Danny Jones Podcast - #199 - Disturbing Psychological Experiments Reveal Dark Side of The Human Mind | Sheldon Solomon

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

Sheldon Solomon is a social psychologist best known for developing terror management theory concerned with how humans deal with their own sense of mortality. Shaldon's book "The Worm at the Core" is based on 25 years of in-depth research, drawing from innovative experiments conducted around the globe that shows conclusively that the fear of death and the desire to transcend it inspire us to buy expensive cars, crave fame, put our health at risk, and disguise our animal nature. SPONSORS: https://bluechew.com - Try BlueChew FREE when you use our promo code KONCRETE at checkout. EPISODE LINKS: bit.ly/3KNcfgE https://www.skidmore.edu/psychology/faculty/solomon.php FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/jonesdannyhttps://twitter.com/jonesdanny JOIN OUR KULT: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon OUTLINE 0:00 - The #1 driver behind human consciousness 6:49 - Human cognition & awareness of death 23:17 - Death experiments on humans 28:30 - What happens when children learn about death 35:35 - Jordan Peterson 50:23 - Equality of opportunity VS equality of outcome 1:02:03 - John Locke, government, & giving up freedom 1:12:37 - American values & individualism 1:21:55 - How existential dread relates to politics 1:45:43 - Civilization collapse 2:04:32 - Climate change 2:09:52 - Artificial intelligence & immortality 2:16:09 - UFOs & schizophrenia 2:23:18 - Psychedelics 2:35:55 - What happens after we die? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

joining me today my pleasure the book your book the worm at the core is fascinating thought-provoking um it really got me excited because it's something that i've always thought about the worm at the core what drives what is the fundamental most foundational driver for human consciousness and like i just showed you that clip from west world i always thought it was sex but it seems like from what you've studied, it's more likely the fear of death. Yes. So we don't have to be simple-minded. I think sexuality is a rather large determinant of human activity. But yeah, if we're looking for just an overarching explanatory concept about what is it that drives us, yeah, then I'm going to cast my vote for the idea that as a Scottish dude said, I think it's Alexander Smith in the 1860s.

It is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human. And so I babble in my classes. I'm like, okay, you know, we're going to study psychology. And then I break it up. It's psyche and ology. And of course, everyone knows ology is the study of. And then I'm like, well, what's psyche? And most students, like I would have, they say, oh, that's mind.

And that is how we think of it today. But Aristotle coined the term psyche. And in the original ancient Greek, it's soul. And he defined soul as the essence of a body that is infused with life. All right. Now, that, I don't know about you, but I'm like, shit, I don't know what you're talking about. I need English. Yeah, I need English, porphyry.

And then he says, okay, let me give you some examples. If an axe were alive, the soul of an axe would be to chop. And if you could pluck your eyeball out of your head and it was still functioning, well, he says, okay, the soul of an eyeball is to see. The soul of a grasshopper is to hop. So that raises the question, what's the soul of a human being? And the answer depends on who you ask. And so Aristotle, he was all about that we're rational creatures, right?

We call ourselves homo sapiens where sapiens means wise. And while I wouldn't want to be on the side of the debating team to defend that proposition, because I think while we are capable of rational thought, it is not our default mental state. But that's one way of thinking about the essence of humanity. But there's others. There's another dude. He called us homo ludens. Ludens is Latin for play.

That were fundamentally playful creatures. We're the only critters that have leagues and uniforms and games with rules. And that's one way of viewing us. Another person calls us homo favor. We're tool-making creatures. somebody else calls us homoestheticus that we like to think about surrounding ourselves with beauty. Somebody else calls us homo-naritans that were storytelling creatures. And my thing, Danny, is I like all of those as interesting ways, interesting vantage points from which to step back and view ourselves as forms of life.

But back to my point, when I ran into this guy who said, it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human. In my gut, I was like, yeah, at least that squares with my experience. I've been disinclined to die since I was like eight the day that my grandmother died, which made me realize that I, too, would someday die. And so that was a long-winded response to your question. But from our vantage point, the work that we do is very much based on the assumption that a defining characteristic of our humanity that differentiates us from all other forms of life that we are currently aware of is that we know that we're going to die from a rather early. age and the average individual is not particularly comforted by that realization. So when you were around eight years old when your grandmother died, is this like an idea or a thought that sort of never left you? Well, in retrospect, yeah. Well, I mean, consciously?

Consciously, no. So there you go, Danny. And this is a very important point that I'm sure we're going to be coming back to. And that is when we talk about the notion. that concerns about and fear of death are the primary motivational impetus for a substantial proportion of human behavior, we need not stipulate that we are the least bit aware of this. And for some people, that is an understandable grounds for skepticism. Because basically what Freud used to say is, oh, we're all driven by sex and aggression. And you could agree with him and say, yeah, dude, you're right. Or you could say, no, that's nonsense.

In which case Freud would have said, well, you're just repressing your sexuality and aggression. So am I right or am I right? And it's the same thing with death anxiety. There are some people who say, I am not afraid of death. and therefore I'm going to stop listening to anything that you say on those grounds. But this would be unfortunate because we do know empirically that when people say that they are completely unafraid of death, either they have attained a Buddha-like serenity in the wake of the

awareness of their mortality, or they're actually riddled with death. anxiety that they repress quite unconsciously. Now, do you think there's a, I mean, obviously there has to be a spectrum of people who, on how afraid they are of death and how that affects their life. How did you begin to start studying and doing, conducting these studies on terror management here? Yeah, great question, Danny. So we're mine in our own business.

My buddy's Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pazinski and I. We were fellow graduate students at the University of Kansas. We all finished and got jobs. And in 1980, I bumped into a book by a recently deceased cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker called The Denial of Death, that received the Pulitzer Prize a few weeks after he died, ironically, of cancer at age 49 and around 1973 or so. And what Becker said, I just found disarmingly simple and poignantly profound. He just said, look, in many ways, we're not that much different from all other forms of life. Here he's channeling Darwin.

We're biologically predisposed towards self-preservation, to stay alive and to reproduce. All right. But then Darwin's like, yo, but there's a lot of. ways to stay alive, right? Got the giraffe with the big neck, got the turtle with the shell. You know, you got birds with good eyesight and so on. All right, well, what about people? And here we are an interestingly paradoxical species because on the one hand, we're actually kind of an abomination physically, right? We do have some good stuff going for us, upright bipedalism, opposable thumb, stereoscopic binocular vision, all really good.

Yeah, but other than that, we're kind of pathetic as isolated individuals. We're not very big. We're not very strong. We're not very fast. Our senses are not very keen. Our teeth are not very sharp. And basically, I kid my students in college. I'm like, hey, you know, you're talking shit about how you can function autonomously.

Give me your phone, give me your credit card. I'm going to helicopter you on top of a mountain. On a fine day and tell you to have a good day because it'll probably be your last one. This is Euphoria Calvin Klein, the new elixir collection, featuring three perfume intense scents, inspired by a unique orchid accord, paired with vanilla, each with its own distinct attitude,

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That's like awesome. But that's not enough. Bees and termites are social creatures. So now Becker shifts to the big brain. And he's like, all right, let's not be too arrogantly homocentric, but let us note that we have an enlarged forebrain that enables us to think abstractly and symbolically to the point where we can imagine things that don't even exist and then have the audacity to create them. And I just find that astonishing. Every other form of life has to accept the world in the form in which they encounter it. All right.

Now, again, all right, I get, you know, bees build hives. Beavers make dams. Spiders spin webs. They've been doing it for billions of years and they haven't changed one bit. All right. But we have Leonardo da Vinci drawn a picture of a helicopter and people. are like you're crazy dude and 500 years later we've got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk flying to the moon. I like Otto Ronk, one of Becker's favorite guys who just says only humans make the unreal real.

I just find that extraordinarily uplifting as well as explanatory because most of the things that we enjoy as humans. chairs and tacos and music and even us being able to talk to each other today are by virtue of the hyper creativity that emerges from an uber social cooperative animal all good and then becker keeps going he says you know what and here he's following the philosopher kirkegaard when he says that people are so smart that we actually realize that we exist. And he's like, okay, wait a minute, because a lot of us are like, well, of course I know I exist. But Kierkegaard's point is that other forms of life are not necessarily in possession of that

awareness. In Psychobabble, excuse me, he said that it takes a ridiculously sophisticated cognitive apparatus to render yourself the object of your own subjective inquiry. All right. English translation, a raccoon is here but doesn't know it. Rosebush is here but doesn't know it. Not going to argue today about whether your dog knows that he or she is here. We just need people to admit that they know that they're here.

And so the point that Kierkegaard made is that if you, you're smart enough to know that you're here, you're going to experience two uniquely human emotions that he called awe and dread. And again, I'm a teacher, so I like words that actually people have heard before. Like, awe is awesome. It is awesome to be alive and to know it. And I say this to remind myself that in our finest moments, it's just fantastic to be a respiring, sentient entity. When you wake up some days, it was so beautiful on the plane, magnificent day, people are friendly, and it's just like, it is great to be alive.

I didn't need to win a Nobel Prize, a million dollars, to just be in. infused with a joyous sense of awe and gratitude by virtue of merely existing, right? Hold that thought. It's great to be alive. And then Kierkegaard turns right around and says, yeah, but it's dreadful at the same time, because unless you're a child or an idiot, you realize that you're here. And that necessarily entails the collateral record. that like all living things, your life is a finite duration, and you too someday will expire. So that's thing number one. And this is the big Ernest Becker point, and that is that the uniquely human awareness of death.

And when I say that, Danny, I'm not saying that if you're an antelope and you're about to be eaten by a hungry lion that has its jaws around your head, My guess is that you know that things are not going well. But only humans are aware of death at a rather early age, in some cases, as young as two, in situations where our life is not threatened. And so that's what makes us unique is the awareness of death and the absence of conditions that would typically be associated with it. So that's unwelcome realization number one. That's an unintended byproduct of our vast intelligence.

