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

Over the last fifty years you've maybe done more than anyone else to increase our understanding of human flourishing thirty bucks or more hundreds of articles and you just sent eighty four so happy birthday by the way thank you. Yeah what's been the common thread between all of your work is there a unifying trend across all of it. Yes yes there is a question of of human mastery and human agency chris so when i started. Working psychology more than sixty years ago there were three huge blind spots. That psychology had been made asking questions about human happiness and human agency almost impossible. No first blind spot was happiness itself and that is a psychology was all about misery sixty years ago. 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 my work has been that what you think. Determines how you feel but psychology excluded thinking sixty years ago it was your psychoanalysts it was just a fluvia that came out of underlying conflict if you're behaviorist. Thinking didn't exist 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 psychologist believe 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 in the middle to human well being and one of the great joys of my sixty years in psychology i've been one of the people who overturned all three of them. It's a rebellious career appending the status quo in that way. Yes i think i've been a rebel in an overturned my scientific technique is generally been. To look at the basic premises of what people were doing in science and say what is the most basic premises wrong what follows and the basic premises of psychology sixty years ago excluded human happiness excluded thinking and excluded the notion that we could choose our future. Why agency why do you get interested in that well i first worked on something called learned helplessness so i basically found in the nineteen sixties and seventies that animals and humans when they were exposed to events that they couldn't do anything about. Showed several basic disturbing symptoms of first baby can profoundly passive. So chris if i put headphones on you and i put a button in front of you and i played loud annoying noise and button nothing you did control the noise and then the next day. I put you in a human shuttle box which is a box about six feet long put headphones on you your put your hand on one side noise went on. You just sat there and didn't do anything so the first thing that we found to our shop can learn to help us 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 i went back to sitting. So where am i interested in this started was the opposite of agency and that is. What is agency what makes us helpless and twenty years of work on finding out what makes us helpless brought me out of the notion of helplessness and into the notion of 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 work. So the groups are matched for trauma reverse city but the group that spread first experience with mastery with what i don't 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 or actually energizing what was the ark from learned helplessness to learn to hopefulness then because we spend all you spend all of this time. Doing this research finding something that sounds very exciting and gets taken on by the fields for it to then need to basically do you turn. It was something i was trying to sleep under the rug but after doing more than ten 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 there's a big effect to look at i mean just not moving and doing anything but importantly three out of every eight people. Create a beverage animals didn't become helpless i tried to sweep that under the rug 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 ten 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 him questions like. Are you failing mathematics examination pessimistic people say it's me it's gonna last forever and it's gonna 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 less and less it hurts you in many circumstances and it's something about you. But we found that optimist when they failed examinations said things like hangover i didn't try hard enough notice a hangover unlike being stupid is temporary. It doesn't mean the next time you have an exam you're gonna 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 who didn't become helpless and it turned out it was the optimist who didn't become helpless. And that led me in my ark from thinking about. The dangers of it's me it's gonna last forever it's gonna 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 let me from. Leaving 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 the. Second big ark in my career. I'll tell you about the third one which had to do with a brings to scale. When i turned fifty i decided i was gonna run for president of the american psychological association. I had 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. What about let me with a problem 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. What happened to me that gave me my initiative and changed my work from being about misery to being about well being 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. It got paid for doing that and so the crucial event for modern psychology occurred right after world war two. When something called the national institute of mental health was open 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 thirty years later the american psychiatric association published its diagnostic manual and reimbursement. Psychotherapist was for treating depression anxiety alcoholism schizophrenia panic you didn't get paid for making people happier. And so psychology follow 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 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 thirty 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 garden and i was in my garden with my five year old daughter on the cold she turned five about two weeks before. And we're waiting together and i'm having the usual miserable time pulling weeds but nikki is running around dancing throwing weeds in the air singing and i. I showered her i said nikki get to work we're waiting. And nikki looked at me she walked away she came back and said daddy can i talk to you. Yeah what is it nikki daddy do you remember before my fifth birthday that i was a whiner. Can i wind all the time yeah yeah you're a little horror. What have you noticed daddy since my fifth birthday two weeks ago i haven't won once. Oh yeah you haven't have you said what daddy on my fifth birthday i decided i wasn't gonna wine 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 they're 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 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 working out what was wrong. Hey and 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. cause of something else, uh, something positive, uh, and that perhaps there were virtues in not being a grouch and maybe being grouch got in the way. And 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. What occurred to me, that was nonsense where you got was to zero. And that for Nikki to be, uh, uh, to grow, we had to find out what she was good at, like talking to an adult, which she had just done reinforcing 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 wellbeing. So I found my initiative there. And it was to create something which we'd gone on to call positive psychology, which investigates not correcting your errors, but finding what your strengths are and living around your strengths. Uh, so that, that was the third major, uh, change in the arc