Hello everyone and welcome to Amanpour and Company.

Here's what's coming up.

China and Britain standing side by side.

Beijing's strategy to expand its power in the new world order.

Foreign policy analyst and former Biden official Elizabeth Economy joins me to discuss this new frontier.

And the idea that seven astronauts could die live on television in a space shuttle, you know, that was also kept carrying the teacher in space, the first citizen astronaut, seemed totally inconceivable.

A true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space.

Forty years since the U.S.

Space Shuttle Challenger exploded and shocked America, I speak to bestselling author Adam Higginbotham about his minute-by-minute account of the tragedy.

Then, "The Mattering Instinct."

Acclaimed philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein joins Walter Isaacson to discuss the driving force behind human behavior.

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Thank you.

- Welcome to the program, everyone.

I'm Bianna Golodryga in New York, sitting in for Christiane Amanpour.

We begin in China, where British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is on a multi-day trip, the first in eight years for a UK leader.

Beijing says the trip is a chance to deepen their "mutual trust and practical cooperation".

At the heart of that cooperation, economic trade.

Meantime, Canada is also expanding its own relationship with China.

Prime Minister Mark Carney hailing their new strategic partnership after his own meeting there last week.

All of this comes as Trump's tariffs continue to alienate Europe and Canada, and possibly push the West further into the arms of Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

It's also been a busy week domestically for Xi, with an ongoing purge at the highest ranks of the country.

On Saturday, he ousted a top military general.

So, as Trump upends decades of foreign policy and China posits itself as a reasonable trading partner, where does all of this leave the world order?

My next guest was a senior advisor on China for the Biden administration and is author of "The World According to China."

And her latest article for Foreign Affairs analyzes what she calls Beijing's strategy to seize the new frontiers of power.

Elizabeth Economy, welcome to the program.

It's really good to see you.

It's a very sharp piece that you've just written for Foreign Affairs.

And as we've noted, we have the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, signaling a ruptured global order as he is signing new trade deals with China.

And Keir Starmer, for the first time in eight years, you have a UK Prime Minister visiting China and potentially signing trade deals of their own.

Does China see this moment of Western disarray as an opening to lock in its influence longer term?

Absolutely.

I think for Xi Jinping, he sees the Trump administration and sort of the disruptive element that the United States has become as an opportunity for China to displace, if not replace, I think, the United States.

And that's probably an important distinction to make, because I think while China's very interested in reshaping the international system in ways that will support China's interests, whether we're talking about trade and development or human rights, it's not really that interested in becoming sort of the global policeman, bearing the burden of global security or of global foreign assistance.

So this is about basically seizing the moment to advantage China's economic and security and political interests.

And this comes as we also noted Xi Jinping purging a top military ally, that's a top general there in the country, and according to the Wall Street Journal actually, he's removed or placed under investigation some 60 military and defense officials and executives in just the last three years alone.

And in fact, given the most recent purge, former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had actually met that ousted general said this, quote, "It's fair to say this is a seismic event for Mr.

Xi to take out somebody who he has such a long history with is striking and raises a lot of questions."

From your perspective, does this consolidation make China more strategically coherent, or does it actually expose internal weaknesses within the country?

Yeah, I mean, you know, on the one hand, it's clearly a display of Xi Jinping's personal power, that he can eliminate the number two leader within the Central Military Commission, which is basically China's, the military body that governs, you know, the People's Liberation Army, it's the party body.

And now there are only two people out of six left in the Central Military Commission.

So the fact that he can simply push out Zhang Youxiao, who's widely considered to be, you know, a very competent, well-respected general, someone who was close to Xi Jinping, they've known each other since kindergarten, their fathers fought together in China's Revolutionary War that, you know, led to the creation of the People's Republic of China.

So the fact that he can move him out is definitely a display of Xi's, you know, personal power.

And, you know, in addition to the 60-odd people that Xi has purged from, you know, senior military officials that Xi has purged over the past couple of years.

He's basically detained or disciplined 4 million party officials since he came into power.

So that's part of it.

We don't know why he's pushed out Zhang Youxao.

There are many different rumors out there, everything from corruption to differences of opinion over military priorities, whether or not the military would be ready to meet Xi Jinping's 2027, be ready to take Taiwan, and of course the explosive allegation that Zhang Youxao was selling or providing nuclear military secrets to the United States.

