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

Episode Date: October 24, 2026

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

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

So when I started work in psychology more than 60 years ago, there were three huge blind spots that psychology had that made asking questions about human happiness and human agency almost impossible. The first blind spot was happiness itself, and that is psychology was all about misery 60 years ago. Trauma, suffering, panic, depression, anxiety. Happiness was a dirty word. No one worked on it.

The second blind spot was thinking itself. So a common thread in all of my work has been. that what you think determines how you feel. But psychology excluded thinking 60 years ago. It was, if you're a psychoanalyst, it was just a fluvia that came out of underlying conflict. If you're 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 psychologists believed that the past plus the present made a puppet of us into the future. All of those three premises have turned out to be wrong, inimical to human well-being. And one of the great joys of my 60 years in psychology, I've been one of the people who overturned all three of them. It's a rebellious career, upending the status quo in that way. Yes, I think I've been a rebel and an overturner, and my scientific technique has generally been to look at the basic premises of what people were doing in science and say, what if the most basic premises wrong, what follows. And the basic premises of psychology 60 years ago excluded human

happiness, excluded thinking, and excluded the notion that we could choose our future. Why agency? Why do you get interested in that? Well, I first worked on something called learned helplessness. So I basically found in the 1960s and 70s that animals and humans, when they were exposed to events that they couldn't do anything about, showed several basic disturbing symptoms. First, they became profoundly passive. So, Chris, if I put headphones on you and I put a button in front of you and I played a loud, annoying noise. And the button, nothing you did could turn off the noise. And then the next day, I put you in a human shuttle box, which is a box about six feet long, put headphones on you, put your hand in on one side. Noise went on. He just sat there and

didn't do anything. So the first thing that we found to our shock and learned helplessly, was that people and animals became profoundly passive. And the second thing we found was that they became stupid, that they had a lot of trouble finding out when they moved their hand, turn off the noise, that mastery actually worked, and they went back to sitting. So where my interest in this started was the opposite of agency, and that is what impedes agency, what makes us helpless?

And 20 years of work on finding out what makes us helpless brought me out of the notion of helplessness and into the notion of mastery and agency. And most importantly, every time we ran an experiment in which there was inescapable noise are inescapable shock, there was always a third group that got the very same noise, but pressing the button worked. So the groups are matched for trauma or adversity, but the group that's had first experience with mastery, with what I now call efficacy, did fine. And then when we started to measure them, they were even better off than the control groups. So the very, The very first hint of efficacy, agency, and mastery was that traumatic events that you can do

something about are actually energizing. What was the arc from learned helplessness to learned hopefulness then? Because you spend all of this time doing this research, finding something that sounds very exciting and gets taken on by the field for it to then need to basically do a U-turn. Well, it was something I was trying to sweep under the rug. But after doing more than 10 years of research with people and animals, when I gave people and animals events they couldn't control, they became passive. But only five out of eight, on average, became passive.

One third of them, I couldn't make helpless. So there's a big effect to look at. I mean, just not moving and doing anything. But importantly, three out of every eight people, three out of every eight animals didn't become helpless. I tried to sweep that under the rug. And finally, it became interesting to me. What was it about some people and some animals that made you resilient, resistant to helplessness? Well, that took another 10 years to find out.

And basically, the key to that seemed to be optimism and pessimism. So what we developed was a way of measuring by questionnaire optimism and pessimism. So pessimistic people, when we gave them questions like you fail a mathematics examination, pessimistic people say, it's me, it's going to last forever, and it's going to undermine everything I do. So they say, I'm stupid. And the problem with saying, I'm stupid, it's a very pessimistic explanation. Stupidity lasts and less. It hurts you in many circumstances, and it's something about you.

