Passion Struck with John R. Miles - World’s Most Influential Psychologist: The Hidden Force That Drives Human Progress | Dr. Martin Seligman – EP 817

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

Have you ever reached a point where you stopped believing that what you do could actually make a difference?Maybe you tried harder. Maybe you kept showing up. But after enough setbacks, rejection, or disappointment, something inside you started asking, "Why bother?"Today, John R. Miles sits down with Dr. Martin Seligman, one of the most influential psychologists of our time and a pioneer of positive psychology.For more than six decades, Seligman has studied learned helplessness, optimism, resilience, and human flourishing. His new book, Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress, brings that work to a much bigger question: What makes individuals—and entire civilizations—believe they can shape the future?Seligman explains that agency is built from three capacities: efficacy, optimism, and imagination. Together, they give us the ability not only to believe that we can act but also to envision a future worth acting toward. But this conversation goes far beyond individual psychology.John and Marty explore what happens when agency becomes collective, why societies need to balance “I can” with “we can,” and how mattering and agency may be connected. Marty argues that our actions begin shaping our sense of self through the responses we receive from other people and the world around us. When our actions repeatedly produce no response, learned helplessness can take hold.They also take the conversation into the future of AI, education, creativity, and human possibility. Seligman describes how AI is already allowing him to test ideas that once would have taken years to investigate—and why he believes the technology could become an extraordinary amplifier of human agency.In this episode, you’ll learn:Why Seligman believes agency—not just happiness—is central to human flourishingHow learned helplessness became the foundation for his lifelong study of human agencyThe three psychological capacities that make up agency: efficacy, optimism, and imaginationWhy some people stop acting when their efforts repeatedly fail to produce a responseHow agency and mattering may reinforce one anotherWhy the future may depend on balancing “I can” with “we can”What ancient civilizations can teach us about the psychology of human progressHow AI is changing the way Seligman conducts research and thinks about creativityWhy education may need to shift from teaching children to be “smart” toward character, leadership, kindness, cooperation, and flourishingWhat Seligman hopes his grandchildren—and future generations—will believe about human possibilityThis is ultimately a conversation about one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves: Do I believe that what I do can make a difference?Because agency doesn't mean believing you control everything. It means believing that your actions still matter.Click for the Full shownotes Pre-Order The Mattering Effect: https://matteringeffect.com/. Take the 90-second diagnostic to see if you're disappearing.Explore the Show: https://passionstruck.com/starter-packs/. New to Passion Struck? Start with the best episodes curated for you.Connect with JohnWebsite: https://johnrmiles.comBook John to Speak: https://johnrmiles.com/speaking/Substack: https://www.theignitedlife.net/Children’s Book — You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Support the Movement: https://startmattering.com/. Every human deserves to feel seen, valued, and like they matter. Wear it. Live it. Show it.Passion Struck — #1 Alternative Health Podcast. 85M+ downloads.DisclaimerThe Passion Struck podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Passion Struck or its affiliates. This podcast is not a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Have you ever reached a point where you stopped believing that anything you did would really make a difference? Maybe you kept trying. Maybe you worked harder. Maybe you kept showing up. But eventually something inside you started to wonder, why bother? When I asked Dr. Marty Seligman, what happens when people lose their sense of agency? His answer went to the heart of of more than 60 years of his research. Take a listen. Individual action is where things start, but whether or not it modifies the world,

that is, you have mastery, an agency, or it falls flat. And you're helpless and you're non-agentic is crucial to the shaping of the self and to flourishing. And in general, the more, more reciprocity, the more our actions produce upward spirals in the world, the more agency, the more flourishing we have.