We don't know why, but I think that depending on the reason, it's also a sign of weakness for Xi Jinping.

If in fact it was simply difference of opinion over military priorities, the inability of Xi Jinping to tolerate differing viewpoints or the belief that somehow Zhang Youxao represented an alternative source of authority and legitimacy within the military that Xi Jinping himself didn't present is actually a sign of weakness.

You know, certainly here in the United States, we want our president to appoint military leaders who are there for their competence and capabilities, not simply because they would agree with everything he said.

And in China, I think the same is true.

Going back to your piece, you do argue about what appears to be short-sightedness on this administration's front with President Trump fixated on tariffs and now tech bans.

You say Beijing has been shaping a world order for years now that would define their power.

And going back to even 2014, Xi Jinping said, "We can play a major role in the construction of the playgrounds, even at the beginning, so that we can make rules for new games."

And this is related to every arena from the deep sea, the Arctic and space.

So is this new China's strategic advantage in your view that while maybe the United States and its allies are being more tactical, China is really playing a longer game here?

I think China and Xi Jinping for short, definitely has a strategic vision in what they call the frontier domains.

And these are areas, as you mentioned, like space and the Arctic and the deep sea bed where Xi Jinping believes both the economic and national security stakes for China are quite high.

Right.

It's really important that China be able to exert influence in these areas, but also that there's an opportunity to write the rules or rewrite them in some cases.

And so China for you know even pre pre-dating Xi Jinping I would say but accelerating under Xi Jinping has put in place sort of the infrastructure to be able to influence that rule setting.

And that means everything from doing cutting edge scientific research capabilities, for example, in the Arctic.

Even though it's not an Arctic power and it doesn't sit on the Arctic Council, which actually sets the rules for the Arctic, it has more polar ice cutters than the United States does.

Research shipping fleet is much larger than the United States is now.

So I think it's putting in the hard capabilities that will allow it to shape and influence sort of the ability of China to access the resources and to ensure its national security.

Right.

China isn't an Arctic state, as you noted, but it describes itself as a near Arctic power.

Why is that so important for the United States to understand, especially as it relates to what we saw play out with President Trump's demand to acquire Greenland, then coming down from that demand.

Ultimately, we'll see if he revisits that in the near future, because there was a lot of consternation among European allies about the aggressiveness that China had been playing in the Arctic and even some of its interests over the last few years in Greenland alone.

Yeah, and kudos to the first Trump administration because it really did sound the alarm bells on sort of China's growing economic influence in the region.

It didn't have the same degree of sort of military access that it does now.

That's largely because of its emerging and growing partnership with Russia, which is an Arctic country.

But China had been investing significantly, both to access rare earth elements and critical minerals, but also in ways that suggested it did have longer-term military ambitions.

And so the Trump administration did alert other countries.

Their national intelligence agencies began to pay more attention to sort of what China was trying to do.

And so you found a number of Chinese projects either stalled or actually just stopped midstream.

So I think that was an important moment.

But that doesn't mean China is stopping.

It's trying to find new avenues through which to exert its influence.

For example, partnering with Russia more and more, both in terms of investment in mining, but also, and certainly oil and gas development, but also in the military and strategic elements.

And it matters to us because the Arctic becomes the shortest route for ICBMs, for intercontinental ballistic missiles, to go from Asia and Europe to North America.

Also, for submarine warfare, it's critical.

And then again, the huge resources that are present in the Arctic.

The United States doesn't want China to dominate in this space.

So from the Arctic to international seabeds to space, China has not been shy about its ambitions on all three fronts.

And it's as it relates to space, its desire to return man to the moon, possibly before the US even does so.

Why is that so significant for China to do this as the US is also embarking on the Artemis project?

- Right, I think, look, China has for a long time dating back to Mao Zedong, actually, when the United States and the Soviet Union launched satellites into space, Mao in the midst of the cultural revolution, the greatest upheaval in contemporary Chinese history, basically, you know, self-imposed revolution.

You know, Mao Zedong said, we're going to launch satellite two, and China did in 1970.

And so, you know, the dream of space has been present in China for decades now.

And for Xi Jinping, I think it again represents not only, you know, there's the scientific element of it, there's the sort of leadership that it demonstrates on the global stage that China has arrived.

But there's also the potential for economic gain, right?

