there's a pressure to behave, to have a hair thing, the way you wear your hair,

Sheldon Solomon (2:23:57.900)

the way you, this isn't like a liberal or a left or anything. It's just in tribes.

Sheldon Solomon (2:24:04.140)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (2:24:04.780)

And academia to me or a place, any place that dreams of having like renegade free thinkers,

Sheldon Solomon (2:24:12.780)

like really deep thinkers should in fact, like glorify the outsider. Should welcome

Lex Fridman (2:24:20.620)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:24:25.500)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:24:26.060)

No, that sounds weird, but I can just imagine an interview with at Princeton,

Lex Fridman (2:24:32.540)

I can imagine why aren't people, why aren't you at Harvard, for example, or MIT?

Sheldon Solomon (2:24:40.300)

Yeah. Well, so that, look, I would love to, I haven't lectured at MIT, but I've lectured at

Sheldon Solomon (2:24:48.300)

Harvard. I've gotten to lecture at almost every place that wouldn't consider me for a job.

Lex Fridman (2:24:55.500)

And I, well, a few things. I'm lucky because I go to Princeton, I'm like, I don't know what I

Sheldon Solomon (2:25:04.780)

want to do. And then two days later I go to Skidmore and I'm like, I don't know what I want

Sheldon Solomon (2:25:08.780)

to do. And they offer me a job later that day, which I declined for months because of the

Sheldon Solomon (2:25:15.340)

extraordinary pressure of my mentors who right mindedly felt that I wouldn't get much done there.

Lex Fridman (2:25:24.140)

But what they told me at Skidmore was take your time, show up for your classes and don't molest

Sheldon Solomon (2:25:31.020)

barnyard animals and you'll probably get tenure. And I'm like, I'll show up for my classes.

Lex Fridman (2:25:35.580)

We'll talk about it.

Sheldon Solomon (2:25:37.580)

That was the negotiation.

Sheldon Solomon (2:25:39.180)

Yeah, I negotiated, I drove a hard bargain. But honestly, Lex, that's, I feel I'm very committed

Sheldon Solomon (2:25:47.820)

to Skidmore because I was given tenure when our first terror management paper wasn't published.

Sheldon Solomon (2:25:57.100)

It took eight years to publish. It was rejected at every journal. And I submitted it as like a

Sheldon Solomon (2:26:03.420)

purple ditto sheet thing. I'm like, here's what I've been doing. Here's the reviews. Here's why

Sheldon Solomon (2:26:09.900)

I think this is still a pretty good idea. And I don't know that this would happen even at Skidmore

Sheldon Solomon (2:26:15.100)

anymore. But I was very lucky to be given the latitude and to be encouraged. I took classes

Sheldon Solomon (2:26:23.020)

at Skidmore. That's how I learned all this stuff. I graduated, I got a PhD unscathed by knowledge.

Sheldon Solomon (2:26:29.180)

We were great statisticians and methodologists, but we didn't have any substance. And I don't

Sheldon Solomon (2:26:39.420)

mean this cynically, but we were trained in a method in search of a question. So I appreciate

Sheldon Solomon (2:26:46.940)

having five years at Skidmore basically to read books. And I also appreciate that I look like

Sheldon Solomon (2:26:54.700)

this 40 years ago. And my view is that this is how I comported myself. Other people, the guy I learned

Sheldon Solomon (2:27:10.300)

the most from at Skidmore is now dead, a history professor, Ted Kuroda. He wore a bow tie. And

Sheldon Solomon (2:27:18.060)

there's another guy, Darnell Rucker, who taught me about philosophy. And he was very proper. And

Sheldon Solomon (2:27:25.660)

he had his jacket with the leather patches. But these guys weren't pompous at all. They were,

Sheldon Solomon (2:27:34.620)

this is the way I am. And I always felt that that's important that somebody who looks at you

Lex Fridman (2:27:44.860)

and says, oh, what a stiff, he's probably an MBA. Well, they're wrong. And someone who looks at me,

Sheldon Solomon (2:27:52.860)

when I first got to Skidmore, other professors would ask when I'd be coming to their office to

Sheldon Solomon (2:27:58.620)

empty the garbage. They just assumed, as in my twenties, they assumed I was housekeeping.

Sheldon Solomon (2:28:04.540)

I always felt that was important that the students learn not to judge an idea by the appearance of

Sheldon Solomon (2:28:10.940)

the person who pervades it. I guess this is such a high concern now because I personally still

Sheldon Solomon (2:28:22.220)

have faith that academia is where the great geniuses will come from and great ideas.

Sheldon Solomon (2:28:27.580)

I love hearing you say that. I still, and it's one of the reasons why I'm really

Sheldon Solomon (2:28:35.340)

apprehensive about the future of education right now in the context of the pandemic is that a lot

Sheldon Solomon (2:28:44.540)

of folks, a lot of these are Google type people who I don't, they're geniuses also, but I don't

Sheldon Solomon (2:28:53.100)

like this idea that all learning can be virtual and that much could happen. I'm big on embodied

Sheldon Solomon (2:29:00.220)

environments with actual humans interacting. I mean, there's so much to the university education,

Lex Fridman (2:29:08.060)

but I think the key part is the mentorship that occurs somehow at the human level. Like I've

Sheldon Solomon (2:29:16.540)

gotten a lot of flack, like this conversation where in person now, and I've even with Edward

Sheldon Solomon (2:29:25.740)

Snowden who done all interviews remote, I'm a stickler to in person. It has to be in person

Sheldon Solomon (2:29:33.660)

like, and a lot of people just don't get it. They're like, well, why can't, this is so much

Sheldon Solomon (2:29:38.300)

easier. Like why go through the pain? Like I've traveled, I'm traveling in the next month to Paris

Sheldon Solomon (2:29:46.300)

for a single stupid conversation. Nobody cares about just to be in person. Well, it's important

Sheldon Solomon (2:29:52.220)

to me. I honestly, I was like this, and thank you for coming down to it. It's my pleasure,

Lex Fridman (2:30:01.100)

but again, it's very self serving. I've enjoyed this. I knew I was going to, but

Lex Fridman (2:30:06.620)

it's not about our enjoyment per se. Again, at the risk of sounding cavalier,

Sheldon Solomon (2:30:13.020)

there are a host of factors beyond verbal that I don't believe can be adequately captured. I don't

Sheldon Solomon (2:30:24.140)

care how much the acuity is decent on a zoom conversation. I feel again, I felt within five

Sheldon Solomon (2:30:35.260)

minutes that this was going to be for me easy in the sense that I could speak freely. I just don't

Sheldon Solomon (2:30:45.340)

see that happening so easily from a distance. Yeah, I tend to, well, I'm hopeful. I agree with

Sheldon Solomon (2:30:52.540)

you on the current technology, but I am hopeful on like some others on the technology eventually

Sheldon Solomon (2:30:58.140)

being able to create that kind of experience or quite far away from that, but it might be

Sheldon Solomon (2:31:03.740)

able to, my hope is, you know, I'm hopeful. I was at Microsoft in Seattle and I can't remember why.