You know, nobody planned it that way. It just happened. We got smart enough to know that we're here. And then when we extend our capacity to think about things over time, both past and future, we realize that the meters running and our lives will someday also be. abated. But that realization is compounded when we also recognize that not only will we someday die, but we could die at any time for reasons we could never anticipate or control. And so this is what puts us, Ernest Becker argues, in a persistent state of chronic dis-ease, put a hyphen between

dis and ease. You know every time that you get on an airplane, that it can. end up flying into a mountain or an ocean. You know, unfortunately, right now that there's more guns in America than there are people. And on a hot day, a disgruntled motorist may blow your head off just because you've annoyed them. You know that the next time you get a headache, it might be a headache. Then again, it might be a golf ball-sized malignant tumor on the way of exterminating you. And so it's not only that we're going to die that causes these existential anxieties. It's that it can happen at any time. And then finally, Becker, just to knee us in the psychological groin, he says, okay, you're going to die. You could die

at any time. And you're your fucking animal, if you'll pardon the language. You're a breathing piece of defecating meat that is no more significant or enduring than a lizard or a potato. And what What Becker claims is that if that's what we thought about while we were conscious all the time, I'm going to die, I could walk outside and get hit by a comet or a pandemic, just a cold cut with an attitude that we wouldn't be able to stand up in the morning. He just says we would be so debilitated by waves of existential terror that we would be functionally incapacitated. And so what he argued is that we had to do something consciously or not as a species to come to terms with the reality of the human condition and that what our ancestors did, quite unconsciously and quite creatively was to develop what the anthropologist today call culture. Humanly constructed beliefs about reality that we share with other people in our group that helps reduce death anxiety by giving us each a sense that life has meaning and that we have

value. And these are, for Becker, this is the motherload of psychological motivation. Underneath all of it is that we're trying to diminish death anxiety, but the way that we experience it in our lives is a persistent quest for a sense of meaning and value. And so let's talk about meaning and value just for a bit because he's like, okay, what do I mean by meaning? He's like, well, look at all the cultures in the world. They all have an account of the origin of the universe. They all have prescriptions for how we're supposed to behave while we're here. They all have the promise of immortality, either literally through the world's great religions, you know, the heavens, the afterlives and the soul.

or the ancient Greek said, maybe you don't believe in immortality. They had another flavor that they called symbolic immortality, where you're like, I know I'm not going to be here forever, but a piece of me is going to live on. I'm going to have kids. I'm going to make a ton of money and buy a building and put my name on it. I'm going to write a book. We're going to do a podcast that'll be here when we are no longer here. And all the Becker points out is that, you know, in order to stand up in the morning, we need to think that life has meaning.

And when we don't, that's his definition of depression. He's like, sometimes it's hard to think that life is meaningful. And in his language, that makes us disillusioned. Our culturally depicted account of the world is no longer compelling. And when we get disillusion, that makes us demoralized. We don't have any symbolic blueprint for how it is that we ought to behave. So anyway, his big point is that we need to think that life is meaningful. But that's necessary but not sufficient.

We also need to think that we're valuable contributors to the meaningful cultural drama to which we subscribe. And the way the culture enables us to do that is through the provision of social roles. So if I'm a baseball player, my job is to hit home runs. If I'm a nurse, my job is to save lives. If I'm a banker, my job is to accumulate money. And if you meet or exceed the standards associated with the social role that you inhabit, well, now you're solid psychodynamically. You feel like you have value.

you and life has meaning. And that's what Becker calls self-esteem. And then just to, and I'll shut up in a moment, just to finish the psychological account, Becker's point is, as I said earlier, whether we're aware of it or not, most of us are striving all the time to maintain a sense that we have value in a world of meaning. And what underlies that ultimately is a disinclination to die. This episode is brought to you by Blue Chew. Let's talk about sex. Fellas, do you remember the days when you were always ready to go?

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the cultural and religious aspect of this and how, you know, for example, like even the most hardcore atheists, if they get on a plane and they hit turbulence, they're going to pray to God. There you go. So that's right. And not to be like an egghead, but that's been demonstrated empirically. And so we, Ernest Becker has all of these ideas. and a lot of people dismiss them on the grounds that there was no evidence for them.

And that's where Tom and Jeff and I come in because we are experimental psychologists by trade, and we developed some very simple laboratory paradigms to just see if these ideas have any scientific merit. And so one of the paradigms is where we just remind people that they're going to die someday. You know, sometimes they're in the lab and we're like, write down your thoughts and feelings about your own death. Sometimes we do this outside of the lab and we stop people either in front of a funeral parlor or 100 meters to either side. And our thought is, is if you're standing in front of a funeral parlor, death is on your mind, whether you know it or not. And then we do other studies when you're at Skidmore where I work next. You'll come to my office and you'll read stuff on my computer.

And while you're doing that, I'll flash the word death for 28 milliseconds so fast that you don't even see it. All right. And the point is, is that you do not need to know that death is on your mind for it to have striking, attitudinal, and behavioral effects. All right. So, for example, back to religion, Danny. if we remind devout Christians that they're going to die, and then we ask them, how much do you believe in God, and how much do you think that prayer is effective? Death reminders make religious believers, not only Christians, but Buddhists and Muslims also, I believe.

They make them more confident in the existence of God. and the efficacy of prayer. Right, here's where it gets interesting. If you ask an atheist how much they believe in God, of course they're going to say not at all. And then if you remind an atheist that they're going to die and you say, how much do you believe in God? They actually say that they believe in God even less.

All right, so just hold that thought. because basically when we remind people that they're going to die, they double down on their prevailing worldview. So if you believe in God, you're going to believe in God more. If you don't believe in God, you're going to believe in God less. If you're conservative and we remind you, you're going to die. You're more conservative. If you're liberal, you become more liberal.

But back to the atheists for a minute, if we measure fear of death unconsciously, then the atheists as well as the Christians become more engaged with the supernatural when they're reminded of death. So on the one hand, the unconsciously. Unconsciously. All right. So that's where you get the phrase there's no atheists in the foxholes. Yeah. When push comes to shove, we all have the proverbial rabbit's foot that we're clutching in the fervent hope that we're not summarily obliterated.

Wow. There's something Ernest Becker said about when after he had kids he thought more about death. That's something that I can relate to. I thought a lot about death and like what the world would be like if I just disappeared after I had kids. It was very weird, very, very dark thoughts I would have for no parent reason subconsciously. Yeah. Is it true that he became religious after he had children? That's by his account.

I never met him, although I have met Marie Becker, who is still alive. And yes, he grew up in a somewhat religious household, evidently a Jewish household. When he became religious after his kids were born, he embraced Christianity. And ultimately, he embraced religiosity. broadly. At the end of his life, he, without insisting or demanding that any of us adhere to his views, what he argued is that in general, a religious worldview may be more effective for helping us cope with existential anxieties than more secular ones. When it comes to children, is there,

Is there, how much time did you spend studying children being aware of death subconsciously or consciously? And like, how can you describe their differences based on the realization of death and before they're aware of it? Okay, so these are awesome questions, Danny. And I like your style because what you've just done is to point out how. complex it will be to inquire in a rigorously in a rigorous fashion to answer those questions. So to back up a bit, it's unclear if small kids are aware of death prior to them being able to talk about it. So that's always going to be important. You know, basically, it seems like a fairly good supposition that we enter the world oblivious to ourselves as well as to our ultimate fate.

But we do come into the world prone to anxiety. and it is that anxiety, one, where in uncertain situations that stimulates the development of the attachments to our ancestral forbearers. And what we do know, and this is not from our work, we have not studied kids directly, but there's a fairly robust clinical literature that started with a woman, I believe her name is Sylvia Anthony, in the 1950. and she was a British clinician, and she studied children and their parents. And her interest was, when do kids become aware of death?

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And the claim is that by 9 or 10, almost all kids, or at least vaguely aware that they will someday die. We don't know all of the factors that would allow us to predict in advance why some are aware of it earlier than others. And we also don't know why some kids come into the world more concerned about it. It's probably at the risk of sounding simple-minded. It's probably a complicated interaction between inherited characteristics. We know that there are folks that are more innately prone to anxiety than others at birth. And we also know that generational trauma causes epigenetic changes in the womb.

So there's another thing that might be relevant. And then just the life circumstances that we find ourselves in. The impoverished and folks that tend to be on the downside of being discriminated against. So impoverished outgroups, not surprisingly, tend to be more prone to existential malaise. Because I think there is a connection between the children, the younger they are, the less aware they are of death. When you look at, when you compare it to religion, typically when people get older, it's more likely for them to become and embrace religion or a god or any sort of afterlife, something like that. That typically, at least in my case, and everyone I know as a kid, we're just like heavy metal, you know, fuck religion. That shit's for losers, nerds.

And then when you get older and you have kids, you kind of embrace it more and you kind of understand it more. And I don't know if that's because you're getting older and you're realizing that, you know, your meat sack is going to fail you. It's failing you now. It's going to keep getting worse. You know, this is kind of comfortable, right? Yeah. Getting back to what you were saying, like the dread and the awe, when you're in those states of awe and you realize, like, we have the ability to understand when, we're experiencing these amazing life experiences, we understand there's an equal opposite to that. Nice.

Right? Yes. I don't know if we do, but I think that maybe as odd as it sounds, Danny, I think that's a wonderful point. Yeah, I think the key to psychological well-being. is ultimately based on the capacity to recognize that there's no such thing as the upside without the downside. The downside. I really like how you put it better than me mumbling at this point.

And I don't want to, again, go all academically, but the philosopher Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, you know, who talks about coming to terms with, death, he makes that point. He says, look, at our best, we are really capable of coming to a place where we accept that we're going to die. And we are joyous as a result. He literally says that if we can pull it off, that our lives get to the point where it feels like we're on some ongoing adventure that's perfused with unshakable joy. Yeah, but then he says, yeah, but this is not to imply that you have obliterated anxiety or psychological dis-ease. In fact, quite the contrary, what you have done, they call it the existential. call it living authentically is you are able to ultimately wallow in spontaneous exuberance precisely because you're not simultaneously denying that life will always be sad and there will always

be suffering and yeah part of our well-being is to acknowledge and accept that right now Jordan Peterson is somebody who's talked a lot about you. He's talked a lot about Ernest Becker. And one of the points, the counterpoints he makes to it is that there are a lot worse things than death. The suffering of your children, the suffering of your loved ones. Isn't that way worse than your own death? Have you ever had this talked with Jordan about this? No, we haven't.

So here's where it gets interesting. So Jordan and I go way back. He used to 35 or so years ago declare that we were full of shit at academic conferences. And by the way, that's the way science works. This was never personal. Science does not advance by agreement. If everybody agrees, science is dead. Right, right.

You know, what we need is civil disagreement. Anyway, I lost track of Jordan for a couple of decades. He became a very highly regarded and rightfully so professor at Harvard before he ended up at the University of Toronto. I'm familiar with a lot of his academic work. And he is familiar with what we have done. although again, if we were sitting next to each other, I would encourage him to take a peek at what we've done over the last 20 years or so. Having said that, though, I spent a day with Jordan in Canada right before his book about the 12 rules of life came out. And we had a great day together.

We were both talking heads at a Shakespeare festival. I think they were reading or watching Macbeth, and we were both asked to give our psychodynamic interpretation of what was going on. And it was an awesome day reminding me of how much I enjoyed his company, how provocative are his ideas. And then, Jordan, as you know, got very famous. I don't have shoes and he does. And in part, that's a personal decision.