China believes that there are enormous resources to be sort of developed in the moon and more, you know, largely in other parts of space.

And then the security element of it too, because of course, any sort of future military engagement is going to involve satellites and, you know, cyber attacks.

And so maintaining sort of a presence, if not a dominance and capability, military capabilities is also essential.

So, you know, it's not so much about just that moment of being first back to the moon, as it is what that represents in terms of China's leadership in this space, its ability to define sort of the path forward.

I think that's really what this symbolizes.

So in response, you outline now three choices that the United States has.

That is either to step back, cooperate, or to compete with China.

You say competition is the only one that is viable at this point.

If you can explain to our viewers everything that you've just laid out on these three fronts specifically, is this competition that the United States is losing as it relates to where China is, or competition that it hasn't just fully shown up to fight?

Yeah, I mean, I think at this point, it's a competition we, you know, haven't shown up fully to fight.

We haven't lost, you know, the game.

And when we haven't picked up our marbles and walked away, like we have in some other arenas, like climate change or the human rights space, you know, we're still in the game.

And the Trump administration has issued some, a number, frankly, of executive orders that speak to the capabilities that we would need to compete more effectively, like saying we're going to invest more in shipbuilding and, you know, polar ice cutters.

At the same time, you know, we're cutting funding from NASA.

And so are we taking ourselves partially out of the game there?

I think we probably are.

So, you know, what we need is a vision for, you know, where we want to be in these spaces in 5, 10, 20 years.

And then how are we going to get there?

And I think that vision can't be just about the United States.

It's a vision that's going to have to include our allies and partners, because we don't have the capabilities, we don't have the resources, we don't have the ability simply to dictate.

And we're not going to invest the resources necessary to create the kind of space that we need.

It's just necessary to compete with China one on one.

And so then it becomes how do we forge, you know, partnerships, you know, with our allies in ways that will enable the United States and our allies and partners to sort of ensure that as these spaces are developed, both economically, but also militarily, they're done in ways that reflect our values and our national interests.

- And cooperate with another area that we have a leg up as it relates to China, and that is our robust private sector as well.

A really smart piece, Elizabeth.

Hopefully somebody in this administration has read it as well and taken a lot of notes.

Really appreciate the time.

Thank you for joining us.

- Thanks.

Thank you.

- Now to a moment that shook America.

This week marks 40 years since the Challenger disaster.

On January 28, 1986, 73 seconds after takeoff, the U.S.

space shuttle exploded.

Millions of Americans watched in real time as seven astronauts lost their lives, including Krista McAuliffe, a civilian who was selected for the NASA Teacher in Space project.

This is the moment that disaster struck live on television, footage that even 40 years later is still hard to watch.

>> 3, 2, 1, and liftoff.

Liftoff of the 25th space shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower.

Mission Control, roll program.

Roger, roll, Challenger.

Good, roll program confirmed.

Challenger now heading downrange.

Engine's beginning throttling down now at 94 percent.

Normal throttles for most of the flight, 104 percent.

We'll throttle down to 65 percent shortly.

Engines at 65 percent.

Three engines running normally.

Three good fuel cells.

Three good APUs.

Velocity, 2,257 feet per second.

Altitude, 4.3 nautical miles.

Downrange distance, 3 nautical miles.

Engines throttling up.

Three engines now at 104 percent.

Challenger, go at throttle up.

Challenger, go at throttle up.

One minute, 15 seconds.

Velocity 2,900 feet per second.

Altitude 9 nautical miles.

Downrange distance 7 nautical miles.

Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation.

Obviously a major malfunction.

The tragedy unfolded as Krista Mikulov's parents and students were on the ground in Florida watching it live.

And nearly everyone watching on television that day remembers where they were when it happened.

But how did it happen?

Best selling author and journalist Adam Higginbotham digs into that question with his book Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space, tracing forensically how it all went wrong.

And he joined me from New York to discuss the lasting impact and lessons learned from this catastrophe.

Adam, thank you so much for joining us.

This is such an important book.

It's so well-researched.

Why do you think it had such an impact on how Americans, how the world, view the space program?

Well, I think there's a few reasons for that, but the main one is that, you know, by 1986, NASA had really built a reputation for being able to do the impossible on a regular basis.

And even their failures in the past had been recast as these amazing achievements of last-minute innovation and derring-do.