Lex Fridman (2:31:13.260)

And no, I can't. I, that's how I'm in my early Mr. Magoo phase. And somebody there was showing us

Sheldon Solomon (2:31:24.220)

like a virtual wall where the entire wall, you know, when you're talking to somebody, so it's

Sheldon Solomon (2:31:35.260)

life size and they were beginning the, get the appearance of motion and stuff. It looked pretty.

Sheldon Solomon (2:31:44.300)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:31:47.820)

It's to me, it's I can just see the future. It's quite real in terms of like a terror of death.

Sheldon Solomon (2:31:57.500)

I'm afraid of heights. Me too. And there's, I don't know if you've ever tried, you should,

Sheldon Solomon (2:32:03.580)

if you haven't, there's a virtual reality experience where you can walk a plank. Yeah.

Sheldon Solomon (2:32:07.500)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:32:15.340)

I was, it was, it was as real as, as anything else could be. And I mean, these are very early days

Sheldon Solomon (2:32:23.100)

of that technology, relatively speaking. So yeah. I mean, I don't know what to do with that. Same

Sheldon Solomon (2:32:30.460)

with like crossing the street, we did these experiments across the street in front of a car

Sheldon Solomon (2:32:35.820)

and, you know, it's being run over by a car. It's terrifying. Yeah. It's just that, yeah. So there's

Sheldon Solomon (2:32:45.900)

a rich experience to be created there. We're not there yet, but, yeah. And I've seen a lot of people

Sheldon Solomon (2:32:53.340)

try, like you said, the Google folks, Silicon Valley folks try to create a virtual online

Sheldon Solomon (2:32:59.020)

education. I don't know. I think they've raised really important questions. Absolutely. Like what

Sheldon Solomon (2:33:04.380)

makes the education experience fulfilling? What makes it effective? Yeah. These are important

Sheldon Solomon (2:33:12.940)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:33:24.460)

wrote a book about, a recent book on charter schools. Yeah. I would like to talk to him. Yeah,

Sheldon Solomon (2:33:31.900)

he's an interesting guy. We will disagree about a lot, but respectfully. Yeah. Such a powerful mind.

Sheldon Solomon (2:33:37.900)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:33:46.780)

seemingly effectively that the public education system is broken. That we blame, he basically says

Sheldon Solomon (2:33:57.020)

that we kind of blame, like the conditions or the environment, but the upbringing of people,

Sheldon Solomon (2:34:05.820)

like parenting, blah, blah, blah, like the set of opportunities. But okay, putting that aside,

Sheldon Solomon (2:34:13.100)

it seems like charter schools, no matter who it is that attends them, does much better than in

Sheldon Solomon (2:34:20.620)

public schools. And he puts a bunch of data behind it. And in his usual way, as you know, just is

Sheldon Solomon (2:34:27.900)

very eloquent in arguing his points. Yeah. So that to me just highlights, man, we don't, education

Sheldon Solomon (2:34:34.300)

is like one of the most important, it's probably the most important thing in our civilization,

Lex Fridman (2:34:39.660)

and we're doing a shitty job of it. Yeah. In academia, in university education and, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:34:49.260)

younger education, the whole thing. The whole thing. And yet, we value

Sheldon Solomon (2:34:59.580)

just about anyone or anything more than educators. You know, part of it is just the

Sheldon Solomon (2:35:07.420)

relatively low regard that Americans have for teachers. Also similarly, like just people

Sheldon Solomon (2:35:18.380)

of service. I think great teachers are the greatest thing in our society. And I would say,

Sheldon Solomon (2:35:26.620)

now on a controversial note, like Black Lives Matter, you know, great police officers is the

Sheldon Solomon (2:35:33.100)

greatest thing in our society. Also, like all people that do service, we undervalue cops severe,

Sheldon Solomon (2:35:40.620)

like this whole defund the police is missing the point. And it's a stupid word. I'm with you on

Sheldon Solomon (2:35:47.260)

that, Lex. Our neighbors to one side of our house are three generations of police, our neighbors

Sheldon Solomon (2:35:54.940)

across the street are police. They know my, you know, political predilections. And we've gotten

Sheldon Solomon (2:36:08.940)

along fine for 30 years. And I go out and tell them every day, you know, when you go in today,

Sheldon Solomon (2:36:14.940)

you tell the people on the force that I appreciate what they're doing. I think it's

Sheldon Solomon (2:36:25.500)

really important to not tribalize those concerns. I mean, we mentioned so many brilliant books and

Sheldon Solomon (2:36:36.620)

philosophers, but it'd be nice to sort of in a focused way, try to see if we can get some

Sheldon Solomon (2:36:45.900)

recommendations from you. So what three books, technical or fiction or philosophical had a big

Sheldon Solomon (2:36:54.140)

impact in your life and you would recommend. Spent four hours driving here, perseverating about

Sheldon Solomon (2:37:02.300)

that. I didn't, I, everything else you sent me as fine. And I actually, I skimmed it and I'm like,

Sheldon Solomon (2:37:08.540)

I don't want to look at it because I want, I want us to talk. The ones in blue. I'm like, all right.

Lex Fridman (2:37:15.340)

And you know, I've already said that I've found backers work and I put the denial of death out

Lex Fridman (2:37:24.060)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:37:31.260)

Yes. If I could have this count as one that the, the birth and death of meaning,

Sheldon Solomon (2:37:36.380)

the denial of death and escape from evil are three books of Ernest Becker's that I believe to

Sheldon Solomon (2:37:44.220)

all be profound in a, in a little sort of brief dance around topics. Um, I've only read denial

Sheldon Solomon (2:37:53.340)

of death. Like, well, how do those books connect in here? Yeah. Nice. So the, the birth and death

Sheldon Solomon (2:37:57.980)

of meaning is where Becker situates his thinking in more of an evolutionary foundation. So I like

Sheldon Solomon (2:38:07.180)

that for that reason. Escape from evil is where he applies the ideas in the denial of death

Sheldon Solomon (2:38:17.100)

more directly, um, to economic matters and to inequality and also to our inability to

Sheldon Solomon (2:38:27.260)

peacefully coexist with other folks who don't share our beliefs. So I would put Ernest Becker

Sheldon Solomon (2:38:32.620)

out there as one. Um, I also like novels a lot. And here I was like, God damn it. No matter what

Lex Fridman (2:38:42.060)

I say, I'm going to be like, yes, but, but the existentialists, do you like all those folks?

Sheldon Solomon (2:38:48.540)

Come on. You like that literary existential? I do. But I mean, you know, I, I've read all those

Sheldon Solomon (2:38:56.540)

books. I will tell you the last line of the plague. We learn in times of pestilence that there's more

Sheldon Solomon (2:39:03.100)

to admire in men than to despise. And I love that. Yeah. Plagues such a, I don't know. I,

Sheldon Solomon (2:39:10.620)

I find the plague is a brilliant before, before, uh, the plague has come to us in 2020.

