91 | Scott Barry Kaufman on the Psychology of Transcendence

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.

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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.

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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I am 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 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 higher level psychological needs, until at the top, you reach 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.

0:00:37 SC: 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.

0:01:08 SC: 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 your more basic needs and then there’s the sails of the sailboat, which have more dynamic needs and I like this imagery because, as a physicist, as someone who knows about entropy and 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.

0:01:51 SC: Scott and I talk about different ways of being psychologically healthy, the 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. 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.

0:02:19 SC: 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.

0:02:34 SC: Remember, you can support the Mindscape Podcast on Patreon if you go to patreon.com/seanmcarroll or just find a link on the podcast homepage which is preposterousuniverse.com/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.

[music]

0:03:32 SC: Scott Barry Kaufman, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:03:35 Scott Barry Kaufman: Thanks Sean, I’ve been looking forward to this chat for a while.

0:03:37 SC: You know, I thought while thinking about this chat, that in some ways, psychology is as ambitious as physics and cosmology. Physics and cosmology tries to understand the whole universe, which is very big but psychology tries to understand people, which are very complicated.

[laughter]

0:03:56 SC: 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 even get into the details, what are your thoughts about the hubris of being a psychologist and trying to help people with psychology?

0:04:16 SK: Okay, sure. I think in a lot of ways, one could make the argument that studying humans is more complicated than studying the universe.

0:04:24 SC: Oh yeah. No, I get it. More complicated. No doubt.

0:04:26 SK: Let me elaborate ’cause I feel… Those are fighting words perhaps for physicists but I think that… In some ways, humans are more unpredictable than… We get the sun. You get the sun, okay? The sun rotates. Yeah, that’s fine. Okay. No… No… No. I’m joking but we get how the universe works in some ways and there’s a certain predictability or regularity there, right? But my gosh, studying humans is so confusing because we…

0:05:04 SK: First of all, there’s individual differences and as you know, that’s the area that I focus on mostly. I’m fascinated with human variation and when you start looking into individual differences, then it’s like all bets are off in a sense. 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?” Then you realize, “Oh my gosh! These general principles really break down because you have this a-hole who broke all the rules.” [laughter] You know what I mean?

0:05:35 SC: They always exist.

0:05:36 SK: With the universe, you don’t have that many a-holes who get out of line when you have the equation that’s beautiful. When you come up with a beautiful equation, am I right?

0:05:45 SC: Yeah. This is why it’s not fighting words at all. I think that physicists and cosmologists be the first to agree that studying human beings is way more complicated. That’s the beauty of physics is that it actually is, at heart, super simple and elegant and pristine but aside from… We totally agree that human beings are complicated and hard. What gives you the… How do you get through the day telling yourself “and nevertheless, I have really good insights to share with you all.”

0:06:14 SK: Yeah, especially with all these replication crisises happening and the fact that a lot of things aren’t coming out. Well, I think that… 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 found it once and for all, in any sort of lane and to not have such confidence that people can’t change, as well.

0:06:47 SK: 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. There are people that try to do interventions and a lot of interventions don’t work but you do see this tendency, especially in the intelligence field, for instance there’s been no good intervention. I’m gonna say this right now. There’s been no really strong intervention that has dramatically improved IQ scores and intelligence researchers…

0:07:16 SK: There’s a bunch of intelligence researchers who almost get a glee from that finding, which I don’t understand why there’s a glee for it but almost a sense of like, “See, we told you. Intelligence… None of that doesn’t change but that it’s pretty genetically-determined or influenced, very heavily influenced.” and yet, I still wanna maintain the spirit of “Oh, that’s interesting. Well, let’s just keep trying.” It’s not like we just stop trying to do interventions, just because we haven’t been able to find the one that really had a striking effect.

0:07:48 SC: You’re interested in sort of the engineering and technology side of Psychology, as well as the Science descriptive side of psychology?

0:07:55 SK: 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 Maslow used, in terms of trying to become integrated human beings.

0:08:10 SC: Oh.

0:08:11 SK: We need to transcend that civil war within ourselves, these different sides of ourself that are fighting each other but I have the scientist hat and when that hat is on in full force, it does not really like the intervention hat side of myself and when the intervention side of myself is on, I’m like “I’m not really into the scientist that much.” It is an interesting sort of balance that I try to strike within myself.

0:08:34 SC: Well, you mentioned Maslow. Tell us about Maslow. Cause we’re gonna go into your new book that is coming out called Transcendence. Is that right?

0:08:42 SK: It’s called Transcend.

0:08:43 SC: Transcend.

0:08:44 SK: It’s a verb.

0:08:45 SC: Got it, Transcend. Is it like an order you’re giving people [chuckle] or are you telling them in imperative, “Please transcend?”

0:08:52 SK: Yes. Yes, that’s the idea. It’s an action, action word, for sure. It’s hopefully an inspirational North Star kind of book that kind of shows what humans could be.

0:09:06 SC: Well and it builds on the work of Abraham Maslow. Tell us a little bit about who he is. We’ve all heard of him, but fill us in as if we didn’t know.