This is not a pissing match. But we're together and Jordan said, you know, anytime I give a talk, I hold my phone up and I tape myself and then I post it and I have several hundred thousand YouTube followers. And you should do the same. You're also an eloquent bullshitter who uses words with more. than one syllable. And my point, and this is not, I do not intend to sound judgmental here. Jordan, I believe at the time, was interested in becoming known for the ideas that he was advocating for. I'd rather not be known. I want the ideas to be known. And again, I don't have shoes. probably because of that. But anyway, no matter, Jordan, since I've seen him last, he has

spoken often about points of disagreement between his ideas and ours. I like to go the other way and start with what we agree about, which is almost everything in general. All right, we argue based on Ernest Becker that we are fundamentally meaning making entities. All right, we're not the first to say that. Victor Frankel said it. Ernest Becker said it. And so too does Jordan Peterson. That's the main point of the maps of meaning book. Where we disagree is how that is back. accomplished and the range of possible manifestations of meaning and value. All right, back to English translation. Jordan is a staunch advocate for a neoliberal Christian worldview. In other words, he's like we're meaning-making entities and the best

cultural world view is the European Judeo-Christian tradition. So religiously, it would tend to be Christianity. Politically and economically, it would tend to be neoliberal economics. And so Jordan is, if I understand him correctly, saying, look, this is the way that we should be, and that all of these other ways are inferior, malignant, degenerate, manifestations that deviate from what he would claim to be what's best for humanity, or at least what's best for people in our cultural milieu at this particular historical moment. I would respectfully take issue with that claim. And so there's a book called The Dawn of Everything by a recently dead guy called David Graber.

And I don't know if you've ever heard of him. He has some cool books, bullshit jobs, the history of debt. And this is a book that he wrote with another psychologist, David Wendgrove. And the Graber's point, and if Jordan was with us today, I would ask him if he had read this book because Graber's point is that we are very parochial and arrogantly Eurocentric when we look at anthropology and religion and archaeology. And we're ignoring boatloads of other cultural traditions that are at least in principle. possible, perhaps better psychologically and materially than the institutions and the social organizations that Jordan is an ardent proponent of.

In other words, he's saying, look, these are the best ways to be Christian and capitalist is the best, if not the only way to proceed. And I would object to that both in principle as well as practice. It's an empirical issue, ultimately. So I would guess that's where, and Jordan makes some claims about the research, when he says, oh, death is not that terrible, these other things. are more terrible, well, that's empirically not the case. All right, we've asked people, how would you feel if so-and-so was dying? How would you feel if this happens? And the fact

is, is that in our studies, what really impels people to respond in a defensive fashion is an intimation of their own personal mortality. Wow. So, once again, this is where some Sometimes we have to be able to momentarily suspend our belief in common sense. Because I too was riddled with thoughts of death and anxiety when my kids were born. And I too thought that that was worse than me dying. But there's not been any empirical demonstration of that claim, at least that I'm aware of. So anyway, that would be my point. And moreover, and to be silly, and again, I wish that Jordan were sitting right next to me so we could have launch together because this is, I'll come back to what I already said and that I believe needs to start every one of these discussions is we don't disagree about the superordinate psychodynamic principle that we are meaning making creatures.

I believe, though, that there is a wider variety of cultural possibilities. And, moreover, I would argue that capitalism and Christianity are arguably rather unfortunate. And again, here it's almost tough to have these conversations without the capacity to respond. Because on the one hand, there are folks who point out that science and technology, as we know it, are unique products of Western civilization. Yeah. And I believe that to be correct. So now I'm going to piss off everybody that might be listening. There are, like when Steve Bannon says, I'm proud to be white, I think he's proud to be white for the wrong reasons.

But it is, I think, a defensible claim that there are aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West that are responsible for the development of the scientific method and the technological advances that for a lot of people on Earth have made life rather pleasant. Yeah, I think that's true, and no reason to deny that. Yeah, on the other hand, you know, my quarrel with the Judeo-Christian tradition is that it is arrogantly homocentric. We are one of the few groups of people who declare ourselves to be created in God's image, who then puts all of the animals here on earth, and we get to name them. And I tell my students, read Genesis, because God then says, I give Adam and Eve, I give human beings dominion over all that walks, over all that flies, over all that swims. And so here's a view of life that separates humans from nature, declares us to

be superior to it and ultimately creates a situation where life is just a giant buffet table that we partake of in our gluttonous leisure, just piss on the table on our way out. Moreover, there's a British philosopher, a guy named John Gray, and his point is that capitalism is just this, it's Christianity without God. because now instead of eternal life, what you're groping for is infinite wealth. And it is similarly, and this is ultimately even more highly problematic than an arrogantly homocentric religious worldview for two reasons. One is that, and these are familiar arguments, but, you know, one is that a capital-based,

now that's not the same as a market economy, by the way, but a capital-based economy requires infinite growth in order to sustain itself. If people in America only bought what they actually needed, the American economy would collapse by lunchtime. Right. And moreover, there is no point at which individuals can ever consider themselves to be satiated or satisfied. Enough is never enough. So Mary Poppins said, enough is as good as a feast, but I've never seen an American behave like that. You know, Elon Musk is the richest guy in the world.

What's he doing today? Well, trying to make more money. Dido for Bezos. And what Ernest Becker said is, you know, beware of insatiable desires. Everything in nature, enough is enough. I like pizza, but after 12 slices, I've had enough. I like chocolate, 55-gallon drama M&Ms, had enough. You know, fill in the blank, beer, sex, movies, music, there's an upper limit.

but there is no upper limit to people's desire for material wealth. And this has made folks like John Gray point out that we're pursuing the same thing both on heaven and on earth, which is not dying. Yeah. That's heavy. It is heavy. And I say these things, Danny, to be sure we understand each other, I'm not claiming that I have any. I have any privileged, detached position. Right.

I'm saying that I, too, am a respiring, you know, meat puppet, riddled with anxieties that I'm primarily unaware of that are manifested in these kinds of behaviors. I'm not saying these things. Well, no, I am saying this intentionally to just insist that I'm prone to all of these affectations. You know, I can't tell you how many times I've been like lost in the middle and nowhere at night and then I'll reach in my pocket. Ooh, I have some money. I'll reach in my pocket and I'll be comforted by a piece of paper that has no value. in the forest unless you're at a toilet paper. And yet there's just something comforting about being in the presence of money.

Right. Yeah. And again, if you're an American, turn the dollar bill over because on the back it says, in God we trust, demonstrating that money has always had religious connotations. And then there's the little pyramid on the back left side of a dollar bill with an eyeball floating on top of it and look at a dollar the next time you have one and that's the ancient Egyptian symbol of immortality. So even, you know, so when people are like, oh, you're full of crap, you're saying money is just a symbol that we use to exchange goods and services. Yeah,

it's that, but so much more. Right. Going back to Jordan, I think one of the big points that he makes that he likes to make is the difference between equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome, right? And, you know, he thinks that it's important to have equality of opportunity. Yeah. But sort of trying to balance the equality of outcomes is not a good way to run a functioning society. Yeah. And that ties into sort of his disdain for Marxism. I know that can become like a bumper sticker type word.

Again, I'm going to be a dick. he should read Marx, who was a crappy economist, but an amazing psychologist, in my opinion. My point, again, I'm saying this repeatedly, just to emphasize that I would feel much more comfortable in a discussion with Jordan next to us. He doesn't, you know, if we could get in touch with him, maybe he'll come by. Yeah, we'll have some lunch. But my point, and here I would ask if he's read a book by a Harvard philosopher Michael Sandell called the tyranny of merit. And what Jordan and folks who share his views, they're big fans of meritocracy. Yes.

And which is superficially attractive. The idea is that we all are on the starting line together, and then we each have an opportunity to excel, and so let's go ahead and do that. The best stuff rises to the top. There you go. All right, well, two things. One is that if we're going to do that, then he doesn't have any kids, but there's other white people who have these views.

And I was like, hey, let your kid play on your driveway, and I'm going to kidnap them and bring them to someplace and enslave them for 400 years so that we can totally decimate an entire culture. And here we're getting into fuzzy territory, because I'm going with the critical race theory. idea, which is simply truth with a piece of jargon, and that is that there are systemic ways of creating inequitable outcomes either by design or otherwise. And so there's a reason why the average white family has 10 times more wealth than the average black family until 50 years.

You couldn't own property if you were black. You couldn't get a mortgage or a GI Bill for education. And so we have systematically, it's like putting cement necklaces on people and then letting them stand next to other people on the starting line of a race and saying, oh, you're slow. So thing number one, and I'm not saying that I have a way to remedy this. So these are two different questions, acknowledging that there are fundamental inequalities as a result of systemic injustice, that's just a statement of fact. But it doesn't follow from that as to what to do about it, right? And I'm not advocating for any particular program of amelioration. I don't know if reparations are a good idea. I see both the upside and the downside of affirmative action. But so that's one problem,

is I'm not seeing equality of opportunity. So Jordan's saying, oh, I'm a big fan of equality of opportunity. If there really was equal opportunity, then I don't think we should dictate particular outcomes. In other words, in a world that doesn't any longer exist, in the 1970s, when I graduated from college, if you were a white guy and you want to wanted a job, you could read a newspaper. I tell my students, these pieces of paper that has shit in it, and at the back of the newspaper were listed jobs. And if you wanted a job, it would take less than a day to get one. And minimum wage was enough to rent an apartment and get a crappy used car. And if you got an entry-level position, I started as a dishwasher in college, and by the time I

finished working at the Sheridan in a hotel, they were offering me entry to their management training program. In other words, to me, that's the American dream. Everyone who wants to work can work. If you do work, it is possible to be compensated adequately to have a life, which is now what I'm talking about is the average white guy in the 1970s and 80s. And so my point is, if that's the way the world is, then I agree with Jordan and most conservative folks who just say, you get in proportion to the effort that you exert. Let's let that happen. But as John Locke pointed out many, many years ago, the dead Scottish philosopher, that that claim is based on a world of infinite resources.

In other words, what Locke said is that if I want to own a thousand apple trees, that's fine. If you want a thousand apple trees, then you can just go someplace else. And he's writing in the 1860s, and he's saying, oh yeah, England's. kind of all filled up. So if you want to have a lot of stuff, just go to America. There's nobody there. And the people that are there are miserable savages. Well, the fact is, is that they weren't miserable. But back to reality, what the meritocracy guy says, Michael Sandell, is, but that's not the way things actually are. In other words, we live. in a world of limited resources.

