World’s Most Influential Psychologist: The Hidden Force That Drives Human Progress | Dr. Martin Seligman – EP 817

In this landmark conversation, John R. Miles sits down with Dr. Martin Seligman, one of the world’s most influential psychologists and a pioneer of positive psychology, to explore his new book, "Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress."

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01John R. Miles?

  Hey friends, what if your biggest problem isn't that you're not doing enough, but that you've spent too long proving that you are enough? You can be successful, needed, and surrounded by people and still feel completely unseen. That's the problem I explore in my new book, The Mattering Effect. I show you how we become hyper-visible for what we produce, while quietly becoming invisible to ourselves, and introduce the matter framework to help you reclaim meaning, autonomy, trust, time, energy, and reciprocity. Stop auditioning for your worth, start living from it. The Mattering Effect is available for preorder now at matteringeffect.com. Have you ever reached a point where you stopped believing that anything you did would really make a difference?

• 0:45John R. Miles?

  Maybe you kept trying, maybe you worked harder, maybe you kept showing up, but eventually, something inside you started to wonder, "Why bother?" When I asked Dr. Marty Seligman, "What happens when people lose their sense of agency?" His answer went to the heart of more than 60 years of his research. Take a listen.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Individual action is where things start, but whether or not it modifies the world, that is, you have mastery and agency, or it falls flat and you're helpless and you're non-agentic, is crucial to the shaping of the self and to flourishing. And in general, the more reciprocity, the more our actions produce upward spirals in the world, the more agency, the more flourishing we have.

• 1:51John R. Miles?

  John, and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've felt the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it.

• 2:30John R. Miles?

  Welcome back to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. This is episode 817, and today we're continuing our new series, The Adaptive Human: How We Thrive in a Changing World. Over the past two episodes, we've been exploring an important question: How much control do we really have over the direction of our lives? Angela Duckworth challenged us to think about the power of the situations we're in, the people, the places, and the environments that quietly shape our behavior. And Jared Diamond took that question even further, asking when individual leaders can actually change the course of history. But today, we come to the question underneath both of those conversations:

• 3:13John R. Miles?

  Do we believe our actions can make a difference? Because there are moments in life when that belief gets tested. You try, you fail, you try again, and eventually, especially when nothing seems to change, it's so easy to begin asking yourself, "Why bother?" That's exactly why I wanted to have this conversation with Dr. Marty Seligman. Marty is one of the most influential psychologists of our time and one of the pioneers of positive psychology. For more than 60 years, his work has explored helplessness, optimism, flourishing, and one of the most important ideas we'll discuss today: Agency. In his new book, Agency,

• 3:57John R. Miles?

  Marty explores what happens when people, organizations, and even entire societies lose the belief that their actions can shape what comes next and what it takes to reclaim it. In this conversation, we talk about why learned helplessness is about more than simply giving up, why agency begins with action, how hope differs from optimism, and why the way the world responds to our actions helps shape our sense of who we are. But here's what stayed with me long after we finished recording: This wasn't just a conversation about psychology, it was a conversation about what happens when we stop believing that we matter to the world around us. Because agency requires more than action,

• 4:41John R. Miles?

  somewhere along the way, we have to believe that what we do can create a response, that our choices can influence something beyond ourselves. And when we lose that belief, it's not just our motivation that disappears, our sense of possibility can disappear with it. I think that's a conversation that all of us need right now. So let's dive into it. Here's my conversation with Dr. Marty Seligman. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

• 5:20John R. Miles?

  I am absolutely honored and thrilled to welcome Professor Martin Seligman on Passion Struck. Marty, it is such an honor to have you on the show.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you, John. I'm happy to be here.

• 5:34John R. Miles?

  Marty, you probably don't even realize this, but Passion Struck has been, in many ways, completely built on your work. And I heard you recently on the Happiness Lab, talking to Laurie Santos, and she also mentioned that the Happiness Lab wouldn't exist without your work. The same thing goes with Passion Struck, because this whole podcast really goes into human flourishing. And I've tried to take the lessons I've learned from you and explore this every single way I possibly can, because I think today, so many people are struggling with living their life in a flourishing way. Have you found that to be the case as well?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Indeed, that's the theme of my last 40 years of work. I think if I did anything, I ushered in a new psychological age of looking at what was going right, flourishing, as opposed to looking at what was going wrong and trying to correct it. So I think that the examination of flourishing as opposed to the examination of pathology has been the theme of the last 40 years of my work.

