Genius Philosopher: The Law of Physics That Explains Why Your Life Falls Apart. Rebecca Goldstein - #549

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Physics, Natural Sciences, Science

4.7 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2026

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a MacArthur Genius Award recipient, philosopher, novelist, and author of The Mattering Instinct. Her verdict on why human beings are driven to matter — and what threatens that drive — might change how you think about your own life. Check out her recent appearance on Mindscape here. In this conversation, we discuss why every human being is haunted by the need to matter, the four types of people and how each one tries to satisfy that longing, why Ludwig Boltzmann's tragic death is a thermodynamic story, how depression maps onto entropy, whether AI can ever have a mattering instinct, and why heroic strivers are the most threatened by artificial intelligence. We also get into what Freud got wrong about what women want, the physics of matter versus the philosophy of mattering, and why the second law of thermodynamics may be the most personal law in all of science. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher, novelist, and MacArthur Genius Award recipient. She is the author of multiple books including Plato at the Googleplex and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Her newest book, The Mattering Instinct, is one of Apple's most anticipated books of the year. 00:00 Why every human being needs to matter — and what happens when they can't 03:30 The second law of thermodynamics and what it has to do with your life 13:10 The 4 types of people: Transcenders, Socializers, Heroic Strivers, and Competitors 16:25 Why fame-seeking millennials will give up everything — including relationships 22:05 Zero-sum mattering: the competitor who was happy for 15 minutes after winning a Nobel Prize 23:20 Ludwig Boltzmann solved one of physics' greatest paradoxes — then despaired 28:45 All tragedies are thermodynamic — and so is depression 35:40 Life as resistance to entropy: what flourishing actually means 48:35 Can AI have a mattering instinct? What that would mean for human rights and everything we think we are ➡️ Follow Rebecca Newberger Goldstein 🌐 Website: https://rebeccagoldstein.com/ 📚 The Mattering Instinct: https://www.amazon.com/Mattering-Instinct-Deepest-Longing-Divides/dp/1324096853 🐦 Twitter/X: https://x.com/platobooktour ✍️ Substack: https://rebeccanewbergergoldstein.substack.com/ Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #philosophy #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #mattering #entropy #meaningoflife #RebeccaNewbergerGoldstein #thermodynamics #AIandhumanity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	There's a law of physics that governs everything, your happiness, your depression, and even whether your life has meaning.
0:07.3	And guess what? It can't be broken.
0:09.6	Life is a local violation of the law of entropy.
0:13.9	It is a counter-entropic resistance.
0:18.3	The thing that the suicidally depressed people feel is that they don't matter. Others do.
0:23.6	They don't. Nothing they can do will ever make them matter. This is how I judge people. Are you increasing entropy or are you decreasing it?
0:31.6	If these agents begin to have a longing to matter, if they do this, then what we have are non-carbon-based humans.
0:40.8	She's a MacArthur genius, a philosopher who's trained in physics.
0:45.3	And she just used the second law of thermodynamics to explain while your life feels like it's always falling apart.
0:51.3	What Rebecca did next is what no physicist has ever done before. She took the second
0:55.5	law of thermodynamics and built an entire theory of human meaning on top of it. What took you from
1:02.7	MacArthur genius, your many, many works of philosophy and your great contributions to literature
1:08.7	from their genius grants, et cetera, to write a book that's basically
1:11.6	a stealth physics book. When I study physics as an undergraduate, and then I had gone, when I went
1:16.3	into philosophy, it was into philosophy of physics, you know, so I've always been interesting
1:21.3	in physics. When I first learned about the second law of thermodynamics, I couldn't quite
1:27.1	conceptualize it. I couldn't completely wrap my
1:30.0	head around it, but it seemed to have implications for us, right? I mean, we are physical systems. We are
1:36.5	subject to the second law of thermodynamics. There's a tragic dimension to this law and that we live in resistance. Do it all living things live in
1:47.0	resistance? In fact, when I was a graduate student that occurred to me, oh my gosh, biological
1:51.4	systems are really just organized to resist the second law of thermodynamics. I said,
1:58.5	this is so exciting. Has anybody discovered this? And then I read Schrodinger's
	...

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