that went from helplessness to pessimism to positive psychology in other news. Have you ever noticed how some websites make it ridiculously easy to buy while some feel infinitely harder? Back in my day, I had to walk 10 miles to the local store. Aren't you younger than me? Yeah, but my dad got a DUI. Anyway, the reality is most businesses just get the website wrong. And if your setup is messy, you lose a ton of sales, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Shopify. They power 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including brands like Gymshark, Skims, Allo, and Nutanix, because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout's 36% better on average compared to other platforms. And with Shopify, you can boost conversions by 50%. So upgrade your business and get the exact same checkout that we use at Nutanix with Shopify. You can sign up for a free trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom. How much have you come to believe people can train themselves into optimism, train themselves into agency? How much are they constrained by the predisposition or their set point? Uh, indeed, uh, the great body of the work I've done was on the question, can you change, uh, can you stop being a pessimist? Can you stop being a tick, a, a catastrophizer? Uh, uh, can you come out of hopelessness and helplessness? So, uh, a great deal of my work has been on, can we change? Uh, the answer is yes, but, uh, uh, 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 are now done with hundreds and in many cases, thousands of people, and we look at them across time. Uh, so, uh, let's take pessimism, uh, seeing the worst side of everything. Um, well, pessimism comes quite naturally. Uh, 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, uh, bias toward catastrophization and automatic thoughts about the worst. Uh, 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 what kinds of things that we do. Um, first thing we do is we put people in touch with, uh, the most pessimistic things they say to themselves. Uh, and, uh, so for example, uh, 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 going to face someone who is reputed to be a really difficult interview. Uh, geez, I'm 84 years old. Uh, uh, Chris is in his thirties or forties. Uh, 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. Uh, you, you can't, you can't face Chris Williamson, uh, but I have learned to be, uh, an active disputer realistically of my most catastrophic thoughts. So at four in the morning, uh, I said, Hey, wait a minute. Uh, I did an interview last week with someone like Chris. I did an interview last week with someone like Chris. Uh, and again, I thought I can't do it at all. And it was super. And, uh, well, I was only 83 then and I'm 84 now. Uh, I basically was realistic arguments, treated the voice that said to me selling you're over the hill as if it was a rival for my job or my wife, uh, whose mission in life was to make me miserable and to argue against it, uh, is as with realistic evidence. Uh, uh, and that, uh, when you learn to become a good disputer of automatic thoughts, uh, pessimism changes to optimism, uh, and it's, uh, fun. And in fact, when we do experiments, uh, on this, uh, 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. Here's something I've done with, uh, 40,000 drill sergeants in the United States army. So, uh, during the Iraq war, uh, the United States army came to be post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide. What does positive psychology say about that? And so, uh, uh, basically the army commissioned me, uh, to teach the drill sergeants to teach positive psychology to, uh, 1 million, uh, men and women in the United States army. So here's a technique that, uh, uh, works very well. Uh, and I'll modify it, uh, not for the army, but for, for the rest of us, uh, it's called putting it in perspective, uh, 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 going to be fired. She's read my memo about the book. It's all over. And naturally we're attracted to that. Uh, now we're catastrophizers for playist scene reasons. What can you do about being a catastrophizer? So here's what we do first. Uh, we have people imagine the very worst that could happen at four in the afternoon. They get into it. She's gonna take me apart and I'm going to be fired. Okay, great. Then we say, okay, that's the worst that can happen. Now what's the best thing that could happen at four in the afternoon? And she'll say, uh, 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? Uh, 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 going to ask me to cut the budget. Great. 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. I don't know. I don't know. That to me, the predisposition that we have, the 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'm going to be kicked out. I'm going to be homeless on the street and I'm going to live under a bridge and I'm going to have a gluten intolerance and a clubfoot and it's all going to go horrendously. And that feels so natural to us, right? It's literally as natural as breathing for a lot of people. But 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, 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 clubfoot. I'm homeless. I'm going to wind up living under a bridge. It's 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 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. What's the relationship between optimism and agency? Agency, your new obsession, this is the new book. How is it different from optimism? How have you come to conceptualize that? 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. 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 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. How predictive is agency in someone's life outcomes, do you think? Our best evidence 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 the Renaissance, and through modern times, and asks the question, when do human beings flourish and when do they stagnate? 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 the hypothesis that I was dealing with was, is this caused in the same way it is in the laboratory? 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? In other news, if you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for 20 years, and it wasn't until the past few years that I had the best training sessions of my life, and RP was a massive part of that. Several scientists built this thing around one obsession, to beat up the high school bullies and provide the most science-backed effective path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps, and weights that you need to do, everything. So all that you have to do is show up and lift. If the RP app could wipe your ass for you, it probably would. And it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference. 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If you track across Greece, by looking at the texts from Homer through the 6th 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, and the fifth is political freedom. 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. Something very important happens in 383 AD, and that's St. Augustine. 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 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. If you map human progress against what the philosophical and religious beliefs 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. Does that suggest that modern religious believers might be less agentic than if the same person was an atheist? It depends on the flavor of the religion. 