Sheldon Solomon (2:39:17.260)

I, it was just a book about love about, but I'll toss a one that may be less known to folks. I'm

Sheldon Solomon (2:39:25.420)

enamored with a novel by a woman named Carson McCullers written in 1953 called clock without

Sheldon Solomon (2:39:32.540)

hands. And I find it a brilliant literary depiction of many of the ideas that we have spoken about.

Lex Fridman (2:39:41.420)

Fiction?

Sheldon Solomon (2:39:42.060)

Fiction. Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:39:43.100)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:39:45.100)

Oh, it, it, all of the existential ideas that we have encountered today,

Lex Fridman (2:39:51.100)

but in the context of a story of someone who finds out that he is terminally ill,

Sheldon Solomon (2:39:59.020)

it's set in the South and the, um, heyday of like segregation. So there's a lot of social issues,

Sheldon Solomon (2:40:06.300)

a lot of existential issues, but it's basically a novel, a fictional account of someone who finds

Sheldon Solomon (2:40:14.060)

out that they're terminally ill and who reacts originally as, um, uh, you might expect anyone,

Sheldon Solomon (2:40:23.500)

uh, becomes more, um, hostile to people who are different, like petty and stupid denies that

Sheldon Solomon (2:40:32.220)

anything's happening. But, uh, as the book goes on and he comes more to terms, um, with his own

Sheldon Solomon (2:40:41.020)

mortality, um, it ends lovingly. And then, uh, back to your idea about, you know, love being

Sheldon Solomon (2:40:51.900)

incredibly potent.

Lex Fridman (2:40:53.660)

That's the, the nice thing, as you mentioned, uh, before with, with Heidegger,

Sheldon Solomon (2:40:59.340)

I really liked that idea. And I've seen that in people who are terminally ill is they bring,

Sheldon Solomon (2:41:06.780)

you know, the idea of death becomes, uh, current. It becomes like a thing, you know, I could die.

Sheldon Solomon (2:41:14.380)

I really liked that idea. I, I can die. Not just tomorrow, but like now, now, now.

Lex Fridman (2:41:20.860)

Yeah.

Sheldon Solomon (2:41:21.340)

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

Lex Fridman (2:41:28.140)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:41:34.380)

in five minutes, it's over.

Lex Fridman (2:41:39.660)

This is it. This is five minutes. It's over.

Sheldon Solomon (2:41:41.660)

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

Lex Fridman (2:41:50.300)

Would you recommend that?

Sheldon Solomon (2:41:51.660)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:41:53.420)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:41:57.500)

It took me 40 years to read Ulysses that could not get past the first five pages. And it took

Lex Fridman (2:42:05.740)

me 40 years to read being in time. It's a slog.

Lex Fridman (2:42:10.780)

And I took a James Joyce course in college. So I've, uh, I, I even, uh, I, I guess read parts

Lex Fridman (2:42:18.700)

of Finnegan's Wake.

Sheldon Solomon (2:42:19.580)

No way.

Lex Fridman (2:42:20.620)

But like, there's a difference between reading and like, I don't think I understood anything.

Sheldon Solomon (2:42:27.180)

I like his, uh, short stories on the dead, the dead. Yeah.

Sheldon Solomon (2:42:30.780)

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

Lex Fridman (2:42:37.580)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:42:43.980)

No. So maybe I got to abandon him. I mean, I mean, being in time is, is awesome. Um,

Lex Fridman (2:42:51.260)

but here's an interesting thing and not to get all academic, but, you know, it's,

Sheldon Solomon (2:42:55.420)

there's two parts to it. And most of the, most philosophers are preoccupied with the first part.

Sheldon Solomon (2:43:02.540)

It's in the second part where he gets into all the flight from death stuff and this idea of,

Lex Fridman (2:43:09.820)

you know, a turning and philosophers don't like that.

Lex Fridman (2:43:14.220)

And I'm like, this is where he's starting to really shine, to really shine for me.

Sheldon Solomon (2:43:19.420)

So, yeah. Yeah. All right. That's a beautiful set of books. So what, um, advice would you give to

Sheldon Solomon (2:43:27.820)

a young person today about their career, about life, about, uh, how to survive in this world

Sheldon Solomon (2:43:36.460)

full of suffering? Yeah. Great. Um, my advice is to get competent advice. That's what I tell my

Sheldon Solomon (2:43:45.420)

students that don't listen to me. Don't listen to me. Well, you know, I think, um,

Sheldon Solomon (2:43:53.420)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:44:01.660)

like a simpleton, but it's to emphasize a few things. One is, um, you know,

Sheldon Solomon (2:44:12.860)

so, uh, one of your questions I think was, you know, what's the meaning of life. And of course,

Sheldon Solomon (2:44:17.260)

the existentialists say life has no meaning, but it doesn't follow from that, that it's intrinsic,

Lex Fridman (2:44:24.060)

that it's meaningless. You know what the existential point is not that life is

Sheldon Solomon (2:44:30.620)

meaningless so much as it doesn't have one inevitable and intrinsic meaning, you know,

Sheldon Solomon (2:44:38.460)

which then it opens up, uh, you know, I think it was Kierkegaard who said consciousness gives us

Sheldon Solomon (2:44:44.700)

the possibility of possibilities. And, but there's another lunatic Oswald Spangler who wrote a book

Sheldon Solomon (2:44:52.140)

called, uh, decline of the West. And he says that the philosopher, the German philosopher Gerta,

Sheldon Solomon (2:44:59.820)

he says, the purpose of life is to live. And I let that's, so that's one of my pieces of advice.

Lex Fridman (2:45:07.100)

So the possibility of possibilities, it's interesting. So what do you do with this

Sheldon Solomon (2:45:12.060)

kind of sea of possibilities? Like, well, this is one of the, when, when young folks

Lex Fridman (2:45:18.860)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:45:24.940)

Yeah. Well, so this is great. And so that's another existential point, which is that

Sheldon Solomon (2:45:30.860)

we yearn for freedom. We react vigorously when we perceive that our choices have been curtailed

Lex Fridman (2:45:40.220)

and then we're paralyzed by indecision in the wake of seemingly unlimited possibilities,

Sheldon Solomon (2:45:46.380)

because we're not choking on choice. And, and I'm not sure if this is helpful advice or not,

Lex Fridman (2:45:53.980)

but what I say to folks is that the fact of the matter is, is the, you know, for most people,

Sheldon Solomon (2:46:03.260)

choice is a first world problem. And sometimes the best option is to do something as silly as

Sheldon Solomon (2:46:16.220)

it sounds. And then if that doesn't work, do something else, which just sounds like my mom

Sheldon Solomon (2:46:21.500)

torturing me, uh, when I was young. But you know, part of the thing that I find myself singularly

Sheldon Solomon (2:46:28.620)

ill equipped is that we're at the, I may be at the tail end of the last generation of Americans

Sheldon Solomon (2:46:38.940)

where you like picked something and that's what you did. Like I've been at a job for 40 years

Sheldon Solomon (2:46:45.100)

where you can expect to do better than your parents cause those days are gone.