Like it doesn't, you can have perfect grades and perfect SAT scores and still get rejected from Harvard and Stanford. And the point that he makes is that we have gotten to the point as a society where we don't even value people unless they're the absolute best at what they do. right so basically if you're rich who cares you got to be the richest person if you're pretty you have to be the prettiest person if you're an olympic runner you have to win a gold medal or else you you know nobody knows who comes in second according to this argument well what sandal said is well when we live in this kind of society where we tell our kids, if you tried hard, you can be just as rich

as Bill Gates or Oprah, or if you wanted to, you could be just as pretty as the female models on the cover of Cosmopolitan that are actually 20% thinner than it is possible for a human being to be, then we create a situation where every person in America, if they're not the best at what they do, is either miserable or enraged. And think about it. That is the culture we now live in. The rate of depression in America is 10 times higher than it was in the aftermath of World War two. Our life expectancy is lower. We're having like literally aggressive confrontations in parking lots, ending with guns over things that used to be considered relatively minor indiscretions. So to get back to your overall question, yeah, I would take respectful issue with this idea

of, yeah, that people have equal opportunity, first and foremost, and that where actually I think they are overstating the case about insisting on identical outcomes. That's never been the progressive point of view, so much as a state of affairs that allows everybody the relatively equivalent latitude to best develop, themselves yeah I think Jordan he also talks from more of a personal perspective to being at the university he was at I think he talks a lot about like children getting their kids getting

enrolled in colleges and like the scale sort of going the other way right like taking a white kid with straight A's or a black or brown kid with bees and they would take the kid who had a different skin color to sort of balance those scales but I guess his claim is that they go too far. I think, again, perhaps. This is where I think we've got to be nuanced. Right, yes, absolutely. Honestly, and that's why, yeah, I'm being annoying,

but I'm going to blast Jordan a message and say hi. See if he's up for a casual conversation about these matters. And John Locke is fascinating, too. Some of the stuff you talked about about John Locke really blew my mind, especially when it comes to how you integrate some of the capitalism into politics and how money kind of controls everything from corporations influencing the policies that are implemented on us. And it all comes back to consumerism. Yeah. So now Locke wouldn't have framed it that way, even though I agree with what you're saying. Locke would be mortified by what is now happening because he really was, well, in my opinion, a genius and ultimately was trying to produce a radical transformation that could. gave all of us who are here today most of the basic individual rights that we collectively enjoy. In other words, he was responding to the prevailing mentality at the time, which is that

top-down leadership by divinely ordained autocrats. And he was like, that's backwards. that the unit of analysis is the individual. And what he was trying to do was, in my opinion, to create a situation that shifted power and autonomy to each of us as individuals, noting that we are individuals who exist collectively in a civil society. And, you know, it's a little long-winded, but I still, you know, I find it a compelling tale because he says, well, you know, in a state of nature, there were no societies. There were just individuals. And we were just all trying to stay alive.

And so basically he's like, well, all right, and there's no private property in nature. Right, right, right. This is the whole creation of the state. Yeah, and I love this stuff. And he's like, okay, so then, well, what are my rights? And he's like, well, I certainly have a right to stay alive. God would agree, and so would Darwin. Right.

And in order to stay alive, I have to consume. There's the consumer thing, which is not intrinsically bad. And then he says, look, nature is here for all. of us. It's common property. It's not private property. But it becomes private property the minute I exert effort in pursuit of my well-being. I see an apple tree. I walk over, I grab an apple. When I grab it, it's not everybody's apple. It's my apple. And Locke goes on and he says, hey, I can have as many apples as I want. As long as I don't steal them from other people or let them rot.

All right. And then he's like, okay, but think about it. You're hungry. There's an apple tree a mile away. And then there's just a guy 10 meters away with a bunch of apples. What's easier? Walking a mile in the heat or grabbing a rock and cracking his fucking head? And Locke said it is just human nature.

that we will transgress. But if I go over and crack a guy's head, well, then his family will get some oil maybe and dump it on my village and incinerate the whole neighborhood. His point is that we are incapable of rationally abjudicating conflicts, and that puts human beings in a state of nature in a constant state of war. And so, what Locke argued is that we reluctantly relinquish the absolute freedom of nature in order to become members of a civil society. Yes. We, we give up the freedom to crack somebody's head if they've cracked our head. We defer to the government to keep us safe and to abjudicate disputes. Right. And in Locke's view, that's the only function of government to protect my

property, including my family, and from domestic turmoil or foreign invasion. And anything else is inappropriate. And that's why conservatives are big fans of small government. Back to the money thing, though, because he's like, hey, property is good. I can have as much as I want. And everything was great until the invention of money. Because before money, there'd come a point where you had enough apples, you had enough trees, you had enough cows. But for Locke, once there was money, then here you had this thing that doesn't rot, right? That's what makes gold unique.

Everything in nature, Locke says, is transient and decays. gold is perpetual. And what he argued is that this allows us to accumulate money. And he says, I can have as much as I want without harming anybody else. Moreover, he says people are different. He uses the word industry. All that means is some of us are smarter, some of us are not lazy.

And he says, well, if people vary, then it makes sense that over time, some of us are going to be richer than others. And that's a good thing. So for luck, inequality is natural and it's good because we need the achievements of the occasional unique individual in order to make life better forever. Right. And now again, there are lots of aspects of that argument that are quite compelling. And yet, there are an equal number of them that I regard as problematic. And I suspect John Locke would, too, if he were here today. because again, all of his ideas about the appropriateness of unlimited access to private property is based on the assumption of infinite resources. So how does that translate, in your mind, that concept to where we are today in our society? Yeah. Well, I see us as literally demented hamsters on the...

the exercise wheel of life. Because where, and let me back up and just say that our argument is that what motivates people to buy infinite amounts of stuff and have ever larger piles of money is death denial. Right. So there's this old-timer dude who is at Tennessee Williams in a play called Cat on. a hot tin roof where the head guy, he just says the human animal is a beast that dies. And if he's got money, he buys and he buys and he buys. And I think one of the reasons why he buys everything that he could buy is that in the back

of his mind, he has the crazy idea that one of his purchases will be life everlasting. right so the idea here is that the reason why i need more and always better is that it has something to do with existential concerns now again you might say well i don't believe that that's where the research comes in yes so when people are reminded that they're going to die and you ask them how much money would you need to be rich they say that they need more right when you ask them at how what they would spend their money on, it's mainly luxury items that confer status, like expensive cars and watches. When people are reminded that they're going to die, they're willing to pay more money to have like a star named after them in the sky.

when people are reminded that they're going to die and you ask him to draw a picture of a coin, it's bigger. They draw it bigger as if money's bigger when death is on your mind. And then Danny, the one that I find, we didn't do this work. My buddy Tom and his colleagues in Poland did, but they just, they gave some people a stack of money and asked them to count it. And then they gave other people just a stack of pieces of paper and asked them to count it. And then they took the money in the paper away, and then they measured death anxiety. And what they found was just having money in your hand reduced death anxiety. Wow.

That is how potent. So when we say money talks and bullshit walks, money is power. Yes. It is in part because, yeah, when you have money, you can eat and go to the doctor. but when you have money, it's like this magic thing shining in your pocket, protecting you from the vagaries of life. Now, these studies, were these only done on Americans, or did you do it across multiple cultures? These have been done across cultures. Really? Was there any disparity between different cultures or different? Good question. That has not been assessed. So that would

require that we look at people from different cultures in the same study. Yeah, we do need to do that. Because it seems like Americans value money more than anyone, not any other country or any other place in the world, right? Like, I think you've spoken to this before. This is correct. Yeah, we, um, our values are based on, on that, on, on money and status and not on, not on values or integrity.

Is what has happened, unfortunately. So again, to be fair, there was a time, uh, where, uh, we could have, money and ethics. But not right now. I mean, as the Michael Sandel guy points out in his book, The Tyranny of Merit, we're in a world right now where the average young person thinks that it's fine to cheat, like on exams in school, thinks that fraud in corporate settings is a legitimate way of getting ahead. We are in a world right now that I do believe to be somewhat sociopathically individualistic. Yes. In that we really do tend to value the achievements of individuals

without adequately recognizing that even the most distinguished individuals are products of the social and cultural milieu that produce them. And moreover, being great is great, but how about just being decent? Yeah, I think we have gotten to the point where we, we now undervalue some of the characteristics that I used to be more proud of as an American. Because we could be all for individual development at the same time that we recognize our dependence on other individuals. we can also do a much better job at making people realize that it is okay to be average. The average person is, after all, average.

Now, again, I'm sounding like father time, but when I was a kid, everybody got to play Little League baseball, even if you were terrible. Yeah, that's no longer the case. When I was in college and I got a bee in organic chemistry, I was so happy that we got inebriated in my dorm room and we went to the football field and ripped down the goalposts and brought them into the room. But now if a student gets a bee, they disembowl themselves in the parking lot. I think we have created a situation, frankly, where our values are not generally attainable for the average individual, which is a real. recipe for psychological despair. You know, it's interesting too. I was just a week ago I was in New York City with my friend Julian Dory who's got a podcast up there and he uh, you know, we were both walking around

noticing like just the the wide variety of people that exist in New York City. Like, right? It's like, it's known for being one of the most, the first major city of America, right? When you think of America, first place people think of is New York City, the I, or the, the, the statue of liberty, the empire state building. But it's like, when you look around, there's no, like, if you think about what does it mean to be an American, the difference between Israelis or people that are Jewish or people that are African or whatever it may be from any part of the world, any part of the world compared to here is here there are more individuals it's more individualism here than anywhere else absolutely so that was a terrible way of no it was i think a really critically important point

we are a more heterogeneous society because yeah we're a popery of all of these different groups and that were only like 200 something years old that's correct And, yeah, I mean, yeah, I like how you put it. I mean, this is just an anecdote, but I was in New York City on September 11th, 2001 when the World Trade Center got knocked down. And I was at the time a professor at Brooklyn College. And Brooklyn College is rather unique because white people, at least when I was there around 2000, 2001. It was a very diverse school.

So you had your white people. And so let's say Italians, there were Jewish people. I'm not going to call them white because they were just begrudgingly declared white in the middle of the last century. The definition of white has shifted over time. But anyway, forget about that. But in the lunchroom at Brooklyn College, before 2001, yeah, there'd be the corner with the Jewish kids, the corner with the black kids, the corner with the Russian kids. Interesting. And you're right, they would be like micro-tribes.

Yeah. However, after, for a few days, after September 11th, they opened up the auditorium just to allow people who wanted to come in and. sit. It's hard to describe what it was like to watch the building melt while my students were telling me that their relatives were in it calling them saying they were hearing on the loudspeaker that everything was fine. So we're watching the thing on fire and we're like, it's not fine, it's not fine. But anyway, it was clearly people were traumatized, but I'll never forget what it was like for a few days where the tribes were shattered and we just became Americans. I know it sounds a little corny. No, it doesn't sound corny. But it was amazing to momentarily be able to overcome

the understandable cultural foundations and embrace our common identity as Americans. And, And moreover, in the French newspaper Le Monde, the headline the next day was, we are all Americans. Now, this wasn't to suggest that we should all become Americans and start playing baseball. It was just the point of let's momentarily unite and let's overcome what are ultimately secondary differences. And this is what's hard about being an American because the whole idea of America at its best is that I can be a Chinese American. I am Chinese, proud of it, if I was. But I'm first and foremost an American, you know, African American, Asian American, Italian American. in. Yeah, and I'm drifting a little bit, Danny, but I think one of the current difficulties right now,

the divisiveness and polarization is that we can't even acknowledge that people we disagree with are fellow Americans. It's a vulnerable position for us to be in. Do you think it's that existential dread and threat of death? that what happened on 9-11 is what brought us all together and created. And is that because if you think of other cultures that had to deal with crazy existential threats, Israel, great example. We never had that. And 9-11 kind of was the first time that we got to experience that.

