Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 91 | Scott Barry Kaufman on the Psychology of Transcendence

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

If one of the ambitious goals of philosophy is to determine the meaning of life, one of the ambitious goals of psychology is to tell us how to achieve it. An influential work in this direction was Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs — a list of human needs, often displayed suggestively in the form of a pyramid, ranging from the most basic (food and shelter) to the most refined. At the top lurks "self-actualization," the ultimate goal of achieving one's creative capacities. Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman has elaborated on this model, both by exploring less-well-known writings of Maslow's, and also by incorporating more recent empirical psychological studies. He suggests the more dynamical metaphor of a sailboat, where the hull represents basic security needs and the sail more creative and dynamical capabilities. It's an interesting take on the importance of appreciating that the nature of our lives is one of constant flux. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Scott Barry Kaufman received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Yale University. He has taught at Columbia University, NYU, the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. He is the host of The Psychology Podcast. He was named by Business Insider as one of the "50 groundbreaking scientists who are changing the way we see the world." He is the author of numerous books; his most recent, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, is published April 7. Web site The Psychology Podcast Google Scholar publications Amazon.com author page Discussion on "Defining Intelligence" Wikipedia Twitter

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That's orderlymeds.com slash podcast. Individual results may vary. Not medical advice. Eligibility required. Seasite for details. Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And if you're like me, you remember maybe in high school, maybe in college, in some psychology course, being taught about Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

There was this sort of pyramid diagram, and at the bottom of it, there were your basic physiological needs, food, shelter, things like that. Then you built up through other sort of higher level psychological needs until at the top you reached self-actualization. So today's guest, Scott Barry Kaufman, is a psychologist who is proposing that we update Maslow's hierarchy of needs. He's done two things. Number one, he's actually dug into many of the writings that Maslow himself did and learned things like Maslow himself never drew a pyramid. And Maslow himself had a lot of ideas that go well beyond the famous hierarchy of needs. And the second thing that Scott does is propose an entirely new metaphor based on a different kind of hierarchy.

He thinks that the pyramid metaphor is a little bit stationary, and it gives you the idea that there's just something to achieve that would make us once and for all self-actualized. So Scott's idea is that instead what we should aim for is not self-actualization, but transcendence, and the metaphor he uses for this is not a pyramid but a sailboat. There's the hull of the boat, which has some of the more basic needs, and then there's the sails of the sailboat, which have more dynamic needs. And I kind of like this imagery because as a physicist, as someone who knows about entropy in the arrow of time, in the big picture and elsewhere, I've absolutely emphasized that we should think of life as a process, as a series of changes, inevitable changes. Things like happiness, which are very popular, are a little bit overrated because we get the idea that you can just achieve happiness and stay there, and life is not like that. So Scott and I talk about different ways of being psychologically healthy. different needs that he's identified, the empirical research that he's used to identify these needs. And I push back a little bit because I don't agree with everything he says, but you know what?

That's psychology. We're not anywhere near done. It's not a mature field in the way that particle physics or cosmology are. So that gives us a little bit of a way to think about ways that we could do better in understanding who we as human beings really are, how we can live our best lives. I should also mention that Scott has his own podcast called The Psychology Podcast. He was lucky enough to get that name early on, where you can find him talking to a bunch of professional psychologists about these ideas and a whole bunch of related ideas. Remember, you can support the Mindscape podcast on Patreon. If you go to patreon.com slash Sean M. Carroll or just find a link on the podcast homepage, which is preposterousuniverse.com slash podcast. Different ways you can support

on Patreon, giving $1 or $2 or whatever per episode, and in return, you get ad-free versions of the episodes, and you also get the ability to ask questions at the monthly Ask Me Anything. And we've changed the policy, so now the answers to the monthly AMA go public, so everyone can listen to them, but if you want to actually ask them and get your question answered, you should join Patreon today. With that, let's go. Scott Barry Kaufman, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Oh, thanks, Sean. I've been looking forward to this chat for a while.

You know, I thought, while thinking about this chat, that in some ways, psychology is as ambitious as physics and cosmology, right? Like, physics and cosmology tries to understand the whole universe, which is very big, but psychology tries to understand people, which are very complicated. And the idea of writing a book that actually gives useful advice to people living their lives and how they think and things like that. It's a daunting task. So before we get into before we even get into the details, I mean, what are your thoughts

about the hubris of being a psychologist and trying to help people with psychology? Okay, sure. Yeah, so I think in a lot of ways one could make the argument that studying humans is more complicated than studying the universe. Oh, yeah. No, I get more complicated, no doubt.

Well, it let me ask, let me elaborate, because I feel like those are fighting words, perhaps, for, you know, physicists. But I think that, you know, in some ways, humans are more unpredictable than, you know, we get the sun, you know, you get the sun. Okay, the sun rotates. Yeah, that's fine. Okay. No, no.

No, no. But, you know, we get how the universe works in some ways, right? And there's a certain predictability or regularity there, right? But my gosh, studying humans is so confusing because, you know, because. We, first of all, there's individual differences, and as you know, that's the area that I focus on. Yeah. Mostly, I'm fascinated with human variation. And when you start looking at individual differences, then it's kind of like all bets are off in a sense.

So some psychologists focus just in the universals, and that may give us a false sense of predictability about humans. But then you say, well, what if we look at the variation and you realize, oh, my gosh, like these general principles really break down because you have this, a-hole who broke all the rules. You know what I mean? It's like with the universe, you don't have that many A-holes, you know, who like get out of line when you have the equation that's beautiful. When you come up with a beautiful equation, right? Am I right?

Yeah, no, I mean, this is why it's not fighting words at all. Like, I think that physicists and cosmologists be the first to agree that studying human beings is way more complicated. I mean, that's the beauty of physics is that it actually is at heart, super simple and elegant and pristine. But aside from, so we totally agree that human beings are complicated and hard. So what gives you the sort of, you know, how do you get through the day telling yourself, and nevertheless, I have really good insights to share with you all?

Yeah, especially with all these replication crises happening and the fact that a lot of things aren't coming out. Well, I think that it's just there's a spirit and excitement of let me share with you what we discovered, but I think that you have to have that humility as a psychologist to not say we've found it once and for all in any sort of way and not have such confidence that people can't change as well. You see there's a lot of research on what is, and I think there's a dearth of research in psychology on what could be. you know, there, I mean, there are people that try to do interventions and a lot of interventions don't work, but you do see this tendency, especially like in the intelligence field, for instance, there's been no good intervention. I'm going to say this, you know, right now, there's been no really strong intervention that has dramatically improved IQ scores. And intelligence researchers, there's a bunch of intelligence researchers who almost get a glee from that finding, which I don't understand why there's glee for it, you know, but almost a sense of like, see, we told you, intelligence researchers. just, you know, not how that doesn't change, but that it's pretty genetically determined, you know, or influenced, very heavily influenced. And yet I still want to maintain the spirit of, oh, that's interesting. Well, let's just keep, well, trying, you know, like we shouldn't, it's not like we just stopped trying to do intervention. It's just because we haven't been able to find the one that really had a striking effect, you know? So you're interested in sort of the engineering and technology side of psychology as well as the science descriptive side of psychology. Yeah, I think equally, which makes me weird.