But we found that optimists, when they failed examinations, said things like, I had a hangover. I didn't try hard enough. Now notice a hangover, unlike being stupid, is temporary. It doesn't mean the next time you have an exam, you're going to fail it. So hangovers are not trying hard enough are optimistic. So having developed first questionnaires and then ways of looking at verbatim speech for optimism and pessimism, we then went back and asked, well, who didn't become helpless? And it turned out it was the optimists who didn't become helpless. And that led me in my arc from thinking about the dangers of its, It's me. It's going to last forever. It's going to undermine everything I do to the virtues of

thinking, hey, it's temporary. It's just this one situation, and I can do something about it. So that led me from believing I was working on pessimism and depression and helplessness, to realizing, hey, I was working on optimism and hope and agency. So that was the second big arc in my career. I'll tell you about the third one, which had to do with bringing this to scale. When I turned 50, I decided I was going to run for president of the American Psychological Association.

I hadn't been president of anything since the ninth grade, and I wasn't a very good president of the ninth grade. And so I put my name in the ring, and I was told by everyone I'd be defeated, and I'd campaigned for it. And I won by the largest vote in the modern history of American. psychology. But that led 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 that 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 II when something, 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 30 years later, the American Psychiatric Association published its diagnostic manual and reimbursement for psychotherapists was for treating depression, anxiety, alcoholism, schizophrenia, panic. You didn't get paid for making people happier.

And so psychology followed the money, essentially, both in getting grants and in treating people at the expense of asking the question, hey, can people flourish? Is there something more to life than they? 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 30 years of my life. And what it was, Chris, I was thinking about the question of what would my initiative be.

And I was in the, I'm a gardener, and I was in my garden with my five-year-old daughter, Nicole. She had turned five about two weeks before. And we're weeding together. And I'm having the usual miserable time pulling weeds, but Nikki is running around, dancing, throwing weeds in the air, singing, and I shouted at her. I said, Nikki, get to work, we're weeding. And Nikki looked at me, she walked away. She came back and said, Daddy, can I talk to you? Said, yeah, what is it, Nikki?

Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday that I was a whiner, that I whined all the time? Yeah, yeah, you're a little horror. Well, have you noticed, Daddy, since my fifth birthday two weeks ago, I haven't whined once? I said, oh, yeah, you haven't, have you? He said, well, Daddy, on my fifth birthday, I decided I wasn't going to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I've ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch. this really happened Chris

and in that moment I realized and I call it an epiphany because it all happened in an instant I realized three basic things about myself about being a parent

and about psychology so the first was about myself I was indeed a grouch and indeed I was proud of being a grouch I had that critical intelligence that made me see right to the heart of everything that was wrong.

So I was really good at picking out what was wrong. And it occurred to me for the first time, maybe some of the success I had in life was not because I was such a grout and such a negative person, but because of something else, something positive, and that perhaps there were virtues in not being a grouch, and maybe being grouch got in the way. 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. Well, occurred to me that was nonsense. Where you got was to zero. And that for Nikki to be a, to grow, we had to find out what she was good at, like talking to an adult, which she had just done, reinforcing it and helping her to live her life, not correcting her. errors, but capitalizing what she was good at. And the third big thing I realized was that

psychology was half baked. It was baked on misery, suffering, divorce, panic, and there was no psychology of flourishing, of happiness, of well-being. So I found my initiative there, and it was to create something which we'd gone on to call positive psychology, which investigates not correcting your errors, but finding what your strengths are and living around your strengths. So that was the third major change in the arc that went from helplessness to pessimism to positive psychology. In other news, have you ever noticed how some websites make it ridiculously easy to buy while some feel infinitely harder.

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optimism, train themselves into agency. How much are they constrained by their predisposition or their set point? Indeed, the great body of the work I've done was on the question, can you change? Can you stop being a pessimist? Can you stop being a catastrophizer? Can you come out of hopelessness and helplessness. So a great deal of my work has been on, can we change? The answer is yes, but let me tell you some of the techniques. And when I talk techniques here, these are not Arnshire 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. So let's take pessimism, seeing the worst side of everything. Well, pessimism comes quite naturally. We are the creatures of ancestors who lived through the ice ages. And those of our ancestors who said, it's a beautiful day in Pasadena today, I'll bet tomorrow would be beautiful, got crushed by the ice. And we inherited a brain that bias toward catastrophization and automatic thoughts about the worst.

