Positive Psychology Founder: How To Stop Your Negative Thoughts - Martin Seligman - #1167

Dr. Martin Seligman is a psychologist, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, pioneer of positive psychology, and author. Expect to learn why some people experience exactly the same adversity and come out more resilient; which traits matter the most in life: efficacy, optimism, or imagination; what people 2,000 years from now possess psychologically that we don’t possess today; if you can be highly competent but still have very little agency, what actually makes life worth living and much more… Sponsors: Sign up for a free trial from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription to the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (00:00) Has Martin Always Been a Scientific Rebel? (03:07) Why Martin Chose Mastery and Agency (09:24) The Epiphany That Changed Martin’s Career (17:50) Can You Train Your Brain to Be Optimistic? (27:50) Optimism vs Agency: What’s the Difference? (29:16) Is Agency the Biggest Predictor of Success? (32:04) How Our Understanding of Agency Has Evolved (38:55) How to Inject Agency Into Your Life (42:22) Is AI the Key to Unlocking Human Creativity? (54:41) Does Our Environment Shape Our Understanding of Agency? (57:08) Were Humans Conscious 3000 Years Ago? (01:02:04) Why Agency Is Double-Edged (01:04:39) Are Optimists More Successful? (01:13:48) What Actually Makes a Good Life? (01:15:04) Martin’s Most Underrated Work (01:18:48) Why Being Boring Is a Choice (01:19:34) Where to Find Martin Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Over the last 50 years, you've maybe done more than anyone else to increase our understanding of human flourishing, 30 bucks or more, hundreds of articles, and you've just turned 84. So happy birthday, by the way.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. What's been the common thread between all of your work? Is there a unifying trend across all of it?

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, there is. And it's the question of of human mastery and human agency, Chris. So when I started working psychology more than 60 years ago, there were three huge blind spots that psychology had that made asking questions about human happiness and human agency almost impossible. The first blind spot was happiness itself. And that is, psychology was all about misery 60 years ago.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Trauma, suffering, panic, depression, anxiety. Happiness was a dirty word. No one worked on it. The second blind spot was thinking itself. So a common thread in all of my work has been that what you think determines how you feel. But psychology excluded thinking 60 years ago. It was, if you're a psychoanalyst, it was just a fluvia that came out of underlying conflict. If you're a behaviorist, thinking didn't exist.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  So that was the second blind spot. And the third blind spot that made it impossible to work on human mastery and human happiness was determinism. That psychologists believed that the past plus the present made a puppet of us into the future. All of those three premises have turned out to be wrong and inimical to human well-being. And one of the great joys of my 60 years in psychology, I've been one of the people who overturned all three of them.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  It's a rebellious career, upending the status quo in that way.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Yes, I think I've been a rebel and an overturner. And my scientific technique has generally been to look at the basic premises of what people were doing in science and say, what if the most basic premise is wrong? What follows? And the basic premises of psychology 60 years ago excluded human happiness, excluded thinking, and excluded the notion that we could choose our future.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  Why agency? Why did you get interested in that?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Well, I first worked on something called learned helplessness. So I basically found in the 1960s and 70s that animals and humans, when they were exposed to events that they couldn't do anything about, showed several basic disturbing symptoms. First, they became profoundly passive. So Chris, if I put headphones on you and I put a button in front of you and I played a loud, annoying noise and the button, nothing you did could turn off the noise. And then the next day, I put you in a human shuttle box,

• 3:56Speaker 01

  which is a box about six feet long, put headphones on you, you put your hand in on one side, noise went on. You just sat there and didn't do anything. So the first thing that we found to our shock in learned helplessness was that people and animals became profoundly passive. And the second thing we found was that they became stupid, that they had a lot of trouble finding out when they moved their hand, turn off the noise, that mastery actually worked and they went back to sitting. So where my interest in this started was the opposite of agency.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  And that is, what impedes agency? What makes us helpless? And 20 years of work on finding out what makes us helpless brought me out of the notion of helplessness and into the notion of mastery and agency. And most importantly, every time we ran an experiment in which there was inescapable noise or inescapable shock, there was always a third group that got the very same noise, but pressing the button worked. So the groups are matched for trauma or adversity.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  But the group that first experienced with mastery, with what I now call efficacy, did fine. And then when we started to measure them, they were even better off than the control groups. So the very first hint of efficacy, agency, and mastery was that traumatic events that you can do something about are actually energizing.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  What was the arc from learned helplessness to learned hopefulness then? Because you spend all of this time doing this research, finding something that sounds very exciting and gets taken on by the field for it to then need to basically do a U-turn?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Well, it was something I was trying to sweep under the rug. But after doing more than 10 years of research with people and animals, when I gave people and animals events they couldn't control, they became passive. But only five out of eight, on average, became passive. One third of them I couldn't make helpless. So it was a big effect to look at. I mean, just not moving and doing anything. But importantly, three out of every eight people, three out of every eight animals, didn't become helpless. I tried to sweep that under the rug.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  And finally, it became interesting to me. What was it about some people and some animals that made you resilient, resistant to helplessness? Well, that took another 10 years to find out. And basically, the key to that seemed to be optimism and pessimism. So what we developed was a way of measuring by questionnaire optimism and pessimism. So pessimistic people, when we gave them questions like, you fail a mathematics examination,