And not only weird, but it makes me have a fight within a civil war within myself. Because I have, that was a phrase Mazel used, you know, in terms of like trying to become integrated human beings, you know. Like we need to transcend that civil war within ourselves, these different sides of ourselves that are fighting each other. But, you know, I have the scientist hat. And when that hat is on in full force, it does not really like the intervention hat or side of myself. And when the intervention side of myself is on, I'm like, I'm not really into the scientist that much. So it is an interesting sort of balance that I try to strike within myself. Well, you mentioned Maslow.

Tell us about Maslow. We're going to go into your new book that's coming out called Transcendence. Is that right? It's called Transcend. Transcend. It's a verb. Got it. Transcend.

Is it like an order you're giving people? Are you telling that imperative? Please transcend? Yes. Yes. That's the idea. It's an action, you know, action word. For sure. It's hopefully an inspirational North Star kind of book that kind of shows what humans could be. Well, and it builds on the work of Abraham Maslow. So tell us a little bit about who he is. I mean, we've all heard of him, but fill us in as if we didn't know.

Oh, good. I'm really glad you said that because I've had other people, well, no one's not good. No, Sue Maslow is. Why should anyone care about your book? I'm like, thanks. appreciate that. So I like your attitude about that. Everyone knows who Maslow's... Well, I think most people who've taken an introductory psychology class,

who have taken an introductory management class have come across Maslow's writings. Yeah. For sure. I've come across, at least if they've never even heard of Maslow, have come across that iconic pyramid. Now, so Abraham Maslow was a humanistic psychologist.

Sorry, the pyramid is the hierarchy of needs that we're talking about. Correct. Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And it's usually depicted as a pyramid where you have an order of needs that must be met before

one can become everything they're capable of becoming salt, which is labeled self-actualization. Now this is the story. This is the story that's being told to so many introductory psychology management students and people who see it diagramed on the internet. However,

it turns out that Mazel never drew a pyramid. And there are so many misconceptions about the hierarchy of needs. It's, it's incorrect how it's been taught the past 60 years. So he did have a list of needs, a hierarchy, but he just never drew them in the form of a pyramid. Correct. He never conceptualized in that way. His theory was very developmental. He made it very clear that we are constantly in this dynamic of moving two steps forward and one step back, that we can also that we can we can target multiple needs simultaneously we don't have the wait to

start self-actualizing until everything else is done until we check all the boxes and also it's as I like to say in the book life is not a video game it's not like we reach one level of the hierarchy like connection and then some voice from above is like congrats you've unlocked a steam you know like moral combat or something yeah it's just not it's not the way the world works and mazill was very clear about that so I really tried to infuse the spirit of what Mazel actually meant, as well as the rest of the humanistic psychologists. It really is an attempt more globally in this day and age, in this world today, to bring back a lot of the ideas of the humanistic psychologists that have been lost.

But tell us what the hierarchy is. What are the levels? The original model, and I revised it. I revised it. But in the original model, you had the safety needs, or sorry, you even had below that. You had physiological needs, like food, water, shelter. and you had safety needs, need for a certain sense of predictability in your environment, and then you have belonging in love, and he lumped them together,

which I've teased them apart, and we can talk about that in my revised model, but he had love and belonging together, and then he had esteem needs, which is esteem from others. So it's not self-esteem, it's the esteem that others hold us in? Both.

I would say he had two sub-components of that, both esteem from others as well is our own self-esteem. But the problem with that is it's hard to actually disentangle that because we do draw so much of our own self-esteem on the esteem. It's almost like redundant in like 90% of humans. And then, but then you can get to the self-actualized individuals. So that's, so that's the next level of self-actualization.

So it's a big, it's a big leap. Yeah. It's a, it's, I've always viewed that as quite a jump. I'm like, okay. Um, I feel, uh, you know, really pumped up ego wise. Boom. Now I can self-actualize. I, I, you know,

There seems to be a lot of steps along the way there. And in a lot of ways, that's what I try to do in my book is connect those dots. And I mean, I took self-actualization out as a stage. It's not because it's not like we ever reach. Again, life is not a video game. It's not like you ever reach self-actualization and then you win the princess or whatever. That was whatever my video game metaphor from Marriott, Barrier Brothers. I think most people understand just an ordinary language the words, you know, physiology, safety, love, belonging, esteem.

But self-actualization, I'm betting, most people heard either directly or indirectly, from Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Can you tell us a little bit about what he meant by that concept? Maslow talks about it in different ways. But there's one quote he used, if you give me a moment to actually find it, I really love this quote. It was the best description of self-actualization I could find. Okay, sure. So I found a unpublished essay that he really wanted. wanted to publish. He was calling it critique of self-actualization. This was really his attempt. He really

wanted to publish this before he died. Instead, it was left in an unpublished collection. But this is the quote, and I think this really gets the heart of what he really thought about self-actualization. We try to make a rose into a good rose, rather than seek to change roses into lilies. It necessitates a pleasure in the self-actualization of a person who may be quite different from yourself. It even implies an ultimate respect and acknowledgement of the sacredness and uniqueness of each kind of person. So in a lot of ways, he viewed self-factualization as being able to realize, it's that unique part of your human potentiality that is unique to you. Because these other forms of, these other needs, these basic needs that I mentioned are things we all share and we're all striving

toward. But the focus of self-factualization is more in realizing that unique potential potential within you that is in a lot of ways some people would call it your best self, you know, in modern day language, although I don't like that phrase. Yeah. Because I, you know, I think that there's no such thing as the real self. Well, I actually really don't like the phrase the real self because there's no such thing. But, you know, but, you know, I think that's really what he was getting at was this, this unique full potential of what we can offer the world. And I do think he, there are misconceptions about it as being selfish. So David Brooks, you know, the New York Times columnist,

was hating on Maslow in a column a couple years ago, and I was like, oh, hell no, you know what I was reading the column. So you're very pro-Maslo, even though you update him, you're definitely in his tradition. I view him as a good friend, you know, who I've never met. And I do think, as Maslow did, that we thought this too that we could have friends from prior generations. It may sound a bit creepy, but we can really have such a fondness for someone to get to know them so well. I mean, I met his, Maslow's daughter, only remaining daughter, and granddaughter, granddaughter Jeannie, who he had written about lovingly in his personal journal, personal diaries.

Jeannie was three years old when Mazel died, but he would say that Jeannie was the greatest source of my peak experiences in life. and it kills me knowing that I won't be able to live to see how Jeannie turns out. So it was such a peak experience for me to meet Jeannie, you know, and she's looking at me as we're talking, I'm geeking out over her grandfather. And she's like, my gosh, you know so much more about my grandfather than I know about my, that I even care to know about my grandfather. And there was something about that where it really made me feel a connection to him, even though I never met him, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, absolutely. At a time when many of us are sticking close to home, this is a great opportunity to learn new things. And a wonderful way to do that is with the Great Courses Plus.

