YouSaid · the spoken record

Sheldon Solomon

lines on the record: 156
first: 2020-08-20
most recent: 2020-08-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, because it's based on infinite growth. And, you know, it's a positive feedback loop. To be silly, infinite growth is only good for malignant cancer cells and compound interest. Otherwise, we want to seek a steady state. And that would be, you know, so when Stephen Pinker writes, for example, again, great scholar, but I'm going to disagree when he says the world has never been better. And all we need to do is keep making stuff and buying stuff.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can we think about to kind of hit that sweet spot? And that would be, in my opinion, how do we maximize individual autonomy in a way that fosters creativity and innovation and the self-regard that comes from creative expression? While engaging are more cooperative and reciprocal tendencies In order to come up with a system that is potentially stable over time, because the other thing about all capital-based systems.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talked about education and public health and infrastructure as things that are best done by governments because you can make a profit, but that doesn't mean that the institutions themselves will be maximally beneficial. Yeah, so I would, I'm just eager to engage people by saying Let's start with our most contemporary understanding of human nature, which is that we are both selfish and tend to cooperate. And we also can be heroically Helpful to folks in our own tribe. And of course, how you define one's tribe becomes critically important. But what some people say is look, what would then be, what kind of political institutions and what kind of economic organization”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For self. For ourselves. Self-interest. Yeah. But, all right, so back to Adam Smith for a second, Lex, is like, Adam Smith, he's got the invisible hand. And my conservative friends, I'm like, you need to read his books because he is a big fan of the free market. And this is my other gripe with folks who support just unbridled markets. Adam Smith understood that there was a role for government for two reasons. One is that just like Locke, people are not going to behave with integrity. And he understood that one role of government is to maintain proverbial even playing field. Then the other thing Smith said was that there's some things that can't be done well for a profit. And I believe he...”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would like to because what I would like to point out. Again, in admiration of all of the people that I will then try and have the gall to criticize this, look, these are all geniuses. Locke genius, Adam Smith, genius, when he uses the notion that we're bartering creatures. So he uses that reciprocation idea as the basis of his way of thinking about things”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love the early Dawkins, some less enamored with the early Beatles. Yeah, no, no. And again, I say this with great respect. But, you know, Dawkins just points out that reciprocation is just fundamental cooperation is fundamental. It's a one-sided view of evolutionary”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's really. Innate. Yeah, I think bats reciprocate not by intention. But this, I'm going here from Richard Dawkins, the selfish gene.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the baby doesn't get what she or he wanted when given a chance to reciprocate, little babies will reciprocate because they're aware of and are responding to intention. Similarly, if they see somebody behaving unfairly to someone, they will not help that person in return. So my point is, yeah, we are selfish creatures at times, but we are also simultaneously uber social creatures who are eager to reciprocate. And in fact, we're congenitally prepared to be reciprocators to the point where we will reciprocate on the basis of intentions above and beyond what actually happens.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And things will inevitably get better. On the other hand, when conservatives say that people are innately selfish, and they use that as the justification for glorifying the unbridled pursuit of wealth, well, they're only half right because it turns out that we can be innately selfish, but we are also innately generous and reciprocating creatures. There's remarkable studies. I think they've been done at Yale of, you know, babies 14 month old babies. If someone hands them a toy and then wants something in return, babies before they can walk and talk will reciprocate, all right, fine. If someone, if they want a toy, let's say, or a bottle of water, baby wants a bottle of water and I look like I'm trying to give it to the baby, but I drop the bottle.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conservatives are right when they condemn liberals for being simple-minded by assuming that a modification of external conditions will yield changes in human nature. Again, that's where Marx and Skinner are odd bed fellows. Here they are just saying, oh, let's change the surroundings.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There you go. Brilliant. It's messy. And this gets back to my rant about the book that I want to try if I don't stroke out Why Left and Right are both beside the point. You know, the people”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is not Marxism. He didn't say that. You know, he literally said each, what was it, like each according to their needs and each according to their abilities or something like that?”