So being negative, being a pessimist comes naturally. What does not come naturally and needs learning is being an optimist. So let me give you some examples of the kinds of things that we do. The first thing we do is we put people in touch with the most pessimistic things they say to themselves. And so, for example, before the show last night, by the way, I am still a pessimist, but I've learned optimism. I wake up Chris at 4 in the morning thinking, gee, in 12 hours, I'm going to face someone who is reputed to be a really difficult interview. She said, geez, I'm 84 years old.

Chris is in his 30s or 40s. He probably knows the literature better than I do, and I'm not quick anymore. Okay, so I hear that voice, and it's saying, You know, Marty, you're over the hill. You can't face Chris Williamson. But I have learned to be an active disputer, realistically, of my most catastrophic thoughts. So at 4 in the morning, I said, hey, wait a minute.

I did an interview last week with someone like Chris, And again, I thought, I can't do it at all. And it was super. And, well, I was only 83 then, and I'm 84 now. I basically with realistic arguments, treated the voice that said to me, Seligman, you're over the hill, as if it was a rival for my job or my wife, whose mission in life was to make me miserable and to argue against it, as with realistic evidence, and that when you learn to become a good disputer of automatic thoughts,

pessimism changes to optimism, and it's fun. And in fact, when we do experiments on this, six months later, people are more optimistic, less depressed, less anxious. Second technique. I'll just limit it to two now, but I could go on for the rest of our show about how to change from being an optimist to a pessimist. And part of the reason for wanting to talk about the book agency is I'd like people to read about this as well. Here's something I've done with 40,000 drill sergeants in the United States Army.

So during the Iraq War, the United States Army came to me. It's a post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide. What does positive psychology say about that? And so basically the Army commissioned me to teach the drill sergeants, to teach positive psychology to one million men and women in the United States Army. So here's a technique that works very well, and I'll modify it not for the Army, but for the rest of us. It's called putting it in perspective 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 actually, we're attracted to that. Now, we're catastrophizers for playist scene reasons. What can you do about being a catastrophizer?

So here's what we do. First, we have people imagine the very worst that could happen at 4 in the afternoon. And they get into it, she's going to 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 4 in the afternoon? and she'll say, 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? 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 4 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 club foot 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, like, how could I ever have a good interview with Chris Williamson, that it be realistic?

and you marshal evidence that's realistic. So I have a club foot, I'm homeless, I'm gonna wind up living under a bridge, is indeed like the most catastrophic thoughts we have. But when you learn to become a good disputer, as opposed to just treating your most catastrophic thoughts as if they were true, empirically, it turns out people learn this,

they learn it well, They become better at it. It alleviates depression and anxiety and increases of 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 techniques. 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 in the Renaissance and through modern times and asked 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?

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So let me do this at least by example. If you look at just Homer, the Greeks, if you look at the older Homer, which is the Iliad, in which Achilles doesn't do it, but the gods get Achilles to do it. Achilles is not agentic. A hundred years later, you've got Odysseus, the clever, wily, agentic person. And 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. But fourth is the quality of life, death rate. and the fifth is political freedom. That if we take just the Greek period,

you get basically a perfect mapping between increases in the belief in agency coded for by the philosophical writings, an increase in progress in all five of those domains. Let me turn it on its side. This progress continues through about three, 50 AD. And something very important happens in 383 AD, and that's St. Augustine.

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

This becomes church doctrine for the next almost thousand years. And what you get by all five criteria is stagnation and regression in thought, in political freedom, in quality of life, in technology and science, and in the arts. And so if you map human progress against what the philosophical and religious beliefs 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 they were the same person was an atheist?