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And I do want to move on to your version of this, so I don't want to spend too much time. But I do want to tease out the idea that it's a hierarchy, because this is both important but also can be overdone and caricatured, right? The idea that it's a hierarchy being that first you solve all your physiological needs or secure them, and then then you go on to safety, and then you go on to love, et cetera. And is that the way it works? Is that the way Maslow thought it work? Is that a good way of thinking about it? No, not that we must 100% satisfy something before we can go on to the next. That would be a misrepresentation. He argued at any given point of time, there's a certain percentage, certain fraction. of each of those needs that we have satisfied.

So right now I could ask, I could go down the list with you and ask you, you know, maybe your 60% connection, maybe you're 90% of steam. You're a lot of Twitter followers. Maybe you're, you know, very high in safety. And then some other needs, you know, if we talk about some of my needs that I added

and we can go down the percentages. So I think he made it clear that at any given time we can target multiple needs simultaneously. We're not at 100% on any of them. However, he did argue, he did make the case there was a hierarchy of prepotency, is what he called it. And whenever I use that word, people are like, what are you talking about? I try to use that word, my book, and my publisher's like, no one's going to know what

prepotency means. Well, now what does he mean by that? Well, I think he did believe that there are certain needs that are, he called deprivation needs. When we're deprived of these things, they shift. our entire worldview and narrow, in a sense they narrow our worldview to a particular worldview, and they really do make it harder to be all that we could become, which is self-actualization. So they really do get in the way of self-actualization. And I think that is quite right.

I think that what he really emphasized is not this lockstep progression of a triangle, you know, of like something that you have to climb, like a mountain you climb, but more of like an integrative process, where if you don't have well-integrated some of these deprivation needs, the whole system is really going to be out of whack, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, actually it does make sense. But, okay, so I think, so there's a hierarchy in the sense that, in Maslow's view, some of these needs are a little bit more basic, even though you don't 100% satisfy them before moving on, as I think you correctly point out, there is, there are levels.

They're not just a list in random order. Yes, there are levels which could be are, I don't think that a firm scientific ground, we can say that there is a precise order because there's individual differences, there are cultural differences in which of those are more prepotent than others. We could probably all at the very basic level say that things like food, water, shelter are essential. I think, you know, there's some things that are hard to argue universally. but there are some cultures where esteem might be more important than connection or some cultures were connection might be important. What I really wanted to emphasize was this distinction between, I didn't want to get hung up on the precise order,

but I wanted to talk about the dialect, the very interesting dialectical, dialectical between security and growth. And that's really what Mazo was fascinated with, was that dialectical. And that leads us directly into your reimagining of it. So you've thrown away the pyramid. Too boring, too stationary. You have a new metaphor.

Yes. So I think a sailboat offers at multiple levels, so to speak, a better conception of what it means to live a good life. What it means just what it means to live life, period. We're all in this vast unknown of the sea. we're all traveling in our own direction but we're all in kind of the same sea of unpredictability

we don't know when there's going to be waves coming we have to secure our boat as much as possible before we can go anywhere if there's a leak in our boat if there's severe deprivations we're not going anywhere but once we can do that we can feel safe

and comfortable to open our sail and and how we open our sail also affects where we can go and how fast we can go and all these things. So I really think that the sailboat does a nice job of capturing that interaction between the boat and the sailor between safety and growth. Right. So if I understood it correctly, the hull of the boat sitting there in the water is the story of our security and these needs that we absolutely have to have met,

whereas the sail of the boat and the air around it is the story of growth and change and trying to move through life in the best way we can. Yes, and at the top of this sail is purpose, and really having a clear, clear direction and being very focused and having the whole unit. So another thing I like about the sailboat metaphor is that it's all about an integration of a whole vehicle. it's the whole vehicle that travels to the ocean. You're not climbing piece by piece

different parts of you up this mountain that it doesn't seem to be all humans or even how thermodynamic systems work. Like whole systems are greater than the sum of the parts. And that's a big, big thing I try to emphasize my book because I am into evolutionary psychology. I went through a phase of evolution psychology maybe like 15 years ago

where I thought it was the thing. the cat's pajamas. And now what I want to do is I want to really show that humans can be greater than the sum of their parts. We're not just identified with our modules. So I think there's something that we can use the evolutionary approach to understand the parts of us. But I'm ultimately interested in how the whole organism deals with those paradoxes of

human existence and lives their own good life in their own way. you know, how do they self-actualize in their own direction, or as Maslow put it in their own style. And to me, that's what's really, really fascinating about humans, our ability to supersede or to become greater than the sum of the parts. And this is where the uniqueness of every person comes in, and you want to sort of emphasize that. Okay.

No, I ultimately want to emphasize transcendence. Okay, well, we'll get there. That's like way for the future in the podcast. I want to get all of the layers on the table. Okay, good. Good, good, good. Even though you have a different metaphor with the sailboat boat rather than the pyramid, you still have some needs, right? You still have a list of needs that we're meeting in the form of this sailboat.

Do you even call them needs still, or do you have a different name? I do call them needs. I call them human needs for sure. I call this is, I call this the integrated hierarchy of needs, the revised hierarchy of needs. The revised integrated hierarchy of needs, yes. Good. Yes. And so which are the needs associated with the hull of the boat?

Safety, which I've combined Mazel's physiological and safety needs into one, because I think there's so much research showing that our body and mind are so interconnected, and it made sense to talk about a general level, I don't know what you call it now, a general process. Yeah. in which there's a we can be pitched into the state of psychological entropy, the state of great uncertainty where there's too much unpredictable in our environment that our brain really is full of fear and anxiety.

And so that would be that stage. And that could happen from hunger. It could happen from having no food on your table or roof on your head. around your head above your head to, but it could also be living in an environment

where you, there's a lot of violence in your environment that pervades your environment or there's just things that are so unstable so that would all be under that aspect.

And in the chapter on safety you actually talk a lot about attachment to other people. So maybe that is not what comes to people's mind when you first start talking about safety. And it's part of safety is, you know, having a house and food and water. But you're also, there's, that seems to be, I would have put that in connection,

but you put it in safety, the attachment we have to other people. Yes, because the opposite of secure attachment is insecure attachment. When you're insecurely attached, there's such anxiety, especially if you're if you have the anxious attachment style. you're pitched into that state of inserting anxiety where you don't trust people. See, I see trust as a really core part of this need for safety. So coherence in the environment, but also trust that your environment will be safe to me is a central part of this need. So an ability to treat other people like they're your friends, not your enemies.

And that you can depend on them in times of great need. Yeah. See, that's what attachment theory is all about. Can I, do I have trust and confidence in this caregiver when we're a vulnerable, you know, and it's been studied a lot in children, but there also been a lot of studies on adults as well. Like my relationship partner, do I, do I trust that when I, you know, when things really get tough, that that they'll protect and help me in those situations? And as a working psychologist, you must know, I mean, you must be very familiar with all the different ways in which attachment is tricky, right? I mean, attachment to other people. Like, you can be overly attached. You can be clingy, right? You want to have that trust and respect for other people without, I don't know, without getting in their way. I'm not sure how you would put it, but there's definitely a balance to be struck there.