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it was just nonsense. And of course, it was made the lead article. And, you know, my poor is Marx wouldn't be a Marxist.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's right. And the fact is, I'm sympathetic with Jordan's dismissal of the folks, the talking heads these days who spew Marxist words. To me, it's like fashionable nonsense. Do you know that book that the physicist wrote, mocking? You're too young. So in the 20 or so years ago, we're all pretty young. Yeah, that's right. But I think there were these NYU physicists. They wrote a paper just mocking the kind of literary postmodern types. Oh, yeah.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order to flatten the curve of economic destruction, to put that in plainer English, I would direct our attention to the social democracies that forgetting for the moment of whether it's possible to do this on a scale in a country as big as ours, on all of the things that really matter, you know, gross domestic GDP or whatever, that's just an abstraction. But when you look at whatever the United Nations says, how we measure quality of life, life expectancy, education, rates of alcoholism, suicide, and so on, the countries that do better are the mixed economies. They're market economies that have high tax rates in exchange. For the provision of services that come as a right for citizens.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He writes about the history of money, and he's like, Yeah, there's been 20 or whatever depressions and big recessions in the last several hundred years. And when that happens, half of the population or whatever is catastrophically inconvenienced. But that's the price that we pay for progress. Other people would argue, and I would agree with them, that I will happily sacrifice”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it would create tension and conflict between those who own things and those who made things that over time would always, you know, the Thomas Pickardty guy who writes about capital and just makes the point that return on investment will always be greater than wages. That means the people with money are going to have a lot more. That means there's going to come a point where the economic house of cards falls apart. Now, the Joseph Schumpters of the world, they're like, that's creative destruction. Bring it. That's great. So I think it's Niles Ferguson. He's a historian. He may be at Stanford now. He was at Harvard.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, if we were all here together, I'd say we need to start with Marx's economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 before Marx became more of a polemicist. And I would argue that Marx's political philosophy, he's a crappy economist. I don't dispute that. But his arguments about human nature, his arguments about the inevitably catastrophic, psychological and environmental and economic effects of capitalism, I would argue every one of those has proven quite right. Marx maybe did not have the answer, but he saw in the 18 whenever he was writing that inevitably capitalism Would lead to massive inequity, that it was ultimately based on the need to denigrate and dehumanize labor, to render them in his language a fleshy cog in a giant machine.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I do not dispute that as an abstraction. But again, to back up for a second, I do take issue with Jordan's fervent devotion to the free market and his cavalier dismissal of Marxist ideas, which he has, in my estimation, mischaracterized in his public depictions.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he says no, but we have run out of Wales. And so Locke was right maybe in 1690 that the world was large and had infinite resources. He certainly wronged today, in my opinion, also wrong is the claim that the unlimited pursuit of personal wealth does not harm those around us. There is no doubt that radical inequality is tragic psychologically and physically. Poverty is not that terrible. It's easy for me to say because I have a place to stay and something to eat. But as long as you're not starving and have a place to be, poverty is not as challenging as being having the impoverished and close proximity. To those who are obscenely wealthy.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when Margaret Thatcher, you're too young, you know, in the 1980s, she said, societies, there's no such thing as societies. There's just individuals pursuing their self-interest. So that's one point where I would take issue respectfully with John Locke. Point number two is when Locke says in 1690, well, England's filled up. So if you want some land, just go to America. It's empty. Or maybe there's a few savages there. Just kill them. So Melville does the same thing in Moby Dick, where he thinks about, well, there ever come a time where we run out of whales.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I think that Plato and Socrates in the Krido were closer to the truth when they started with the assumption that we were interdependent and they derived individual autonomy as a manifestation of a functional social system.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's two flaws. One is that, well, one flaw is, first of all, that it is based on an erroneous assumption to begin with, which is that there never was a time in human history when we were in asocial species.