• 6:54John R. Miles?

  Today, we're going to be discussing your brand-new book, which I have to say is incredible. It's titled, "Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress." And I want to start out here. Your career began with a simple, but a really profound question: If helplessness can be learned, can hope be learned too? Looking back now, was there a moment you first encountered what you now call agency?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  What surprises me about the trajectory of my work is how long it took me to realize that I was not working on pessimism, helplessness, and hopelessness, but I was really working on the opposite, which is human agency. And the new book, Agency, is the culmination of 60 years of work and how I realized that the human future and the individual future for us is not correcting our weaknesses, but finding out what we're good at and building flourishing on what we're good at.

• 8:07John R. Miles?

  You write that psychology in the 1960s suffered from three blind spots that you saw at the time: happiness, freedom, and thinking itself. Which of those blind spots do you still think shapes our culture most powerfully today?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  I think psychology has changed to work on happiness, freedom, and cognition. But I think, in many ways, our society is still stuck on misery, on a lack of freedom, constraints. And I do think we take cognition seriously for a change. So the behaviorism that existed in the 50s and 60s, I think, is gone from psychology, and I think it's also gone from the society as a whole. So I think we take mental life and what we're feeling and thinking seriously,

• 9:08Speaker 01

  both in society generally and in psychology, finally.

• 9:13John R. Miles?

  Marty, the book opens up with the story of a woman named Susan, and it's a deeply personal story for you and obviously has affected you for decades. And when I was reading her story, it reminded me of my own mentor, a woman named Wendy Lawrence, who was my physics instructor when I was at the Naval Academy. And Wendy became the first female astronaut from the Naval Academy. And she and I, as we've had conversations over the years, her central message to children today, and it's been this way for decades, is that oftentimes, the first time they run into any hardship,

• 9:55John R. Miles?

  instead of trying harder, they give up. And it's something that you have studied as well. When did you realize that learned helplessness wasn't simply an individual phenomenon, but something entire institutions, cultures, even civilizations can experience?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  It took me a long time, John. So as a psychologist, what I worked on was individual helplessness. First, helplessness in animals, and then helplessness in individual human beings. The book opens with someone named Susan, who's actually a collage of two Susans that I, brilliant students of mine, that I had in my very first job teaching at Cornell. And both of them, when I gave them a really difficult research problem, their reaction was to give up, and I can't do it. And they both turned out to be success stories.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  One went on to become the editor of the Journal of Vulnerable Psychology. The other one went on to become the president of the American Psychological Association.

• 11:12John R. Miles?

  Wow.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  So a lot of my mentoring of them had to do with breaking up individual helplessness. My thinking about individuals really went on for almost 40 years. And it began to dawn on me, first, that I wasn't really working on helplessness. I was working on mastery and agency. I was working on the opposite. But what psychology was all about was about pathology. And what getting grants was all about was curing pathology. So it took me almost 40 years to realize that I was not working on pathology,

• 11:54Speaker 01

  but its opposite, on flourishing and growth. The question of society as a whole, of human history, was a new one for me, starting maybe 25 years ago. Mandy and I have seven children, and we've homeschool them. Mandy felt that I was incompetent for teaching psychology. So I got consigned to teaching history. I'd never taught history before. And so I started to teach and taught five of our children American history.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  And it was reading American history, starting 25 years ago, that I began to think about helplessness, hopelessness, and agency as a historical, societal situation, and not just an individual situation. So I think it started with teaching my children about the history of the world, in which I had to begin to learn myself.

• 13:06John R. Miles?

  This whole topic is so interesting to me because, as I have leaned more into the research and what's happening in the world, I keep looking at the challenges that we're facing in society as more systemic in nature. So in order to fix some of the upcoming things that are going to need to be fixed, we're going to need overall systems change to happen. And so I think what you were discovering with learned helplessness long before me, I am, I'm now leaning into more and more on the changes that need to become part of civilization on a greater level.

• 13:50John R. Miles?

  Marty, as I told you earlier, my podcast is built on the foundations of positive psychology. And your PERMA model has been one of the frameworks I've returned to over the years. Over the course of this podcast, I've had the opportunity to interview and get to know many of the people in your intellectual orbit. People like Rebecca Goldstein, Barry Schwartz, David Yaden, and Gabriela Kellerman have all been on the show. And one thing that fascinates me was your collaboration in 2019 with Rebecca, Roy Bymaster, Barry, David, Gabriela, and others on mattering and significance.