• 7:33Speaker 01

  pessimistic people say, it's me, it's going to last forever, and it's going to undermine everything I do. So they say, I'm stupid. And the problem with saying I'm stupid, it's a very pessimistic explanation. Stupidity lasts and lasts. It hurts you in many circumstances, and it's something about you. But we found that optimists, when they failed examinations, said things like, I had a hangover. I didn't try hard enough. Now, notice, a hangover, unlike being stupid, is temporary.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  It doesn't mean the next time you have an exam, you're going to fail it. So hangovers and not trying hard enough are optimistic. So having developed first questionnaires and then ways of looking at verbatim speech for optimism and pessimism, we then went back and asked, well, who didn't become helpless? And it turned out it was the optimists who didn't become helpless. And that led me in my arc from thinking about the dangers of, it's me, it's going to last forever,

• 8:57Speaker 01

  it's going to undermine everything I do, to the virtues of thinking, it's temporary. It's just this one situation, and I can do something about it. So that led me from believing I was working on pessimism and depression and helplessness to realizing, hey, I was working on optimism and hope and agency. So that was the second big arc in my career.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  I'll tell you about the third one, which had to do with bringing this to scale. When I turned 50, I decided I was going to run for president of the American Psychological Association. I hadn't been president of anything since the ninth grade, and I wasn't a very good president of the ninth grade. And so I put my name in the ring, and I was told by everyone I'd be defeated, and I campaigned for it. And I won by the largest vote in the modern history of the of American psychology. But that led me with a problem.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  And the problem was that presidents are supposed to have themes, initiatives. And I didn't know what mine would be. And it was an epiphany that happened to me that gave me my initiative and changed my work from being about misery to being about well-being.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  I suppose it might seem strange to a lot of people in the modern world that psychology wasn't particularly worried about how to make people's lives better, but that for a long time it was preoccupied with why are people's lives bad? It wasn't really focused on improving. It was more focused on diagnosing problems.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  It got paid for doing that. And so the crucial event for modern psychology occurred right after World War II, when something called the National Institute of Mental Health was opened and gave money to psychologists. And it gave money to psychologists not for making people happy, but for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, treating depression, treating anxiety and the like. And 30 years later, the American Psychiatric Association published its diagnostic manual.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  And reimbursement for psychotherapists was for treating depression, anxiety, alcoholism, schizophrenia, panic. You didn't get paid for making people happier. And so psychology followed the money, essentially, both in getting grants and in treating people at the expense of asking the question, hey, can people flourish? Is there something more to life than the absence of being miserable? And that's what greeted me as president of the American Psychological Association.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  And the following thing happened to me, which changed my mind about psychology and gave me the theme of my work and then the next 30 years of my life. And what it was, Chris, I was thinking about the question of what would my initiative be? And I was in the, I'm a gardener, and I was in my garden with my five-year-old daughter, Nicole. She had turned five about two weeks before. And we're weeding together. And I'm having the usual miserable time pulling weeds, but Nikki is running around,

• 13:03Speaker 01

  dancing, throwing weeds in the air, singing, and I shouted at her. I said, Nikki, get to work, we're weeding. And Nikki looked at me, she walked away, she came back and said, Daddy, can I talk to you? I said, Yeah, what is it, Nikki? She said, Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday that I was a whiner? That I whined all the time? I said, Yeah, yeah, you're a little horror. Well, have you noticed, Daddy, since my fifth birthday, two weeks ago, I haven't whined once?

• 13:47Speaker 01

  I said, Oh, yeah, you haven't, have you? She said, Well, Daddy, on my fifth birthday, I decided I wasn't going to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I've ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch. This really happened, Chris. And in that moment, I realized, and I call it an epiphany because it all happened in an instant, I realized three basic things about myself, about being a parent, and about psychology. So the first was about myself. I was indeed a grouch.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  And indeed, I was proud of being a grouch. I had that critical intelligence that made me see right to the heart of everything that was wrong. So I was really good at picking out what was wrong.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Ah-huh.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  And it occurred to me for the first time, maybe some of the success I had in life was not because I was such a grouch and such a negative person, but because of something else, something positive. And that perhaps there were virtues in not being a grouch, and maybe being a grouch got in the way.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  And.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  That was the first thing I realized. The second thing was what my job as a teacher or as a parent was. So my view of being a parent was your job was to find out everything your kid did wrong and correct it. And somehow, if you corrected all the bad things that Nikki did, you'd get an exemplary child. It occurred to me that was nonsense. Where you got was to zero. And that for Nikki to be a, to grow, we had to find out what she was good at, like talking

• 15:54Speaker 01

  to an adult, which she had just done, reinforcing it, and helping her to live her life, not correcting her errors, but capitalizing what she was good at. And the third big thing I realized was that psychology was half-baked. It was baked on misery, suffering, divorce, panic, and there was no psychology of flourishing, of happiness, of well-being. So I found my initiative there. And it was to create something which we went on to call positive psychology, which investigates

• 16:35Speaker 01

  not correcting your errors, but finding what your strengths are and living around your strengths. So that was the third major change in the arc that went from helplessness to pessimism to positive psychology.

• 16:54Speaker 00

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• 17:03Speaker 00

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• 17:50Speaker 00

  How much have you come to believe people can train themselves into optimism, train themselves into agency? How much are they constrained by their predisposition or their set point?