Yeah. So that probably is well put. Yes. And it's interesting. Also, you talk about George Bush and his approval ratings before and after September 11th. which is fascinating. Yeah, just again. And what I like about, you know, I'm kind of an egghead, but yeah, these are just, quote, facts. That's another thing about America. Two plus two is four. Some things, there's no alternative facts. But George W. Bush had the lowest approval rating

in the history of presidential politics two days before September 11th, three weeks later, after he said, we will rid the world of evil, and I believe God has chosen me to lead the country during this perilous time, he had the highest approval rating. And we did dozens of studies where we showed that people, Americans, they didn't like George Bush, in a benign state of mind. But if we reminded them that they were going to die, they liked him a lot more. So in 2004, John Kerry, ran against George Bush for president. And in control conditions, the participants liked John Kerry more than George Bush. But if we reminded them that they were going to die, they liked Bush more than Kerry. And again, a lot of your, a lot of young people weren't around then. But four days before the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry was actually winning in the polls. And then Osama bin Laden put out a video saying he was going to attack us again. And some people argued that that created the death reminder that enhanced people's opinions of Bush.

You know, fast forward to more recently, same thing with Donald Trump. In 2015, we demonstrated that Americans did not care for Donald Trump. Trump. This is before he became the Republican candidate for president, except if you reminded them they were going to die first. Then they liked them more and said they were more likely to vote for him. And when Hillary Clinton became the Democratic opponent, we found that Americans liked Clinton more than Trump, except if we reminded them they were going to die. then they like Trump a lot more. I fast forward to 2020.

In our studies, white Americans in a control condition, they like Joe Biden more than Donald Trump. But if they were reminded they were going to die first, then they like Trump more than Biden. Let's be clear. This is not to suggest that your political preferences are determined solely by existential anxieties. On the other hand, these are amazing studies that momentary alterations in psychological conditions are able to nudge you in one direction or another. And so back to politics just for a moment. But there's a reason why Steve Bannon, who is Donald Trump's one of his closest advisors, they make no pretense of arguing about political principles. Right.

Right. Steve Bannon says, our enemy is not the Democrats. Our enemy is the media, so we're going to flood the zone with shit. That's a quote. And then he says, what gets people to the polls is fear and anger. All right. And so the way I see it, what's happening right now. Now, part of this, the pandemic has certainly aroused existential anxieties.

so is the prospect of the earth melting and the global economy imploding on itself. So the point that we make these days is that Americans are saturated with death reminders, whether they're aware of it or not. And this in turn increases their support for ideological demagogues. I call Trump-Arange Hitler. and I call him that because it's the same underlying psychodynamic. It was Hitler who said he was going to make Germany great again. Did he actually say that?

Yes, he did. It was Hitler who used a lie about the Jews being responsible for Germany losing World War I. 20 years later, he used that same big lie. And it was Hitler who said, if you're going to lie, go big. If you tell a big lie often enough, people will believe you. Well, here we are in America in the same situation. Perhaps the world's greatest liar, Donald Trump, perpetuating an obvious falsehood. And by the way, even the people of goodwill could disagree.

Some people might say, oh, I do think that the election was rigged. But we should agree, at least in principle, that the first, folks who are running for election are not the ones who should arbitrate that. In other words, there's a reason why they have referees in sports. You don't get to call it, you know, you're not able to play on a team and call things the way that you see them. But anyway, back to the point, we're in the same situation where we've got an ideological demagogue riding a lie in order to pursue political power by keeping people in a perpetual state of existential anxiety. And studies have shown that that's exactly what's happening. And so a few years ago, there was a study showing that

support for Donald Trump in America is correlated with death rates in different communities. Right. And so, you know, basically Trump is lying and people's dying. And what's ironic is that he's killing his own people in some ways, and that's increasing death anxiety that in turn fortifies support for his candidacy. And that is, by the way, what some people argue are the psychodynamic underpinnings of fascism. It is you have powerful autocratic leaders teaming up. with corporate interests to take advantage of a population by keeping them in a constant state

of fear and rage. And this is by no, and to just make an important point, this is not a condemnation of the intelligence or character of the average person who supports Donald Trump. As I think we were saying earlier, I think most folks are kind and decent and in the average setting we have more in common than otherwise. I think so too. Do you think it's accurate and or a good idea to say that Donald Trump is the same thing as Hitler? Because I don't think he was quite the same thing. Yeah, he's actually working faster and getting shit done better. No, it is the same thing. They are both malignantly narcissistic sociopaths with delusions of paranoia and grandeur. They are both singularly devoted to maintaining power.

You know, I think that, and yeah, it's unfair to compare anybody to Hitler. Right. I get that. It's equally unfair, however, to not notice the state. Daggering commonalities. Hitler was elected without Russian interference. And it took him several years in the 1930s to undermine the judiciary, to completely overwhelm the press to replace able civil servants with synchophantus cronies.

Trump has done all of that. You know, so let's just look at the various indictments. And my point also didn't, I don't mind being annoying or political. If you're an American and you're a fan of democracy and you don't vote, fuck you. If you do vote and you do so with a grotesque ignorance of the issues in question, fuck you. And if you're unfamiliar with American history, I'll give another fuck you, because it was George Washington, as well as the founding fathers, that they were against political parties. They said that once we have parties, then we're not going to be on the same team anymore.

and we're going to get into domestic conflicts, and then that's going to be a ripe opportunity for an ideological demagogue to be elected and to ransack democracy. Well, that's precisely what we are now witnessing in my estimation. All right, moreover, anyone who has an opinion about President Trump and who hasn't read the Mueller report, fuck you. Because even if you don't have time to read the report, how about the three-page executive summary? If you don't have time to read that, read the entire sentence that Bill Barr mangled when he protected Trump by leaving out the part where Mueller suggested that he was indeed guilty of obstructing justice and proposed that there be a civil trial thereafter. All right.

Anyway, on top of that, if you've not read any of the indictments, then how are you in a position to be a responsible citizen? What does this say? DOJ under Barr wrongly withheld parts of Russia probe memo. Thank you. Because he took a sentence that was extraordinarily damning and he only read half of it. And that was before the report was released. But anyway, ditto for the recent indictments.

Maybe people of goodwill could disagree, but shouldn't we disagree after being informed? than 5% of Americans have actually read the indictments. And so anyway, my point is that we as Americans have been grotesquely irresponsible. Let's stop blaming the leaders and let's step up. It's not only our right to vote, it's our responsibility, but again, it's our responsibility to do so in an educated fashion. I wonder about these indictments and I wonder what the thinking is behind them, especially when it comes to like what they're doing in my view with these indictments is they're making him an underdog. And I think these indictments and making him more of an underdog and if he gets a fucking mugshot, I think they're just handing him the presidency.

Yeah, they're not actually. They're handing them the nomination. The presidency in the absence of voter suppression is highly unlikely. And I just say that based on electoral college politics and recent polls. He is unlikely to win a general election, especially in Georgia right now. You know, it comes down, and again, this is, we're getting political, but we're not a democracy. see, we already know that the next election's going to be decided by three or four states. They even know the particular neighborhoods.

You know, if it were just the popular vote, there's no doubt that Trump would lose by 10 to 20 million votes, no matter who he ran against. So that's not. Oh, yeah. He lost the first one by 3 million. He lost the next one by 7 million. the amount of effort that's now being devoted in states like Texas, Tennessee, Florida, to ensure that the people are restricted from voting is extraordinarily comparable to what happened after the Civil War during the Reconstruction. So in South Carolina, for example, right after the Civil War, there were African Americans elected to Congress. There were like 80,000 people that voted, like 10 years later, there were like 800 black people who voted in South Carolina.

I guess when you start hanging people and burning. Republican, too, right? Yeah. Lincoln. That's right. But the point is that, no, I don't think that what's happening now will ensure a victory in a general election. Also, it's Donald Trump who is portraying him. self as a victim. You know, he is a very, he is an evil genius in my estimation. He's a moron,

first of all, intellectually. And no, that's a declarative statement. His professor at the Wharton School of Business, where he said he finished first in his class, said 30 years ago, he's the stupidest student that he ever had. But he's a genius appealing to brain stem. Yes, exactly. He knows how to schmooze. He knows how to get people to like him. And he is like him. If you got in a room with him, he could get you to like him. Absolutely. I like them. I come from the Bronx. He comes from Queens. He's a likable asshole. But he's also an extraordinarily dangerous one. And he's the one. Remember, he declared that he was running for president in anticipation of being indicted. Most presidential races don't start this early.

So basically, he's got it backwards. He's saying, oh, you're indicting me every time my, you know, you think I'm going to win. That's when you break out another indictment. But the indictments, you know, maybe they should have happened sooner. Some people. They speculating the timing of them. Yeah, they probably should have. But I blame all that on Kevin McCarthy and what's his face, Mitch McConnell. They're the ones. Listen to them the day after January 6th when they said Trump is responsible.

Right. And he should have been impeached and convicted at that time. And if that had happened, we wouldn't be in the mess that we now are. And to your point about like the overwhelmingly narcissistic sociopathic traits, I also believe that that is very much a thing with a lot of people in politics, especially high level of politics. And business. And business, yes. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are way up their narcissism and sociopathy. Dick Cheney.

Suggesting that a touch of those, right? Remember you said earlier, Danny, and it was a great point. We're on a continuum. And it could be, and some evolutionary types have pointed out, that there may be times where we're well served by a somewhat narcissistic, maybe a tad sociopathic kind of leader. it's when we get to the extremes because there's no moral compass that underlies any of that. Everything we've just been talking about, is that sort of encompassing your, I don't know if you started writing it, but you talked about something called left or right is beside the point. Yeah, I never did that.

So I would like to write a book called Why Left and Right or Both Beside the Point. And I haven't done it yet, although I've been blubbering about it at times. And my point, Danny, is that just like political parties, we've reduced this to like a worldwide wrestling federation thing. We're like, oh, you're a liberal. So if I lean left, that means I'm leaning away from the right. and and it's like a tug of war, right? Yes. And it's like, oh, you know, you're the all-encompassing repository of evil.

No, you're like anal cranial fusion. And my point is that that's an extraordinarily absurd way to look at this, right? First of all, political orientation is in large measure genetically acquired. All right. So if you take identical twins and you separate them at birth and raise them in different parts of earth, if one twin is conservative, so will the other be. Really? It's not identical, but it's what's called a heritability quotient that goes from zero to one. And the heritability quotient for political orientation is somewhere around 0.4 or 0.5. And all that means is this, that if we had a room full of people that about half of the variation in the group of politics can be accounted for genetically.