Lex Fridman (2:46:49.580)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:46:50.780)

And where you can make a comfortable inference that the world in a decade or two will have any

Lex Fridman (2:46:59.500)

remote similarity to the one that we now inhabit. And so.

Lex Fridman (2:47:05.820)

But still you recommend just do.

Sheldon Solomon (2:47:08.620)

Yeah. And to do so I'm again, I'm, this is, I'm so back to the Heidegger guy because,

Sheldon Solomon (2:47:15.580)

all right, I may, you know, I consider myself a professor, but what happens if most of the

Sheldon Solomon (2:47:22.380)

schools go out of business? Somebody else may consider themselves a restaurant tour,

Lex Fridman (2:47:28.860)

but what happens if there's no more restaurants? So what I, this is negative advice, but I tell

Sheldon Solomon (2:47:36.460)

folks, don't define yourself as a social caricature. Don't, don't limit how you feel about yourself by,

Sheldon Solomon (2:47:51.660)

through identification with a host of variables that may be uncertain.

Lex Fridman (2:48:01.180)

Maybe temporary.

Lex Fridman (2:48:02.220)

And temporary.

Lex Fridman (2:48:03.420)

What,

Sheldon Solomon (2:48:04.220)

let's say. No, but of course that gets back to your point earlier, Lex, where you're like, yeah,

Lex Fridman (2:48:08.380)

but when you step out of that, it's extraordinarily discombobulating.

Lex Fridman (2:48:15.420)

So what, I think you talked about an ax of chopping wood and soul from Socrates.

Lex Fridman (2:48:23.740)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:48:24.380)

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

Lex Fridman (2:48:33.260)

Wow. That was like, awesome.

Sheldon Solomon (2:48:36.380)

Like when God, when you, when you show up at the end of this thing, he kind of looks at you,

Lex Fridman (2:48:41.500)

he's like, oh yeah, yeah, I remember you.

Sheldon Solomon (2:48:45.180)

Yeah. Well, you know, I, to be honest, what I muse about,

Sheldon Solomon (2:48:51.500)

is to me, the, when, when people are, I told you, I have to, we have two kids, late 20s, early 30s.

Lex Fridman (2:49:05.580)

And over the years, when people, when we meet people that know our kids and they're like, oh,

Lex Fridman (2:49:13.660)

your kids are kind and decent. And I'd be like, that's what I would like to be.

Sheldon Solomon (2:49:22.620)

Because I think intelligence is vastly overrated. You know, the Unabomber was a smart guy.

Lex Fridman (2:49:27.740)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:49:28.380)

And I do admire intelligence and I do venerate education and I find that to be

Lex Fridman (2:49:35.340)

tremendously important. But if I had to pay the ultimate homage to myself,

Sheldon Solomon (2:49:43.340)

it would be to be known as somebody who takes himself too seriously to take myself too seriously.

Sheldon Solomon (2:49:51.660)

Again, as corny as it sounds, I'd like to leave the world a time when I can be known as somebody

Sheldon Solomon (2:50:01.020)

who takes himself too seriously. Again, as corny as it sounds, I'd like to leave the world

Lex Fridman (2:50:09.020)

a tad better than I found it, or at least do no harm.

Sheldon Solomon (2:50:14.300)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:50:20.860)

I love that question, Alex. That's a good one. I think everyone should be asked that.

Lex Fridman (2:50:25.260)

What is your soul?

Lex Fridman (2:50:26.540)

I think there's a lot of lingering questions around it.

Sheldon Solomon (2:50:33.420)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:50:45.100)

on a personal level, do you have an answer to the meaning of your life, of something that brought you

Lex Fridman (2:50:54.060)

meaning, happiness, some sense of sense?

Lex Fridman (2:51:09.100)

No, I mean, yes and no. I mean, I'm 66, so I'm in the kind of

Lex Fridman (2:51:16.700)

and not ready to wrap it up, literally or metaphorically, but you look, I look back and

Lex Fridman (2:51:27.420)

just really with a sense of awe and wonder, gratitude, and

Sheldon Solomon (2:51:35.100)

Is there memories that stand out to you from childhood, from earlier, that like,

Sheldon Solomon (2:51:39.580)

it's like, you know, stand out as something you're really proud of or just happy to have been on this

Sheldon Solomon (2:51:48.220)

earth, because that stuff happened.

Sheldon Solomon (2:51:50.300)

Yeah, that. I mean, you know, my family, also a chunk, my folks, my grandparents are from Eastern

Sheldon Solomon (2:51:59.420)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:52:08.620)

myself very fortunate to have been a so called product of the American dream. You know, my

Sheldon Solomon (2:52:22.380)

grandparents were basically peasants. My parents, my dad worked two full time jobs when I was growing

Sheldon Solomon (2:52:32.700)

up, and I would see him on the weekends. I'd be like, why are you working all the time? He'd be

Sheldon Solomon (2:52:37.100)

like, so you won't have to. And he said, Look, the world does not owe you a living. And so your first

Sheldon Solomon (2:52:45.900)

responsibility is to take care of yourself. And then your next responsibility is to take care of

Sheldon Solomon (2:52:54.940)

other people. And I think you did a pretty good job with that. I don't know. But I so that those

Lex Fridman (2:53:03.100)

are the things that I'm proud of.

Sheldon Solomon (2:53:07.740)

Well, it's funny. You've been, you've talked about just yourself as a human being. But you've

Sheldon Solomon (2:53:16.540)

also contributed some really important ideas for your ideas and also kind of integrating and maybe

Sheldon Solomon (2:53:27.980)

even popularizing the work of Ernest Becker of connecting it of making it legitimate scientifically.

Sheldon Solomon (2:53:34.380)

I mean, you know, as a human, of course, you want to be you want your ripple to be one that makes the

Sheldon Solomon (2:53:43.020)

world a better place. But also, I think, in the span of time, I think it's of great value. You've

Sheldon Solomon (2:53:51.340)

contributed in terms of how we think about the human condition, how we think about ourselves,

Sheldon Solomon (2:53:57.500)

assuming as finite beings in this world. And I hope also in our technology of engineering

Sheldon Solomon (2:54:04.300)

intelligence, I think, at least, at least for me, and I'm sure there's a lot of other people

Sheldon Solomon (2:54:11.820)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:54:15.580)

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

Sheldon Solomon (2:54:22.380)

we have had no original ideas. And maybe that's the only thing that's original about our work is

Sheldon Solomon (2:54:29.580)

we don't claim to be original. What we claim to have done is to integrate and to connect

Sheldon Solomon (2:54:38.940)

these disparate and superficially unconnected discourses, you know, so existentialists,

Sheldon Solomon (2:54:45.180)

they'd be like, evidence? What's that? And yeah, there's now a branch of psychology, experimental,

Sheldon Solomon (2:54:52.780)

existential psychology that I think we could take credit for having encouraged the formation of.