So, you know, the Apollo 13 accident where, you know, three astronauts were almost marooned in space to die of suffocation, you know, a quarter of a million miles from Earth.

We've had a problem here.

This is Houston.

Say again, please.

Houston, we've had a problem.

The engineers in mission control managed to engineer a last minute solution and bring them back and rescue them.

And so that was recast famously as an event in which failure was not an option.

And so by 1986, having sent men to the moon, having rescued people in Apollo 13, having sent up Skylab, they seemed to be able to do anything they put their minds to.

So the idea that seven astronauts could die live on television in a space shuttle, you know, that was also kept carrying the teacher in space, the first citizen astronaut, seemed totally inconceivable.

And so I think that's one main reason why it's lodged in the minds of Americans in a way that the Columbia accident hasn't, because in 1986 nothing like that had happened before.

You know, it was completely unprecedented.

So walk us back in 1986.

Where was the NASA program relative to the Great Space Race versus the Soviet Union?

And how many missions was NASA undertaking each year?

Well, the Space Race had effectively been one when Armstrong and Aldrin were walked on the moon in 1969.

At that point, you know, the Soviets were sort of left behind, and they had begun developing their own space station program.

But really, the American space program and NASA were kind of leagues ahead of them.

And the whole idea of the space shuttle program was that NASA was going to make space travel routine.

It was designed as a sort of space truck that would launch eventually as frequently as once every two weeks or once a week.

And NASA had really succeeded to a certain extent in bringing that about in 1985 because by the end of the year they had four space shuttles in operation, a fleet of space shuttles, and they launched almost once a month.

So they'd succeeded really in kind of making space travel seem almost quotidian by that point.

The problem with that is that it really kind of cut against what NASA had become convinced they needed to do even before men landed on the moon, which was that they, in order to keep funding going for the space program, they needed to keep public engagement, they needed to keep Congress keeping the money flowing, they needed to keep doing one amazing, exciting technological leap after another, in order to keep people engaged with the program.

But when they started launching once a month, you know, the American public really kind of got bored with with space flight to the extent that the three national networks actually stopped broadcasting space shuttle launches live because they seem to be happening so frequently.

And the the initiative that they introduced in order to try and re engage people with the space shuttle program was the space flight participant program, which was the idea that they were going to bring space travel within the reach of ordinary citizens.

And the first group of people that they chose to select their initial candidate from were American school teachers.

And so the Challenger launch was going to be the first of these space flight participant launches.

And it therefore carried Krista McAuliffe, who was a high school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, who'd been selected from 11,000 candidates to be the first citizen in space.

Right.

And she won over all of the other astronauts who were on board the Challenger with her, who were initially skeptical, right?

They thought that the civilian space program was a bit too gimmicky.

It wasn't taking their profession that seriously.

And then they met Krista.

They worked with her through her training and she won them all over with her dedication to the mission at hand as well.

And you do such a beautiful job not only telling Krista's story but of all of the fellow astronauts there.

Ellison Onizuka, who was the first American of Asian descent in space and his family life and his history back in Hawaii.

Commander Francis Scobee, who was a veteran test pilot at his incredibly close relationship with his wife and Judy Resnick.

Her intensity.

She's the second woman in space.

Ronald McNair, African-American who faced racial adversity to overcome, though, through his dedication and hard work, I believe, to graduate from MIT.

And he became a physicist, also a saxophonist as well.

Of all of the personal stories that you uncovered and that you researched, which one of these astronauts stood out to you the most?

>> I think definitely Ronald McNair.

I mean, because when I began reading about all of his achievements and, as you say, the adversity that he'd overcome, I kind of couldn't believe that he hadn't already been the subject of his own biopic.

You know, he grew up in the Jim Crow South in a segregated town, under conditions in which he and his brother used to go out when school was out to pick cotton in the fields to make extra money.

And yet he went on to graduate with a doctorate in laser physics from MIT.

He was also a black belt in karate and became a gifted jazz saxophonist.

I mean, it was as if there was nothing that he could not do.

A fascinating character.

- Yeah, he really moved me as well, and I just felt like I wanted to learn more and more about him.

I believe he actually did play the saxophone in space, but it wasn't recorded.

Is that correct?

- It was recorded, and then they inadvertently taped over the recording that he successfully made.

- So then obviously there's the tragedy itself, and you really set up how the tragedy unfolded.