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Indeed, the great body of the work I've done was on the question, can you change? Can you stop being a pessimist? Can you stop being a catastrophizer? Can you come out of hopelessness and helplessness? So a great deal of my work has been on, can we change? The answer is yes, but let me, let me tell you some of the techniques. And when I talk techniques here, these are not armchair techniques. These are things that we have now done with hundreds, and in Betty's case, thousands of

• 18:48Speaker 01

  people, and we look at them across time. So let's take pessimism, seeing the worst side of everything. Well, pessimism comes quite naturally. We are the creatures of ancestors who lived through the Ice Ages. And those of our ancestors who said, it's a beautiful day in Pasadena today, I'll bet tomorrow would be beautiful, got crushed by the ice. And we inherited a brain that's biased toward catastrophization and automatic thoughts about the worst.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  So being negative, being a pessimist, comes naturally. What does not come naturally and needs learning is being an optimist. So let me give you some examples of the kinds of things that we do.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  First thing we do is we put people in touch with the most pessimistic things they say to themselves.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  And so, for example, before the show last night, I, by the way, I am still a pessimist, but I've learned optimism. I wake up Chris at four in the morning thinking, gee, in 12 hours, I'm gonna face someone who is reputed to be a really difficult interview. Said, geez, I'm 84 years old.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Chris is in his 30s or 40s. He probably knows the literature better than I do. And I'm, I'm not quick anymore. Okay, so I hear that voice and it's saying, you know, Marty, you're over the hill. You, you can't, you can't face Chris Williamson.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  But I have learned to be an active disputer realistically of my most catastrophic thoughts. So at four in the morning, I said, hey, wait a minute. I did an interview last week with someone like Chris. And again, I thought it, I can't do it at all. And it was super. And well, I was only 83 then, and I'm 84 now. I basically with realistic arguments treated the voice that said to me,

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Seligman, you're over the hill as if it was a rival for my job or my wife.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Whose mission in life was to make me miserable and to argue against it. Is as with realistic evidence.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  And that, when you learn to become a good disputer of automatic thoughts, pessimism changes to optimism. And it's fun. And in fact, when we do experiments on this, six months later, people are more optimistic, less depressed, less anxious. Second technique, I'll just limit it to two now, but I could go on for the rest of our show about how to change from being an optimist to a pessimist. And part of the reason for wanting to talk about the book Agency is I'd like people to read about this as well.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Here's something I've done with 40,000 drill sergeants in the United States Army. So during the Iraq war, the United States Army came to me, said, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide. What does positive psychology say about that? And so basically the army commissioned me

• 23:03Speaker 01

  to teach the drill sergeants to teach positive psychology to one million men and women in the United States Army. So here's a technique that

• 23:19Speaker 01

  works very well. And I'll modify it, not for the army, but for, for the rest of us. It's called putting it in perspective.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Noon on Friday, you get an email from your manager that says, come see me at four o'clock. What do you think? Oh my God, I'm gonna be fired. She's read my memo about the, it's all over. And naturally we're attracted to that.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Now, we're catastrophizers for place, scene reasons. What can you do about being a catastrophizer? So here's what we do. First, we have people imagine the very worst that could happen at four in the afternoon. And they get into it. She's gonna take me apart and I'm gonna be fired. Okay, great. Then we say, okay, that's the worst that can happen. Now, what's the best thing that can happen at four in the afternoon? And she'll say,

• 24:34Speaker 01

  she's read my memo on the marketing campaign. She thinks it's wonderful and she's calling me in to give me a raise and promote me. Okay, great. Now, what's the most likely outcome?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  What's in between and most likely and most realistic? Well, she's probably read my memo on the marketing campaign. She likes it. She thinks the budget is much too high and she's gonna ask me to cut the budget. Great. What should you, what can you do now to prepare for the four o'clock interview? So putting in perspective is a second of about 15 different exercises that change pessimism into optimism, that change helplessness into agency.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't know. That to me, the predisposition that we have, the

• 25:38Speaker 00

  set point of everything being so negative. It seems so natural, that email that you get at four o'clock. And you think, that's it, my job's done. I, I'm gonna be kicked out, I'm gonna be homeless on the street. And I'm gonna live under a bridge. And I'm gonna have a gluten intolerance and a club foot. And it's all gonna go horrendously. And that's, that feels so natural to us, right? It's literally as natural as breathing for a lot of people.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  But what, what we have on our sides is realism, a realistic argument. So it's very important when you put something in perspective or you argue against the thought, like, how could I ever have a good interview with Chris Williamson? That it be realistic? And you marshal evidence that's realistic. So I have a club foot, I'm homeless, I'm gonna wind, wind up

• 26:36Speaker 01

  living under a bridge is indeed like the most catastrophic thoughts we have. But when you learn to become a good disputer as opposed to just treating your most catastrophic thoughts as if they were true. Empirically, it turns out people learn this. They learn it well. They become better at it. It alleviates depression and anxiety and increases flourishing. So in advance, I didn't know if it would work, but it turns out

• 27:10Speaker 01

  there's something called meta-analysis in which you go over the entire literature instead of just doing one study. Well, it turns out there are last count, 335 studies of these positive techniques on depression, well-being and anxiety. What you do is you put the whole literature together. And the literature basically shows that contrary to what you and I might have thought at the beginning, that there are a set of more than a dozen techniques that increase optimism and increase human agency.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  What's the relationship between optimism and agency? Agency, your new obsession, this is a new book. How is it different from optimism? How have you come to conceptualize that?