• 14:34John R. Miles?

  Where I'm going with this is when you first introduced PERMA, meaning occupied a central place in flourishing. But later in your work, the conversation has seemed to expand towards mattering. When did you come to understand that flourishing and meaning alone couldn't fully capture the M in the PERMA model? And that mattering needed to take on a bigger role in the model?

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Meaning has always bothered me. It felt pointy headed to me, the kind of discussions I had with my roommates when I was in college around meaning. But if I ask you, John, how meaningful is this conversation? That, for me, is a real head scratcher. I don't have a good handle on meaning, even though there is a very substantial literature that when people feel a sense of meaning, they're more productive and they're happier. But the problem for me was its intellectual pointy headedness. About seven years ago,

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Gabriela Kellerman and I with Better Up called together a meeting of about 10 of us to ask the question about mattering. Is mattering a better notion? And what we found, both in our meeting and then our subsequent research, that if I asked you, John, how much do you matter to your family? If you disappeared tomorrow, vanished, what would happen to your family? How much do you matter to passion struck? Would it keep going? People had a very good handle on how much they mattered.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  They could talk about it articulately, and they could rate it on a one to seven scale for their family, for their work, and for the world. And so for me, the fact that mattering was a psychologically more accessible notion than meaning has led me to work on M in PERMA of being much more measurable about mattering. And I think we know more about how to change mattering than we do to change meaning. It's the specificity and accessibility of mattering

• 17:11Speaker 01

  that converted me away from meaning as a basic psychological notion.

• 17:18John R. Miles?

  Thank you for answering that. I have a couple of follow-ons from it. I have really been putting a lot of my attention recently in studying reciprocity. And I've had some really intriguing conversations with people you would know, like Claude Steele, Harry Rees, Sonia Lieber-Murisky, and others on this topic. And one thing I wanted to ask you about it, when you think about reciprocity, I kept wondering whether agency and mattering are reciprocal forces. What is your thought on that?

• 17:53Speaker 01

  I think the crucial thing is R in PERMA, which is other people, and that relationships matter. And that so much of what we know about flourishing has to do with other people. So I don't think the individual is a fertile ground for happiness, for PERMA, or for accomplishment. And we are social creatures. And if there was one thing I had to say about flourishing that I'm certain of,

• 18:33Speaker 01

  is that anything that makes us happy, that increases flourishing, if it's done with someone else, it multiplies it. So what Chris Peterson said about the heart of positive psychology being other people matter is, for me, what reciprocity is about.

• 18:54John R. Miles?

  I want to ask this to you a little bit differently, because I understand where you're going. I was trying to ask, do we first believe we matter and therefore we act? Or do we act and discover that we matter after our actions?

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Well, I think in development, we act. And the way we learn what we are and who we are has to do with other people in the world's reactions to our acting. So I think individual action is where things start. But whether or not it modifies the world, that is, you have mastery and agency, or it falls flat and you're helpless and you're non-agentic, is crucial to the shaping of the self and to flourishing. And in general, the more reciprocity,

• 19:55Speaker 01

  the more our actions produce upward spirals in the world, the more agency, the more flourishing we have. If the world doesn't react and people don't react, that's exactly learned helplessness.

• 20:18John R. Miles?

  We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Dr. Marty Seligman. As you're listening today, I want you to sit with one question. Where in your life have you started to believe that your actions won't make a difference? One of the most powerful ideas in this conversation is that agency doesn't begin when we're certain we'll succeed. It begins when we act and when we learn through our relationship with the world around us that our actions can create a response. That idea connects deeply with the research behind my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, coming this October 6. Because one of the questions I've been exploring is what happens when people begin to feel that their contributions don't matter?

• 21:00John R. Miles?