In fact, it's a miracle that it didn't happen sooner than it already did.

You talk about NASA redefining the risk that was acceptable to the organization.

Engineers at the aerospace contractor that was building the rocket boosters had been warning specifically about the cold temperatures, unusually cold temperatures at Cape Canaveral in Florida before the launch.

It had been delayed, which is routine, a number of times because of the weather.

But talk about the meeting the night before the launch, where you had engineers on the record saying they did not feel that it was safe for the shuttle to take off the next day, given the temperatures and they were overruled.

You really pinpoint that meeting and the gravity of it, obviously, given the aftermath.

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the most kind of dramatic turning points in the story, is that when the engineers at that Morton Firecoal, who were the contractors who were responsible for manufacturing the solid rocket boosters, heard news of the impending weather at Cape Canaveral overnight on the 27th and 28th, they immediately got together and called their bosses to to organize a teleconference with NASA officials at Cape Canaveral and the Marshall Space Flight Center to call for the launch to be delayed.

And so they had this late night meeting that was the right on the eve of the launch.

And they presented their data and they said, look, you know, we've seen information and evidence from previous launches in cold weather, that that the seals in the solid rocket boosters might fail if they've been left out in the cold overnight before a launch.

And if they do, there will be a leak in the rockets and there will be catastrophic results.

And you stand an extremely high risk of losing the solid rocket boosters and with it the shuttle and its crew.

The problem was that NASA was under enormous pressure to get this launch off the ground, because it had, as you say, been repeatedly delayed.

And it was also an extremely high-profile launch because of the presence of Kristen McAuliffe on the mission.

So although the engineers presented all of their data and they felt that they had presented a very convincing case as to why the launch needed to be delayed, at least until weather improved and the temperatures rose, The NASA officials to whom they presented this data made it very clear, without explicitly saying so, that they really didn't want to hear this and they wanted to go ahead with the launch regardless.

And so when they realized this, the managers at Morton Thiokol then asked for a recess in the meeting to go offline and talk about it amongst themselves.

And they used this opportunity to then actually decide to reverse their recommendation, which had been given in writing as a no-go for launch, to make it a go for launch.

And they did so despite objections of their own engineers in the room at the time.

So then they went back at the end of the caucus and they agreed to reverse their recommendation.

And then they gave the go ahead for launch.

- And then obviously we know the tragedy that occurred after that.

And you write about the devastating impact, the torturous, I would say, next few years, rest of their lives really, for those engineers who felt so guilty on the one hand vindicated, but no one wants to be vindicated in that sense, given that all on board had been killed just moments after takeoff.

And in the immediate aftermath, you also talk about how NASA not only emphasized resilience and continuity, but they really tried to control the narrative here in terms of their owning the story, their owning the investigation, and that led to the Rogers Commission.

But then suddenly that changed because specifically of one infamous moment now, and that relates to the O-rings, that were demonstrated by Richard Feynman, who was a theorist physicist, and he was terminally ill at the time.

His involvement, though, in this investigation was crucial.

Just tell us more about that.

I mean, Feynman's role was at its most important, I think, in the way in which he was able to crystallize in the minds of the public the proximate cause of the accident.

Because one of Feynman's many gifts was in making complex concepts easily digestible to a wide audience.

And so what he did when he was on the one of the public panels of the Rogers Commission, live in front of TV cameras, is he obtained a sample of this synthetic rubber material that was used to manufacture these O-rings.

And he had clamped it into a glass of ice water, which he put onto the desk in front of him.

And then in front of the cameras, when questioning one of the Morton Thiokol executives, he produced this sample and unclamped it from the glass of ice water and demonstrated that it became inflexible if you made it extremely cold.

I did a little experiment here, and it's not the way to do such experiments, indicating that the stuff looked as if it was less resilient at lower temperatures than the temperature of ice.

And it was at that moment that a wide audience was able to understand for the first time exactly what the problem was with the seals in the solid rockets.

So the scientific explanation there and closure on that front, but obviously this was happening as the nation was reeling.

This impacted the world, but really here in the United States, I was a third grade student in Houston, Texas, obviously NASA's headquarters there.

You can understand how we were impacted as students watching this play out on television, given the world's attention to this launch.

And the president of the United States at the time, Ronald Reagan, was set to deliver his State of the Union Address.