Absolutely. So not to get too nerdy about this, but it's really good to view attachment styles as continuing. not types. I think that this type way of thinking is not really been very profitable for psychologists. And we really need to think about things as, and this applies to everything. I mean, this is actually quite profound. I think a whole revision of the DSM needs to occur. So that could be a whole other conversation where we view everything, all disorders, as on a continuum.

But if we view, there's two main dimensions that we all differ on. Anxious attachment style and avoidant. attachment style. There's are the two fundamental dimensions we differ on. And there's no such thing as secure attachment type. None of us are, just like none of us are ever 100% self-actualized, none of us are ever 100% securely attached. So if you just have these two dimensions, anxious and avoid an attachment styles, you can actually create a space of different combinations of those two, of different ways that one can be insecurely attached. Or, or, you And then you can only conceptualize secure attachment the extent to which both of those are high, if you see what I'm saying.

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in the book. So can I just find that? Sure. Okay. So I think, so the anxious This attachment dimension reflects a concern about being rejected and abandoned and is abandoned and is the product of beliefs about whether others will be for you in times of great need. The avoid an attachment dimension has less to do with a sense of safety and more to do with how you regulate your emotions in response to stress, whether you use others as a secure base or pull away and withdraw from them. Now it's interesting because I've looked really closely. into the literature and found something that I think's interesting, and that it's much more detrimental

and mental health to score very, very high on the anxious dimension than the avoidant dimension. I found, interestingly, that there are a lot of people who score high on just the anxious, sorry, who score very high on just the avoidance dimension who are quite content with their life. Well, I was going to say from the description you just gave, it doesn't sound like one end or the other is clearly good and clearly bad. For the anxious one, Yeah, being anxious is bad. Being less anxious is good. But how much of ourselves we secure through other people seems like there's a happy middle ground.

Yes. I mean, there is a lot of research showing that if both of those dimensions are very, very low, so you're very low, avoidance of touch, very low, anxious touch, it does tend to be correlated positive with lots of forms of well-being in life and lots of other indicators of mental. health as well as even epigenetic research and how certain genes become activated in the stress response. So working as a interaction or combination, I think, is interesting. But there are people who aren't very anxious attachment at all, but are very high and avoided. And that's an interesting combination, I think, has been understudied in the research literature. There are plenty of people

who are actually quite fine being single, not being in a relationship. And we found, well, not, we, Dr. Keltner and their colleagues have done some interesting research looking at different correlations between these different attachment styles and personality traits. And they found that those who score very high on avoidant but not anxious, they just don't score particularly high on compassion. They're just not high in compassion and love. Like they don't report being a very love, yeah, I'm not a loving person. But they actually report higher levels of contentment in life.

I totally get that. So I think it's interesting. I think it's interesting. So this is a good point to digress a little bit because you're mentioning, you're mentioning, you know, the research that's been done. I mean, how much of the conversation we're having here is based on data, is based on experiments in empirical research versus how much of it is a theory that you're hoping will be tested using data down the road. Oh, my gosh. Well, if I may, if I, I don't know if I may do what I want to may do, but if I may, if I may

toot my own horn in a second, I really meticulously tried to make sure everything I said in this book could be linked to robust studies. So I have a pretty extensive references list in the back. There are a lot of footnotes, yes. Yeah, this was something that I've been working on for years and years and wanted to get right, or at least as right as could be in the moment. So when you make choices like collapsing Maslow's first two levels into one need,

assessed over it. Yeah, so you, you, but you, you looked at the data when you chose to do that. It's not just like an idea you had that sounded cool. That's exactly right. I mean, I obsessed over every little detail of this book. For instance, I mean, it gets really nerdy. I have some, I put the most nerdy things in the footnotes.

It's like, believe me, when I say something like throw a lie in the book. And modern personality psychologists have confirmed this model of security and growth, this distinction. But then I have like a big, huge footnote for. for any nerds that want to go to the back of the book to see what I actually mean, and I actually link it to research on cybernetics. And research being done in artificial intelligence, not just in humans. I think that there's a whole, there are lots of different areas of human knowledge that are coalescing, that I think is quite exciting pointing to this distinction that Maslow put out that we,

that a whole system in order for it to fully, to be fully functioning, it needs both the ability to resist distractions, so stability, as well as plasticity, the ability to have come up with new goals. So you can get really, there's a level in which you can get, I can like explain a lot of my decisions at the nerdiest level. Excellent. This is what I'm trying to say. Let's get to some more of the decisions you're making here. So we're still in the hull of the boat. There's three needs that we talk about in the hall.

One is the safety that we just talked about. The next is connection. What does that mean? Yes. Yes. The need for connection is the need to have at least a minimal number of intimate, mutually loving or appreciating relationships in your life. So this is more than just getting likes on Twitter?

Correct. And this is a point I wanted to make because I had two sub-needs that comprise connection. And that's the need for belonging and the need for intimacy. and I think a lot of people in the field of psychology have conflated the two, or maybe I've treated them as synonymous. But when I was really looking deep into the literature on belonging, it seems like there are lots and lots of instances in which people strive for the need to belong. They may do so in a way that lacks intimacy.

So let's say you join violent extremism, or you join a cult or a religious organization or political organization because you have a desperate, desperate deprivation of the need to belong. And the leaders of this thing you join don't care at all about you. I mean, they only care about you to the extent to which you are furthering their cause. But in what way is there a reciprocal loving relationship there? So it seemed to me like both of those things are really important. And also for the loneliness epidemic, it dawned on me that there's so much of a deprivation of a need. for belonging that people are going about in the hopes that it will satisfy that whole within

themselves of loneliness and then they're surprised when it never does. Sorry, is there a loneliness epidemic? Well, I used that phrase. Then I had Stephen Pinker on my podcast and he's like, I would not call that. He's like, if you look at the history of you, I'm like, yeah, I get your schick. Stephen Pinker. I love him to death. Don't get me wrong.

He's a friend and all the good things about him. But he likes to take the long, long, long view. And I'm like, yes, but that's cold comfort for the billions of people on this planet who in this generation, right now, this moment of history, would quite characterize it as an epidemic. Do you know what I'm saying? Well, tell me. I mean, what do you mean by the loneliness epidemic? Well, the rates, especially among the elderly, are quite staggering of reports, just simple reports of loneliness. Like if you do self-report questionnaires and you ask people to report how lonely they are.

and it is really high among the elderly. But you also see it even in college students. You see the rates are high and not just the rates, but the impact of loneliness. John Capiopo, I believe that's how you pronounce his name. He was a loneliness researcher and unfortunately passed away as I was researching the book. But he had shown that the effects of loneliness on our physical, health is even greater than smoking or obesity or lots of other factors that we know are

our risk factors for mortality. But you're saying that there is a quantitative difference in the amount of loneliness now versus when, versus last year versus 100 years ago? So, yes. So that is, if we want to look, take the long, long view, I could get on board a pinker sort of argument that it's not technically an epidemic because it's hard to make the case that this generation is lonelier than the hippies were, for instance, you know, in the 60s. And I think there is a point there that could be made, so perhaps we shouldn't call it.

