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 reach self-actualization. So today's guest, Scott Berry 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 you 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 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. So Scott and I talk about different ways of being psychologically healthy, the

...