0:09:15 SK: Oh, good. I’m really glad you said that ’cause I’ve had other people be like, “No one knows who Maslow is. Why should anyone care about your book?” I’m like, “Thanks.” [laughter] “I appreciate that.” I like your attitude about that. Everyone knows who Maslow is. 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.

0:09:36 SC: Yeah.

0:09:37 SK: 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…

0:09:46 SC: Sorry, the pyramid is the hierarchy of needs that we’re talking about?

0:09:49 SK: 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, which is labeled self-actualization. Now, this is the story that’s being told to so many introductory psychology management students and people who see it diagrammed on the internet. However, it turns out that Maslow never drew a pyramid. [chuckle] and there are so many misconceptions about the hierarchy of needs, it’s incorrect how it’s been taught the past 60 years. [chuckle] It’s been incorrect.

0:10:29 SC: He had a list of needs, a hierarchy but he just never drew them in the form of a pyramid?

0:10:33 SK: 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 target multiple needs simultaneously. We don’t have to wait to start self-actualizing until everything else is done, until we check all the boxes and also, 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 connection and then some voice from above is like, “Congrats, you’ve unlocked esteem.” Like Mortal Kombat or something.

0:11:09 SC: Yeah.

0:11:09 SK: That’s not the way the world works and Maslow was very clear about that so I really try to infuse the spirit of what Maslow actually meant, as well as the rest of the humanistic psychology. 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 psychologies that have been lost.

0:11:27 SC: But tell us what the hierarchy is, what are the levels?

0:11:32 SK: The original model…

0:11:32 SC: In Maslow…

0:11:33 SK: And I revised it but in the original model, you had the safety needs or… Sorry you even had, below that, you had physiological needs.

0:11:42 SC: Okay.

0:11:43 SK: Like food, water, shelter. Then you had safety needs, need for a certain sense of predictability in your environment and then you have belonging and 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. That was a big component of that…

0:12:05 SC: So it’s not self-esteem, it’s the esteem that others hold us in?

0:12:09 SK: Both. I would say he had two self-components of that, both esteem from others as well as 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 redundant in 90% of humans but then, you can get to the self-actualized individual. That’s the next level is self-actualization. It’s a big leap. [laughter]

0:12:22 SC: Yeah.

0:12:35 SK: I’ve always viewed that as quite a jump. I’m like “Okay. I feel really pumped up ego-wise. Boom. Now I can self-actualize.” [laughter] It seems to be a lot of steps along the way there and in a lot of ways, it’s what I try to do in my book, is connect those dots. 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 Mario Brothers.

0:13:06 SC: I think most people understand, just in ordinary language, the words 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?

0:13:26 SK: Maslow talks about it in different ways but there is 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.

0:13:39 SC: Okay, sure.

0:13:40 SK: I found a unpublished essay that he really wanted to publish. He was calling it Critique of Self-Actualization. He really wanted to publish this before he died and 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.”

0:14:19 SK: In a lot of ways, he viewed self-actualization as being able to real… 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 towards but the focus of self-actualization is more in realizing that unique potential within you. That is, in a lot of ways some people would call it your best self in modern day language, although I don’t like that phrase because I think that there’s no such thing as the real self.

0:14:53 SK: Well, I actually really don’t like the phrase “the real self” because there’s no such thing. [chuckle] But I think that’s really what he was getting at, was this unique full potential of what we can offer the world and I do think there are misconceptions about it as being selfish. David Brooks, The New York Times columnist was hating on Maslow in a column a couple of years ago and I was like “Oh! Hell no!” [laughter] When I was reading the column. I was…

0:15:20 SC: So you’re very pro-Maslow, even though you update him, you’re definitely in his tradition.

0:15:26 SK: Yes. I view him as a good friend who I’ve never met.

0:15:29 SC: Yeah.

0:15:32 SK: And I do think as Maslow did, Maslow thought that we could have friends from prior generations. It may sound a bit creepy [laughter] but we can really have such a fondness for someone to get to know them so well. I met 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 Maslow died but he would say that “Jeannie was the great 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.”

0:16:09 SK: So it was such a peak experience for me to meet Jeannie 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… [laughter] than 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.

0:16:32 SC: Yeah no, absolutely. But the important… Good so that is very helpful to understanding self-actualization and I do wanna 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. The idea that it’s a hierarchy being that first, you solve all your physiological needs or secure them and then you go on to safety and then you go on to a love etcetera and is that the way it works? Is that the way Maslow thought it worked? Is that a good way of thinking about it?

0:17:06 SK: No, not that we must 100% satisfy something before we can go on to the next. That would be a mis-representation. He argued at any given point of time there’s a certain percentage, certain fraction of each of those needs that we have satisfied. Right now, I could go down the list with you and ask you, maybe you’re 60% connection, maybe you’re 90% esteem. You’re pretty…

0:17:32 SC: Oh yeah!

0:17:32 SK: You have a lot of Twitter followers. [laughter]

0:17:34 SC: I’m not a virgin.

0:17:37 SK: Maybe you’re very high in safety and then some other need. If we talk about some of my needs that I added and we can go down the percentages. 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 pre-potency, is what he called it and whenever I use that word and people are, “What are you talking about?” I try to use that word in my book and my publisher is like, “No one is going to know what pre-potency means.” [laughter] Well, now what does he mean by that?