  That they can speak and not be heard, act and not make a difference, and show up and still feel invisible? Over time, those experiences can change not only how we see the world, but how much we believe we're capable of influencing it. If you'd like to go deeper into these ideas, you'll find a companion workbook inside The Ignited Life on Substack designed to help you put these conversations into practice. You'll find the links in today's show notes. Now, a quick break for today's sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

• 21:42John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck on the Passion Struck Network. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Dr. Marty Seligman. So Marty, about 15 years ago, I took a 34-week class on the Bible called Discipleship One. And I had always, I grew up Catholic. I had always grown up around the Bible, but I had found that I had never really studied it end to end. And that's what this course was aimed to do. And during this course, I started to get this subliminal messaging, I feel it came from God himself, that I was supposed to make a major career change and that the

• 22:25John R. Miles?

  words I was given was that I was supposed to help the helpless, the lonely, the hopeless, the disengaged, the burned out, et cetera. And for years, I studied and pondered and couldn't sleep because it seemed to me to be such a broad collection of people I was supposed to help. And as I leaned into this more and more, one of my central arguments that I started coming to, and you've brought up loneliness and helpless now a bunch of times. And this is a central argument that's in my forthcoming book. And before we came on today, you asked me about something that I call the Great Erasure. But the Great Erasure

• 23:10John R. Miles?

  to me is that I have become more and more convinced that loneliness, helplessness, burnout, disengagement, hopelessness, may not be separate epidemics, but symptoms of something deeper. And this something deeper is something I've been exploring with Rebecca Goldstein, and I've called it systemic unmattering. And what I define this as is the erosion of people's sense that they are consequential within the groups and the institutions that organize their lives. So school, their families, work environments, could be the military.

• 23:53John R. Miles?

  From everything that you've learned over the past decades about helplessness, flourishing, loneliness, and now agency, does a society lose agency when people stop believing that they matter to one another?

• 24:08Speaker 01

  The short answer is yes, but I want to go back and resonate with you about epiphanies in your life, changing one's career. Because I had one too, that was not dissimilar from yours. So let me just tell you the story, John, of one of the major changes in my thinking and my life, which may have paralleled yours. And generally, I've had several different careers, and almost each major change revolves around an epiphany. But the first big one

• 24:44Speaker 01

  was in the early 1970s, I was a young, became a well-known researcher, and got tenure very early in my life in the 1970s. And my mentor was someone named Aaron Beck. And Tim Beck and I worked together, and I was at least present at the founding of cognitive behavioral therapy. But the story I want to tell you, John, is the epiphany story. So Tim and I would meet once a week for lunch. I was now a tenured professor at Penn. He was a tenured

• 25:23Speaker 01

  professor of psychiatry, 25 years older than me. And we're having lunch together, and he says to me, Marty, if you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to waste your life. Now, I choked on my grilled Reuben, and I thought I was being pretty successful. And Tim was the most congenial, generous person. It was the first cruel thing he ever said to me. About two weeks later, I had a dream which changed everything. In the dream, John, I'm walking, I'm at the Guggenheim Museum, and I'm walking up the ramp in the

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Guggenheim Museum. I don't know, do you know the museum?

• 26:10John R. Miles?

  I do. It's been years since I've been there, but I, yes.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  And I opening doors on the right-hand side, and in each room, there are people playing with cards. And so I say, I ask, why is everyone playing with cards? Whereupon the roof of the Guggenheim opens, and the Godhead appears. And the God I saw actually had a white beard, very biblical, and in a loud voice said, Seligman, at least you're starting to ask the right questions. Well, that changed my life. I went from working

• 26:55Speaker 01

  on helplessness, individual pathology, to working on people and hopelessness and flourishing. Like you, I've felt called to my work, and it indeed has changed my work. I just wanted to start by saying, the background here for me has been a science change by epiphany.

• 27:22John R. Miles?

  It's eerily similar how much our two stories are separated by years, but have a lot of commonality in them, because the version of God that appeared to me was a very similar individual who kept showing up and still shows up in my dreams, guiding me.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  In general, with my MAP students, so MAP is the course I teach for pretty much adults, people your age, masters of applied positive psychology. And I have give 50 new students every year at the graduate level. And I asked them, are you, were you called to be here? And these are successful, smart adults, doing well in the world, and about 80% of them echo what you and I are saying, that they've been called to this work on flourishing.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  So it's a mysterious phenomenon for me, but it's close to universal among the people I work with, having been called to their work, having a vocation, and not just a career.

• 28:39John R. Miles?

  Marty, I wanted to return to the second part of that epiphany that I was telling you about, and that is, when you look at all these things that are plaguing society today, the number of people who feel burned out, the number of people who increasingly report feeling numb, the disengaged workers we have, the rise in people who feel helpless, the people who feel invisible, do you think there's something that sits at the core that is creating all these, what I think are symptoms to emerge?