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. 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, any time we're lifted up, it's only because God lifts us up. So that's the origin of modern Protestantism. 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. 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. Bringing it into the modern world, how do you advise people to construct more agency in their life? Well, let's take two things one at a time. So the first aspect of agency is efficacy. And that is, how do you get better at undoing your beliefs that you can't succeed? 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 a 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 going to do? Say, go to your sink and wash one cup. Turns out if you wash one cup, that leads to a cascade of mastery experiences. One coffee does that. 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, you systematically increase efficacy. For increasing optimism, we talked about arguing against your most catastrophic thoughts and putting things in perspective. The third, and the thing I think we know, 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. I'm very interested in the question, 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 going to 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. 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. 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. 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 Nicky 30 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 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 80 years older than they are. 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, Anthropx AI, 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 24. This is where Max and Denny tour 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 from their photographs flying on Pegasus and the like. The kids can't wait to see me anymore. I'm. Visible they want to 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 going to be dehumanized I've got more love in my life by a lot by the two The two people I most care about in the world because of AI And that was part one human emotion big supplement for me But the big issue is creativity Is AI creative? 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 It's the Wright brothers going back and forth It's a McCartney and Lennon Kahneman and Tversky 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 don't only figure out how birds fly but much more importantly they create the first airplane This Is the sense in which AI is massively Creative and I let me give you two examples of this I've been working on this book of agency for seven years Has 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 and Indeed we found we tracked Chinese agentic fought 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 8 chapter 9 is Israel Hebrews and what I had done in chapter 9 is I look at agency in the Torah Well, the five books of Moses are not very agentic God basically does heavy lifting here the Hebrews complain and go along with them, but Starting after the Torah in the writings of the prophets. That's when you get human agency as opposed to God's agency That's chapter 9. I turn this in to my editor says Marty there There's no transition between chapter 8 and chapter 9 I've 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 8 and read chapter 9 and write me a transition whoosh 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 Well, that turns out to be exactly right I couldn't see it but Claude could see it Here's the big thing that Claude did creatively, so that's just one example 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 Chat GPT 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 Persia and India on terms of progress all of these cultures are Backwater Villages, no coinage, you know 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 or tragedy Buddha Confucius What happened in the 500 years? What happened to what happened in five cultures across the Axial Age that enabled innovation? Okay, that's called the great mystery of the Axial Age Something big happened to human beings between a thousand and five hundred BCE Okay, I Had the hypothesis that it was words that in a thousand 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 so I went to Wilbur In this case Claude and again with cat GPT and I said look is this true Could it be there were no words for human agency in a thousand? and then suddenly this huge panoply of agency words have 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 Sad script ancient Chinese Changes in Persian language and ancient Greek and Golden Age Greek, but they are yeah, 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 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 a quick aside You've probably heard me talk about element before and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last Five years now, which is a cold glass of water with elements in it Element is an electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't it's a science-backed Electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium. 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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. 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. You know, I absolutely, so here's a Example from the Bible from Hebrew in The Torah Go beyond the Torah after the Torah the word teshuvah occurs for the first time teshuvah means repentance That you can redo your life It doesn't occur in the Torah Once you have a notion like Repentance that tells you there are a gentic things that you can do To repent to make life better and as far as we can see that doesn't exist before 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 a thousand years ago but once you get words that are about will and freedom and choice and Repentance then you get a completely different view of what the human being is and that the human being Can make life better. 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 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 On Jaynes argued that consciousness itself this Into 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 Jaynes 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 3,000 years ago, but by 2,500 years ago, it's it's 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 a thousand BCE in and before Writing occurs for the first time 3,500 BCE There are no psychology. No consciousness words Their lists and their words about the gods and the idols 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 and Medical view. 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 in what because they 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 That spoke spoken from above or below, I guess. They were from God. 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. Okay. And that is the corpus callosum develops. Oh, this is a structural argument. This isn't phenomenological. James's argument is structural. Wow. My view of how that's neuromythology, 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 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. In particular, what's called theory of mind, being able to intuit what the other person might be thinking is what drives the change in consciousness between 1,000 and 500. And more specifically for me, you get words that do this. 