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So for me, agency has three components. And optimism is the second one. The first component is efficacy. So efficacy is the belief that you can accomplish your goals in the here and now.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Secondly, optimism is the belief that you can accomplish your goals into the far future. Third, imagination is the range of goals that you can accomplish into the far future. So to be agentic, you have to be efficacious, believing you can accomplish your goals now, optimistic, I can do them into the future, and imaginative, there's a large range of goals that I can accomplish. And the reason that expanded view of agency beyond just optimism matters is at the heart

• 29:07Speaker 01

  of the new book, and that's human history and when does human innovation occur? And that's in the presence of full-blown agency.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  How predictive is agency in someone's life outcomes, do you think?

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Our best evidence is, comes across cultures and across time and place. So what the book Agency is about, it takes the human condition from hunter-gatherers through agriculture, through Homer, through the Greeks, through the Middle Ages, through the Reformation and Renaissance, and through modern times, and asks the question, when do human beings flourish and when do they stagnate?

• 30:00Speaker 01

  So in the laboratory, I devoted my life to showing that these three components, when they're present, produce more happiness and less depression. But the challenge of the book was to go back through history and ask the question, there are long periods in which people stagnate. So the Middle Ages is a very interesting example. And there are other periods in which humans flourish and innovation flourishes. So my hypothesis that I was dealing with was, is this caused in the same way it is in the laboratory?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  So we know from the laboratory, when we make people more optimistic, more efficacious, and more imaginative, they do better, less depressed, flourish. So the challenge was to go back through history and ask the question, what is the role of agency in human progress and human innovation?

• 31:07Speaker 00

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• 32:13Speaker 01

  So let me do this at least by example. If you look at just Homer, the Greeks, if you look at the older Homer, which is the Iliad, in which Achilles doesn't do it, but the gods get Achilles to do it. Achilles is not agentic. A hundred years later, you've got Odysseus, the clever, wily, agentic person.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  And if you track across Greece by looking at the texts from Homer through the sixth century, through the tragedians, through the Golden Age, what you see is a mapping of increased belief in agency with increased progress in five different realms of life. The first is thought. The second is the arts, literature, sculpture. The third is technology, medicine, and science. The fourth is the quality of life, death rate.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  And the fifth is political freedom. That if we take just the Greek period, you get basically a perfect mapping between increases in the belief in agency coded for by the philosophical writings, and increase in progress in all five of those domains. Let me turn it on its side. This progress continues through about 350 AD. And something very important happens in 383 AD, and that's St. Augustine.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  So Christian philosophers are becoming more and more agentic, more and more you can be holy, and what you choose to do in life when you die, God is going to judge you for, and if you do good things and avoid the bad things, you're going to go to heaven. That's the trajectory of Christian thought, continuing Greek thought. Augustine comes along in 383 and renounces human agency, declares that if you ever resist

• 34:52Speaker 01

  temptation, if you ever do good things, ever avoid bad things, it's because God arbitrarily injected you with grace. This becomes church doctrine for the next almost thousand years. And what you get by all five criteria is stagnation and regression in thought, in political freedom, in quality of life, in technology and science, and in the arts. And so if you map human progress against what the philosophical and religious beliefs

• 35:35Speaker 01

  are of the time, when they're highly agentic, that's when humans flourish, just as they do individually now from laboratory evidence. Conversely, if the religious and philosophical doctrines are pessimistic, non-agentic, God does it, it's all chance, it's all determined, that's when you get stagnation.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Does that suggest that modern religious believers might be less agentic than if they were, the same person was an atheist?

• 36:14Speaker 01

  It depends on the flavor of the religion. So very interestingly enough, let's take modern Protestantism. The origins of modern Protestantism are Luther and Calvin. And contrary to what you might have learned in school about the Reformation, Luther and Calvin out Augustinian Augustine, that is, they believe in utter depravity, predetermination, and the absence of freedom of the will.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  And indeed, in 1524, the leading Catholic theologian Erasmus writes a major article called On the Freedom of the Will. And it basically says, we're like toddlers. We fall down, God lifts us up, but we have to have motive power of our own to be lifted up. Luther responds a year later, saying, that's sheer nonsense. We are predetermined. Anytime we do, anytime we're lifted up, it's only because God lifts us up. So that's the origin of modern Protestantism.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Catholicism is becoming highly agentic. Luther and Calvin kill that. But starting in the 17th and 18th century, Protestantism changes. It adopts the notion that we can participate in our own grace, that we can actually choose to do things that get us into heaven. And this is now what, it's very hard to find a Lutheran or a Calvinist who believes anything like utter depravity, lack of freedom of the will, and predetermination.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  So Protestantism of the original Calvin-Luther form kills progress in all five realms. And indeed, that's the evidence from what goes on. Protestantism evolves from this fundamentalist view, and in many ways feeds the highly agentic American society and European society that we have today, and feeds greatly the last 200 years of unprecedented progress.

• 38:55Speaker 00

  Bringing it into the modern world, how do you advise people to construct more agency in their life?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Well, let's take the figures one at a time. So

• 39:09Speaker 01

  The first aspect of agency is efficacy. And that is, how do you get better at undoing your beliefs that you can't succeed?