And I want to say something as well, because I am very open to being, you know, for people making these arguments. I, after my podcast chat I had with Stephen Pinker, I went back in my book and actually changed my book. And I think I took out the word epidemic. But I'm just trying to understand. Is the claim that loneliness is increasing or is the claim simply that there's a lot of it? There's a lot of it.

Okay. I want to focus on the, oh, there's a lot of it. Yeah. Aspect. And I don't want to get stuck too much on, you know, making it a competition of some sort with prior epics or generations, you know. Sure. I mean, I can totally get on board with the idea that there's a lot of loneliness out there. That's right.

Almost by definition, it can be hidden from us because if other people are lonely, maybe we're not connecting with them. And the effects of it could be very bad. The effects. That's also what I wanted to focus on, because that was mind-boggling to me to look into that literature and seeing just how strong and effect loneliness can have not just on our minds, but also our bodies and on mortality. And it's a risk factor for death. So that's a greater risk factor than a lot of physical risk factors that people look at. And so that's where this connection need comes in. This is the second need in the hull of your sailboat.

Correct. And how does it relate to the issue of introverts versus extroverts, right? I mean, introverts are having their day in the sun now. We have Susan Kane's book, You know, Let Us Love introverts Again, because it's not that they don't like people. it's just they need their own space. Is that related to this need for connection somehow, one way or the other? I've done quite a bit of research on introverse and extroversion dimension, but I actually see that as irrelevant to this need.

Okay. Because the need suggests a minute. I said minimal number. We're talking about one or two. And I think that is a need, regardless of where you are on the introversion, and extroversion dimension of personality. and we could have a whole separate podcast on the latest science of introversion because I'm super, super interested in that topic and I've written a lot about it. But I think that's actually a separate dimension.

That dimension of personality has more to do with your levels of assertiveness and your levels of enthusiasm or what's called positive emotions that are of the high kind. So I think like introverts can have contentness and calmness, but you find extroverts tend to. report higher levels of these other kinds of static states, you know, all the time. Okay. And also assertiveness. So the connection need is more about having, you know, a small number of really solid connections. Stable. Minimal number of stable and intimate.

So mutual relatedness. There's a relatedness aspect to it. Okay, good. And the third need within the whole of the boat is self-esteem. And you did put the word self in there. Yes. Just one more thing about introverts You could be the most

You know Interversion doesn't track Anti-sociality This is a common misconception So you know And I know you know that I want to make that This is why I think this is separate

From this basic need I mean We're talking something else If you have this extreme Sort of a version Of any human connection Well then I think there's something else going on Which we could talk about later

Dark Triad stuff But yeah That's not introversion Does that make sense? Yeah no 100%. So maybe that's what introversion is not. Why don't you tell us what introversion is? Oh, boy.

Well, this is why this is so hotly contested because scientists have a different view of what introversion is from what everyday people on the Internet who identify themselves, self-identify as introverts, think of themselves. So on the Internet, if you ask most people, the Internet, they'll say, well, it's how I recharge my batteries. You know, they'll say, it's, you know,

do I get energized by people? people are not energized by people. Well, scientists view it more in terms of levels of dopamine. Okay. And social reward. So it's more simply a matter in the scientific literature of if you're an introvert, you simply get less reward from social information or from social rewards. And that could conclude things like the possibility of getting esteem from a person you're talking to or what, you know, not like being excited.

for lots of novel social situations. That's why you tend to find that introverts tend to prefer a couple, close people than going and networking with a million people. It's because when you network with a million people, your dopamine system is more activated than your oxytocin system. And I think it's just simply a matter.

Physiologically, introverts don't get as much dopamine release at the possibility for social reward with novel social encounters. I think that's technically all that dimension means. Okay. Does that make sense? It does, but now I need a word for the feature that I need to be alone to have time to recharge my batteries. What do we call that?

I mean, there are some people who are energized by being out in public, and there's some people who are, you know, the energy seeps away when they're putting the effort in to do that. But if he viewed as a dopamine thing, though, which is what's really going to, on, then you can map it on to that in a way because dopamine predicts how much effort we are motivated to put into something. So if we're not getting a lot of dopamine push for something, it actually will take greater effort. It'll be more exhausting to put in the energy to do something. Okay.

So we, yeah, so they're not wrong. So that metaphor of the, of the recharge battery thing, it can roughly be explained. physiologically through what we know about the dopamine system as you have to work harder. Like introverts would have to put in more effort to be motivated and to talk to lots and lots of people. Right. And you could see how it would be exhausting to them quicker than extroverts. Yeah. However, I wrote a paper showing that there are some misconceptions here because there's been some study showing that both introverts and extroverts do get tired.

Extroverts do get tired from at a certain point. We're just talking about thresholds. That's all personality is. We're all human. Like, you know, we're all, and this is a big point in my book, we're all human. We can get too stuck on these different types, personality types, not realizing that, look, you could talk to extroverts and they would still be able to resonate with that feeling of, yes, I've talked to too many people today.

I need to sleep. Okay, they're human too. They're human too. So we're really just talking about thresholds. I think that it can be explained physiologically through the dopamine system and how we know dopamine. When you have, dopamine can be an energizing force. Do you know what I mean? For things that are possibility of rewards.

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Yeah, good. Okay. I think that does clear something up. That's very useful. And it's certainly separate from your notion of connection. So let's move on to self-esteem. That's the third need right there in the hull of the boat. So what do you mean by that? So self-esteem is, and I focus on a healthy self-esteem, having us, which has two components, a healthy sense of self-worth of, I'm good enough, doesn't mean that I'm better than others. And I go great pains to distinguish self-esteem from narcissism because they're different things and they have different developmental pathways. It's just I'm worthy. And the second component of self, of a healthy self-esteem is mastery or some people call it self-competence or even just competence, or self-efficacy,

a generalized form of self-efficacy. So across all the different areas of my life, I feel a general sense of I'm in control of my life. I'm the driver of this life. I can do things. I can make things happen. I have agency. And the self-worth part is not just about agency.

It is a distinguishable component from competence. So with self-worth, it's more tied to social relations. And my valued social partner, We tend to tie our self-worth to being viewed as a social partner, as well as liking ourselves. Some people actually will call that component in the psychological culture. They'll call it self-liking versus self-competence. And they can actually come apart, these two forms of self-esteem. So, for instance, those who score very, very high in narcissism tend to feel a great sense of competence, almost an exaggerated sense.

but they don't actually like, they don't actually like themselves that much. This is fascinating. And that would be terrible to be that kind of narcissist. If you can't even like yourself. Well, I'd be a narcissist at all. Exactly.

Oh, that's so funny. Well, they can fully admit, especially grandiose narcissists, and I actually distinguish between different types of narcissists. I tell you, I'm really nerdy. So, like,

you know, I could distinguish between vulnerable, more vulnerable, quiet, introverted form of narcissism from the more braggadozo or whatever that, you know, form of narcissists.