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? I think agency is double-edged. And so most of what I do in the book is 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. So we develop the 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, 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. But what we need is a wise and moral sense about efficacy, optimism, and imagination. And that's not something that we can guarantee. What was that analysis you did about Trump and Harris, about that debate? 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. Everyone thought that Trump was a doomsayer and a pessimist. And indeed, in the following sense, he was. And 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 October 31st. I had 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 sent it to reporters and the like. And I think we were the only pundits who predicted a substantial Trump victory. Wow. That is fascinating. It goes to show how alluring optimism is. Not just functionally useful inside of your own life, but it's a kind of an attractor, I suppose, to sort of bring people in. Misery loves company, but company does not like misery. And it turns out if you do the following experiment, 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. 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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 slash modernwisdom 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 modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Are you familiar with resting bitch face? Do you know what that is? No, tell me about that. 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. They're just sort of ambiently happy. Other people might look a little bit more like this. 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 just minus 10% happy. Is there a literature on whether or not people like the resting bitch face? I don't know. This could be the next book. I'm going to do it. It's called Resting Bitch Face. Resting Bitch Face. Who knew that I was going to teach maybe the greatest positive psychologist of all time about resting bitch face today. The reason I bring it up is 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. Somebody can say the same script but if it's a little bit more bouncy. We do ad reads for the podcast. And sometimes when I have to do a big chunk of them in a single day I'm not super... I've been tired. Maybe I 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 because in one of them I felt really positive about it. I'm saying the same words but I'm not saying them with the same level of bubbliness 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 can change how people interpret who you are. Well, I've written it down and I'm going to work on it. Who knew? There is literature on fertility and optimism that optimistic people have more children. That's something about attractiveness. That's interesting. 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. 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 so conscious about whether they can deal with it. I guess I'm kind of interested. I'm just reminded, Chris, of something that happened recently in my life about well-being and positivity. And this actually is an example of how even at my age you can change. So, you know, I'm a complainer, particularly at restaurants. And I had noticed when, you know, 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. And I realized really for the first time in my life watching them cringe that if Mandy, my wife, who is a sunny, positive, good resting face, in fact, 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 not to complain anymore at restaurants. And we tested it out. And about a week later, we all went to a restaurant and I ordered steak tartare. And the maitre d' came over to me and said, oh, I'm sorry, professor. The machine is broken. The machine. You don't make steak tartare with a machine. You shave the beef with a knife. I'll have the smoked salmon. So, indeed, I've stopped. 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. Resting complaining face at a restaurant. I guess, you know, after all of this time, 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? Well, two things, Chris, I'd say. The first is that having agency, waking up in the morning and having things that you can master that you're optimistic about is crucial for well-being, happiness, and how long you live. And the second is the importance of living in the future as opposed to the past or the present. So I think the human species example is that we are creatures of the future, that more than half of our thinking is planning for the future. 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. Across all of the papers that you've written, is there a best paper you wrote that you think didn't get anywhere near as much attention as it should have done? It's the very best paper I've ever written, almost no one has read. I'm very interested in dreaming, 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. 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 to the Psychological Review, which is our major journal, and for two years, the following thing went on. Sixteen reviewers over the course of two years, 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. So in fact, I think the only, the best paper I've ever written, maybe a hundred people have read in a very obscure journal. 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 took the behavioral genetics red pill, Robert Plowman came on the show, and 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 I had lots of conversations about this stuff, and I think anyone that learns about the facts, the building blocks of what makes you 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? And 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 niche books, it was wonderful, like really, really fantastic. I re-read it recently, it must be 25 years old or so, I had written five editions about neuropsychology, 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, 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. What if your ambitions in life is to not be boring? Why is that? At age 21, when I decided to become a psychologist, I went to one of my professors, Peter Madison, and I told him I was going to go to graduate school in psychology rather than philosophy or become a professional bridge player, those were my other two options, and Peter said, But 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. So good. Martin Seligman, ladies and gentlemen. Martin, you rule. I think you're great. I love your work. Just an unbelievable contribution to pivoting the world of psychology. I'm so happy. Where do you think people go to keep up to date with everything that you've got going on? I've never woken up in the morning more excited 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, and it's really the first time in my life I wished I was 21 again and not 84. Wow. Well, it's nice, you know, it's very popular and very trendy for people to push back against AI at the moment, and your learned optimism appears to be managing to countervail even the most negative of forces about how people feel about the forthcoming robot apocalypse. Martin, I appreciate you very much. Thank you so much for today. Thank you, Chris. Good to meet you. Good to meet you, too. Is your home wish list just sitting in your cart? Well, get ready to hit checkout because Wayday at Wayfair is here. Save up to 80% off everything home during the biggest sale of the year. Whether you're refreshing the living room, upgrading the bedroom, or finally tackling that home project you've been putting off, now's the time to save big. Shop Wayfair's Wayday sale and get up to 80% off now till October 26th. These deals won't last. 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