Lex Fridman (2:55:02.380)

And that, in turn, has gotten these ideas in circulation and academic communities where they

Sheldon Solomon (2:55:10.060)

may not have otherwise gotten. So I think that's good. Well, Sheldon, it's a huge honor. I can't

Sheldon Solomon (2:55:17.500)

believe you came down here. I've been a fan of your work. I hope we get to talk again. Huge honor

Sheldon Solomon (2:55:25.020)

to talk to you. Thank you so much for talking today. Thanks, Lex. We'll do it again soon, I hope.

Sheldon Solomon (2:55:29.340)

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sheldon Solomon. And thank you to our sponsors,

Sheldon Solomon (2:55:34.060)

Blinkist, ExpressVPN, and CashApp. Click the links in the description to get a discount. It's the

Sheldon Solomon (2:55:40.140)

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Sheldon Solomon (2:55:45.420)

Five Star Snapper Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter

Sheldon Solomon (2:55:50.940)

at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Vladimir Nabokov that Sheldon

Sheldon Solomon (2:55:56.780)

uses in his book, Warm at the Core. The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us

Sheldon Solomon (2:56:04.380)

that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Sheldon Solomon (2:56:09.980)

Thanks for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Sheldon Solomon (30:03.280)

neoliberal economics. Can you linger on that a little bit? Can you describe his philosophy

Sheldon Solomon (30:11.680)

again as view of the world and what neoliberal economics is? Yeah, let me translate it in

Sheldon Solomon (30:19.120)

English. So basically on all these days, anybody who says I'm a conservative free market type,

Sheldon Solomon (30:30.400)

you're following John Locke and Adam Smith, whether you're aware of it or not. So here's

Sheldon Solomon (30:35.520)

John Locke, who, by the way, all of these guys are great. So for me to appear to criticize any

Sheldon Solomon (30:42.000)

of these folks, it is with the highest regard. And also, we need to understand in my estimation

Lex Fridman (30:49.280)

how important their ideas are. Locke is working in a time where all rule was top down by divine

Sheldon Solomon (30:57.520)

right. And he's trying desperately to come up with a philosophical justification to shift power

Lex Fridman (31:06.320)

and autonomy to individuals. And he starts in his second treatise on government, 1690 or so,

Sheldon Solomon (31:16.240)

he says, okay, let's start with a state of nature. And he's like, in a state of nature,

Lex Fridman (31:22.320)

there's no societies, there's just individuals. And in a perfect universe,

Sheldon Solomon (31:29.760)

there wouldn't be any societies, there would just be individuals who by the law of nature have a

Sheldon Solomon (31:37.920)

right to survive. And in the service of survival, they have the right to acquire and preserve the

Sheldon Solomon (31:48.800)

fruits of their own labor. But his point is, and it's actually a good one, he's following Hobbes

Sheldon Solomon (31:56.080)

here. He's like, well, the problem with that is that people are assholes. And if they would

Sheldon Solomon (32:02.480)

let each other alone, then we would still be living in a state of nature, everybody just

Sheldon Solomon (32:08.000)

doing what they did to get by each day. But it's a whole lot easier if I see like an apple tree

Sheldon Solomon (32:16.400)

a mile away. Well, I can go over and pick an apple. But if you're 10 meters away with an apple

Sheldon Solomon (32:23.280)

in your hand, it's a lot easier if I pick up a rock and crack your head and take the apple.

Lex Fridman (32:29.360)

And his point was that the problem is that people can't be counted on to behave. They will take each

Sheldon Solomon (32:38.880)

other's property. Moreover, he argued, if someone takes your property, you have the right to retribution

Sheldon Solomon (32:52.000)

in proportion to the degree of the magnitude of the transgression. English translation,

Sheldon Solomon (32:57.920)

if I take your apple, you have the right to take an apple back. You don't have the right to kill

Sheldon Solomon (33:04.480)

my firstborn. But people being people, they're apt to escalate retaliatory behavior, thus creating

Lex Fridman (33:13.440)

what Locke called a state of war. So he said, in order to avoid a state of war, people reluctantly

Sheldon Solomon (33:20.080)

give up their freedom in exchange for security. They agree to obey the law and that the sole

Sheldon Solomon (33:28.480)

function of government is to keep domestic tranquility and to ward off foreign invasion in

Sheldon Solomon (33:34.400)

order to protect our right to property. All right. So now here's the property thing. All right. So

Sheldon Solomon (33:42.960)

Locke says, if you look in the Bible and in nature, there is no private property.

Lex Fridman (33:48.480)

But Locke says, well, surely if there's anything that you own, it's your body. And surely you have

Sheldon Solomon (33:58.480)

a right by nature to stay alive. And then by extension, anything that you do where you exert

Sheldon Solomon (34:07.680)

effort or labor, that becomes your private property. So back to the apple tree. If I walk

Sheldon Solomon (34:14.560)

over to an apple tree, that's everybody's apples until I pick one. And the minute I do,

Sheldon Solomon (34:21.840)

that is my apple. And then he says, you can have as many apples as you want, as long as you don't

Sheldon Solomon (34:30.160)

waste them. And as long as you don't impinge on somebody else's right to get apples. So far,

Lex Fridman (34:39.600)

so good. Yep. And then he says, well, okay. In the early days, you could only eat so many apples

Sheldon Solomon (34:55.520)

or you could only trade so many apples with somebody else. So he was like, well, if you put

Sheldon Solomon (35:01.920)

a fence around a bunch of apple trees, those become your apples. That's your property.

Sheldon Solomon (35:07.600)

Those become your apples. That's your property. If somebody else wants to put a fence around

Sheldon Solomon (35:13.920)

Nebraska, that's their property. And everybody can have as much property as they want because

Sheldon Solomon (35:22.960)

the world is so big that there is no limit to what you can have if you pursue it by virtue of

Sheldon Solomon (35:33.680)

your own effort. But then he says money came into the picture. And this is important because he

Sheldon Solomon (35:41.040)

noticed long before anybody, before the Freud's of the world, that money is funky because it has no

Sheldon Solomon (35:48.240)

intrinsic value. He's like, ooh, look at that shiny piece of metal that actually has, if you're

Sheldon Solomon (35:55.440)

hungry and you have a choice between a carrot and a lump of gold in the desert, most people are

Sheldon Solomon (36:00.960)

going to go for the carrot. But his point is that the allure of money is that it's basically a

Sheldon Solomon (36:10.560)

concentrated symbol of wealth, but because it doesn't spoil, Locke said, you're entitled to

Sheldon Solomon (36:18.000)

have as much money as you're able to garner. Then he says, well, the reality is that some people

Sheldon Solomon (36:29.520)

are more, the word that he used was industrious. He said some people more industrious than others.

Sheldon Solomon (36:36.640)

All right, today we would say smarter, less lazy, more ambitious. He just said that's natural. It's

Sheldon Solomon (36:43.440)

also true. Therefore, he argued, over time, some people are going to have a whole lot of property

Lex Fridman (36:52.640)

and other people not much at all. Inequality for Locke is natural and beneficial for everyone.