But grandios narcissists, narcissists, they have such an inflated sense of their competence. But if you do these kinds of even implicit self-esteem measures and you have measures like, I'm a good person or I'm a good, I'm a valued social partner, or I like myself, I think I'm, you know, I like myself. They're kind of neutral to negative on that aspect. All right. That's good to know. We'll keep that. It's helpful knowledge when we meet narcissists to go like, yeah, you probably are not happy with yourself. Yeah. Maybe that makes me a bad person that I want to that I want to say that. But yeah. Okay, so that's security. We have it. We have it sussed, right? The water that our boat floats in and the boat itself are a story of safety and connection and self-esteem. But you're kind of, you know, as important as those things are, you really get juiced up when we start talking about the sail and how we can move and how we can move and how we

can do things, the growth aspect of all this. That's exactly right. Maso called it the growing tip. You know, when you have a tree, there's a certain portion of the tree that grows much, much more than the other parts of the tree. And I always like that metaphor of the growing tip. I thought that was kind of brilliant. But, yeah, I'm really interested in what are these potentialities within us and humans

that really help us grow and evolve as a source. species. And your first one, you again, once again, have three needs that we associate with the sale. The first one is exploration. So what does that mean? That's right. You could, in a way, view this whole thing as two different triangles, two different hierarchies.

When you're pitched in the state of security, and that's your whole world, that base is safety. But when you're in the growth realm of human existence, so you can actually have a lot of have two different realms of human existence. I don't know if you knew that, Sean. I didn't know. You can have the deprivation form of human existence where everything becomes about you trying to impart on the world. You're making demands in the world.

Like, feed me, love me, respect me. But when you're in the growth realm of existence, which is the realm we're entering now in this conversation, the base of that is exploration. So you're no longer, everything is not pivoting around the need to resolve a deprivation. Now everything revolves around a general spirit

of actively entering the unknown. Right. You can exist from moment to moment, but you're going to seek out some new experiences. Correct. You're excited by the unknown, as opposed to fearing it intensely, which is what psychological entropy is all about. Well, actually, let's talk about psychological entropy because I just had a good, I know, this is my thing,

but I had a very interesting conversation with Carl Fristin, the neuroscientist, who has a whole theory of free energy and so forth, and it gets very technical, but the very short version is that he thinks that brains and even organisms work to model the world in such a way so as to minimize the surprise that they experience. And, of course, one question was, you know, but we seek out surprise all the time. Like we do explore, we do read mystery novels or whatever.

And his answer to that, which I thought was interesting, was that it's secretly a strategy on the part of the brain to anticipate the future. So be surprised now so that you have a more complete and flexible model of the world so as to minimize the total amount of surprise integrated over your future life. Do you think that makes sense? I do. I think that the need for exploration, evolved as a need all in its own,

but primarily as an anxiety-reducing function. So I think that's consistent with what he just, what he said. And also, by the way, I consulted these folks. I had Skype chats with this whole group, a lot of these people who studied the physics of entropy and trying to apply it to the brain. And I think that I could make, and I hope I did make a good case in the book

for the need for exploration. having its own evolved function and not being reduced to the need for safety or anxiety. But I do think it evolved in order to help us with that anxiety reducing functioning. It helps, you know, the more that we can prepare ahead of time and the more that we can reduce that uncertainty by actively seeking information. So I really connect the need for exploration with the information-seeking aspects of dopamine. So there's some recent research distinguishing between the same. social aspects of dopamine or the more

of what are called appetitive rewards cocaine, sex, you know, status. And there are dopamine pathways that get us really excited at the possibility of those things. And they're listeners that when I said those three things, their brain is particularly releasing. It's just

releasing the dopamine in the synapses like in mofo. But there are also, and I suspect a lot of your listeners who just by the nerder we get in this conversation, They also are releasing dopamine into other dopamine projections more related to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And I think that's a really interesting new line of research and understanding how there might be dopamine pathways that give us excitement, the possibility of information, not just the possibility for mating opportunities.

So you're saying that equations lead to dopamine release? Yes, I do. I think that there's some good, there's some suggestive evidence. that that may be a separate pathway. And I think it can still be debated and we're still trying to understand is it really just the same pathways, but there's individual differences and et cetera. And there's ways that this can be argued,

but I think that it is possible too. There are different pathways. There are pathways that project specifically to the dorsalateral prefrontal cortex and our working memory that gives us excitement when our working memory is active with things that may give us greater information to survive. I think this is your next book right here. You know, why math releases dopamine?

Like, this is going to be absolutely killer. I know people who would buy this book, Scott, I'm telling you. But also it makes me wonder about there are, since we're talking about the uniqueness of different individuals, there are absolutely people who hate being in a routine, and there are absolutely other people who love being in a routine, right? There are people who love having a job where you get to wear the same uniform every day. And there's other people who would find that, you know, inner torment. So how do we distinguish between those people?

How do we give them both space to be valid? Well, this is a great point. This is where we get to the realm of individual differences. And as I talk about in the need for safety chapter, there are people who, maybe the high in neuroticism personality trait, they have obsessive-compulsive disorder at a very high level or other things that give them a intense need to control the world.

And that may be a more pressing need for them than the need for exploration. And I've spent maybe 10 years of my career studying the personality trait openness to experience, which predicts, you know, to the extent to which neuroticism predicts the need for security, openness to experiences predicts the need for exploration.

I think... And these are elements in the Big Five personality inventory, right? Correct. Correct. I just mentioned two of the big five, and we already went deep into the extroversion, introversion one. So which are the ones we have left to discuss today? We've got conscientiousness. We haven't talked about grit conscientiousness. And we haven't talked about agreeableness being a good person. Although we did kind of talk about e-holes a little bit. Yeah, we'll have to get to conscientiousness. Yeah. But your question is good. And I wanted to make it clear that while these are all basic, while these are all needs of human, humans, we do differ quite a bit in at different points in our life, how pressing they are for us. So I think regardless of our personality, I think, contextually as well, these things, these needs can ebb and flow. But also based on our own temperament, we can, these needs can ebb and flow.

There are some people that really do, I think genetics plays a role here, care a lot more about being, belonging and intimacy. But I think that the lesson of what you're saying here is that, I mean, exploration is important as a part of this growth aspect of the needs. But it is something where you don't try to just push it to the maximum. You don't want to be surprised every moment of your life. There is an appropriate amount of newness and newness to experience and exploration for any one person given who they are and what they're interested in. Yes, I really do think that. Any fully functioning system requires both safety and growth, security and growth. And also there's been other labels like I used earlier, like stability and plasticity.

But I think any fully functioned system is going to have to reconcile with both at some point in their life. Good. Okay. The next need on our sale is love. So it's interesting because you're putting love here in the growth part of the needs, not in the security part. Yeah, I did. And I wanted to separate. So one thing I did is I separate belonging from intimacy within the need for connection.

But the other thing I want to do is I wanted to separate an unconditional form of love, a higher spiritual form of love entirely from connection. I wanted to get it out. I wanted to get it out of the boat and into the sail and into the sail. Because when you project that in your sale, you can do that to anyone. It doesn't have to be those, only the people you like, or only the people you feel a sense of relatedness to. So there's a more cosmic aspect of love. Yes, absolutely. It's an attitude.