• 29:16Speaker 01

  By coincidence, this is what I've been working on for the last week or so. So I'm first trying to find out, is it true? Now, for me, that means we don't have questionnaires over the last 100 years about agency, about optimism, and about hope. So what I've been doing with AI, with Claude and ChatGPT, is assembling a vast data source, magazine articles,

• 29:52Speaker 01

  books, speeches, scholarly commentary, literally hundreds of millions of words. And I scan them for agency, for optimism, and for hope, because I now have mechanical ways of using AI to read whole passages and to make judgments about optimism, agency, and hope. And so far, as of this morning, John, I have not found much of a change across the last two years

• 30:32Speaker 01

  in American rhetoric, speeches, songs, novels, in hope and agency. So the first thing I want to say is that I'm not convinced that we're in the middle of an enomic period in which people are feeling more helpless, less agentic, and more pessimistic. Before I can begin to answer the question of why, what I've been trying to do is document whether or not it is actually true. So I started where you were, which is my impression from

• 31:11Speaker 01

  reading the newspapers. And the depression statistics are that depression has gone up, and anxiety has gone up in America. But so far, I've not been able to find that agency has gone down, and that pessimism has gone up. The big fact is, depression is up. Now, the question is why? And I've always been interested in the history of depression. I did a horse race recently between John Height's theory and your and my theory. Okay, so I

• 31:49Speaker 01

  started with a theory, which is very much like yours, that agency, mattering, helplessness have all gone up, and that's why depression has gone up. And I think that's where we're both starting from. John Height has a very different view. He says it's the social media, and that the participating in the social media, particularly with girls, females, and with young people, is the cause of more depression. Because I've got a lot of data, both on depression going up,

• 32:30Speaker 01

  And a lot of data on agency changes, helplessness changes over time. What I did is created a statistical horse race between the increase in young people using social media and the increase in agency as predictors of more depression. So is it clear what I was after here? So what I found was that John won, that once you cancelled out the increase in social media statistically, the changes in agency were no longer predictive of depression.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  So I wrote John about three weeks ago, I sent it to John, it looks like you're right here and that social media are having more of an effect on depression, particularly in young females than any changes in agency and helplessness. So I've been disconfirming what both you and I intuitively believe that we're seeing an increase in decrease in mattering, a decrease in agency and a decrease in optimism, that those are the causes of more depression and anxiety. So as of June 30th, that's where I am statistically about this.

• 33:55John R. Miles?

  It's fascinating that obviously the court cases that have happened in New Mexico and Los Angeles with YouTube and Meta have really opened the ideas of how damaging this can be in addition to what John has written and others have talked about with social media. I guess what I keep coming back to is that might explain this for this next generation that's been coming up, but it's still not explaining it to me for the adults who are also feeling this way. And so.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  And AI, John, has put us in a new world in which we can actually check our speculations. So I started out believing exactly what you believe, that the increase in depression has to do with a decrease in agency. And I was actually repelled, because I'm a great fan of AI and the media, I was repelled by John's notion that it was the social media that was causal here.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Ten years ago, you and I could speculate forever about this, but right now, because of the analytic power of Claude of ChatGPT, I can within a day statistically check whether or not you and I were right, or John was right about the increase in depression. So one new age we're in is the kind of psychological speculations and biases that you and I share, we can actually check, and in this case for me, disconfirm.

• 35:36John R. Miles?

  Marty, I want to take us back to the book. I had the unusual privilege of reading both an earlier version of the manuscript, which I received several months ago, and more recently, a different and updated draft. And what struck me was that the later version, as I was reading it, places much greater emphasis on collective agency and on the balance between quote unquote, I can and we can, and on meaning relationships and contribution as foundations for progress. What changed in your own thinking between that earlier draft and this newer draft, if I'm reading these two drafts correctly?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  There were two big changes, and let me start with the one that I think is a major discovery, and then turn to the question of individual versus collective. So what I do in a lot of the book is to go back to one of the great mysteries of human history, that I think I solved a mystery. And let me tell you what the mystery is, and that's what's in the version that you would see recently. The mystery is that something big happened across the globe between 1,000 BCE and 500 BCE.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Now, it's called historically the Axial Age. And basically, the portrait is, if you look at the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Persians, the Indians, 1,000 BCE, no progress, no technology, limited thinking, no medicine, very little progress in the arts and literature, no political freedom. 500 BCE, in the 500 year stretch, there appears progress, technology, villages become cities,