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are more. The word that he used was industrious. He said, some people are more industrious than others. Today we would say smarter, less lazy, more ambitious. He just said that's natural. It's also true. Therefore, he argued over time some people are going to have a whole lot of property and other people not much at all. Inequality for Locke is natural and beneficial for everyone. His argument was that the rising tide lifts all boats and that the truly creative and innovative are entitled to relatively unlimited worth because we're all better off as a result. Have Adam Smith in the next century with the invisible hand, where Adam Smith says everyone pursuing their own selfish, that's not necessarily pejorative, if everyone pursues their own selfish interests, we will all be better off as a result.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then he says money came into the picture, and this is important because he noticed long before anybody, before the Freuds of the world, that money is funky because it has no intrinsic value. He's like, ooh, look at that shiny piece of metal that actually has, if you're hungry and you have a choice between a carrot and a lump of gold in the desert, most people are going to go for the carrot. But his point is that the allure of money is that it's basically a concentrated symbol of wealth, but because it doesn't spoil. Locke said, you're entitled to have as much money as you're able to garner. Then he says, well, the reality is that some people”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could only eat so many apples. Or you could only trade so many apples with somebody else. So he was like, well, if you put a fence around a bunch of apple trees, those become your apples. That's your property. If somebody else wants to put a fence around Nebraska, that's their property. And everybody can have as much property as they want because the world is so big that there is no limit to what you can have if you pursue it by virtue of your own effort.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But Locke says, well, surely if there's anything that you own, it's your body. And surely you have a right by nature to stay alive. And then by extension, anything that you do where you exert effort or labor, that becomes your private property. So back to the apple tree. If I walk over to an apple tree, that's everybody's apples until I pick one. And the minute I do, that is my apple. And then he says, you can have as many apples as you want as long as you don't waste them and as long as you don't impinge on somebody else's right to get apples. All right. So far so good. Then he says Well, okay, in the early days.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But people being people, they're apt to escalate retaliatory behavior, thus creating what Locke called a state of war. So he said, in order to avoid a state of war, people reluctantly give up their freedom in exchange for security. They agree to obey the law, and that the sole function of government is to keep domestic tranquility and to ward off foreign evasion in order to protect our right to property. So now here's the... Property thing So Locke says if you look in the Bible and in nature there is no private property”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's a whole lot easier, you know, if I see like an apple tree a mile away, well, I can go over and pick an apple, but if you're 10 meters away with an apple in your hand, it's a lot easier if I pick up a rock and crack your head and take the apple. And his point was that the problem is that people can't be counted on to behave. They will take each other's property. Moreover, He argued, if someone takes your property, you have the right to retribution in proportion to the degree of the magnitude of the transgression, English translation, if I take your apple, you have the right to take an apple back, you don't have the right to kill my firstborn.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He says, okay, let's start with a state of nature. And he's like, in a state of nature, there's no societies, there's just individuals. And in a perfect universe, there wouldn't be any societies. There would just be individuals who by the law of nature have a right to survive. And in the service of survival, they have the right to acquire and preserve the fruits of their own labor. But his point is, and it's actually a good one, you know, he's following Hobbes here. He's like, well, the problem with that is that people are assholes. And if they would let each other alone, then we would still be living in a state of nature, everybody just doing what they did to get by each day.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, let me translate in English. So basically. All these days, anybody who says, I'm a conservative free market type, you're following John Locke and Adam Smith, whether you're aware of it or not. So here's John Locke, who, by the way, all of these guys are great. So for me to appear to criticize any of these folks, it is with the highest regard. And also, we need to understand, in my estimation, how important their ideas are. Locke is working in a time where all rule was top down by divine right. And he's trying desperately to come up with a philosophical justification to shift power and autonomy to individuals. And he starts in his second treatise on government 1690 or so.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one of the most obviously patently wrong assertions in the history of intellectual thought. And Locke uses that to justify his claims about the individual right to acquire unlimited amounts of property, which is ultimately the justification for neoliberal economics.