0:18:06 SK: 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 world view and narrow, in a sense, they narrow our world view to a particular world view and they really do make it harder to be all that we could become, which is self-actualization. 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 lock-step progression of a triangle… Of something that you have to climb like a mountain you climb but more of an integrative process where if you don’t have well-integrated some of these deprivation needs, the whole system is really gonna be out of whack, if that makes sense.

0:18:57 SC: Yeah no, actually, it does make sense. But 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 are levels, they’re not just a list in random order.

0:19:18 SK: Yes, there are levels which could be… 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 pre-potent than others. We could probably all, at the very basic level, say that things like food, water, shelter are essential.

0:19:42 SK: I think there’s some things there that are hard to argue, universally but there are some cultures where esteem might be more important than connection or some cultural connection might be more important. What I really wanted to emphasize was this distinction between… I didn’t wanna get hung up on the precise order but I wanted to talk about the dialect, he had very interesting dialect… Dialectical between security and growth and that’s really what Maslow was fascinated with, was that dialectical.

0:20:12 SC: And that leads us directly into your re-imagining of it. You’ve thrown away the pyramid. Too boring, too stationary. You have a new metaphor.

0:20:23 SK: Yes. I think a sail boat offers, at multiple levels so to speak, a better conceptualization of what it means to live a good life, what it means just to… 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 the same sea of unpredictability, we don’t know when there’s gonna 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.

0:21:04 SK: But once we can do that, we can feel safe and comfortable to open our sail and how we open our sail also affects where we can go and how fast we can go and all these things. I really think that the sail boat does a nice job of capturing that interaction between the boat and the sail or between safety and growth.

0:21:30 SC: Right. 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.

0:21:53 SK: Yes and at the top of the sail is purpose and really having a clear, clear direction and being very focused and having the whole unit. Another thing I like about the sail boat metaphor is that it’s all about an integration of a whole vehicle. It’s the whole vehicle that travels through ocean. You’re not climbing piece by piece different parts of you up this mountain that it doesn’t seem to be how humans or even how thermodynamic systems work. Whole systems are greater than the sum of the parts and that’s a big, big thing I try to emphasize in my book because I am into evolution psychology.

0:22:36 SK: I went through a phase of evolution psychology maybe 15 years ago where that I thought it was the cat’s pajamas and now, what I wanna do is I wanna really show that humans can be greater than the sum of their parts. We’re not just identified with our modules. I think there’s something… 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. 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 fascinating about humans, our ability to supersede or to become greater than the sum of the parts.

0:23:22 SC: And this is where the uniqueness of every person comes in and you wanna sort of emphasize that.

0:23:27 SK: Yeah. No, I ultimately wanna emphasize transcendence.

0:23:30 SC: Okay well, we’ll get there. That’s like way in the future in the podcast. [laughter] I want to get all of the layers on the table.

0:23:37 SK: Okay. Good, good.

0:23:37 SC: Wven though you have a different metaphor of the sail boat rather than the pyramid, you still have some needs, you still have a list of needs that we’re meeting in the form of this sail boat. Do you even call them needs still or do you have a different name?

0:23:54 SK: I do call them needs. I call them human needs for sure. I call this the integrated hierarchy of needs, the revised hierarchy of… That revised integrated hierarchy of needs. Yes.

0:24:08 SC: Good and so, which are the needs associated with the hull of the boat?

0:24:15 SK: Safety, which I’ve combined Maslow’s physiological and safety needs into one ’cause I think there’s so much research showing that how our body and mind are so interconnected and it made sense to talk about a general level. I shouldn’t say level but I don’t know what to call it now. General process, in which there’s a…

0:24:41 SK: 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 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. That would all be under that aspect.

0:25:27 SC: In the chapter on safety, you actually talk a lot about attachment to other people. Maybe that is not what comes to people’s mind when you first start talking about safety and part of safety is having a house and food and water but you’re also… That seems to be… I would have put that in connection but you put it in safety, the attachment we have to other people.

0:25:51 SK: Yes because the opposite of secure attachment is insecure attachment. When you’re insecurely attached, there’s such anxiety, especially if you have the anxious attachment style. You’re pitched into that state of uncertain anxiety where you don’t trust people. I see trust as a really core part of this need for safety. Coherence in the environment but also trust that your environment will be safe, to me is essential part of this need.

0:26:26 SC: An ability to treat other people like they’re friends, not your enemies.

0:26:31 SK: And that you can depend on them in times of great need. See, that’s what attachment theory is all about. Can I… Do I have trust and confidence in this caregiver? When we’re vulnerable 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 trust that when things really get tough, that they’ll protect and help me in those situations?

0:27:05 SC: As a working psychologist, you must know, you must be very familiar with all of the different ways in which attachment is tricky. I mean, attachment to other people. You can be overly attached, you can be clingy. You want to have that trust and respect for other people without getting in their way. I’m not sure how you would put it but there’s definitely a balance to be struck there.