• 37:50Speaker 01

  money is coined, political freedom breaks out, and the great thinkers like Buddha and the Socrates and the Confucius all occur. The question is, why did human progress break out between 1,000 BCE and 500 BCE? And this has been a mystery for all historians of the ancient world. So I had the hypothesis that maybe in these five civilizations, 1,000 BCE, they did not have the words for agency.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  They did not have words like I can do it and we can do it and human ability, and that their words were all about the gods doing things. But in the 500 years, in all five of those civilizations, they invent new words of a form, agency, I can do it, we can do it. Now, I never could have tested that in my lifetime, so, but Claude and ChatGPT can test it, because unlike any human being, they are fluent in ancient Aramaic, ancient Hebrew,

• 39:13Speaker 01

  ancient Greece, ancient Persian, ancient Sanskrit, and the vocabulary 500 years later. And so I turned to them and it turns out in every culture, new words are invented. They don't have the words for agency 3,000 years ago, but by 2,500, all of these cultures have agentic words. And what we basically discovered, it's the invention of new words that produces human progress, and that in many ways is the theme of the new book.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  So that's part one, John, of what's new. It's about what all of the ancients across the world discover in this 500 year period. Now, the second thing that's in the book that you raise is the difference between I can do it and we can do it, between individual agency and collective agency. So when I wrote the history of Western progress, it's essentially a story of a growth in individual agency. But then I began to work with the leading Chinese scholars about the history of China,

• 40:38Speaker 01

  and the history of China looks very much like the history of the West, in that when agency goes up, progress occurs, when the belief in agency goes down, stagnation occurs. But the difference is, in China, it's the balance between I agency and we agency. So for China, when I agency is crushed by we agency over, and now we've done it for all of the history of China, that's when technology, freedom, thought all stagnate.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  But when there's a balance between I agency and we agency, that's when you get progress. So when I think about our future, I think there's a lesson from China. So mostly, the West has been about I can do it, individual agency. But I think the role of collective agency has become more and more important, and our future may have more to do with the balance between I agency and we agency, as in the history of China.

• 41:56John R. Miles?

  I often think of it as the difference between either or thinking versus both and thinking, and how differently the West approaches problem solving versus how the East does problem solving, which I think touches on what you were just saying.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  But I do have to say one thing about it, which is one of the things about being an academic for 60 years. So I've been attending faculty meetings for 60 years. And basically, what they do is form a committee to solve problems. We agency. And I must say, in my individual experience over 60 years, the collective faculty meeting is a poorer problem solver than individual. So one of my worries about collective agency is the mediocritizing of agency. And so that's something that I think we have to worry about

• 42:59Speaker 01

  as we seem to have in America now, according to my statistics, a growth in collective agency. And one more caution about it. So as I plot modern America, and this is tentative, that when individual agency goes up, productivity goes up, GDP goes up. But depression also goes up. If you plot collective agency, GDP goes down, patents go down, productivity goes down, but depression goes down as well.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  So there's a way in which the collective makes us feel happier and more consoled, but it may interfere with progress. Whereas progress may be individual, and it may bring about depression and anxiety. So those are the very topics that, as we speak, I'm trying to analyze carefully about modern.

• 44:08John R. Miles?

  I guess I want to ask this more directly. So what you're analyzing is do hopeful people build flourishing societies? Or do flourishing societies give people permission to hope? Is that one of the fundamental questions you're trying to answer?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  I think what I'm tackling is that flourishing has different aspects and progress has different aspects. So on the one hand, we can care about human happiness, how we feel, the P in PERMA, how much depression we have. On the other hand, we can care about the A in PERMA, which is accomplishment. Now, I would have liked to believe that P and A go together and that the forces that produce more accomplishment produce more happiness and well-being.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  So one of the things that really concerns me today, John, is that productivity, accomplishment, is differently engendered than happiness and well-being. So at the moment, what I'm trying to analyze for, and is one of the themes in the book, is that collective agency produces more felt happiness, less depression and less anxiety. But it also is tied up with less accomplishment. And when you've got a highly individualistic society,

• 45:51Speaker 01

  a capitalistic society that's based on I rather than we, then you may get more GDP, more productivity, more patents, but at the expense of more depression and anxiety. So I want to fractionate PERMA into what are the different drivers of P, E, R, M, and A. And I'm worried at the moment, John, that P, positive emotion, and A, accomplishment, may have different and antagonistic drivers.

• 46:29John R. Miles?