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was going to be called Why Left and Right Are Both Beside the Point. And my argument was going to be, and it is going to be that both liberal and political, no, liberal and conservative political philosophy are each intellectually and morally bankrupt because they're both framed in terms of assumptions about human nature that are demonstrably false. And Jordan didn't mind me knocking liberal political philosophy on those grounds. That would basically be like Stephen Pinker's blank slate. But he took issue when I pointed out that actually it's conservative political philosophy, which starts with John Locke's assumption that in a state of nature there are no societies, just autonomous individuals who are Striving for survival.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. And this is where it would be nice to have him here. He has, you know, from a distance criticized our work as misguided. Having said that, though, when we were together, he said something along the lines that there is no theoretical body of work in academic psychology right now for which there is more empirical evidence. And so I appreciated that. He's a great researcher. He's a good clinician. The other thing that we will agree to disagree about rather vociferously is ultimately political slash economic. So I remember being at dinner with him telling him that the next book that I wanted to write.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, our disagreements today would be Along two dimensions. One is he is, and again, I wish he was here to correct me. When I say that he is more committed to the virtues of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Particularly Christianity. And in a sense is a contemporary Kierkegaard of sorts when he's saying there's only one way to leap into faith. And I would take ardent issue with that claim on the grounds that that is one, but by no means not the only way to find meaning and value in life. And so, and I see his”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we are both kind of punk. So I saw him three or four years ago. We spoke on a, it was an awesome day. We were in Canada at the Ontario Shakespeare Festival where we were asked to To be on a Canadian broadcast system program, I think we were talking about Macbeth from a psychodynamic perspective. And I hadn't seen him in a ton of years. And we spent two days together, had a great time. You know, we had just written our book, The Worm at the Core. And he's like, you know, you're missing a big opportunity. Every time you say something, you have to have your phone”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, back in the day, I just said, you know, Jordan was a young punk. We were young punks. He was just kind of flailing in an animated way at some conferences saying that. We.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And I wish him well Jordan was working on his maps of meaning and we were publishing our work. And I think Jordan at the time was concerned about our vague claims to the effect that all meaning is arbitrary. He takes a more Jungian as well as evolutionary view that I don't think is wrong, by the way, which is that there are certain kinds of meanings that are more important, let's say religious types, and that we didn't pay sufficient attention to that in our early days.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We go way back, actually. If he were here with us today, he would be jumping in and I believe very interesting and important ways. But yeah, we go back 30 years ago. He was basically saying our work is nonsense.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“or with vain, famous German social psychologist, and the quote is, there's nothing more useful than a good theory. And then on the other side was another quote by a German physicist. His name eludes me, and it was all theories are wrong. And I'm like, Which is it Of course, the point is that it's both. Our theories are, I believe, powerful ways to direct our attention to aspects of human affairs that might render us better able to understand ourselves and the world around us. Now, I also, as an experimental psychologist, I adhere to the view that theories are essentially hypothesis generating devices and that at its best science is a dialectical interplay where you have Testable hypotheses in that either result in the corroboration of the theory, the rejection of it, or the modification thereafter.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the other hand, I think it's quite arrogant when scientists all just speak about psychological scientists when they have the audacity to mistake statistical precision for knowledge and insight. When they make the mistake, in my estimation that Einstein bemoaned, and that's this idea that the mere accumulation of data will necessarily result in conceptual breakthroughs. And so I like the, well, where all I hope appreciative of the people who trained us, but I remember my first day in graduate school at the University of Kansas, they brought us into a room, and on one side of the board was a quote by Kurt Lewin.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's the Socratic I know that I don't know. Which is the first step on the path to wisdom? I would argue forcefully that we know a lot more. than we used to, I would argue equally forcefully, not that I have a PhD in the philosophy of science, but I believe that Thomas Kuhn's of the world are right when they point out that change is not necessarily progress. And so on the one hand, I do think we know a lot more than we did back in the day when if you wanted to fly, you put on some wax wings and jumped off a mountain.