• 39:22Speaker 01

  And indeed, half an hour ago, Chris, you and I went over a variety of techniques for coming to believe that you have more efficacy. The best techniques for efficacy, and this all comes from the modern psychological laboratory, is actually doing things and having them succeed. And sometimes we have to break. If you're feeling helpless and hopeless and you're looking at your apartment and it's filthy and you get out of bed, what am I gonna do? Say, go to your sink and wash one cup.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Okay? Turns out, if you wash one cup, that leads to a cascade of mastery experiences.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  One coffee cup.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  You go on to two cups and then you go on to cleaning up. And it turns out, when you do graded task assignment with people,

• 40:28Speaker 01

  you systematically increase efficacy. For increasing optimism, we talked about arguing against your most catastrophic thoughts and putting in things in perspective. And the third, and the thing I think we know the... So, teaching efficacy and optimism, there are literally a thousand studies that have demonstrated you can do it. And you can be more efficacious and more optimistic and happier tomorrow than you are today.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  I'm very interested in the question, can you, the third one, can you be more imaginative and more creative? And indeed, a lot of my work today with AI is exactly that question. And I'll tell you about that in a bit. But in spite of the fact, if you go to Barnes and Noble, you're gonna find several bookshelves called Creativity and Imagination. No one's really succeeded at teaching more imagination and more creativity. So, we've got brainstorming, we've got taking a shower, taking a break. But none of these things are enormously effective.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  And it really wasn't until I came across Claude and ChatGPT that I've seen a breakthrough about human creativity and the notion that we can become more imaginative. And a lot of my work and thinking now is about the joint use of AI and human imagination to produce an unprecedented level of creativity.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  But it's interesting, I think a lot of people would assume that AI would be sapping agency, you know, outsourcing thinking, outsourcing the feeling of being needed, of being useful in the world.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Yes, indeed, the doomsayers have the floor at the moment. And they're telling us all the terrible things that AI might do to remove human agency, make us less human and the like. If AI had come along before Nikki thirty years ago, I would have joined them in as a doomsayer. I'd have been great at seeing all the hypotheticals that could go wrong. But AI has done exactly the opposite in my life. And let me take you through my story about AI

• 43:15Speaker 01

  and why I've come to believe AI is the best companion and supplementer of human agency of my lifetime. So, first story. I have two four-year-old grandsons, Denny and Max. I am crazy about them. But the problem is, I'm eighty years older than they are.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  They walk faster than I can run. I can't throw a football around with them. And the sad thing, starting at age two, I noticed that I was becoming invisible to them. So, what could I do? So, I went to Claude and I said, Claude Anthropic's AI,

• 44:09Speaker 01

  help me write stories in which Max and Denny are the heroes. So, I said, "Chapter one, Max and Denny see the haunted lighthouse in Stone Harbor." Well, basically, we're now on book six, chapter twenty-four. This is where Max and Denny toured the solar system together. And basically, with a combination of Claude helping me write stories and ChatGPT giving wonderful oil paintings of Max and Denny

• 44:50Speaker 01

  from their photographs flying on Pegasus and the like.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  The kids can't wait to see me anymore. I'm visible. They wanna see me. They want the story. So, part one, the warm-up, is even though I'm very cognizant of the doomsayers saying we're gonna be dehumanized, I've got more love in my life by a lot, by the two people I most care about in the world because of AI.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  That was part one, human emotion, big supplement for me. But the big issue is creativity. Is AI creative?

• 45:36Speaker 01

  And the answer is, for me, there are two views of what the number is in creativity. So, the view that most of you probably hold is creativity comes out of the brow of Zeus. So, it's one person, Michelangelo, a genius sculpting out of this piece of Marvel, David. Well, I don't think AI is creative in the sense of Michelangelo. But the second theory of creativity, which is one that I think is most plausible, is that the number is two.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  It's the Wright Brothers going back and forth. It's McCartney and Lennon, Condon and Fursky, Balanchine and Farrell. One of the Orville says this, Wilbur says, "No, that's wrong." They go back and forth and out of that, they not only figure out how birds fly, but much more importantly, they create the first airplane.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  This is the sense in which AI is massively creative. And let me give you two examples of this. I've been working on this book of agency for seven years. It's been a lot of work. Chapter eight is about China. So, I had looked at the West and found that the more agentic people were, the more progress there was. But is this something peculiar about individualism and the West? And so, I looked at ancient China with my Chinese colleagues from Beijing.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  And indeed, we found, we tracked Chinese agentic thought from the Shang Dynasty to modern times. And we basically found that when there was good balance between individual and collective agency, that's when you get progress in China. That's chapter eight. Chapter nine is Israel, the Hebrews. And what I had done in chapter nine is I look at agency in the Torah. Well, the five books of Moses are not very agentic.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  God basically does the heavy lifting here.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  The Hebrews complain and go along with him. But starting after the Torah and the writings and the prophets, that's when you get human agency as opposed to God's agency. That's chapter nine. I turned this into my editor. She says, "Marty, there's no transition between chapter eight and chapter nine." I had been staring at these chapters at that point for five and a half years, and I couldn't see a transition. So, I go to Claude and say, "Hey Claude, read chapter eight and read chapter nine and write me a transition." Woof.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  At the same time, across the globe, as the Chinese were struggling with the question of the relationship of individual agency to the state, the Israelites were wrestling with a more basic question, the relationship of human agency to God.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Well, that turns out to be exactly right. I couldn't see it, but Claude could see it.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Here's the big thing that Claude did creatively. So that's just one example of, of, of some, maybe a very clever critic could have come up with that, but Claude did and I didn't. But here's something Claude and ChatGPT did that with my going back and forth with them that no human being could possibly have done. And they've solved something I call the mystery of the Axial Age. Now, the Axial Age is, if you look at a thousand BCE, at Greece, China, the Hebrews,

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Persia, and India, on terms of progress, all of these cultures are backwater villages, no coinage. You take any criteria of progress, nothing is happening in a thousand BCE. 500 BCE, 500 years later, all five of these civilizations are booming. They're inventing things, coinage, art, tragedy, Buddha, Confucius. What happened in the 500 years? What happened, what happened in five cultures across the Axial Age that enabled innovation?