  Marty, what do you think happens when collective agency becomes conformity or authoritarianism in its approach?

• 46:40Speaker 01

  I think that's the lesson of China. So when we look at the balance between we agency and I agency in China, when collective agency is very high, it mediocritizes and squashes individual agency. But on the other hand, I think when individual agency is very high, it squashes the benefits of collective agency. And that's what occurs in China. And we don't know about the West for that. And indeed, what I'm working on as we speak is the importance of collective versus individual agency

• 47:21Speaker 01

  now in America and also across history in the West.

• 47:28John R. Miles?

  And you are doing some extremely deep thinking. As you and I were coming on the podcast, you were talking about how much AI has opened up research portals to you that didn't exist in the past. How has AI helped you rethink, in addition to the example that you gave about John Haidt's research, your own thinking on so many of the things that you've been studying for decades? And what do you think are its potential harms in the future? And what do you think its overwhelming benefits may be?

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Let me tell you the story of what happened the day before yesterday. So there was this lovely article in the New York Times, which said that the reduced fertility rate in America is producing depression. And that's because the more siblings you have, the less depression will occur because you've got siblings who will take care of you, who will babysit, who you can learn from. That's a beautiful idea. So I thought I would check it with AI. Now, 10 years ago, there was no way of checking this. It would have taken me a full year to go back over the century,

• 48:53Speaker 01

  look at the number of siblings, look at the amount of depression and anxiety, and plot them together. But yesterday morning, I was able to go to Claude and say, Claude, give me the family sibling size and the rate of depression over time. And is it the case that the more siblings you have, the less depressed you are? Whoosh. One minute later, I have the complete statistics. And the answer is no, there's no difference in depression by number of siblings. So then I said to Claude, well, how about is it,

• 49:38Speaker 01

  could it be that there's more depression, as this author states, because your mother goes to work and doesn't take care of you? So what's the relationship between depression in children and full-time mother working? Is it that the mother working produces more depression? Whoosh. No relationship between mother employment full-time and depression. So basically, within the course of a morning, actually, within the course of about an hour, I was able to disconfirm this lovely article in the New York Times, which I would have sentimentally said,

• 50:22Speaker 01

  oh, it's great to have a lot of kids and it's great to have your mother at home because then you'll be less depressed. She was wrong. And I never could have found that out without a year's work on my part. So that's one way in which the AI is agentic for me in a way that's never been before. The other has to do with the question, and this is the big one, is AI creative?

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Well, that's really, I work on creativity and that's really interesting for me. There are essentially two theories of what the unit of creativity is. One is the usual Michelangelo theory, that the brow of Zeus, one brain creating a David. I don't think AI is creative in that sense. But there's second theory is that the creativity is two people going back and forth. The Wright brothers, McCartney and Lennon, Dallin, Sheen and Farrell correcting each other.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Now, that's the sense in which I interact with AI. So the story I told about discovering new words, I had the hypothesis that there were new words that the ancients discovered about agency. I asked Claude in chat and they were able to answer it going back and forth with me. That's the kind of creativity that AI has. It's the best companion I've ever had. And just one last example of this, John, it's the book you've read.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Chapter eight of Agency is about the Chinese and agency in China. Chapter nine is about the Hebrews and the Bible and agency. So I had written the book, this is a draft you saw, and my editor said, Marty, there's no transition between chapter eight and chapter nine. Well, I've been staring at these chapters for five years and I didn't write. So I went to Claude and said, Claude, please read chapter eight on the Chinese and chapter nine on the Hebrews and the Bible and write me a one paragraph transition.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  And here's what Claude wrote. While the Chinese were struggling with the relationship between the state and the individual, the Hebrews across the globe at the same time were wrestling with a much deeper question, the relationship of individual agency to God's agency. Well, that's exactly right. I hadn't seen that in five years and Claude saw it creatively on a rereading. The bottom line of this story, and I'm enacting it every day of my life now, is that in a

• 53:48Speaker 01

  sense of creativity going back and forth with another person, a human being going back and forth with AI now produces an enhancement of agency unlike any agency I've ever had before in my life's work.

• 54:10John R. Miles?

  Marty, I have two questions where I wanted you to apply this book to modern environments that we find ourselves in. If you were redesigning education around agency rather than performance, what would schools teach differently in the future?