That was postponed.

Nancy was watching this also happen live.

The First Lady, he was in a meeting and rushed in, but with aides telling him exactly what happened.

And it was that speech that really is still so indelible and that as a comforter in chief, as President of the United States, stands as one of the most impactful.

Let's play a clip of it.

- The families of the seven, we cannot bear as you do the full impact of this tragedy, but we feel the loss and we're thinking about you so very much.

Your loved ones were daring and brave and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy.

They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths.

They wished to serve and they did.

They served all of us and I want to say something to the school children of America who are watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff.

I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen.

It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery.

It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons.

The future doesn't belong to the faint-hearted.

It belongs to the brave.

The crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger honored us for the manner in which they lived their lives.

We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.

- It was that last line especially that really has a story behind it.

This was a speech that was written by a young speechwriter at the time, Peggy Noonan, who had included a famous poem that the president obviously was very familiar with as well.

Tell us the story behind that.

- So yes, Peggy Noonan wrote the speech and she had to write it at great speed because what happened was, as you mentioned, Reagan was due to give the State of the Union Address that was then canceled when news of the accident first came through.

But he decided that he needed to address the nation about the Challenger accident.

And Noonan was sitting in a room watching the footage being replayed again and again on television of the launch and then the disintegration of the spacecraft, but included amongst it was the footage of the crew waving goodbye from outside the crew quarters that morning.

And she felt that she wanted to encapsulate what she was feeling and what schoolchildren who were watching might be feeling, and also the President's own feelings about what he'd witnessed and about what he'd heard.

So she based the speech on remarks that he'd given to the press in the immediate aftermath of news coming through about the accident, but then wanted to add a sort of final poetic touch.

And she remembered this poem named High Flight, which was actually a poem that had been carried into space by previous astronauts, including Michael Collins, who flew to the moon with Armstrong and Aldrin, and was a copy of it was also being carried by Krista McAuliffe on Challenger, who was a World War Two fighter pilot who'd written the poem about the sensation of flight.

And she deliberately added this as a sort of coda to the speech, because she knew that Reagan, if he didn't recognize the lines himself, was unlikely to actually read it.

So she structured the speech that she wrote in such a way that it could end before those lines.

And if Reagan recognized and liked the words of the poem that she'd included at the end, he could include them or he could stop before that point.

And as it turned out, unbeknownst to Noonan, those words had actually been written on the wall outside the elementary school that Reagan's daughter attended in Los Angeles.

So he saw them every time he dropped his daughter off at school in the morning.

So when he got to that point in the speech, he recognized the lines and read them.

And as you say, that became one of the most defining moments of Reagan's presidency.

40 years later, there's still so much that we are learning about the Challenger tragedy, about those brave astronauts.

You give us more information about their final moments before the explosion.

And it's just notable, here we are 40 years later and about to send humans back to the moon with the Artemis program.

How far this program indeed has come.

Thank you so much Adam.

I really appreciate it.

I loved the book and thank you for your time today.

Thank you.

Now, what gives us meaning in life?

It is a question countless intellectuals and ordinary citizens have spent years pondering.

Well, award-winning philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein says it's our desire to matter that drives us.

She argues that this most crucial and basic instinct shapes our identity, culture, relationships, and even our conflict with one another.

Goldstein shares her insight and analysis with our Walter Isaacson.

Thank you, Biannaand Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.

Welcome to the show.

About 40 years ago, you wrote a very famous novel, "The Mind-Body Problem."

Tell me how this book, "The Mattering Instinct," came out of that novel.

Yes.

So that was a surprise, because I was a young, untenured professor of philosophy of science, philosophy of math.

I certainly wasn't expected to write a novel, but it came to me and it was very exciting to hear this other voice speaking in my head.

The editor who acquired it in our first meeting, he was as young as I, Jonathan Galassi, since he's become a very famous editor, and he asked me a very, a very precise, acute question, which was this.

Your main protagonist is very good looking, sexually desirable, very bright, very funny, and she's so miserable.

Why is she so miserable?

And I thought about that and then I heard her answering me and it was in terms of this concept of mattering.

What she had to tell me was she didn't feel that she mattered in the way that most mattered to her.

And that's what first got me started on this deep need that people have to feel as if they matter and then the great diversity of ways in which people respond to this shared need to feel that they matter.