0:27:27 SK: Absolutely. Not to get too nerdy about this but it’s really good to view attachment styles as continuums, not types. I think that this type way of thinking has not really been very profitable for psychologists and we really need to think about things as… And this applies to everything. 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. Those are the two fundamental dimensions we differ on and there’s no such thing as secure attachment type. Just like none of us are ever 100% self-actualized, none of us are ever 100% securely attached.

0:28:24 SK: If you just have these two dimensions, anxious and avoidant attachment styles, you can actually create a space of different combinations of those two of different ways that one can be insecurely attached and then you can only conceptualize secure attachment, the extent to which both of those are high, if you see what I’m saying.

0:28:41 SC: Can you explain to us what they are? What is an anxious attachment continuum and what is the avoidance?

0:28:49 SK: Well…

0:28:50 SC: This is the place to get nerdy. Go nuts. [chuckle]

0:28:52 SK: Can I really get nerdy? Okay, give me a moment. I actually say it… Sometimes I get in these moments where I’ve never said it better than I did in the book, so can I just find that part?

0:29:02 SC: Sure.

0:29:03 SK: Okay. The anxious attachment dimension reflects a concern about being rejected and abandoned and is the product of beliefs about whether others will be for you in times of great need. The avoidant 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.

0:29:31 SK: Now, it’s interesting because I’ve looked really closely into the literature and found something that I think is interesting, in that it’s much more detrimental in mental health to score very, very high on the anxious dimension than the avoidant dimension. I’ve found interesting that there are 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.

0:29:57 SC: Well I was gonna 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.

0:30:17 SK: Yes. There is a lot of research showing that if both of those dimensions are very, very low. So you have very low avoidance attachment and very low anxious attachment, it does tend to be correlated positively 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. Working as a interaction or combination, I think is interesting.

0:30:49 SK: But there are people who aren’t very anxious attachment at all but are very high in avoidant and that’s an interesting combination, I think it’s been understudied in the research literature. There are plenty of people who are actually quite fine being single [chuckle] not being in a relationship and we found… Well, not we Dr. Keltner and their colleagues have done some interesting research looking at correlations between these different attachment styles and personality traits and they found that who score very high on avoidant but not anxious, they just don’t score particularly high on compassion. They’re just not high on compassion and love. They don’t report being a very love… “Yeah, I’m not a loving person.” But they actually report higher level of contentment in life. [chuckle]

0:31:28 SC: Yeah, I totally get that. Yeah.

0:31:30 SK: I think it’s interesting. I think it’s interesting.

0:31:33 SC: This is a good point to digress a little bit because you’re mentioning the research that’s been done. How much of the conversation we’re having here is based on data, is based on experiments and empirical research versus how much of it is a theory that you’re hoping will be tested using data down the road?

0:31:49 SK: Oh my gosh! I don’t know if I may, what I wanna may do but 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. I have a pretty extensive references list in the bag.

0:32:13 SC: There are a lot of footnotes, yes.

0:32:16 SK: This was something that I’ve been working on for years and years and wanted to get right, at least as right as could be in the moment.

0:32:25 SC: When you make choices like collapsing Maslow’s first two levels into one need…

0:32:32 SK: Obsessed over it.

0:32:33 SC: Yes but you looked at the data when you chose to do that. It’s not just like an idea you had that sounded cool.

0:32:39 SK: That’s exactly right. I obsessed over every little detail of this book. For instance, 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 a throw away line in the book like, “and modern personality psychologists have confirmed this model of security and growth, this distinction.” But then I have a huge footnote for any nerds that wanna go to the back of the book to see what I actually mean and I actually link it to recent research on cybernetics and research being done in artificial intelligence, not just in humans.

0:33:16 SK: 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 be fully functioning, it needs both the ability to resist distraction so stability, as well as plasticity, the ability to come up with new goals. You can get really… There’s a level in which you can get… I can explain a lot of my decisions at the nerdiest level.

[laughter]

0:33:49 SC: Excellent.

0:33:49 SK: I guess is what I’m trying to say, yeah.

0:33:51 SC: Let’s get to some more of the decisions you’re making here. We’re still in the hull of the boat, there’s three needs that we talk about in the hull. One is the safety that we just talked about, the next is connection. What does that mean?

0:34:02 SK: 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 and…

0:34:18 SC: So this is more than just getting likes on Twitter?

0:34:21 SK: Correct and this is a point I wanted to make ’cause I have 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 have treated them as synonymous but when I was really looking deep into the literature on belonging, it seems like there’s lots and lots of instances in which people strive for the need to belong. They may do so in a way that lacks intimacy. Let’s say you join violent extremism or you join a cult or a religious organization or a political organization because you have a desperate, desperate deprivation of the need to belong and the leaders of this thing you joined don’t care at all about you.

0:35:11 SK: They only care about you to the extent to which you’re furthering their cause but in what ways is there a reciprocal loving relationship there? 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 it in the hopes that will satisfy that hole within themselves of loneliness and then they’re surprised when it never does.

0:35:38 SC: Sorry, is there a loneliness epidemic?

0:35:41 SK: Well, I use that phrase and then I had Steven Pinker on my podcast and he’s like “I would not call that a… ” He’s like “If you look at the history of… ” I’m like “Yeah, I get your shtick.”