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Okay, that's called the great mystery of the Axial Age. Something big happened to human beings between 1000 and 500 BCE. Okay. I had the hypothesis that it was words, that in 1000 BCE, none of these five cultures had words for human agency. And then by 500 BCE, they've got words that describe, I can do it, optimism, efficacy, and imagination. So that's the hypothesis. That's Orville saying it's words that did it.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  So I went to Wilbur, in this case Claude, and again with ChatGPT, and I said, look, is this true? Could it be there were no words for human agency in 1000? And then suddenly this huge panoply of agency words had developed. And so both of them went through, no human being, there's barely a field called ancient philology anymore, but there is no human being who is fluent in Aramaic, Hebrew, Sanskrit,

• 52:28Speaker 01

  ancient Chinese, changes in Persian language, and ancient Greek and Golden Age Greek, but they are. You know, they're ancient philologists. And after a day of going back and forth, they basically demonstrate that the words don't exist. And that by 500 BCE, all five of these cultures have discovered words about human agency. And when we have words, then we can do things.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  So if you take a term like sexual harassment, people were always being harassed sexually in the office from time immemorial, but we didn't have the word until about 1975. Once we got the words, we got lawsuits and mandatory training and the B2 movement and the like, because the words came into being. And so when you've got words for agency, that enhances human agency.

• 53:42Speaker 00

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• 54:27Speaker 00

  Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. Does that have an implication that because humans learn through language as well as action, that the infectiousness of the culture that we put ourselves into, the sort of contents that we expose ourselves to, the things we read, the friends that were around, the stories that we hear, that has a unique contribution to our learned hopefulness or helplessness and our ability to understand agency?

• 55:11Speaker 00

  It feels like we're very permeable in that way for what narrative and story and, and local influence can be on our belief in agency and therefore our ability to enact agency?

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So here's a example from the Bible, from Hebrew. In the Torah, go beyond the Torah, after the Torah, the word teshuva occurs for the first time. Teshuva means repentance, that you can redo your life.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  It doesn't occur in the Torah. Once you have a notion like repentance, that tells you there are agentic things that you can do to repent, to make life better. And as far as we can see, that doesn't exist before.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  In Greek, we get the word weakness of the will. Well, before that word, what you have is a civilization in which the gods are telling you what to do. When you get weakness of the will, that has a concept of the human being as having a will, and when they go astray, it's something they're responsible for. So our entire notions of moral responsibility did not exist in these five cultures 1000 years ago. But once you get words that are about will and freedom and choice and repentance, then

• 57:00Speaker 01

  you get a completely different view of what the human being is and that the human being can make life better.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  How differently do you think a human mind would have experienced reality 1,200 years ago than me or you or anybody listening does now?

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Well, it's very hard to know, and the evidence that we have is just through what's written. But one major hypothesis, this is of Julian Jaynes, wonderful book called The Bicameral Mind, about 50 years ago, he was a teacher of mine. Jaynes argued that consciousness itself, this

• 57:50Speaker 01

  This thing inside of us that's looking at this landscape of reality and has agency isn't there until the Bronze Age. And so for James, the transition in Homer from Achilles being a puppet of the gods to Odysseus being this masterful, cunning, wily person is a huge change in consciousness. So the extreme people here believe that consciousness as we know it is barely present

• 58:29Speaker 01

  3,000 years ago, but by 2,500 years ago, it's across the globe. And indeed, the writings we have indicate that. So if you look across different cultures, there aren't psychological words in 1,000 BCE. And before writing occurs for the first time, 3,500 BCE, there are no psychology, no consciousness words. There are lists and there are words about the gods and the idols.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  But by 500 BCE, consciousness emerges. So the most radical hypothesis is that we weren't conscious 3,000 years ago and something new happened. Consciousness as we know it now, introspection develops for the first time.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  And is it your...

• 59:37Speaker 01

  That's the radical view.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. And is it, the mechanism for that would be this kind of self-belief, this language, this cultural technology that allowed us to reflect inward? Because I think I'm right in saying the bicameral mind, the whole point of that was that the inner words that we have inside of ourselves were not seen to be self-generated. They were spoken from above or below, I guess. They were from God.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Well, indeed, James's hypothesis is quasi-neurological. It's that 3,000 years ago, the gods are talking to us from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  And that is the corpus callosum develops.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  Oh, this is a, this is a structural argument. This isn't a phenomenological...

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  James's argument is structural.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Mostly that's neurom mythology. I think it's more like population pressures. So I think 3,000 years ago, you could get along in your little tribe by listening to the gods and obeying your parents. But in all five of these cultures, there is upheaval. The Doric invasion, the raiders from across the sea. And when there's upheaval and you meet new people, in order to survive, listening to

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  the gods of your fathers and obeying them doesn't get along very well with these people. You have to be able to think about what they might be thinking. You have to leave listening to the gods and form other minds. And so from my point of view, what social upheaval does is it drives consciousness. Consciousness in particular, what's called theory of mind, being able to intuit what

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  the other person might be thinking is what drives the change in consciousness between 1,000 and 500. And more specifically for me, it's you get words that do this.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Given that I think almost everybody loves the idea of more freedom, more independence, more agency, if they know that word, is more agency always a better thing for humans? Is there such a thing as having too much agency?

