Imagine a machine that gives you the feeling of your life’s greatest achievement. Almost nobody says yes to it. We want the achievement to be real. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein has spent decades mapping that need, and what it means now that AI is coming for the thing you wanted to be known for.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein trained at Princeton under Thomas Nagel and has written ten books on Spinoza, Gödel, Plato, and God. She won a MacArthur Genius grant, and President Obama placed the National Humanities Medal around her neck. Her new book, The Mattering Instinct, asks why we long to matter and argues that this longing drives both our finest achievements and our fiercest conflicts.
I coach venture-backed AI founders. Not the company, the human running it. This show is where I think out loud about building, and staying human while doing it.
Work with me: https://duncancj.com
⏰ Timestamps:
00:00 – Cold open
00:35 – Introduction: the phrase she buried in a novel in 1983
01:59 – How the topic gets misunderstood
02:16 – Mattering to others, and the part people overlook
05:45 – The BS detector, turned on ourselves
07:18 – William and Alice James
11:58 – What is a mattering project?
12:44 – The mattering map, and why the map changes what you see
14:08 – The pickup artist in the hotel lobby
17:37 – Transcenders, and the sense of mattering Rebecca finds most robust
22:11 – Competitors, and why she feels for them
23:51 – Why the instinct itself is neutral
26:36 – Greatest achievements, greatest atrocities
28:52 – The urge to universalize, and where intolerance begins
32:08 – The flute student who broke into the Tring museum
34:21 – It’s hard to be human
37:06 – Entropy, and the deepest law in physics
38:48 – Entropy in plain terms
43:14 – Building up rather than tearing down
46:35 – Teachers, children, and who should have the highest status of all
47:14 – The mattering machine thought experiment
48:50 – AI companions, validation, and the machine made real
52:26 – Optimism, and whether there is enough mattering to go around
53:16 – The story we are told about who gets to matter
55:06 – Closing: on the side of life
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