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How we came to be that way. And so whereas the existential psychodynamic types, I would say are more interested in development across a single lifespan. But the evolutionary types dismiss the psychodynamic type says overly speculative and devoid of empirical support for their views. They'll just say these guys are talking shit, if you'll pardon the expression. And of course, you can turn right around and say the same about the evolutionary types. They are often and rightfully criticized. Evolutionary psychologists for what are called the just so stories where it's like, oh, this is probably why fill in the blank is potentially adaptive. My thought, again, early on was I didn't see any intrinsic antithesis between these viewpoints. I just found them dialectically compatible and a very powerful when combined.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's a fine question. Well, for the evolutionary types in general are interested in how it is and why it is that we have adapted to our surroundings in the service of persisting over time and being represented in the gene pool thereafter.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are eager to dismiss the psychodynamic types and vice versa and maybe only John Bolby, you know, there's other folks, but the attachment theorist John Bolby was really one of the first serious academics to say these ways of thinking about things are quite compatible.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking to myself, wow, one of the reasons why I'm finding this so compelling is that it squares with my own personal experience. And then to make a short story long, and I'll shut up, Lex, but what grabbed me about Becker, and this is in part because I read a lot of his other books. There's another book, The Birth and Death of Meaning, which is framed from an evolutionary perspective. And then the denial of death is really more framed from an existential psychodynamic vantage point. And as a young academic, I was really taken by what I found to be a very potent juxtaposition that you really don't see that often. Usually evolutionary television”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To miss my grandmother. And then I'm like, no, wait a minute. That means my mother's gonna die after she gets old. And that's even worse, after all, who's going to make me dinner. And that bothered me for a while, but then I'm looking at the stamps, all the dead American presidents. And I'm like, there's George Washington. He's dead. There's Thomas Jefferson. He's dead. My mom's going to be dead. Oh I'm gonna get old and be dead someday and at eight years old that was my first explicit existential crisis I remember it being in one of these blood curdling realizations that I tried my best to ignore for the most of the time I was subsequently growing up but fast forward back to Skidmore College mid-20s you know reading Becker's book in the”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the same thing. And then it reminded me, I think, not to play psychologists, but, you know, let's face it, I believe there's a reason why we end up drifting where we ultimately come to. So I'm in my mid-20s. I got Ernest Becker's book in my hand. And the next thing I know, I'm remembering when I'm eight years old the day that my grandmother died. You know the day before my mom said, oh, say goodbye to grandma. She's not well. And okay, so I was like, okay, grandma. And I knew she wasn't well, but I didn't really appreciate the magnitude of her illness. Well, she dies the next day. And it's in the evening, and I'm just sitting there looking at my stamp collection. And I'm like, wow, I'm going to.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually his next to last book. I don't know how you pull this off, but he had one more after he died called Escape from Evil. And evidently it was supposed to originally the denial of death was supposed to be this giant thousand page book that was both. And they split it up and what became Escape from evil, his wife Marie Becker finished. Well, be that as it may, it is in the denial of death where Becker just says in the first paragraph, I believe that the terror of death and the way that human beings respond to it or decline to respond to it is primarily responsible for almost everything we do, whether we're aware of it or not, and mostly we're not. And so I read that first paragraph, Lex, and I was like, wow, okay, this dude, you're onto something. You're on to something.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Death. And so the apple is beautiful and it's tasty. But when you get right into the middle of it, there's that ugly reality, which is our finitude. And then fast forward a bit. And I was a young professor at Skidmore College in 1980. My PhD is an experimental social psychology, and I mainly did studies with clinical psychologists evaluating the efficacy of non-pharmacological interventions to reduce stress. And that was good work, and I found it interesting. But in my first week as a professor at Skidmore, I was just walking up and down the shelves of the library, saw some books by a guy I had never heard of, Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist recently deceased. He died in 1974. Weeks before actually he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for his book, The Denial of Death.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source