[laughter]

0:35:54 SK: I love him. I love him to death, don’t get me wrong. He’s a friend and then 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, in this moment of history, would quite characterize it as an epidemic” do you know what I’m saying?

0:36:13 SC: Well, tell me. What do you mean by the loneliness epidemic?

0:36:16 SK: Well, the rates, especially among the elderly are quite staggering of reports, just simple reports of loneliness. 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-end and not just the rates but the impact of loneliness. John Cacioppo, 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 risk factors for mortality.

0:37:10 SC: But this is a… Are you’re saying that there is a quantitative difference in the amount of loneliness now versus when? Versus last year, versus 100 years ago?

0:37:22 SK: Yes. If we wanna 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, in the ’60s and I think there is a point there that could be made so perhaps we shouldn’t call it… And I wanna say something as well because I am very open to being… For people making these arguments. After my podcast chat I had with Steven Pinker, I went back in my book and I actually changed my book and I took… I think I took out the word epidemic. [laughter]

0:38:00 SC: 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?

0:38:07 SK: There’s a lot of it. I wanna focus on the there’s a lot of it aspect and I don’t wanna get stuck too much on making it a competition of some sort with prior epics or generations.

0:38:20 SC: Sure.

0:38:21 SK: But it is…

0:38:21 SC: No, I mean I can totally get onboard with the idea there’s a lot of loneliness out there.

0:38:25 SK: That’s right.

0:38:25 SC: Almost by definition it can be hidden from us [chuckle] ’cause if other people are lonely maybe we’re not connecting with them and the effects of it could be very bad.

0:38:34 SK: The effects, that’s also what I wanted to focus on ’cause that was mind-boggling to me to look into that literature and seeing just how strong an 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.

0:39:00 SC: And so that’s where this connection need comes in, this is the second need in the hull of your sailboat?

0:39:03 SK: Correct, correct.

0:39:05 SC: And how does it relate to the issue of introverts versus extroverts, right? Introverts are having their day in the sun now, we have Susan King’s book.

0:39:17 SK: We’re cool.

0:39:18 SC: 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?

0:39:30 SK: I’ve done quite a bit of research on introversion-extroversion dimension but I actually see that as irrelevant to this need because the need suggests a min… 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-extroversion dimension of personality and we could have a whole separate podcast on the science, 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.

0:40:02 SK: 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. I think introverts can have contentness and calmness but you find extroverts tend to report higher levels of these other kinds of static states all the time and also assertiveness.

0:40:27 SC: So the connection you need…

0:40:28 SK: But that’s how the…

0:40:29 SC: Is more about having a small number of really solid connections?

0:40:32 SK: Stable.

0:40:33 SC: Stable.

0:40:34 SK: Minimal number of stable and intimate, so mutual relatedness. There’s a relatedness aspect to it, that’s right.

0:40:42 SC: Okay, good and the third need within the hull of the boat is self-esteem and you did put the word self in there.

0:40:49 SK: Yes and just one more thing about introverts. You could be the most… Introversion doesn’t track anti-sociality. So this is a common misconception so…

0:41:00 SC: No, not at all, right.

0:41:00 SK: Yeah and I know you know that. I wanna make that, this is why I think this is separate from this basic need. We’re talking something else if you have this extreme sort of aversion of any human connection. Well then, I think there’s something else going on with you which we could talk about later, dark triad stuff but yeah, that’s not introversion.

0:41:18 SC: Right. Okay, good.

0:41:18 SK: Does that makes sense?

0:41:18 SC: Yeah no, 100%. Maybe, that’s what introversion is not. Why don’t you tell us what introversion is?

0:41:25 SK: 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 introverts will say, “Well it how I recharge my batteries.” They’ll say it’s, do I get energized by people or not energized by people? Well, scientists view it more in terms of the levels of dopamine and social reward.

0:41:58 SK: 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 I can conclude things like the possibility of getting esteem from a person you’re talking to or being excited for lots of novel social situations so that’s why you tend to find that introverts tend to prefer a couple of 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 then 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.

0:42:50 SK: I think that’s technically all that dimension means.

0:42:52 SC: Okay, no that makes sense.

0:42:54 SK: Yeah, does that make sense? Yeah.

0:42:55 SC: It does but now, is there… Now I need a word for the feature that I need to be alone to have time to recharge my batteries? [chuckle] What do we call that?

0:43:05 SK: Well we can…

0:43:08 SC: I mean, there are some people who are energized by being out in public and there’s some people who are, the energy seeps away when they’re putting the effort in to do that.

0:43:16 SK: But if you view it as a dopamine thing though, which is what’s really going on, then you can map it onto that in a way because dopamine predicts how much effort we are motivated to put into something. 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.

0:43:42 SC: Okay but they’re…

0:43:42 SK: They’re not wrong. So that metaphor 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. Introverts would have to put in more effort to be motivated and to talk to lots and lots of people and you could see how it would be exhausting to them quicker than extroverts. However, I wrote a paper showing that there are some misconceptions here because there’s been some studies 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. We’re all… And this is a big point of my book, we’re all human.