So it was by way of this novel, which was considered by my colleagues to be such a frivolous thing for me to be doing.

And in fact, it gave me what has been, in fact, my mattering project to try to understand this mattering instinct and the way that it operates in our species.

You call it the mattering instinct.

Explain to me why it's an instinct.

It's not exactly an instinct as I explained in the book.

It's the result of two other instincts.

In fact, one of the instincts is deeper than an instinct, and that is that all living things in some sense matter to themselves.

They're going to be first and foremost striving for their own survival and flourishing.

And that's kind of an organizing principle of all the instincts.

And in us, we also have this capacity, because we have these enormous brains that we've evolved for other purposes.

But this brain has the capacity for self-reflection.

So we can sort of step outside of ourselves and interrogate ourselves and think, "Am I really worth all of this attention that I am determined by biology to give myself?"

And that's what results in this mattering instinct to try to prove to ourselves that we're really deserving of all the attention that we give ourselves in order to pursue our lives.

Is it evolutionarily caused?

Yeah, it is.

I can tell, if I even start further back than evolution, I start with physics, with the second law of thermodynamics, the supreme law of physics, that entropy increases, which means that all living things are constantly fighting against entropy.

And so they have to be giving their own persistence and thriving top priority to strive to defy the law locally of entropy.

So, and from that we get the laws of biology.

And that can take us all the way, as I tried to show, to this longing to matter.

But then we're left on our own.

If free will exists any place, it's here.

How we decide to respond to this longing to matter, to prove to ourselves that our existence is worth all the attention we give it.

Does it relate to empathy?

I think trying to understand how the mattering instinct operates in others is part of what it is to empathize, to try to get a sense of what their subjectivity is like, what it is like to live that life.

We all know people live very, very different lives.

And part of this narrative of how they're living their life is shaped by how they're trying to respond to this need to prove to themselves that they matter.

For some people, it really is their social connections.

It really is, you know, their family.

It's just, you know, the need for connectedness and the mattering instinct are collapsed into one thing.

But for others, it's their, it could be the relationship with God or something spiritual.

And that's what really gives them the sense that they matter in the universe.

In fact, that's a very grand, very full notion of mattering in the universe, that you were intentionally created by that which created the starry heavens above and the moral order within, in Kant's language.

For others, it's who I call heroic strivers.

It's certain standards of excellence that they need to fulfill in order to reconcile themselves with themselves.

It could be intellectual, it could be artistic, it could be athletic, it could be entrepreneurial, it could be military, it could be ethical.

Steve Jobs, who's in real life, you know better than maybe he knew himself, had had this statement, "Try to live to make a dent in the universe."

This is the expression of a heroic striver.

And then there are people who really think about mattering in competitive terms.

It really means mattering more than others.

They really see mattering in zero-sum terms.

The more others matter, the less they matter.

So it's a very competitive approach to to mattering.

I've been spending the last 40 years just talking to people about it because it's, I found that the best conversations I can have with people, people just open up and the stories they tell about their, how they try to prove that they're not nothing, that their existence is something.

Just the diversity is extraordinary.

- Well, this instinct to matter in this cosmos in which we find ourselves, is that always a good and healthy thing or can it be a problem?

- It is, I would say, in fact, our greatest achievements as a species and our greatest atrocities come from this mattering instinct.

And which is not so surprising because I think it really gets to what it is to be human.

What makes this species so different from even our closest primate relatives.

It's it's and so and we are capable of incredible achievements, incredible, you know, compassion and achievements and knowledge and art and athleticism, all sorts of things.

And but also we are capable of extraordinary atrocities.

How does this arise out of your philosophy of mathematics and science?

Yeah, well I try to be very precise about it.

I was trained in analytic philosophy and in analytic philosophy rigor is very, very important, defining your terms.

And one of the things about analytic philosophy as opposed to what's often called sort of continental philosophy, or I mean these are outdated terms, but is that it takes science very, very seriously.

And so to me science doesn't destroy these questions of meaning and mattering and values and what it is to live a good life.

It doesn't undermine them.

In fact, we can use science, use the second law of thermodynamics, use theory of natural selection to try to gain insight into why we have this need, and then how we could best appease it.

It's a longing.

We never really know for sure.

There's a lot of doubt in living a human life.