Love is an attitude, not necessarily a feeling. In fact, you could hate someone in terms of the feeling, you know, the label we put hate on the, on that feeling, but still have be love. And this is what Maslow talked called be love, love for the being of others and the sacredness of others, even if they're different from who our being is. We can just admire people for who they are, not what we're trying to get out of them,

or the usefulness they have for us. Right. Even at the level of connection, it's still about usefulness. You know, you're still making demands on people to connect with me. But at the B-Love level of human existence, you don't make those sorts of demands. It's more that you're offering something to the world rather than just asking things of it.

That's right. Okay. And then the third need in the sale is purpose. And this is the one I want to talk about the most, because I have my doubts. But I want to hear your sales pitch first. So I can't wait to hear your own thought of this. I know, because it's the most important one to you. I know. Well, I wouldn't actually say it's the most important.

If you actually asked me to choose, I may actually choose, like, transcendence, which we're going in a second, you know. But purpose, the point I wanted to make there is if I had to choose, I would choose the integration of them all. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's like, that's like the spoiler. Totally cheating. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. But purpose, it's a tough one to define, although I do have a precise. definition in the book. How did I define it? The need for purpose can be defined as the need for an overarching aspiration that energizes one's efforts and provides a central source of meaning and significance in one's life. The way I think about purpose, and we can have multiple purposes, but it's a more superordinate goal, and it serves as an organizing framework, so to speak, for all of our other goals so that we can see if our other goals

in our hierarchy, maybe at less abstract levels or broad levels of abstraction, are working together as a whole unit in making sure that we're realizing that highest level goal or aspiration or one could just colloquially called a dream, dream!

If we've lost everyone and what I just said, we say just having a dream, you know, a really broad dream, making sure that we really can reach it to our full, capacity, that we're not having things that are taking away unnecessarily from our capacity to realize that dream. But I'd love to get your thoughts. Well, I completely agree that

having a purpose of the form that you talk about can really help, right? Can really give somebody momentum direction and fulfillment in their lives. But I have a bunch of questions, one of which is, do we really need that? I mean, can people be just as happy without some sort of big picture future goal in mind? Can there be real more living in the moment without necessarily having a purpose, and can that be just as rewarding? This is a legitimate question. It's not like a leading question.

Like I'm open to whatever the answer might be. So yes, and it's a terrific, terrific question. It's one that I had quite a bit back and forth with. Ken and Sheldon, who did a lot of the research that I tried to synthesize in that chapter, he doesn't talk about, he doesn't use the word purpose, he talks about self-concordant goals, the importance of setting the right goals that will lead to growth. And when I told him, I was kind of framed this in terms of purpose and everything. He was very skeptical of that.

And he, you know, he said, well, like, I teach my students, don't worry about this purpose. It's so dramatic, sounds so dramatic and daunting, you know. I'm also can be a bit of a dramatic person too, so Purpose resonates more with my being, you know? Yeah. Like there's something exciting and thrilling about having a superordinate goal that gives you like a hierarchy of meaning in your life. You know, like I think it's fair to say there are some goals you have that give you a deeper sense of meaning than other goals. You know, like the goal to just get out of bed in the morning, you know,

It's not your purpose in life, but it's an important goal. Well, I mean, this is where, I mean, this is what I, if I were to be more playing the devil's advocate, which I sometimes try to do in the podcast context. I love it. You know, one of the criticisms against Maslow was that it was a little elitist, his conception of psychology, right? Like, he was looking at the people who had been most successful in lives. Not successful. I would correct you there.

He did not equate self-actualization with achievement. Okay, but he was looking at people like, Gandhi and Einstein and so forth, right? I mean, he was not looking at people who he met randomly on the street. That's a fair point. That's a fair point. Although he, I saw an interview with his, a very precious interview with his wife, Bertha, after Maslow died. And they're interviewing her about how he thought about self-actualization. And she said, you know, he really thought my mother was self-actualized, was way more self-actualized than he thought he himself was. And his mother was really a good, a good kind, her mother was a good kind person, but not a, not someone who had achieved a lot. Yeah. And if you actually look at Maslow's writings, he started off the whole idea of self-actualization.

He started what he called what he called the good human being notebook. He was just taking down notes of who he thought were the best specimens of humanity in the sense that they were good people. And I think that gets lost a lot in, in this notion of self-actualization. and actually the spirit upon which he went into this, he thought that self-actualized people represent what's best in humanity, but he did not equate it with high achievement. Okay, that aside, Maslow's individual thoughts aside, I think that there is a danger, because it's not,

so, I mean, for you, it might have been Maslow, for me, when I think about people in moral philosophy, for example, like John Stuart Mill, trying to make distinctions between higher and lower pleasures, or people who talk about the meaning of life, and they associate it with, you know, some sort of creative work or changing the world in some way. And all of this sounds, and, you know, I have those goals and purposes myself, but the idea that that's what it should be does sound a little bit elitist to me.

I think that there's plenty of space out there, again, playing the devil's advocate, for just living, for just saying, like, no, I don't wake up in the morning, like with my grand plan, I just want to like be good at the day. And I can find meaningfulness in the competency and compassion with which I approach the everyday small things. And I, if you, if you want to say, well, that counts as a purpose, then that's fine. But I don't think it's what people think of when you say the word purpose. Hmm. I think you're right. And, you know, if you want to talk about transcendence, we do, we do. But it's a sort of, it's so. It's some point, there is a kind of a, there is a grand reveal, or not grand reveal, there is a, a, there's a twist ending to this book.

Yeah. And I've been holding off on it because it's like, I want people to read the book, but I, you know, there is a twist ending and, and it gets to, what do you say? What do you say? Okay, M. Knight Chameleon. Oh, yeah. I know, I know. I'm the M. Knight Chabalon of psychology. No, no, no, that speaks directly to the heart of what you're saying. And that was a twist of Maso's as well because he thought it was all about self-actualization, all about this grand purpose and mission, having a mission outside yourself. And then he faced his own mortality. And he suddenly didn't care about any of that stuff anymore. Right. And it confused the heck out of him. And he wrote, you know, in his book, this is so strange that this experience of mortality, which has, in a sense, taken me all the way to the bottom,

not of a pyramid, but, you know, made me focus on this lower need has actually increased my sense of transcendence and appreciation of the world more than I've ever had in my entire life and has made me care less about the competitiveness drive or the achievement drive or the ego. So this was a real paradox that he was trying to work out in the last. year and a half of his life before he did succumb to a heart attack at the age of 62, suddenly, you know? You know, I think, so, yeah, this is good. I do want to sort of, I'm sorry about your book and your dramatic instincts. I want to totally spoil the ending of your book here in the podcast and talk about transcendence, but I do have one more question about purpose, which is, I think, you know,

one that many people will have, which is, where is it supposed to come from? I mean, can it be completely arbitrary? Does it matter which purpose we have? You know, there are people here in the United States of America who, you know, build the world's largest ball of twine or something like that. And is that just as good as people who find a cure for cancer? Oh, just as good. Wow. Well, that's a heavy question. And I would be the last one to start to claim I'm the arbitrator of whose purpose is. No, I think you are. I think it's your job. Oh, boy, that's something. But I want to emphasize that this is an integrated hierarchy of needs.