So let's just think about that for a moment. If there's, if some people are conservative and others are liberal and it's in our genes, not saying there's a conservative gene, it could be a combination of them, doesn't it suggest that they are both adaptive? perhaps in different ways? Does that make sense? In other words, why would there still be variations on both sides of the spectrum that if they didn't perhaps serve some kind of evolutionary function? So there's a guy in Israel, his name's Glead Hirschberger, and he's at the interdisciplinary center in Herzliah. And he wrote a paper with his colleagues that I find very compelling. And it's like, why can't we look at it as if

we need everybody? In other words, and we may have been talking about this earlier, but if we were all conservative, we'd be sitting on the floor of a cave, you know, literally, because by definition, conservatives cling to tradition. If we were all liberal, we would be doing stupid shit. I be like, oh, I have an idea. Let's put an asshole on my forehead. Or what about the electric spoon? And we would be summarily just wandering around doing random stuff, ignoring past experiences. And so I like people who say, wouldn't the best kind of society be some kind of sweet spot where we had both? both liberal and conservative folks. And what Galad has pointed out, and this is based on research,

is that in general, when we look at intergroup conflict, that, so conservatives are better than liberals at detecting external threats. You know, because liberals are like, fuck, you know, everything's fine. Kumbaya. Kumbaya, let's do five.

K-rays and t-shirts. And conservatives at the high end are paranoid and afraid of everything. But it's functional to be afraid sometimes. So conservatives are better at detecting threat. Liberals are better at negotiating peaceful conflicts or peaceful resolutions of conflicts. And so in a functioning society, wouldn't we want to have both? Yes. Don't we need some people that are saying we're going to be fucked? Pay attention. Right, right.

And don't we need others that can step in and do a Gandhi or mother Teresa? And my point, and the older I get, the more convinced I am of this, is that, yeah, we're thinking about it too individualistically when we're like, oh, I'm going to. I'm liberal. That's good. You're conservative. That's bad. I think we're better off accepting that we exist on a continuum. And we need each other. And we need each other. That I just, that's my current preoccupation. That's fascinating. I love that. Yeah, I do love it, Danny. I really do because right now all I see is on both sides, how are we going to get rid of the damn progressives or what am I going to do with these trailer park people with their mega hats and it's like no because basically yeah basically we need each other right and at our best

as you put it earlier when I see it in many public settings just folks cheerfully engaged with each other I'm like, you know, again, it is corny and simple-minded. I think a lot of it has to do with communication. Absolutely. Technology. Communication and connection. Yes. And literally a direct connection between humans.

Not through Twitter. Yeah. Honestly. And this brings us to another uplifting point about, we talked about, we talked about, we about this before we started, but who was the guy who predicted our civilization would collapse by 2025? Yeah, this is Peter Turchin. Peter Turchin. Yeah, so he wrote a book called End Times, and he was a professor at the University of Connecticut, and is now at Oxford in England. And I'm just becoming familiar with his work. He is an ecologist by trade, and he studies how societies collapse

and what we might do to forestall or at least deflect a bit. Yeah, awesome. There we go. Yeah. And so his point is, and it's all based on math models of a study of over 100 societies. Wow. Yeah. And I like that he starts out by saying, I'm not, it's not a political argument.

What he's insisting is that we can predict. dict mathematically when a society is going to collapse. And he argued 20 years ago that the collapse of American society is inevitable. And the argument is based on a couple of things going on. But the main thing is he talks, first of all, about an overabundance of cultural elites. So he's like, look, one thing is he's like all societies are hierarchical. You know, stop being like Walt Disney and knocking people for being organized in a bureaucratic fashion. And that, and it's, there are going to be people that are richer than others.

And he's basically, well, that's the way it has always. been. But then he says, yeah, but there are certain times historically where the, and he describes it metaphorically as like a game of musical chairs. He's like, look, there's only one president still. You know, there's only 50 senators, but there's a whole lot more people that want to go to Harvard. And so in the old days, there weren't that most of the admissions to these schools were all legacy. You know, you had to be white. You had to be Protestant. Well, now there's all kinds of folks clamoring for admission, but there's still the same amount of elite positions.

And what Turchin said is what that does is to create a host of disobeyed. affected wannabes. And so, and that that's where a lot of populist movements start. And so he points out, if you look at what's going on right now, you know, you've got Donald Trump, you know, proclaiming himself, you know, one of the people. No, but he's not one of the people. You know, his dad gave him a million dollars when he was still in diapers. He went to pen. Ted Cruz. Do you know where he went to school? I have no idea. Princeton. All right. What's his face? Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri. He went to Stanford. DeSantis, Ron DeSantis. He went to Yale and Harvard. The guy who's the senator in Louisiana, I think his name is Kennedy. Anyway, he went to Oxford.

In other words, these people that are pretending that they're, you know, spraying cheese whiz on a cracker down on a 12 pack of beer in the trailer park that are leading these populist revolts. They're not really working class people. They just want to take over the power. It's all optics. It's all optics. All right. So that's one thing that Church and says often starts the decomposition of societies is when there's too many people, for positions of power.

But more understandable. And then he says at the same time that that's happening. So he's like you got a lot of elites that are disappointed. But then he's like, yeah, but then what's really happening are rich corporate interests sucking the lifeblood out of the poor. All right. So America peaked around 1970 something. in the aftermath of World War II, because of the New Deal, which wouldn't happen if rich oligarchs didn't accept a higher tax rate.

All of that changed the day that Ronald Reagan was elected president. He ripped the solar panels off the White House. Ivan Boski convicted felon, said greed is good. What good is the moon if you can't buy or sell it? And until then, as wealth rose in America, so did minimum wage and so did the income of the average American, the average white American. The rising tide lifts all boats. But that changed in 1980. Since Reagan's presidency adjusted for inflation, the average working class wage.

age has declined, whereas the average CEO in America now makes in a day what their employees make in a year. And the last time that the richest 50 people on Earth owned half of Earth or more was in the Gilded Age just before the Depression. So anyway, what Turchin says is what happens when the rich get too greedy is that the poor get miserable. Right? They get to the point where there's not enough hours in the day to work at Walmart, which by the way, has more part-time workers than anyone on earth so they don't have to pay them benefits. So anyway, you're at a point where it is not physically possible to survive on minimum wage. And people then get angry.

they get depressed. Their life expectancy goes down. And this is the point where the Hitler's and the Trump's and the Mussolini's and the guy in Brazil and the guy in Hungary, this is where the fascists want to bes tend to arise because they come into power in order to deflect the anger and despair of the masses in pursuit of maintaining the financial interests of the rich. And he calls that a wealth pump. And again, without any politics or judgment, he's just saying this is the way it is. How specifically does it collapse? He says that, there you go, you are awesome, Danny. No, because what he says is, I want to be really mathematical. And what I can tell you is that when the discrepancy between wealth gets to a certain level that collapse is inevitable, what I can't tell you is how long it will take, what form it will take, and whether or not people in power at the time, will notice what's happening, and consider

doing something to address the underlying concerns. And so he gives historical examples in England hundreds of years ago, and I'm not a historian, where he's like, oh, well, here in one century, the shit hit the fan, and then there was a civil war for 200 years. But then he's like, oh yeah, but in this other time, the king realized that maybe it'd be better if everybody got fed. And so they tweak the way that resources are distributed to address the anger and fear and material deprivation in a way that restores some kind of social equilibrium. Now, again, this is not a Marxist diatribe, because what Turchin is saying is that societies come and go. They all collapse eventually.

Right. And so what we need to do is to think about what we're going to do or not. But what it looks like we're doing now is if anything accelerating. the rate of disintegration by increasing the transfer of wealth from the public to the few. Right. And again, that's not a political statement. You know, no one disputes that the tax cuts from the Trump administration were largely devoted to the richest Americans.

Right. And that that is responsible for a budget. about a quarter of the current debt. But a lot of the problems that I think of when we're talking about this is I don't think of necessarily like policies like tax cuts for the rich. I think of, for example, what's going on now? What do we just, the government just gave like a trillion, a bazillion dollars to fight the war in Ukraine. But then we have homeless people in every major city like all over the place. Like, like whose fault is that?

What is that, what is the, what is responsible for that being able to happen in the country? I, look, my rap to be annoying is let's all look in the mirror. We are responsible. So I can't, there's a literature about this and we'll talk and I may have to send you some stuff. But basically that argument, which is a, it's traditionally. conservative one. We're pissing away our money in Ukraine. The argument is that if we weren't sending Ukraine a trillion dollars, we'd be feeding poor Americans. And in Psychobaboball, that's what's called a zero-sum argument, that anything that you're giving to somebody, you're taking away

from something else. Right. Right. This is a very strong, um, belief of conservative Americans. So one of the reasons why they are so hostile to any effort to foster equality is that they perceive that anything that black people get is being taken away from them. It's factually incorrect. In other words, white Americans receive much more in the way of welfare than do African Americans. Really? Oh, absolutely. So we need to, and moreover, rich Americans, they get much more in tax breaks than poor Americans get in what are declared as handouts. See, one thing that is important that I've learned from political scientists is that there's a difference when somebody gives you something. Yeah, it's a handout, right? So food stamps, you pour. bastard, you're grabbing that. But it's no less of a handout when I get a shit ton of money as a deduction for the interest that I pay on a mortgage. Right, right. Well, that's a,

that's a prop for the rich. Tax deferred retirement accounts. That's a prop for the rich. People that have minimum wage. So the point, though, is that, um, the point, though, is that, um, that it's not that if you give something to one person, you're taking it away from another. Heather McPhee. Right. It's not taken, like, just because we gave trillions of dollars to another country for a war, doesn't mean that if we didn't do that, all the poor people would get that money. They still probably wouldn't get that money.

But so then why not treat them as separate problems and address them accordingly? We still pay farmers to not grow food in America. It's just hypocritical, I guess. It is. But yes, but we can. That's where I'm a fan of democracy. In other words, you know, Lyndon Johnson comes in and he has this idea, the great society. And this is where we get all these efforts, head start, food stamps.

And the effort was to give everybody a bit of a boost. And I think we've lost a lot of those efforts along the way. I kind of forgot what I was ranting about there, though. Yeah. So we were talking about the collapse of society. Yeah. Okay. So back to collapsing.

Yeah. All right. So basically, so you got too many people wanting to be president. and all of the elite wannabes, the Ted Cruz's, they then become your little mini-fascists, trying to rouse the people. Meanwhile, the people are getting miserable because the rich are getting richer. Look what's happening right now. Have you noticed that what, do you know what right to work laws are?

I don't think so. Okay, so they're in all the Republican states, and those are laws designed to destroy unions. and eradicate minimum wage. So they're saying, we want to give you the freedom to work. So no more minimum wage. Right now, there's like 12-year-olds working at McDonald's and stuff. So the point, though, is that we got, there's basically things are just miserable. So you've got people getting more miserable, the rich are getting richer,

and the anger and resentment is being directed at your scapegoat de jure. So the Germans blame the gypsies and the Jews. Yes. The Americans blame whatever. The negrottnus horde storming the border, the Islamic terrorists, the Chinese raping us and so on. And so basically, if I understand Turchin, his point is that what makes things very difficult in the moment is it's very hard to see what's going on, except like you say, well, what might we do?