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  I think agency is double-edged. And so most of what I do in the book is to take the three components, efficacy, optimism, and imagination, and celebrate them and talk about the progress that it brings. But each of these has a shadow side. So efficacy is our ability to accomplish goals. But the fact that we can make an atom bomb doesn't mean we should. It doesn't tell us...

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  So we develop a steam engine and this has a lot of costs in pollution and the like. So efficacy, being able to do something, doesn't tell us we should do it. Being optimistic about things doesn't mean they're going to turn out well. It leads to foolish decisions, but it also leads to blaming the victim. And that is if you think that good character and smarts produce wealth, technology, freedom,

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  and you find people who are poor and oppressed, you might blame them for not doing this. So that's the shadow side of optimism. And the shadow side of imagination is we've now imagined, to my mind, the greatest technological development in my lifetime, which is AI. But we don't know what it's going to do. So having efficacy, optimism, and imagination produces progress.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  But what we need is a wise and moral sense about efficacy, optimism, and imagination. And that's not something that we can guarantee.

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  What was that analysis you did about Trump and Harris, about that debate?

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  I've been quite interested in the relationship between optimism and winning elections. And so I had done quite a bit of work on coding optimism over the last, since Grover Cleveland, actually, till now, and looking at optimism in the nomination acceptance speeches, rating optimism, and in more than half the elections, the more optimistic candidate wins. So Trump and Harris presented a very interesting contrast.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Everyone thought that Trump was a doomsayer and a pessimist. And indeed, in the following sense, he was. And that he talks about a lot more bad events than Harris does. But I haven't been interested in the number of bad events. The more bad events, the darker you sound. But in the nomination acceptance speeches, Trump and Harris are about equally optimistic and pessimistic. So that would have said to me, well, it was a dead heat. But for the first time, I decided to track all the press conferences going right through

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  October 31st. I'd never done that before. And starting around September 15th, Trump gets more and more optimistic, darker, but the causes for Trump are things he can change. He's going to change them. His attributions are optimistic. And by election day, Trump is considerably more optimistic than Harris. We put our data in a sealed envelope. We send it to reporters and the like. And I think we were the only pundits who predicted a substantial Trump victory.

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  Wow. That is fascinating. I mean, it goes to show how alluring optimism is. You know, not just functionally useful inside of your own life, but it's a, it's a kind of an attractor, I suppose, to sort of bring people in. What, um...

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Misery loves company, but company does not like misery. And it turns out, if you do the following experiment, I give you, I'm going to make you make cold calls and you're going to read a script either in a very depressive tone or in a real chirpy tone, and you just wait till people hang up on you. You hang up on depressed people much faster than chirpy people. In general, optimism is an attractive characteristic.

• 1:07:55Speaker 00

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  Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/moderndwism and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom at checkout. Are you familiar with resting bitch face? Do you know what that is?

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  No, tell me about that.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  Resting bitch face is, I have a little bit of resting bitch face. It is a passive face. When you're not doing anything, you're just sat across the far side of the room, maybe you're thinking about something, and some people across the far side of the room might look like this.

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  They're just sort of ambiently happy. Other people might look a little bit more like this.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  And for the people that are listening, I smiled and then I did my normal face. My normal face is what's referred to as a resting bitch face. It's someone who's like just minus 10% happy.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Is there a literature on whether or not people like the resting bitch face?

• 1:09:44Speaker 00

  I don't know. This is, this, this could be the next book, actually.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do it.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  It's called resting bitch face.

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  Resting bitch face. Uh, who knew that I was going to teach maybe the greatest positive psychologist of all time about resting bitch face today? Um, I, the reason, the reason I bring it up is resting, uh, resting smiling face or resting bitch face is kind of the same as what you're talking about with the script. It's the same person, but just this sense of a demeanor. It's the packaging that everything's being wrapped in, but somebody can say the same script, but if it's a little bit more bouncy. But we do, um, ad reads for the podcast, right? And sometimes when I have to do a, a big chunk of them in a single day, I'm not super, I've been tired, maybe we had a hard day or something. And the difference in how, when I watch them back, how happy I am to watch my own reads.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  Because in one of them, I felt really positive about, and I'm saying the same words, but I'm not saying them with the same level of bubbly-ness and bounciness. Anyway, my point here is resting bitch face is someone wrapping the same face, the same person, the same demeanor in just a slightly different expression. And I think that, uh, that can change how people interpret who you are.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Well, I've written it down and I'm gonna work on it.

• 1:11:02Speaker 00

  Who knew?

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  There is a literature on fertility and optimism, that optimistic people have more children. Uh, that's something about attractiveness.

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  Uh, that's interesting. I mean, certainly we like to be around people that are positive some, for the most part. I also wonder whether part of the optimism is those people just assume that they can deal with more children. They think, I've had one, ah, two will be fine, three will be fine, four will be fine. As opposed to maybe some people that are a little bit more uncertain about the future. They might not be, they might not be so, so conscious about whether they could deal with it. I guess, I'm kind of interested.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  And I'm just reminded, Chris, of something that happened recently in my life about, uh, uh, well-being and positivity. Uh, and this actually is an example of how even at my age, you can change. So, you know, uh, uh, I'm a complainer, particularly at restaurants. And, uh, I had noticed when, you know, I'm, I'm serious about wine and food. And I had been noticing that when I took all my kids and grandkids and wife to good restaurants, that they would cringe whenever the wine was brought to me to taste, because I would turn it down and criticize it.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  And I realized, uh, really for the first time in my life, watching them cringe, uh, that if Mandy, my wife, who is a sunny, positive, uh, good resting face, in fact, uh, if she was complained as much as I did, I wouldn't want to be married to her. And so about two years ago, I resolved after the most recent restaurant experience, uh, not to complain anymore at restaurants. And we tested it out and, uh, about a week later, we all went to a restaurant and, uh,

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  I ordered steak tartare and the maître d' came over to me and said, oh, I'm sorry, professor, uh, the bichid is broken, machine. You don't make steak tartare with a machine. You shave, shave the beef with a knife. I'll have the smoked salmon.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  So indeed I've stopped, uh, uh, it's not the resting bitch face, although my resting face is frowny, but I've learned the cost of complaining and I can break myself of complaining.