We can't view any one of these as separate from the whole system or the whole sailboat. And I've really thought this out, I really thought this out at a very, at a very, very OCD level. But, you know, if we're talking about building purpose on a foundation of expiration and love, That's the way of being that I think leads to the transcendence that I'm talking about. And I'm not talking about a purpose that's being driven by your deprivation needs, like ego, and the desperate need to fulfill a whole within yourself. I do think that we can call it purpose. We can call it just a deep, deep, or a goal that gives us a deep sense of satisfaction

when we work toward it. If that's fine, we can get, let's get rid of, for the purposes of this conversation, just so we're on the same page, we can get rid of the word purpose, and we just talk about a, a dream, an overarching aspiration

or even just a goal that is higher priority of meaning for us than other goals. Yeah. Even just that, even just that at the basic level. And you combine that with a sense of exploration and a sense of be love for humanity. It's being driven by a,

a spirit of wanting to make the world a better place, I think those three things work as a whole unit in allowing us to transcend ourselves. And that's the point I wanted to make in the book. Good. I mean, maybe let's focus more specifically in on transcendence. You know, when I read that part of your book, I thought of the Zen story about the monk who was asked,

you know, what is the difference in his life before and after he became enlightened? Stop me if you've heard this one. but he said, well, before I became enlightened, I would chop wood and carry water, and now that I'm enlightened, I chop wood and carry water. That's it. That's the whole story. He does it an enlightened way now. Is that related in some way to the idea of transcending the...

I'm sure that he sort of... The idea was he conceptualized and perceived it and got a different kind of satisfaction from it post-enlightenment, but his stuff that he was doing to get through the day was just the same stuff. That's right. That's very right. And I do love that.

I talk about healthy transcendence as different from unhealthy transcendence. So there's a lot of, this is an overarching framework for everything in life, by the way. I think everything in life is neither good or bad. It has a deprivation flavor to it and a growth flavor to it. And that can apply to anything. You start to view the world that way. I think it really opens your eyes up to a lot. you can have deprivation humor, which is very self-deprecating or maybe aggressive towards

others, but you can have a more growth-oriented form of humor. You can have a form of aggression that is very deprivation motivated, but you can have kind of the Martin Luther King kind of aggression, which is like we're going to use this to uplift all of humanity. You can go down the line, you know, and I think the same applies to transcendence. I think you have a deprivation form of transcendence, which you see in the world today with these so-called gourd who who claim to be above humanity. They're like, so I'm not saying all the gurus, but I'm not trying to piss off the whole,

all the gurus here, but I'm saying there are some that you see they abuse their position of power. You see that they, they sort of have this, it's being motivated clearly, as I see it, through narcissism and through these security needs, not through growth.

But I do think there's a form of health, transcendence that sits that's well integrated and is not about being above humanity but it's about being a part of humanity as much as possible and I think that's very that's different those are different conceptualizations of what transcendence means and the kind I'm talking about is a is a sense of great great connectedness to the rest of humanity just by being who you are I'm not saying that it's you are sacrificing yourself there's a high level of integration where at the highest level of integration, there's a seamlessness between you and the

world. I'm actually going to stop on that. Okay, no, no, that's very good. The seamlessness between you and the world, I think, is a very powerful image. And maybe, in fact, it answers the question I was just going to ask, which is the word transcend or transcendence, kind of begs a question about what is it that we are transcending? And do you have a simple answer to that? Is it a thing that we're transcending, or is it more vague than that? Well, one could, at the most simplistic level, say you're transcending the ego. Okay, good. And then that's a very simplistic way of saying, and then when we say, well, what is the ego?

And I would define, the ego could be defined in a million different ways. And then the self has a million different definitions. But for purposes of our conversation, one could define the ego as all those aspects of our self that are the defensive aspects of ourself are the ones that tie us to security as much as possible and to the relief from risk and the potential for pain.

It's our defense mechanisms. So in a lot of ways, it really is transcending, no longer needing, no longer needing our needs. Got it. So it's the needs that are being transcended or the need for our needs. Correct.

That's a better way of saying it, yeah. Correct. Correct. Okay. Very good. Good. Is that people should read your book to find out more? I don't want them to think that they learned everything.

There's a long book full of footnotes and a lot more detail than we were able to get into here. Thank you. I appreciate that. There is more. But you've really given me quite the opportunity here today to really get, I hope not in the weeds. No, we like the weeds. The weeds is where we live. This is what.

Believe me. I'm going to get a million comments on YouTube saying thank you for going into the weeds. More weeds. Oh, good. I truly hope that people do like to listen to us kind of nerd out at this level and that they can gain value from that because this is not your, I realize this is not your kind of self-help book that I'm just telling you the five steps to lead a better life. And I do have an appendix of exercises, but I think, and I, you know, There are enough people out there that don't want to just be told what to do. They want to know the theory and science behind it. And I try to balance both those things. But let's make it clear for potential readers. I mean, in the book and also on your website, you do have actual specific, actionable items that people can do to try to help themselves transcend in the sense you're talking about, right?

I do. And a lot of these things I adapted from exercises, I called them growth challenges that I have my students do. I teach a course on the science of living well. And I see transformations. This is not only tested through science in a formally peer-reviewed journal articles through hundreds and hundreds of students who have said this way of thinking about the world and these kinds of exercises have helped them grow and transcend themselves in. in powerful ways. And these exercises are also, a lot of them are not your standard, sort of happiness exercises because happiness is not my goal here. My goal is growth. So, yeah.

This is going to be deflationary, but I love the story in your book about Maslow moving to Brandeis and teaching the class. And then at the end, like the end of the semester, one of the students says, is this going to be on the test?

Can you tell me what's going to be in the final? And he's like, you've learned nothing from anything that I've taught you all this course. And ironically, that happened to be in my class. Of course. And I couldn't

help but then relay the story of Maslow and I could, that student, I didn't appreciate it. No, that's going to undermine that. Well, and of course you also have a podcast. Tell people about your podcast so they know about that. Sure. So I have something, I have a podcast called

the psychology podcast. It's great that you're able to steal it to sort of get that name before anyone else. I got it. I got it. Yeah, now others have to try to steal mine, but I didn't steal anything. You didn't steal it. That was a misstatement on my part. Yeah, you know, I know. You were there first. I was there first. And it's just such a great opportunity for me to find the leading psychologists, maybe even names of psychologists that aren't the household psychologist names, but I could still give them a platform because I still think they're leading and they're doing great stuff. And discussing all aspects of the human mind and human nature and the human variation. Nothing's off limits for discussion respectfully and compassionately on my podcast.

So that's been great fun. I really hope. I think a lot, I really do believe a lot of the listeners of your podcast would enjoy some of the episodes, if not a lot of the episodes of my podcast. Yeah, no, I think it's a great thought. And a great place to end on, Scott Berry Cowman. Thanks so much. for being on the Mindscape podcast. Thank you for having me on. It's been great.

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