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Oh, that's very important. You and I, John, you at the Naval Academy, me at graduate school, we were trying to be the smartest kid in the room. And in many ways, we were both raised and raise our children to be smart. Well, is that what education should be about, being smart? How much you know? Well, it turns out we can never be the smartest kid in the room anymore. AI is so much smarter and more knowledgeable than we are.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  AI levels the playing field about knowledge, about IQ, about being smart. So what should we be teaching our children? And what should education at the Naval Academy, at the University of Pennsylvania, in grade school be about? I think it has to turn now on questions like character, well-being, leadership, kindness, cooperation, and not how smart you are.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  For me, the machines level the playing field and are going to transform education to be what I think of as positive education about flourishing, not education about being clever.

• 56:09John R. Miles?

  I couldn't agree with you more. I love that answer. The second question I wanted to ask is, parents today often oscillate between overprotection and achievement pressure. Which of those poses the greater threat to developing agency in their kids?

• 56:29Speaker 01

  They both have an upside and a downside. Overprotection means your kids are going to be safe, but will they be resilient? How will they do when they're out in the real world when they come across events that are uncontrollable? On the other hand, teaching kids about achievement and resilience and overcoming runs the risk of danger, of failure, of death. And I don't have a good answer about the balance between overprotection versus overachievement.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Mandy and I have raised our children. She's an overprotection person. I'm an overachievement person. We compromise. But she also wanted two kids and I wanted no kids and we compromised on five.

• 57:32John R. Miles?

  Marty, my last question is this. We began our discussion and you began your career by asking whether helplessness could be learned. This book asks whether agency built civilizations and you dedicate this book to two of your grandchildren. When your grandchildren grow up and inherit the world that we're creating today, what is one belief about human possibility you most hope they carry forward?

• 58:11Speaker 01

  I think it's a strong belief in progress, that the human story has been a story of progress. Just the fact that my grandchildren are alive at age four. Two hundred years ago, one out of two of them would have been dead.

• 58:29John R. Miles?

  Yes.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  We often hear the notion that there's been no progress and that progress is not an important human value. So what I want my grandchildren to believe and to be part of is the growth of human progress, not just technological progress, John, but spiritual progress as well.

• 58:54John R. Miles?

  Marty, it has been such a profound honor to have you on the show today and thank you for the amazing contributions that you have made to so many people over the years, including myself. I am so thankful to finally interview you. And I do have to say, I had the opportunity to talk to Angela Duckworth last week and every time I talk to her, and she talks about you all the time, she always refers to you as her second father. And so one of the things I thought was so fitting is that your two books are both coming out in September, one week after the other. And I thought that was just an amazing coincidence.

• 59:35John R. Miles?

  So I will end there and just tell the listeners that I love this book and I read the first version end to end and then I read the second version end to end. And I think it may be the best book that you've ever written, Marty, and that says a lot. So thank you so much for joining us today.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Thank you, John.

• 59:54John R. Miles?

  I hope today's conversation gave you something to think about. For me, one of the biggest takeaways is that agency begins with a simple but powerful belief. What I do can make a difference. That doesn't mean we control everything. We don't, but we can choose to act, we can choose to respond, and over time, those actions help shape both the world around us and the person we're becoming. If something from today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. Send me a message on Substack, LinkedIn, or Instagram, or share this episode with someone who may need a reminder that their actions still matter. And if you haven't already, make sure you're following Passion Struck so you don't miss what's coming next. Because in our next episode, I'm joined by bestselling author David Epstein.

• 1:00:39John R. Miles?

  You probably know David from his bestselling book, Range, where he made the case that broad experiences can help prepare us for an unpredictable world. But his new book, Inside the Box, asks the question that naturally comes next. Once you develop all those capabilities, how do you actually channel them into something meaningful? We talk about why more options don't always lead to more progress, why boundaries can sometimes create freedom, and how to focus your energy when the world keeps giving you more things to pay attention to. And I think it creates the perfect next question for this series. Agency gives us the belief that we can act. Adaptability helps us learn where to direct that action. I think you're going to love this conversation.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  I actually think the gap between the mendeley of myth and reality is symbolic of something important, which is that we overvalue the complete freedom of something like the dreaming brain and undervalue the power of constraints to channel us into productive experimentation. I think most breakthroughs do with a much smaller problem that opened into something that changed the world.

• 1:01:43John R. Miles?

  Until then, remember, you don't have to control everything that happens next to influence what happens next. Sometimes it starts with simply believing that what you do can make a difference. I'm John Miles and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion struck.