It depends on the flavor of the religion. So very interestingly enough, let's take modern Protestantism. The origins of modern Protestantism are Luther and Calvin. And contrary to what you might have learned in school about the Reformation, Luther and Calvin out Augustinian Augustine, that is, they believe in utter depravity, predetermination, and the adjudication, and the absence of freedom of the will. And indeed in 1524,

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

Any time we do, anytime 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. 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 the 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 the modern psychological laboratory, is actually doing things and having them succeed. And sometimes we have to break, if you're feeling helpless and hopeless, and you're looking at your apartment and it's filthy, and you get out of bed, what am I 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 tub. 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. and the third and the thing I think we know the, so teaching efficacy and optimism, there are literally a thousand studies that have demonstrated you can do it and you can be more efficacious and more optimistic and happier tomorrow than you are today. I'm very interested in the question,

can you, the third one, can you be more imaginative and more. 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 & 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 in thinking now is about the joint use of AI and human imagination to produce an unprecedented level of creativity. 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 doomsayer. have the floor at the moment, and they're telling us all the terrible things that AI might do to remove human agency, make us less human and the like. If AI had come along before Nikki 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, 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, Anthropics, AI, help me write stories in which Max and Denny are the heroes. So I said, Chapter 1, 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 toured the solar system together, and basically with a combination of Claude helping me write stories and ChatGPT giving wonderful oil paintings of Max and Denny 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 people I most care about in the world because of AI. 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, Michael Angelo, 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 the one that I think is most plausible, is that the number is two. It's the Wright brothers, going back and forth. It's McCartney and Lennon,

Kahneman and Thursky, Balin and Farrell, One of the Orville says this, Wilbur says, no, that's wrong. They go back and forth and out of that. They not only figure out how birds fly, but much more importantly, they create the first airplane. This is the sense in which AI is massively creative. And let me give you two examples of this. I've been working on this book of agency for six.

seven years. It's been a lot of work. Chapter 8 is about China. So I had looked at the West and found that the more agented 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 thought from the Shang dynasty to modern times. And we basically found that when there was good balance between individual and collective agency, that's when you get progress in China. That's chapter eight. Chapter nine is Israel, the Hebrews. And what I had done in chapter 9 is I look at agency in the Torah. Well, the five books of Moses are not very agentic. God basically does the heavy lifting here. The Hebrews

complain and go along with them. But starting after the Torah and the writings and the prophets, That's when you get human agency as opposed to God's agency. That's chapter 9. I turned this into my editor. She says, Marty, 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. Wush! 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 of,

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, maybe a very clever critic could have come up with that. But Claude did and I didn't. But here's something Claude and ChatGPT did that. 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 take any criteria of progress, nothing is happening in 1,000 BC. 500 BC, 500 years later, all five of these civilizations are booming. They're inventing things, coinage art, tragedy, Buddha, infucius, 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 1,500 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 chat 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 pataply 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, Sanskrit, ancient Chinese, changes in Persian language, and ancient Greek and Golden Age Greek. But they are.

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 are 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. No sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients.

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Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to link in the description below. They're heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Does that have an implication that because humans learn through language as well as 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 we're 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 local influence can be on our belief in agency and therefore our ability to enact agency? Yeah, absolutely. So here's an example from the Bible, from Hebrew.

In the Torah, go beyond the Torah, after the Torah, the word to Shiva, occurs for the first time. Teshuvra 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 agentic 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 1200 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 Jane's wonderful book called The Bicameral Mind about 50 years of, He was a teacher of mine. James argued that consciousness itself, this thing inside of us that's looking at this landscape of reality and has agency isn't there until the Bronze Age.