And people who don't recognize this, who are so certain of their way of doing it and think everybody ought to do it or they are nothing, they don't matter, they often cause a lot of trouble in the world.

Well, you talk about a lot of stories in the book, some leading down a bit of a dark path.

Tell me about, I think, Frank Meehink was one of them?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So he might be the most amazing person I ever spoke to.

He came from a very, very poor background, a dysfunctional family.

His mother was a drug addict.

His stepfather was a brute who would beat him up.

And he had a real sense of not mattering.

And he came in contact with some neo-Nazi skinheads.

And they told him, and they used the language of mattering, you look in the mirror, you will see that, of course, you matter.

He was 13 at this time, he already dropped out of school.

You are a white, male, heterosexual American.

You matter by your racial identity and these other people are stealing it from you.

This was a notion of zero-sum mattering.

But it was group mattering.

He said, "You belong to a certain group.

You matter more than these other groups.

And as they're rising and mattering, they're taking away what is rightfully yours."

And so he became a full-blooded, full-time, neo-Nazi skinhead activist, arrested as a felon at 17, put away, met some black guys in jail that he really bonded with.

And he began to see through this ideology that had made him feel that he mattered.

And he's still a terrifically anti-Semitic.

And he said that he held on to that with even more vengeance because it was the one thing that tied him to his sense of mattering.

You know, that somehow the Jews were behind everything.

And then he met a very nice Jewish man who employed him when nobody else would, even though he had a great big swastika tattoo on the side of his neck and his knuckles spelled out "skinhead" so that when he beat people up, they would know why they were being beaten up.

He completely reversed himself.

I would say he became what I call an ethical heroic striver.

He has devoted himself to trying to fight ideology.

So he's just, you know, people can change what I call their mattering project.

- We have somebody on more the other side.

I think it's Lau Shuaiying.

Can you tell me her story about being a scavenger but helping kids?

Yeah, you know we tend to think of heroic strivers, you know, those who have some standard of excellence that they need to achieve and that's what makes them feel worthwhile.

Whether others know about this or not, it can be very, very private, not public.

And she to me is, you know, it really exemplifies this kind of ethical achievement.

She was a Chinese woman, she's now dead.

I spoke to her, her daughter, Zhu Zhu.

And this, she grew up extremely impoverished, she lost her parents when she was three years old, it was during the Chinese Civil War.

She I don't even know how she survived, but, but she did.

And she became a scavenger picking up, you know, garbage, going through the dumpsters for recyclables and bringing them to be recycled and earning her very meager living from this.

Well, it was during the period of one-child policy in China, and what she was finding in these dumpsters and public toilets and on the side of the road were babies, little girl babies who had been put out to trash because if you can only have one baby, well then for various cultural reasons, families preferred it to be a boy.

And so they left the girls out and with a blank piece of paper pinned to them.

And she, this impoverished woman, took these babies home and took care of them.

She brought up at least 30 little babies and she rescued many more and found homes for them.

And it was a, you know, so this was an extraordinary story.

And it's the last story I tell.

So, you know what?

We often don't pay attention to this kind of heroic striving.

Our society has been hit, we discuss it every week on this show, by populism, tribalism, authoritarianism.

To what extent does that reflect in your mind a crisis of mattering?

Yeah, that's exactly how I see it, as a crisis of mattering.

That our society, you know, we have not paid enough attention to the fact that everybody has this longing.

Everybody, wherever there is human life, there is a longing to matter, to not be nothing, to not be treated as nothing.

And we've created a society in which there doesn't seem to be enough mattering to go around.

We talk so much about economic inequality, and that's a fact.

But since we also judge how much people matter more and more by how much money they have, this has made people feel as if they don't matter.

Maybe only the famous, the powerful, the rich matter.

And this causes great resentment.

The needs of mattering are being ignored.

And if a leader can appeal to that, especially a leader who seems to be on a higher plane of mattering, very powerful, very rich, very famous, and say, "I feel you.

I'm one with you.

You matter as much."

Especially if that leader himself may feel a dearth of mattering, being constantly needing to prove to himself how much he matters.

So it's very, very authentic, this anger, but it's a shared anger, and you can, given the privation that many people are feeling as to their own mattering, it can create a very strong movement.

I think we're seeing that.

- Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein, thank you for joining us.

- It's been a pleasure.

- And that is it for our program tonight.

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