Yeah, in my opinion, what we might do is to step back and think about what might help. So, again, to be particular and at the risk of sounding somewhat political, we're the only industrialized country on earth where health care is not, it's a commodity. It's not a right. So we're the only ones who say, hey, if you want insurance, it's like a car. You know, you just buy it. Every other country actually provides it. And we're an anomaly here because basically historically, every European country right after women get to vote, it doesn't take more than a few decades before there's universal health care, free education, much more care throughout the life course and then in retirement. So I guess my point would be, yeah, we used to vote about that stuff. And, you know, and so, and there was a moment when people voted in ways that were consistent with what their interests appeared to be. Right. In other words, when I was your age in the 1960s and 70s, let's say, or whatever, there are any work, most working class white people and black people for that matter,

they would vote for Democrats because it was Lyndon Johnson saying Social Security good. And food stamps, good, head start, good. and right now as we were talking about earlier, I think we're in the ironic situation of people being galvanized to support leaders who are on record as proposing to make matters worse for them. So I'd rather be wrong about all of this. Yeah, I hope you are. Yeah. But at the very least, if we are in a state of societal decomposition, I hope that these kinds of not to be naive, But hopefully these kinds of conversations are at least, even if it's a preliminary

stimulant to think about some of this stuff. Yeah. And another one of these polarizing topics that these politicians like to cling on to is the climate change thing. There's no nuance in the conversation. It's just based on camp. I think there was an empirical poll done or a study. done on people who believe that humans are contributing to climate change people who don't.

And you can basically, you can figure it out on what their political party is. You can figure out what their belief is solely based on their political party. Yeah, but that's only since the 1970s. So we have national parks because of Teddy Roosevelt is a Republican. And he put them aside on the grounds that we needed to conserve. The Environmental Protection Agency was, in the Nixon administration, another Republican. It was only around 1980 or so. In the 1980s or so, you could not predict by political party. And now you can. And my point is that what that suggests is that it has become an ideological position void of rational cogitation as you proposed. Right. There's so much nuance when it comes to that. Like I've had many people on the podcast

who study ancient civilizations and like the ancient Egypt and the pyramids and stuff like that. And these people that have done these ice core samples where they drill down miles into the ice cores and they figure out like the flux. Are you familiar with like the younger dryus impact hypothesis? how there's been these crazy fluctuations and heating and cooling. But that's true that we've been in much hotter climates and much colder climates. But at the same time, you can't say that humans don't affect the climate. Correct. We do affect the climate.

They're both true. Yeah. So, yeah. People don't like that. Important. Yes, we don't like nuance, especially when we're in a sense. state of distress. Right. And yet that's one we most need it. Yes. There you go. And there's a book called the Ministry for the Future. I don't know if you've ever heard of that one, but it's a science

fiction book. And it was basically, anyway, it's a guy named Kim Stanley Robinson, I think. Yeah. And his view It's kind of like you said, can't we step back and just acknowledge that things are rather complicated? Right. I like your point. I've been learning from some folks about these just indigenous histories where they used to have like these apocalyptic narratives. And archaeologists or anthropologists would say, wow, the Native Americans, they must have been doing too much peyote. And then we realized, no, these were narratives that arose during times of extraordinary climactic stress. So it's clearly true that we've almost been wiped out before.

Right. There's no doubt about that. Yeah, what makes this different, as I understand it, is that the last time the Earth got 10 degrees hotter, it wiped out 90%. of the life on earth, and it took 50 million years to recover. This was like 270 million years ago. Right. Although I probably botched every detail, and someone will let us know. But that's the point is that, yeah, things come and go. And the coming and going is now, I think, almost impossible. to understand without accepting that we're complicit. Right.

Moreover, I like some of the arguments, Danny, we're very, very nuanced people, just point out that there's kind of an asymmetry because you could say let's just do nothing, or you could say we better do something because the outside. Odds are, it may be that if we do nothing, we're, quote, fine, but the danger of obliterating ourselves is much higher than if we err in the other direction. Right now is an interesting time, too, when it comes to this topic, because right now, it's like we're the closest we've ever been to the Cold War, where we have this threat between Russia and the United States, the two biggest nuclear powers in the world.

We don't know when a nuke's going to go off or when what country is going to set off a tactical nuke and where we've come technologically today, you know, I hope I'm optimistic that that's not going to happen and we've kind of evolved past that. But then like, you know, I'm also interested in the technology side of it. I know you talk to Lex. I don't know what he said to you specifically about that. But like with the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning and like chat GPT and stuff like that, when we start to create consciousness, what happens when we create something similar to ourselves that doesn't have this mortality to it or this fear of immortality to it? Yeah. So great point, Danny. And I say this sometimes,

and it sounds silly, but I can't think of a more important question. You know, if we could answer that, we'd be chugging rum out of a coconut with our Nobel Prizes on the beach. But I work with some folks now that are concerned with those issues. And they literally, the way that they're thinking about them is in terms of AI ethics. They're saying, and some of the questions are to have an ethical AI, does it have to be an embodied and mortal entity? So I work with some folks that did a podcast. It's a dramatic podcast. It's called The Spark Hunter File. And it is about set in 2030 or so. And it's about the most sophisticated artificial intelligence. It's a female. And it's an embodied, you know, robotic form. And the, um, the, um, The AI entity finds out from the guy that created her that he made her mortal.

So it's basically a science fiction show about the first existential crisis of an artificial intelligence. Wow. What is it called again? It's called the Spark Hunter File. The Spark Hunter File. Yeah, I'll send you these things. Okay.

But again, it's very fascinating because you brought it up. It's like, wow, would it require some kind of existential apprehensions in order to ensure that AIs are not ultimately devoid of conscience? What do you think would happen if AIs were devoid of that consciousness of mortality? I don't know. Yeah, what do you think? I don't know either. I wonder what would happen if we weren't. I don't even know what would happen if we didn't know about if we weren't aware or a better way of putting it. I don't understand. I can't comprehend what life would be like if we could live 500,000 to a million years. Right.

You know, I like what you talk about in your book as you said that if we were aware, we could live a half a million to a million years. years, suddenly we wouldn't be able to have the definition of a hero wouldn't exist or a coward wouldn't exist because that's all defined by the finitude of our life and the risks that we're willing to take in life for different reasons. Yeah, I find those ideas compelling, Danny. I am in all truth, I'm still disinclined to die. And yet I find those arguments. convincing. In other words, if you were reading a book and it never ended, it would be tiresome. Yeah. I think it was Lucretius, some ancient dude who just said, you know, life's like a banquet. But isn't what makes a banquet great that there comes a point where you have enough and you're done?

and he just says that to lead a full life requires that it be bounded. You know, there was a time that we're not here. And now we are. And, you know, it's a cliche, but all good things do have an end. Have an end. And that in no way suggests that we should avoid. making our lives richer or even longer. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer?

Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount? New vehicle discount. Storage discount. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. And yet a lot of folks that are like having their heads chopped off when they die and frozen in Arizona.

Oh my God. I had a guy on here that paid like hundreds of thousands of dollars. to do that. Yeah. The thing around his neck. He has like a dog tag in case he gets in a car accident. They know to like call the company and come freeze him. And to me, and again, with all due respect, that's rather sad and also rather silly because you're going to pay a shit ton of money. And, you know, Arizona's going to be uninhabitable in the next decade. And when the grid goes down, do you think the owners of those cryogenic places are going to be all too worried about the frozen heads? in the middle of the...

Oh, my God. Hell no, they're not. No, they're not. So anyway, who's going to be... They've got to make sure their lawyer lives forever, right? No, there you go. So anyway, yeah. So I see most of those efforts to be thinly veiled attempts to forest to forestall death permanently.

And again, I see that as much. much as I like being alive and hope that I've got a couple of more rotations. Yeah, I feel. But like, don't you wish you could, like, be there, like, to watch your kids get old? Of course. And your grandkids. No, absolutely. Yeah.

It's such a conundrum, isn't it? There you go. Do you think there's a connection between the fear of death, religion, and the you UFO phenomenon because of what I had noticed talking to people I had a lady in here who was a professor of religious studies in North Carolina and she was approached by somebody who was had recently come become familiar with the history of like the UFO phenomenon in the United States, Roswell, everywhere else and she found like a stark connection between some of the ancient biblical texts with some of these these nuns and these ladies that writing.

in their journals from the ancient times that are identical to some of like the modern day depictions of UFOs. And I've noticed that there is a huge community of people in the U.S. that are, they treat the UFO phenomenon like a religion. Yeah. Do you ever think about that? I do, but only peripherally because I don't know enough about it. So I've heard what you said about the historical,

commonalities and it's like wow um yeah i i don't know uh you know i i i do know that or i do suspect rather that existential anxieties are perfused throughout uh in other words um in times of upheaval there's increased belief in conspiracies and UFOs. I'm not suggesting that there's nothing to observe, just noting that there appears to be some coordination. And schizophrenia, too, is a big thing you talk about in the book. Yeah. What is the relationship with fear of death and schizophrenia?

Our argument in the book is that death, underlies or amplifies of all psychological disorders. Right. That's a rather strong claim. We're not saying that it is the sole cause of psychological disorders. It certainly cannot explain the differences between them, but, and we're following a guy, Erwin Yalom,

who in a book Existain, psychotherapy, he just said that he called psychological disorders clumsy mismanagement of existential terror. Now, I don't like that because it suggests that we have more discretion over our conditions than we might want to, than we actually do. But so we have done experiments with clinical populations. where we showed, for example, that when people who are afraid of spiders are reminded that they're going to die, they become more afraid of spiders. When people that are OCD, obsessive, compulsive, when we remind them that they're going to die and then send them into the bathroom to wash their hands, they use more soap and water.

When we remind socially anxious people that they're going to die, they go hide in a closet for longer. People that are prone to PTSD become more psychologically dissociated. So everything that we have studied so far, we've demonstrated that death anxiety magnifies those symptoms. When it comes to schizophrenia, thankfully, there's no ethics board that will allow us to remind schizophrenic people that they're going to die. Right. In principle, if we did do that, though, what we would predict is that death reminders would increase delusions of grandeur and paranoia. And this is based on just transcripts of schizophrenic people talking about their own concerns. And so, yeah, the argument is that the schizophrenic individual in the wake of existential anxiety

inflates themselves to superhuman proportions while declaring themselves omniscient and aware of everything that's happening at all times. Yeah, that makes sense But getting back to the To like the UFO phenomenon thing I just see like Whether it be more paranoia or more anxiety I think it is It's like the hope that there's something else out there

That's gonna save us from ourselves right Nice And there's also many books And many testimonies from like army generals Talking about these things hovering around nuclear base and disarming nukes. Yeah. Like these things are going to save us.