Sheldon Solomon (37:04.400)

His argument was that the rising tide lifts all boats and that the truly creative and innovative

Sheldon Solomon (37:13.760)

are entitled to relatively unlimited worth because we're all better off as a result.

Lex Fridman (37:19.920)

So the point very simply is that, and then you have Adam Smith in the next century with the

Sheldon Solomon (37:29.520)

invisible hand where Adam Smith says, everyone pursuing their own selfish, that's not necessarily

Sheldon Solomon (37:36.320)

pejorative, if everyone pursues their own selfish interests, we will all be better off as a result.

Lex Fridman (37:44.720)

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

Sheldon Solomon (37:47.040)

Well, there's two flaws. One flaw is, first of all, that it is based on an erroneous assumption

Sheldon Solomon (37:57.920)

to begin with, which is that there never was a time in human history when we were an asocial

Lex Fridman (38:03.920)

species.

Sheldon Solomon (38:05.040)

In a sense, you don't feel like there's this emphasis of individual autonomy is a flawed

Lex Fridman (38:12.160)

promise. There's something fundamentally deeply interconnected between us.

Sheldon Solomon (38:18.400)

I do. I think that Plato and Socrates in the Crito were closer to the truth when they started

Sheldon Solomon (38:27.440)

with the assumption that we were interdependent, then they derived individual autonomy as a

Sheldon Solomon (38:33.680)

manifestation of a functional social system.

Lex Fridman (38:37.200)

That's fascinating.

Lex Fridman (38:38.000)

So when Margaret Thatcher, you're too young, in the 1980s, she said, societies? There's

Sheldon Solomon (38:44.480)

no such thing as societies. There's just individuals pursuing their self interest.

Lex Fridman (38:53.120)

So that's one point where I would take issue respectfully with John Locke.

Sheldon Solomon (38:57.360)

Point number two is when Locke says in 1690, well, England's filled up, so if you want

Sheldon Solomon (39:06.400)

some land, just go to America, it's empty. Or maybe there's a few savages there, just

Lex Fridman (39:11.840)

kill them.

Lex Fridman (39:13.120)

So Melville does the same thing in Moby Dick where he thinks about, will there ever come

Sheldon Solomon (39:20.400)

a time where we run out of whales? And he says, no, but we have run out of whales.

Lex Fridman (39:26.720)

And so Locke was right maybe in 1690 that the world was large and had infinite resources.

Sheldon Solomon (39:36.640)

He's certainly wrong today, in my opinion. Also wrong is the claim that the unlimited

Sheldon Solomon (39:47.360)

pursuit of personal wealth does not harm those around us. There is no doubt that radical

Sheldon Solomon (39:54.320)

inequality is tragic psychologically and physically. Poverty is not that terrible.

Sheldon Solomon (40:02.480)

It's easy for me to say because I have a place to stay and something to eat. But as

Sheldon Solomon (40:07.360)

long as you're not starving and have a place to be, poverty is not as challenging as having

Sheldon Solomon (40:15.680)

the impoverished in close proximity to those who are obscenely wealthy.

Lex Fridman (40:20.800)

LW So it's not the absolute measure of your

Sheldon Solomon (40:24.800)

well being, it's the inequality of that well being is the penalty painful.

Lex Fridman (40:29.120)

So maybe just to linger on the Jordan Peterson thing, in terms of your disagreement in his

Sheldon Solomon (40:37.040)

world view. So he went through quite a bit, there's been quite a bit of fire in his defense

Sheldon Solomon (40:45.840)

or maybe his opposition of the idea of equality of outcomes. So looking at the inequality

Sheldon Solomon (40:52.240)

that's in our world, looking at, you know, certain groups, measurably having an outcome

Sheldon Solomon (40:59.440)

that's different than other groups, and then drawing conclusions about fundamental

Sheldon Solomon (41:06.080)

unfairness, injustice, inequality in the system. So like systematic racism, systematic sexism,

Sheldon Solomon (41:13.360)

systematic anything else that creates inequality. And he's been kind of saying pretty simple

Sheldon Solomon (41:20.320)

things to say that, you know, the system for the most part is not broken or flawed,

Sheldon Solomon (41:28.880)

that the inequalities part, the inequality of outcomes is part of our world. What we

Sheldon Solomon (41:34.880)

should strive for is the, you know, equality of opportunity.

Sheldon Solomon (41:39.120)

Yeah, and I do not dispute that as an abstraction. But again, to back up for a second, I do take

Sheldon Solomon (41:47.040)

issue with Jordan's fervent devotion to the free market and his cavalier dismissal of

Sheldon Solomon (41:55.920)

Marxist ideas, which he has, in my estimation, mischaracterized in his public depictions.

Sheldon Solomon (42:06.400)

Let's get into it. So he just seems to really not like socialism, Marxism, communism.

Sheldon Solomon (42:13.680)

Historically speaking, sort of, I mean, how would I characterize it? I'm not exactly sure.

Sheldon Solomon (42:19.440)

I don't want to, again, he'll eventually be here to defend himself. John Locke, unfortunately,

Sheldon Solomon (42:24.000)

not here to defend himself. But what's your sense about Marxism and the way Jordan talks

Lex Fridman (42:34.960)

about it, the way you think about it, from the economics, from the philosophical perspective?

Sheldon Solomon (42:39.280)

Yeah, well, if we were all here together, I'd say we need to start with Marx's economic and

Sheldon Solomon (42:45.600)

philosophical manuscripts of 1844, before Marx became more of a polemicist. And I would argue

Sheldon Solomon (42:54.560)

that Marx's political philosophy, he's a crappy economist, I don't dispute that. But his arguments

Sheldon Solomon (43:02.560)

about human nature, his arguments about the inevitably catastrophic psychological

Lex Fridman (43:10.160)

and environmental and economic effects of capitalism, I would argue every one of those

Sheldon Solomon (43:17.120)

has proven quite right. Marx maybe did not have the answer, but he saw in the 18, whenever he

Sheldon Solomon (43:28.400)

was writing, that inevitably, capitalism would lead to massive inequity, that it was ultimately

Sheldon Solomon (43:41.280)

based on the need to denigrate and dehumanize labor, to render them, in his language, a fleshy

Sheldon Solomon (43:49.040)

cog in a giant machine. And it would create a tension and conflict between those who own things

Lex Fridman (43:59.360)

and those who made things, that over time would always, the Thomas Pickardy guy who writes about

Sheldon Solomon (44:07.760)

capital, and just makes the point that return on investment will always be greater than wages. That

Sheldon Solomon (44:17.360)

means the people with money are gonna have a lot more. That means there's gonna come a point where

Sheldon Solomon (44:23.200)

the economic house of cards falls apart. Now, the Joseph Schumpeters of the world, they're like,

Sheldon Solomon (44:29.280)

that's creative destruction, bring it, that's great. So I think it's Niles Ferguson, he's a

Sheldon Solomon (44:35.200)

historian, he may be at Stanford now, he was at Harvard. He writes about the history of money,

Lex Fridman (44:40.400)

and he's like, yeah, there's been 20 or whatever depressions and big recessions in the last several

