This was an episode of TED Radio Hour back when Guy Roz was hosting the show. It made a huge impact on me and the way I see the world.
Humans need food, sleep, safety, love, purpose. Psychologist Abraham Maslow ordered our needs into a hierarchy. This week, TED speakers explore that spectrum of need, from primal to profound.
npr.org/ted-radio-hour
I have stopped listening to the show in the years since this episode aired. I tried going back to it after Manoush Zomorodi started hosting the show. I love her work, but I just don’t have time to listen to every podcast I want to listen to. There aren’t enough hours in the day for that.
I wanted to maintain a link to this episode anyway. I first heard it rebroadcast on the date that I’m publishing this article. It was first aired two years previously. Here is the audio for the first four minutes, discussing Maslow and his hierarchy of human needs:
These are the TED talks that were sampled for the episode:
Addendum
As we head into December of 2021, the weather got colder. I mourned for the people we would lose in those first few days of freezing weather. The homeless suffer mightily every winter everywhere that gets cold weather. We degrade ourselves as human beings when we allow people to become homeless. It shouldn’t be a thing that happens, and it definitely shouldn’t be a thing that we allow to continue indefinitely. But we do, and we are less than human because of it.
