“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.

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.”