0:44:31 SK: We can get too stuck on these different types, personality types, not realizing that look, you could talk to experts 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.” [chuckle] Okay? They’re human too, they’re human too. We’re really just talking about thresholds and I think that it could 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.

0:45:01 SC: Yeah, good. Okay. I think that does clear something up. That’s very useful.

0:45:05 SK: Yay!

0:45:05 SC: 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?

0:45:15 SK: Self-esteem is and I focus on a healthy self-esteem 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 ’cause they’re different things and they have different developmental pathways, it’s just I’m worthy and the second component 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. 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.

0:46:11 SK: So with self-worth, it’s more tied to social relations. Am I a 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 literature they’ll call it self-liking versus self-competence and they can actually come apart, these two forms of self-esteem. 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 themselves that much. This is fascinating when you…

0:46:52 SC: Man, that would be terrible, to be that kind of narcissist. [chuckle] If you can’t even like yourself, why be a narcissist at all?

0:46:58 SK: Yeah. 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. I could distinguish between the more vulnerable, quiet, introverted form of narcissism from the more braggadocio or whatever that form of narcissism. But grandiose 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 valued social partner or I like myself. I think I like myself, they’re kind of neutral to negative on that aspect.

[laughter]

0:47:43 SC: Alright, that’s good to know. It’s helpful knowledge when we meet narcissists to go like “Yeah, you probably are not happy with yourself.” [chuckle]

0:47:52 SK: Yeah.

0:47:53 SC: That makes me a bad person, that I want to do that but… Okay, so that’s security. 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 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 do things. The growth aspect of all this.

0:48:21 SK: That’s exactly right. Meza called it the growing tip. 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 liked 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 as humans that really help us grow and evolve as a species.

0:48:49 SC: And your first one, you once again, have three needs that we associate with this sail. The first one is exploration. What does that mean?

0:48:57 SK: 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. You can actually have two different realms of human existence. I don’t know if you knew that Sean? [chuckle]

0:49:21 SC: I didn’t know.

0:49:21 SK: You can have the deprivation form of human existence where everything becomes about you trying to impart on the world, like you’re making demands on 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. 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.

0:49:58 SC: Right. You can exist from moment to moment but you’re gonna seek out some new experiences.

0:50:03 SK: Correct. You’re excited by the unknown, as opposed to fearing it intensely which is what psychological entropy is all about.

0:50:13 SC: 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 Friston, 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 “But we seek out surprise all the time.” 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.

0:51:09 SC: Do you think that makes sense?

0:51:10 SK: I do. I think that the need for exploration evolved as a need all on it’s own but it primarily as a anxiety-reducing function. I think that’s consistent with what he he said and also, by the way, I consulted these folks. I had Skype chats with this… The 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 it’s 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…

0:51:57 SK: The more that we can prepare ahead of time and the more that we can reduce that uncertainty by actively seeking information… I really connect the need for exploration with the information-seeking aspects of dopamine. There is some recent research distinguishing between the social aspects of dopamine or the more what are called repetitive rewards, cocaine, sex, a status and there are dopamine pathways that get us really excited at the possibility of those things and there are listeners that when I said those three things…

0:52:29 SC: They’re getting excited. [chuckle]

0:52:31 SK: Their brain is particularly release… 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 nerdier we get in this conversation, they are also 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 at the possibility of information, not just the possibility for mating opportunities.

0:53:05 SC: So you’re saying that equations lead to dopamine release?

0:53:09 SK: Yes, I do. I think that there’s some good… There’s some suggestive evidence that may be a separate pathway and I think it could 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 could be argued but I think that it is possible too, there are different pathways. There are pathways that project specifically to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and are working in memory that gives us excitement when our working memory is active with things that may give us greater information to survive and…

0:53:45 SC: I think this is your next book right here, Why Math Releases Dopamine? This is gonna be absolutely killer, there’s… 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 inner torment. How do we distinguish between those people? How do we give them both space to be valid?

0:54:21 SK: Yes. Well, great… 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 they are high in neuroticism personality trait, high in ob… They have obsessive-compulsive disorder at a very high level or other things that give them an 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… To the extent to which neuroticism predicts the need for security, openness to experiences predicts the need for exploration. I think… Yeah.

0:55:08 SC: And these are elements in the Big Five Personality Inventory, right?

0:55:12 SK: Correct. I just mentioned two of the big five and we already went deep into the extroversion and introversion one. So which are the ones we have left to discuss today? Grit and we haven’t talked about grit conscientiousness and we haven’t talked about agreeableness, being a good person. Although we did kinda talk about a-holes a little bit.

0:55:31 SC: Yeah, we talked about agreeableness a little bit, yeah. We’ll have to get to conscientiousness?

0:55:34 SK: Yeah. Your question is good and I wanted to make it clear that while these are all needs of 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 belonging and intimacy.

0:56:08 SC: But I think that the lesson of what you’re saying here is that 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 wanna be surprised every moment of your life. There is an appropriate amount of newness and newness to experience an exploration for any one person given who they are and what they’re interested in.

0:56:37 SK: 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 functioning system is going to have to reconcile with both at some point in their life.

0:57:02 SC: Good. Okay. The next need on our sail is love. It’s interesting because you’re putting love here in the growth part of the needs, not in the security part.