They're going to save us from ourselves. That's magnificent. And again, very existential. Because in Greek tragedy, you know, the worse than death is to be no one surrounded by no thing. And I think that's correct. That so here you have the UFOs filling this existential void. There is something out there. and the yallum dude he calls it a magic helper that we're always hoping you know that behind the next cloud

right the next bush yes is someone or something paying attention and it's it's also interesting because it's a phenomenon that it sort of hangs out on on the fringe of being there's not enough evidence to convince the skeptic but there's enough evidence to convince somebody to who's willing to believe. That's correct. And I think if those things were to come, if a UFO was to land in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and come out and say peace,

greetings, earthlings, I think that we would replace UFOs with something else probably. Yeah. Because we yearn for something. Yeah. Something we don't understand. In fact, there's a guy that Becker writes about who wrote a book called Immortality,

I can't remember his name and it doesn't matter. But he just said that, yeah, that if necessary, what would replace God is like a giant slot machine. You know, because we just have to think that there's a jackpot somewhere. Right. Yeah. One of the other things I want to talk to you about was people that are near death are like suffering from diseases or can't. experimenting with psychedelics and the phenomena of ego death. Yeah.

Like I told you, I had that guy Andrew Gallimore in here who has that extended state DMT study where he keeps people on DMT for extended period of time so they can sort of map out what's going on in that quote unquote world that they're experiencing. What sort of science or studies are you aware of in regards to this research? Yeah, no, this is awesome. So we did some research in the near-death area. Nothing new. We looked at people who had had near-death experiences, and we replicated a common finding,

which is that it reduces death anxiety. And what we found is that having a near-death experience reduces death anxiety because people's notion, of what death means changes. So like some people see death as, I'm just totally obliterated and annihilated. Other people, they see it as more of a continuous transition. It need not be to immortality,

but they're like, no, I'm not, I am in a different state, and I'm not me anymore, But all of the molecules that make up me, well, they've been around forever, and they're going to go and mingle with the rest of the cosmos. And so what the near-death experience appears to be doing is to alter our conception of death, to render it, not an immediate, and total obliteration. And that appears to be what the psychedelics are doing. First of all, there's one line of work with the terminally ill people. And these findings are magnificent. Sometimes a single dose of psilocybin reduces anxiety and depression and people that have had no prior

drug experience. And the same folks that are doing that research are now extending the range of people that are receiving psychedelic treatment. It's no longer just terminally ill. It's now being used for folks with PTSD, for example. And it really does appear to have remarkably palliative effects. Some of the folks that I'm familiar with, they talk about it in terms of the word cosmic connection comes up. Whereas people who have had positive psychedelic experiences, whether they're traumatized or not, yeah, what they often say is I saw a completely different world, the culturally constructed world that I learned about and lived. in, yeah, that momentarily dissolved. And I got to see a world where I recognize that everything is connected. Everyone is related.

And even though in the overall scheme of things, I'm an inconsequential speck of transient dust, I am still involved. and always have been. In other words, if you're alive today, well, then you're descendant from the first living thing, right? And you're related to everything that's ever been alive, right? You're more related to me than a fig or a turtle. Right.

Well, and that means we're going to be related to everything that's ever been alive. And, well, anyway, that's the kind of stuff I remember from my hallucinogenic days of yesteryear. That's the kind of stuff that's now being reported in psychedelic therapy. Just this really radical sense of total contentment, you know, kind of based on this tripod of psychological well-being. It's awe, humility, and gratitude. Ah, humility and gratitude. Yeah, because basically there's this sense of awe just like, wow. You know, the world is infinitely large and beyond my comprehension.

And yet here I am getting a peak. That's like awesome. Right. And then, again, the irony is that one result of awe is humility, which Americans need to look in a dictionary because we see humility. as something bad like self-deprecation. But humility is just really recognizing your proper position in the universe. And in the overall scheme of things, we really are radically inconsequential, right?

You're born in a body, not of your choice, and a time and place, not of your choosing. You're here for a tiny amount of time. and then, you know, off to the next generation. And the point is is that when you get that feeling, it doesn't make you, it doesn't undermine your self-esteem. It actually at times makes you feel better. Because what that does is to say, well, maybe I'm not going to be in Einstein. Maybe I'm not going to be Mother Teresa or Jesus or fill in the blank.

I'm going to be me and I'm going to do things and I can't know ahead of time. So does that mean it sort of renders the whole notion that us needing self-esteem sort of less meaningful? Like it makes... Yes. Okay. In my opinion. Or rather, how about it broadens the scope of what is meaningful and, valuable. So there's this guy Oliver Berkman, and he calls it Cosmic Insignificance Therapy. And he's not

knocking self-esteem. He's like, yeah, you could be proud of yourself. You wrote a book. You made a shit ton of money. On the other hand, that obscures other aspects of our existence that might be psychologically debilitating. In other words, you might have been, I might have been so busy worrying about whether I'm going to sell enough of these warm at the core books so that I can be on some Amazon list that, you know, I didn't notice that the old woman who lives next door to me is struggling. Let's say it snows at our house. And I just didn't notice that there was a lot of snow.

I'm saying this because we had neighbors who were elderly back in the day. And I noticed once, I'm like, God, I'm an asshole. I'm racing off to write a sentence. Why don't I pick up a snow shovel and help the person next to me? All right. So another example, you're like walking on the street. you see somebody, you've never seen them before. And for some reason, you just kind of look up and give them one of these, you know, hi, how are you doing?

You're never going to see them again. You just like acknowledge the existence of a fellow human. Well, how do you know that person wasn't walking to the nearest bridge to kill themselves? And what you just did by your momentary connection with an at the moment struggling human is to not only save their lives, But what if they're the next Gandhi who's going to go on to lead Earth to a radical transformation that saves all of humanity? Well, what, and so the point that these folks are trying to make is that there's a whole lot of ways to have a meaningful life and that we should become more. aware of them and take greater advantage of those possibilities. Yes.

And again, what I like about that, Danny, is like this is not to knock more conventional, culturally constructed pursuits. Right. You can have both. Can have both. So this is, let's get back to we don't need to be either liberal or conservative. We could be both. we don't need to

I like sometimes I talk in terms of heroism and I'm like well you got heroes with a capital age you know there's Jesus and and Buddha and Einstein and then you could be heroic with a lowercase

age people that just literally make the best of the lives that the world has dealt them right and yeah I'm of the my current view for me. I haven't gotten there yet. Yeah, but I like, you know, like anybody, if somebody says, oh, I like your ideas. I think they're interesting. Yeah, I like that. I get great

joy from that. And I get great joy from walking my little dog around the block. And I want to get to the point where they are not necessarily any different in terms of, their potential value psychologically or otherwise. Yeah, there's a lot of layers of the onion to peel back. I think it would be beneficial if a lot of people in power were forced to take psychedelics. Yes. Now, again, you're too young, a guy named Aldous Huxley, and he wrote a book, Brave New World. Have you ever heard of that?

Yeah. All right. He in a magazine, so he also wrote a book called Doors of Perception. Do you know that book? I don't know that one. So in his 50s, he took psilocybin for the first time. And he wrote a book about it called Doors of Perception, magnificent book. It's in 1950s.

And then in the 1960s, the most popular magazine in the United States, it was either live or look magazine. It'd be like Newsweek or Time magazine today. Yeah, he wrote an article saying that in the future, every world leader, will have had psychedelics, and every child will have had psychedelics in grade school. What? As part of their education into the world. Yeah.

Wow. All right, back to my day with Jordan Peterson, we actually spent a few of those hours talking about the virtues of psychedelic experiences. I can't remember the exact details, but he was even, he was saying, let's go to South America and do that. Ayahuasca. I mean, he was aware that I have like the hippie background, but he was quite serious about those experiences being of extraordinary potential value. What is your personal belief on what happens when we die? I don't have one.

I know I'm waffling, Danny, but I've already admitted, for better or worse, that, yeah, I'm not a big fan of dying. At the same time, I believe it to be the proper culmination of a life well-lived. that's just natural. And I'm going with the ancients on this one. Just as I was, to my knowledge, completely unaware of the billions of years that the world was here, but I wasn't. My guess is that a nanosecond or so after I expire, that it will be no different. than before you were born.

Yeah. But I want to have it both ways because I really am of this Epicurean persuasion. They're the ones that talk about that we are just a bunch of atoms. And before they came together to make us, they've been bouncing around the universe since the Big Bang. And that, that, and maybe I'm... That's not a comfort. I know, but I'm trying to make it. I'm trying to make it so. That's correct.

I thought about that before. I remember being very young thinking about this. Yeah. And thinking about like before I was born, it was just black, nothing. Yeah. Is that what it is after we died? Like that's... Yeah. And so if my buddy, Jeff Greenberg were here, he would make... He wouldn't blubbering. Jeff's point would be we can dance around all this, all we want,

and there's no way to put a good spin on what turns out to be almost of necessity, a state of ambivalence of sorts. I guess where I keep coming back to, it's hard to love life at the same time that one proclaims that you're just totally fine with being devoid of it.

Right? So I'm like, yeah. So in a sense, you love life more, being aware of nothing, nothing, there being nothing at the end of it i don't know that i do i'm just saying that it's hard i yeah i if i hear your point you're like no none of these things are particularly soothing and i'm i'm with you on that i and that's so you don't find a soothing no that's my buddy jeff's point right it is yeah we can be hippie like maybe do a few gummies and you're like oh i'm down

I'm fine with death. No, we're not. And, yeah, and I don't know if that's, yeah, I don't know if that's idiosyncratic, or if that's just a fundamental property of life, you know, which is a resistance to premature termination at all costs. Well hey Sheldon I really appreciate you Talk to me we just did three hours Tell people Where they can find more of your information Your book I love your book I'm a huge fan of not only the contents of it

But I love the title The Worm at the Core It's a very metal title Yeah it is metal And that's actually a line from Who's the guy William James Anyway no thank you Danny We wrote a book called The Worm at the Core

on the role of death and life that that's around. I do podcast stuff. I work at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and people that have computers will have no trouble finding my email address. And feel free to be in touch. I said this before we started talking live, but I think what you and fellow podcasters are doing is of an estimable value. If you're having trouble sleeping, you know, send me an email.

I'll send you one of our technical papers. But to me, most strikingly important is the hope that these ideas are interesting enough for people to jump in. Don't mindlessly believe anything that you've heard us say. so much is to be open to the possibility that it might be relevant to your own life and those of the people around you. And yeah, so, yeah, that's kind of how to find me. I don't have a website or, and I don't know how to use any social media stuff, which is probably for the better. But yeah, that's it. I'm a little surprised. You said we were talking for three hours. I didn't feel like it.

30 minutes. And is there anything that we didn't cover that you think we should? No, just that I hope that the folks that are accustomed to listening to you and other people, if I said something wrong, let's get it right. If I said something that is disagreeable, yeah, fine. Let's engage in civil disagreement. And yeah, that's it. And I'm being a little duplicitous, but I hope in a couple of years we get a chance to reconnect, perhaps.

I'd be interested in seeing where your world drifts and just to keep you posted on what's happening on my end of Earth. So thank you so much. Likewise, Sheldon, and I hope you continue to do more of these podcasts. I really think that we need to amplify your signal as much as possible. With that said, sleep tight, folks.