Sheldon Solomon (44:48.320)

hundred years. And when that happens, half of the population or whatever is catastrophically

Sheldon Solomon (44:56.560)

inconvenienced. But that's the price that we pay for progress. Other people would argue, and I

Sheldon Solomon (45:05.920)

would agree with them that I will happily sacrifice the rate of progress in order to flatten

Sheldon Solomon (45:16.720)

the curve of economic destruction. To put that in plainer English, I would direct our attention

Sheldon Solomon (45:28.560)

to the social democracies that forgetting for the moment of whether it's possible to do this on a

Sheldon Solomon (45:35.760)

scale in a country as big as ours, on all of the things that really matter, gross, domestic GDP

Sheldon Solomon (45:44.800)

or whatever, that's just an abstraction. But when you look at whatever the United Nations says,

Lex Fridman (45:50.960)

how we measure quality of life, life expectancy, education, rates of alcoholism, suicide, and so on,

Lex Fridman (46:00.720)

the countries that do better are the mixed economies. They're market economies

Sheldon Solomon (46:07.520)

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

Sheldon Solomon (46:16.560)

for citizens. Yeah, so I mean, I guess the question is, you've kind of mentioned that, you know,

Sheldon Solomon (46:24.000)

as Marx described, capitalism with a slippery slope, eventually things go awry in some kind

Sheldon Solomon (46:30.400)

of way. So that's the question is, when you have, when you implement a system, how does it go wrong

Sheldon Solomon (46:35.760)

eventually? You know, eventually we'll all be dead. That's exactly right. No, that's right.

Sheldon Solomon (46:43.360)

So, and then the criticism, I mean, I think these days, unfortunately, Marxism is a dirty word.

Sheldon Solomon (46:50.320)

I say unfortunately, because even if you disagree with a philosophy, you should, like calling

Sheldon Solomon (46:58.240)

somebody a Marxist should not be a thing that shuts down all conversation. No, that's right.

Lex Fridman (47:05.520)

And the fact is, I'm sympathetic with Jordan's dismissal of the folks, the talking heads these

Sheldon Solomon (47:13.840)

days who spew Marxist words. To me, it's like fashionable nonsense. Do you know that book that

Sheldon Solomon (47:22.320)

the physicists wrote mocking? You're too young. So in the 20 or so years, we're all pretty young.

Sheldon Solomon (47:28.640)

Well, yeah, that's right. But I think there were these NYU physicists, they wrote a paper just

Sheldon Solomon (47:33.760)

mocking the kind of literary postmodern types. And it was, oh, those kinds of, yeah, it was just

Sheldon Solomon (47:41.600)

nonsense. And of course it was made the lead article. And you know, my point is Marx wouldn't

Sheldon Solomon (47:48.160)

be a Marxist. True. I have read and listened to some of the work of Richard Wolff. He speaks

Sheldon Solomon (47:56.480)

pretty eloquently about Marxism. I like him. He's one of the only, you know, one of the only people

Sheldon Solomon (48:03.760)

speaking about a lot about Marxism and the way we are now in a serious way, in a sort of saying,

Sheldon Solomon (48:10.480)

you know, what are the flaws of capitalism? Not saying like, yeah, basically sounding very

Sheldon Solomon (48:16.800)

different. People should check out his work. Because all this kind of work, this kind of

Sheldon Solomon (48:21.840)

outrage mob culture of sort of demanding equality of outcome, that's not Marxism.

Sheldon Solomon (48:30.720)

It is not Marxism. He didn't say that. You know, he literally said each, what was it like,

Sheldon Solomon (48:37.120)

each according to their needs and each according to their abilities or something like that.

Lex Fridman (48:42.240)

So the question is the implementation, like, humans are messy. So how does it go wrong?

Sheldon Solomon (48:47.600)

Like, it is, there you go, Lex. Brilliant. It's messy. And this gets back to my rant about

Sheldon Solomon (48:54.880)

the book that I want to try if I don't stroke out, why left and right are both beside the point.

Sheldon Solomon (49:01.120)

You know, the people, the conservatives are right when they condemn liberals for being simple minded.

Sheldon Solomon (49:11.120)

By assuming that a modification of external conditions will yield changes in human nature.

Sheldon Solomon (49:20.560)

You know, again, that's where Marx and Skinner are odd bedfellows. You know, here they are just

Sheldon Solomon (49:27.360)

saying, oh, let's change the surroundings and things will inevitably get better. On the other

Sheldon Solomon (49:34.480)

hand, when conservatives say that people are innately selfish and they use that as the

Sheldon Solomon (49:45.280)

justification for glorifying the unbridled pursuit of wealth, well, they're only half right because

Sheldon Solomon (49:53.040)

it turns out that we can be innately selfish, but we are also innately generous and reciprocating

Sheldon Solomon (50:02.560)

creatures. There's remarkable studies, I think they've been done at Yale, of, you know, babies,

Sheldon Solomon (50:08.880)

14 month old babies. If someone hands them a toy and then wants something in return,

Sheldon Solomon (50:19.040)

babies before they can walk and talk will reciprocate. All right, fine.

Sheldon Solomon (50:23.600)

If someone, if they want a toy, let's say, or a bottle of water, baby wants a bottle of water,

Lex Fridman (50:30.800)

and I look like I'm trying to give it to the baby, but I drop the bottle so the baby doesn't get

Lex Fridman (50:39.200)

what she or he wanted. When given a chance to reciprocate, little babies will reciprocate

Sheldon Solomon (50:47.440)

because they're aware of and are responding to intention. Similarly, if they see somebody

Sheldon Solomon (50:55.360)

behaving unfairly to someone, they will not help that person in return. So my point is,

Sheldon Solomon (51:04.400)

yeah, we are selfish creatures at times, but we are also simultaneously ubersocial creatures

Sheldon Solomon (51:14.560)

who are eager to reciprocate, and in fact, we're congenitally prepared to be reciprocators to the

Sheldon Solomon (51:21.840)

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

Lex Fridman (51:28.960)

How close, so, I mean, your work is on the fundamental role of the fear of mortality in

Lex Fridman (51:37.680)

ourselves. How fundamental is this reciprocation, this human connection to other humans?

Sheldon Solomon (51:44.400)

Oh, I think it's really innate. Yeah, I think it's because, yeah, bats reciprocate, not by intention,

Sheldon Solomon (51:50.800)

but, you know, this, I'm going here from Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, you know, to, I love

Lex Fridman (51:58.560)

the early Dawkins, I'm less enamored. I like the early Beatles.

Sheldon Solomon (52:02.880)

Yeah, no, no, no. And again, I say this with great respect, but, you know, Dawkins just points out

Sheldon Solomon (52:13.520)

that, you know, reciprocation is just fundamental, cooperation is fundamental. You know, it's a

Sheldon Solomon (52:22.880)

one sided view of evolutionary takes on things when we see it solely in terms of individual

Sheldon Solomon (52:30.560)

competition. It's almost, from a game theoretic perspective too, it's just easier to see the world

Sheldon Solomon (52:36.560)

that way. It's easier to, I don't know, I mean, you see this in physics, there's a whole field of

Sheldon Solomon (52:43.600)

folks, like complexity, that kind of embrace the fact that it's all an intricately connected mess,

Lex Fridman (52:50.320)

and it's just very difficult to do anything with that kind of science. But it seems to be much

Lex Fridman (52:56.000)

closer to actually representing what the world is like.