0:57:19 SK: Yeah, I did and I wanted to separate… One thing I did is I separate belonging from intimacy within the need for connection but the other thing I wanna 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 of the boat and into the sail because when you project that in your sail, 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. You can…

0:57:53 SC: So there’s a more cosmic aspect to love.

0:57:55 SK: 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 label. We put hate on that feeling but still have B-love and this is what Maslow talked… Called B-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 what they can do or the usefulness they have for us.

0:58:27 SC: Right.

0:58:28 SK: Even in the level of connection, it’s still about usefulness. 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.

0:58:42 SC: It’s more that you’re offering something to the world rather than just asking things of it.

0:58:47 SK: That’s right.

0:58:48 SC: Okay and then the third need in the sail is purpose and this is the one I wanna talk about the most but I’ll… ’cause I have my doubts but I wanna hear your sales pitch first.

0:59:01 SK: I can’t wait to hear your own thoughts on this…

0:59:04 SC: I know cause it’s the most important one to you. I know.

0:59:07 SK: Well, I wouldn’t actually say it’s the most important, if you actually asked me to choose, I may actually choose transcendency which we’ll go in in a second but purpose… The point I wanted to make there is, if I had to choose, I would choose the integration of them all.

0:59:24 SC: Sure.

0:59:24 SK: Than… Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That’s like the spoiler.

0:59:28 SC: Totally cheating but okay, go ahead. Yeah.

0:59:29 SK: 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 super ordinate 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 may be 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 call it a dream. [chuckle] Dream.

1:00:24 SK: If we’ve lost everyone in what I just said, we can say just having a dream, 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.

1:00:42 SC: 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? 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?

1:01:20 SC: This is a legitimate question. It’s not a leading question. I’m open to whatever the answer might be.

1:01:26 SK: 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 framing this in terms of purpose and everything, he was very skeptical of that and he said “Well, like I teach my students don’t worry about this. Purpose is so dramatic… It sounds so dramatic and daunting. I’m also can be a bit of a dramatic person too so…

1:02:03 SC: That’s okay.

1:02:04 SK: Purpose yeah, resonates more with my being. There’s something exciting and thrilling about having a super ornate goal that gives you like a hierarchy of meaning in your life. I think it’s fair to say there are some goals you have, that give you a deeper sense of meaning than other goals. Like the goal to just get out of bed in the morning [chuckle] is not your purpose in life but it’s an important goal.

1:02:32 SC: Well this is where… 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.

1:02:39 SK: I love it. I love it.

1:02:41 SC: One of the criticisms against Maslow was that it was a little elitist his conception of psychology, right? He was looking at the people who had been most successful in lives.

1:02:52 SK: Not successful. I would correct you there. He did not equate self-actualization with achievement.

1:02:57 SC: Okay but he was looking at people like Gandhi and Einstein and so forth, right? He was not looking at people who he met randomly on the street.

1:03:04 SK: Well that’s a fair point. That’s a fair point. [chuckle] 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, “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 kind… Her mother was a good kind person but not someone who had achieved a lot.

1:03:17 SK: And if you actually look at Maslow’s writings, he started off the hold of self-actualization, he started what’s 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 this notion of self-actualization and actually the spirit upon what 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.

1:03:17 SC: Okay. That aside. Maslow’s individual thoughts aside, I think that there is a danger ’cause it’s not… 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 some sort of creative work or changing the world in some way and all of this sounds and 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 with my grand plan. I just wanna be good at the day and I can find meaningfulness in the competency and compassion with which I approach the every day small things.” and if you wanna 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.

1:05:21 SK: I think you’re right and if you wanna talk about transcendence…

1:05:27 SC: We do, we do but…

1:05:28 SK: At some point there is a grand reveal… Or not a grand reveal, there’s a twist ending to this book and I’ve been holding off on it ’cause it’s like I want people to read the book but there is a twist ending and…

1:05:43 SC: Okay. M Night.

[laughter]

1:05:44 SK: It gets… What’d you say? What’d you say?

1:05:46 SC: Okay M. Night Shyamalan.

[laughter]

1:05:49 SK: I know, I know. I’m the M. Night Shyamalan of psychology. No. No, that speaks directly to the heart of what you’re saying and that was a twist of Maslow’s as well because he thought it was all about self-actuation, 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 and it confused the heck out of him and he wrote in his book, “This is so strange that this experience of mortality, which is in a sense, taken me all the way to the bottom, not of a pyramid but 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 it has made me care less about the competitiveness drive or the achievement drive or the ego.”

1:06:49 SK: 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.

1:07:00 SC: Yeah, this is good and I do wanna sort of… I’m sorry about your book and your dramatic instincts. I wanna 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 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? There are people here in the United States of America who build the world’s largest ball of twine or [chuckle] something like that and is that just as good as people who find a cure for cancer?

1:07:38 SK: Oh, just as good. Wow! That’s a heavy question and I would be the last one to start to claim I’m the arbitrator of [chuckle] who’s built this as…

1:07:48 SC: No, I think you are. I think it’s your job.