And so for James, the transition in Homer from a 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 across the globe. And indeed, the writings we have indicate that. So if you look across different cultures, there aren't psychological words in 1,000 BC. And before writing occurs for the first time, 3,500 BCA, 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. That's the radical 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 inward. Because I think I'm right in saying the bicameral mind, the whole point of that was that the inner words that we have inside of ourselves were not seen to be self-generated.

they were spoken from above or below, I guess. They were from God. Well, indeed, James' hypothesis is quasi-neurological. It's that 3,000 years ago, the gods are talking to us from the right hemisphere or the left hemisphere. Okay. And that as the corpus callosum develops. Oh, this is a structural argument. This isn't a phenomenal.

James' argument is structural. Wow. That's a neuromithology. I think it's more like population pressures. So I think three thousand 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 a piece. 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, listen to. to the gods and form other minds.

And so from my point of view, what social upheaval does is it drives consciousness. Consciousness in particular, what's called theory of mind, being able to intuit what the other person might be thinking is what drives the change in consciousness between 1,500. 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 to take the three components, efficacy, optimism, and imagination, and celebrate them and talk about the progress that it brings.

But each of these has a shadow side. So efficacy is our ability to accomplish goals. But the fact that we can make an out of 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, 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 that he talks about a lot more bad events than Harris does. But I haven't been interested in the number of bad events. The more bad events, the darker you sound. But in the nomination acceptance speeches, Trump and Harris are about equally optimistic and pessimistic. So that would have said to me, it was a dead heat. But for the first time, I decided to track all the press conferences going right through October 31st. I've 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 fast.

I mean, it goes to show how alluring optimism is, you know, not just functionally useful inside of your own life, but it's a kind of an attractor, I suppose, to sort of bring people in. What, um... Chris, misery loves company, but company does not like misery. And it turns out if you do the following experiment, I give you, I'm going to make you make cold calls, and you're going to read a script either in a very depressive tone

or in a real chirpy tone, and you just wait till people hang up on you. You hang up on depressed people. much faster than chirpy people. In general optimism is a attractive characteristic. The supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentus. Their co-founder, Jeff Byers, played in the NFL and saw firsthand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary. So he built Momentus around a higher standard. Every product for Momentus uses evidence-backed ingredients, transparent doses, and independent

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slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 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. No. 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.

But somebody can say the same script, but if it's a little bit more bouncy, We do ad reads for the podcast, right? 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 bitchface is someone wrapping the same. 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. I mean, certainly we like. to be around people that are positive some, for the most part. I also wonder whether part of the optimism is those people just assume that they can deal with more children. They think, I've had one, two will be fine, three will be fine, four will be fine, as opposed to maybe some people that are a little bit more uncertain about the future. They might not be, they might not be so, so conscious about whether they could deal with it. I guess I'm kind of interested. 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 were as 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 restaurant. And we tested it out, and about a week later, we all went to a restaurant, and I ordered steak tartar, and the matri-D came over to me. said, oh, I'm sorry, Professor, the machine is broken. A machine. You don't make steak tartar with a machine.

You shave the beef with a knife. I'll have the smoke 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. I can break myself of complaining. Resting complaining face at a restaurant. I guess, you know, after all of this time, you know, over half a century of studying human

flourishing, what have you come to believe about what makes life worth living? What is a good life? 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 hallucination, secondly, an emotional tone underneath it, and third, plot making, by relating the successive 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. 16 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 100 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 had lots of conversations about this stuff. And I think anyone that learns about the fact the building blocks of what makes you are 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 reread it recently. It must be 25 years old or so. I had written five editions of abnormal psychology. So every five years, I had to revise the textbook with new discoveries. Well, there were almost none, and in fact, what I said in the book, What You Can Change, and what you can't, that's pretty much remained the same. So psychotherapy and drugs work decently well on some things and don't work at all on others. And it's very important for people

to realize what is malleable and what is not. 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. One of 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 become, 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, Marty, there are two reasons to become the 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 should 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 than about my work than now. And that's because there's 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, as a, 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.

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