Lex Fridman (52:58.800)

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

Lex Fridman (53:02.480)

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

Lex Fridman (53:07.120)

or something?

Sheldon Solomon (53:07.440)

Yeah, I would like to, because what I would like to point out, again, in admiration of all the

Sheldon Solomon (53:14.320)

people that I will then try and have the gall to criticize is, look, these are all geniuses.

Sheldon Solomon (53:19.680)

Locke, genius. Adam Smith, genius, when he uses the notion that we're bartering creatures. So he uses

Sheldon Solomon (53:28.800)

that reciprocation idea as the basis of his way of thinking about things.

Lex Fridman (53:33.760)

But that's not at the core. The bartering is not at the core of human nature.

Sheldon Solomon (53:37.200)

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

Sheldon Solomon (53:42.240)

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

Lex Fridman (53:48.320)

autonomous individuals?

Lex Fridman (53:50.080)

Well, because we're going to barter with an eye on

Sheldon Solomon (53:53.440)

for ourselves, self interest.

Lex Fridman (53:55.600)

Yeah. But all right. So, but back to Adam Smith for a second, Lex. He's like,

Sheldon Solomon (54:00.480)

Adam Smith, here's, he's got the invisible hand and my conservative friends. I'm like,

Sheldon Solomon (54:05.360)

you need to read his books because he is a big fan of the free market. And this is my other gripe

Sheldon Solomon (54:15.360)

with folks who support just unbridled markets. Adam Smith understood that there was a role

Sheldon Solomon (54:23.600)

for government for two reasons. One is, is that just like Locke, people are not going to behave

Sheldon Solomon (54:30.400)

with integrity. And he understood that one role of government is to maintain a proverbial,

Sheldon Solomon (54:38.320)

you know, even playing field. And then the other thing Smith said was that there's some things that

Sheldon Solomon (54:44.960)

can't be done well for a profit. And I believe he talked about education and public health and

Sheldon Solomon (54:51.600)

infrastructure as things that are best done by governments because you can't, you can make a

Sheldon Solomon (55:01.520)

profit, but that doesn't mean that the institutions themselves will be maximally beneficial.

Sheldon Solomon (55:06.720)

Yeah. So I would, I'm just eager to engage people by saying, let's start with our most

Sheldon Solomon (55:16.800)

contemporary understanding of human nature, which is that we are both selfish and tend

Sheldon Solomon (55:27.200)

to cooperate. And we also can be heroically helpful to folks in our own tribe. And of course,

Lex Fridman (55:42.400)

how you define one's tribe becomes critically important. But what some people say is, look,

Sheldon Solomon (55:49.520)

look, what would then be, what kind of political institutions and what kind of economic organization

Sheldon Solomon (55:59.600)

can we think about to kind of hit that sweet spot? And that would be, in my opinion,

Lex Fridman (56:07.200)

how do we maximize individual autonomy in a way that fosters creativity and innovation and the

Sheldon Solomon (56:16.640)

self regard that comes from creative expression while engaging our more cooperative and reciprocal

Sheldon Solomon (56:27.120)

tendencies in order to come up with a system that is potentially stable over time? Because

Sheldon Solomon (56:35.280)

the other thing about all capital based systems is the stability. It's fundamentally unstable.

Sheldon Solomon (56:41.280)

Yeah, because it's based on infinite growth. And it's a positive feedback loop. To be silly,

Sheldon Solomon (56:47.200)

infinite growth is only good for malignant cancer cells and compound interest. But otherwise,

Sheldon Solomon (56:54.640)

we want to seek a steady state. So when Steven Pinker writes, for example, again,

Sheldon Solomon (57:03.040)

great scholar, but I'm going to disagree when he says the world has never been better,

Lex Fridman (57:08.800)

and all we need to do is keep making stuff and buying stuff.

Lex Fridman (57:14.000)

So your sense is the world sort of in disagreement with Steven Pinker, that the world is

Lex Fridman (57:23.120)

like facing a potential catastrophic collapse in multiple directions.

Sheldon Solomon (57:27.760)

Yes.

Lex Fridman (57:28.400)

And the fact that there are certain like the rate of violence and aggregate is decreasing,

Sheldon Solomon (57:33.760)

the death, you know, the quality of life, all those kinds of measures that you can plot across

Sheldon Solomon (57:40.240)

centuries that it's improving. That doesn't capture the fact that our world might be this,

Sheldon Solomon (57:44.960)

we might destroy ourselves in very painful ways in the in the in the next century.

Lex Fridman (57:51.200)

So I'm with Jared Diamond, you know, in the book Collapse, where he points out studying

Sheldon Solomon (57:56.560)

the collapse of major civilizations, that it often happens right after things appear to never

Sheldon Solomon (58:03.440)

have been better. And in that regard, I mean, there are more known voices that have taken issue

Sheldon Solomon (58:12.640)

with Dr. Pinker. I'm thinking of John Gray, who's a British philosopher and here in the States. I

Sheldon Solomon (58:21.280)

don't know where he is these days, but Robert J. Lifton, the psycho historian. Yeah, they're both

Sheldon Solomon (58:26.560)

of my view and which I hope is, by the way, wrong.

Lex Fridman (58:31.360)

Me too.

Sheldon Solomon (58:32.880)

Yeah, no, but you know, between, you know, ongoing ethnic tensions, environmental degradation,

Sheldon Solomon (58:42.960)

economic instability, and the fact that, you know, the world has become a Petri dish of

Sheldon Solomon (58:49.120)

psychopathology. Like what really worries me is the the quiet economic pain that people are going

Sheldon Solomon (58:56.160)

through, the businesses that are closed, dreams that are broken, because you can no longer do the

Sheldon Solomon (59:01.280)

thing that you've wanted to do and how I mentioned to you off camera that I've been reading The Rise

Lex Fridman (59:08.480)

and Fall of the Third Reich. And I mean, the amount of anger and hatred and on the flip side of that,

Sheldon Solomon (59:21.120)

sort of a nationalist pride that can arise from deep economic pain. Like what happens with that

Sheldon Solomon (59:27.520)

economic pain is you become bitter. You start to find the other, whether it's other European

Sheldon Solomon (59:34.320)

nations that mistreated you, whether it's other groups that mistreated you, it always ends up

Sheldon Solomon (59:39.200)

being the Jews somehow or fault here. That's what worries me is where this quiet anger and pain goes

Sheldon Solomon (59:51.760)

in 2021, 2022, 2030. If you look, sorry to see the parallels. No, no, no. Rise and fall of the

Sheldon Solomon (59:59.920)

Third Reich, but you know what happens 10, 15 years from now from what's because of the COVID