[laughter]

1:07:50 SK: Oh boy, that’s something. But I wanna 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 in a very very OCD level [chuckle] but 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 hole within yourself. I do think that, we can call 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.

1:08:52 SK: If that’s fine, we can… Let’s get rid of the… 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 dream, an overarching aspiration or even just a goal that is higher priority of meaning for us than other goals. Even just that, even just at the basic level and you combine that with a sense of exploration and a sense of B-love for humanity, it’s being driven by 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.

1:09:31 SC: Good and maybe let’s focus more specifically in on transcendence. When I read that part of your book, I thought of the zen story about the monk who was asked 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.”

[chuckle]

1:09:58 SC: That’s it, that’s the whole story.

1:10:00 SK: Yeah, I have…

1:10:00 SC: He does it in an enlightened way now. [chuckle] Is that a 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-enlightennment but his stuff that he was doing to get through the day was just the same stuff.

1:10:16 SK: 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…

1:10:30 SK: 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.

1:10:55 SK: You can have a form of aggression that is very deprivation-motivated but you can have the Martin Luther King kind of aggression which is like we’re gonna use this to uplift all of humanity. You can go down the line 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 gurus who claim to be above humanity. They’re like… I’m not saying all the gurus. [chuckle] I am not trying to piss off the whole… All of the gurus here but I’m saying there are some that you see they abuse their position of power or you see that they sort of have this… It’s being motivated clearly as I see it, through narcissism and through these security needs not through growth.

1:11:44 SK: But I do think there’s a form of healthy transcendence that’s 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 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 am actually gonna stop on that.

1:12:27 SC: Okay, no, no, that’s very good. That seamlessness between you and the world, I think it’s very powerful image and maybe in fact, it answers the question I was just going to ask which is the word transcend or transcendence, 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?

1:12:53 SK: Well, one could at the most simplistic level, say you’re transcending the ego. That’s a very simplistic way of saying it and then one would say, “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. [chuckle] but for purposes of our conversation, one could define the ego as all those aspects of ourself that are the defensive aspects of ourselves, are the ones that tie us to security as much as possible and to the relief from risk and the potential for a pain.

1:13:34 SK: It’s our defense mechanisms so in a lot of ways, it really is transcending no longer needing our needs in a way.

1:13:44 SC: Got it. So it’s the needs that are being transcended or the need for our needs. Maybe that’s a better way of saying it. Yeah.

1:13:50 SK: Correct, correct.

1:13:51 SC: Okay, very good. Good, is that… People should read your book, to find out more. I don’t want them to think of they learned everything. There’s a long book full of footnotes and a lot more detailed than we were able to get into here.

1:14:05 SK: Thank you, I appreciate that. There’s more but you’ve really given me quite the opportunity here today to really get… I hope not in the weeds [laughter]

1:14:14 SC: No, we like the weeds. The weeds is where we live. This is what, believe me, I’m gonna get a million comments on YouTube saying thank you for going into the weeds, more weeds.

1:14:23 SK: Oh good! I truly hope that people do like to listen to us, nerd out at this level and that they can gain value from that because this is not your… I realize this is not your 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 that there are enough people out there that don’t wanna just be told what to do. They wanna know the theory and science behind it and I try to balance both those things.

1:14:58 SC: But let’s make it clear, for potential readers, 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?

1:15:14 SK: 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 you see, I see transformations. This is not only tested through science in a formally peer-reviewed through articles, through hundred and hundreds of students who have said that this way of thinking about the world and these kinds of exercises have helped them grow and transcend themselves in powerful ways and these exercise are also… A lot of them are not your standard, happiness exercises because happiness is not my goal here, my goal is growth. So yeah.

[chuckle]

1:15:57 SC: This is gonna be deflationary but I love the story in your book about Maslow moving to Brandize and teaching the class and then at the end, like the end of the semester, one of the student says, “Is this gonna be on the test. Can you tell me what’s gonna be the final?” and he’s like “You’ve learned nothing from anything that I’ve taught you.” All of this course.

[laughter]

1:16:15 SK: And ironically that happened to be in my class.

1:16:18 SC: Of course.

1:16:19 SK: And I couldn’t help but then relay the story of Maslow and I could… That student I didn’t appreciate it obviously…

1:16:28 SC: Well and of course, you also have a podcast, tell people about your podcast so they know about that.

1:16:28 SK: Sure. I have something, I have a podcast called The Psychology podcast.

1:16:28 SC: That’s great that you were able to steal, to get that name before anyone else did. That’s very good marketing.

1:16:28 SK: I got it. I got it. Yeah, now others have to try to steal mine but I didn’t steal any…

1:16:28 SC: You didn’t steal it. That was a mistake on my part.

1:16:28 SK: No, I know. I know.

1:16:28 SC: You were there first.

1:16:28 SK: 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 can 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 human variation. Nothing is off limits. [chuckle] up for discussions respectfully and compassionately on my podcast so that’s been great, great fun. I really hope… I think a lot…

1:17:29 SK: 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.

1:17:38 SC: Yeah no, I think it’s a great thought and a great place to end on. Scott Barry Kaufman, thanks so much for being on The Mindscape podcast.

1:17:44 SK: Thank you for having me on, it’s been great.

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