• 1:13:44Speaker 00

  Resting complaining face at a, uh, at a, at a restaurant. I guess, you know, after all of this time, you know, over half a century of studying human flourishing, what have you come to believe about what makes life worth living? What is a good life?

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Well, I, two things, Chris, I'd say. The first is that, uh, having agency, uh, waking up in the morning and having things that you can master, that you're optimistic about, uh, is crucial for, uh, well-being, happiness and how long you live. Uh, and the second is the importance of living in the future as opposed to the past or the present. So I, I think, uh, the human species example is that we are creatures of the future, that more than half of our thinking is planning for the future.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  And so I think it's very important to understand that we metabolize the past and the present in order to have a better future. So being agentic and being prospective are for me, the two keys to human flourishing.

• 1:15:04Speaker 00

  Across all of the papers that you've written, is there, is there a best paper you wrote that you think didn't get anywhere near as much attention as it should have done?

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  It's the very best paper I've ever written, almost no one has read. Uh, I'm very interested in, in dreaming.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  And indeed, about 40 years ago, I wrote up my theory of dreaming, which I think really is right. It says dreams have three and only three components. One, visual hallucinations. Secondly, an emotional tone underneath it. And third, plot making by relating the success of visual hallucinations to the underlying emotion.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  Well, I think that explains dreaming. I think I nailed it. In fact, it's the only thing I've ever written, which I didn't have doubts about. So I sent it, I sent it to the Psychological Review, which is our major journal. And for two years, the following thing went on. Uh, 16 reviewers over the course of two years, uh, half of whom say, this is the best article on dreaming I've ever seen. And half of them saying, if you publish this, I'm canceling my subscription to the Psychological Review.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  So in fact, I think the only, the best paper I've ever written, uh, uh, maybe a hundred people have read in a very obscure journal.

• 1:16:44Speaker 00

  Well, my favorite book of yours is What You Can Change and What You Can't. And maybe not quite as obscure, but that, I, I, I took the, uh, Behavioral Genetics red pill. Robert Ploman came on the show and I, I, I really sort of tumbled down the rabbit hole of understanding predisposition and heritability and twin studies. And Joyce Benenson came on the show and had lots of conversations about this stuff. And I think anyone that learns about the fact, the building blocks of what makes you a predetermined, or at least predisposed before you arrive, immediately you start to ask the question, well, how much should I try? And what areas am I going to be falling behind in and what areas should I focus on?

• 1:17:29Speaker 00

  And, uh, the agency book's great, but what you can change and what you can't, for me, was just so, even if it is one of your more, uh, niche books, it was wonderful, like really, really fantastic.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  Um, I, I reread it recently. It must be 25 years old or so. I, I had written five editions of abnormal psychology. So every five years I had to revise the textbook with new discoveries. Well, there were almost none. And in fact, what I said in the book, What You Can Change and What You Can't, that's pretty much remained the same. So psychotherapy and drugs work decently well on some things and don't work at all on others. And it's very important for people to realize what is malleable and what is not.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  So you don't waste your money and effort on the stuff that's not changeable. In fact, there are lots of things in human life that are incorrigible and unchangeable. And there are a lot of other things which are malleable and correctable. And it's very important to know the difference.

• 1:18:48Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. One of your ambitions in life is to not be boring. Why is that?

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Uh, at age 21, when I decided to, uh, become a psychologist, I went to, uh, one of my professors, Peter Madison. And I told him I was gonna become, I was gonna go to graduate school in psychology rather than philosophy or become a professional bridge player. Those were my other two options. And Peter said, Marty, uh, there are two reasons to become a psychologist. One is not to be wrong and the other is not to be boring. I hope you choose the latter. And indeed, that's what I've chosen.

• 1:19:34Speaker 00

  So good. Martin Seligman, ladies and gentlemen. Martin, you rule. I think you're great. I love your work. Uh, I just, uh, unbelievable contribution to pivoting the world of psychology. I'm so happy. Where should people go to keep up to date with everything that you've got going on?

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  I've never woken up in the morning more excited than, about my work than now. And that's because there is something hugely new on the horizon and that's AI. So in my field and in my life, AI changes everything. It's the most important technological development in my life. Uh, and it's really the first time in my life I wished I was 21 again and not 84.

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  Wow. Well, it's nice, you know, as a, it's very popular and very trendy for people to push back against AI at the moment. And, um, your learned optimism appears to be, uh, managing to countervail even the most, uh, negative of forces about how people feel about the, the forthcoming robot apocalypse. Martin, I appreciate you very much. Thank you so much for today.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  Thank you, Chris. Good to meet you.

• 1:20:46Speaker 00

  Good to meet you too.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

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