John, and welcome to Passionstruck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered. why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers

to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Welcome back to Passionstruck. I'm so glad you're here. This is episode 817, and today we're continuing our new series, The Adaptive Human. How we thrive in a changing world. Over the past two episodes, we've been exploring an important question. How much control do we really have over the direction of our lives? Angela Duckworth challenged us to think about the power of the situations we're in,

the people, the places, and the environments that quietly shape our behavior. And Jared Diamond took that question even further, asking when individual leaders can actually change the course of history. But today we come to the question, underneath both of those conversations. Do we believe our actions can make a difference? Because there are moments in life when that belief gets tested. You try, you fail, you try again, and eventually, especially when nothing seems to change, it's so easy to begin asking yourself, why bother? That's exactly why I wanted to have this conversation with Dr. Marty Seligman.

Marty is one of the most influential psychologists of our time and one of the pioneers of positive psychology. For more than 60 years, his work has explored helplessness, optimism, flourishing, and one of the most important ideas we'll discuss today. Agency. In his new book, Agency, Marty explores what happens when people, organizations, and even entire societies lose the belief that their actions can shape what comes next. and what it takes to reclaim it. In this conversation, we talk about why learned helplessness is about more than simply giving up, why agency begins with action, how hope differs from optimism, and why the way the world responds to our actions helps shape our sense of who we are. But here's what stayed with me long after we finished recording.

This wasn't just a conversation about psychology, it was a conversation about what happens when we stop believing that we matter to the world around us. Because agency requires more than action. Somewhere along the way, we have to believe that what we do can create a response, that our choices can influence something beyond ourselves. And when we lose that belief, it's not just our motivation that disappears. Our sense of possibility can disappear with it. I think that's a conversation that all of us need right now.

So let's dive into it. Here's my conversation with Dr. Marty Sligman. Thank you for choosing Passionstruck and choosing me to be your hosting guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely honored and thrilled to welcome Professor Martin Silligman on Passionstruck. Marty, it is such an honor to have you on this show. Oh, thank you, John. I'm happy to be here.

Marty, you probably don't even realize this, but Passion Struck, has been in many ways completely built on your work. And I heard you recently on the happiness lab talking to Lori Santos. And she also mentioned that the happiness lab wouldn't exist without your work. The same thing goes with Passion Struck, because this whole podcast really goes into human flourishing. And I've tried to take the lessons I've learned from you and explore this every single way I possibly can because I think today so many people are struggling with living their life in a flourishing way. Have you found that to be the case as well? Indeed, that's the theme of my last 40 years of work. I think if I did anything, I ushered in a new psychological age

of looking at what was going right, flourishing, as opposed to looking at what was going wrong and trying to correct it. So I think that's the examination of flourishing as opposed to the examination of pathology has been the theme of the last 40 years of my work. Today we're going to be discussing your brand new book, which I have to say is incredible. It's titled Agency, the Psychological History of Human Progress. And I want to start out here. Your career began with a simple but a really profound question. If helplessness can be learned, can hope be learned too?

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

You write that psychology in the 1960s suffered from three blind spots that you saw at the time, happiness, freedom, and thinking itself. Which of those blind spots do you still think shapes our culture most powerfully today? I think psychology has changed to work on happiness, freedom, and cognition. But I think in many ways our society is still stuck on misery, on lack of freedom, constraints. And I do think we take cognition seriously for a change. So the behaviorism that existed in the 50s and 60s, I think, is gone from psychology. And I think it's also gone from the society as a whole.

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

hardship, instead of trying harder, they give up. And it's something that you have studied as well. When did you realize that learned helplessness wasn't simply an individual phenomenon, but something entire institutions, cultures, even civilizations can experience? It took me a long time, John. So as a psychologist, what I worked on was individual helplessness. First, helplessness in animals and then helplessness in individual human being. The book opens with someone named Susan, who's actually a collage of two Susan's, that I, brilliant students of mine, that I had in my very first job teaching at Cornell. and both of them, when I gave them a really difficult research problem, their reaction was to give up and I can't do it. And they both turned out to be success stories. One went on to

become the editor of the Journal of Vulamil Psychology. The other one went on to become the president of the American Psychological Association. Wow. So a lot of my mentors of them had to do with breaking up individual helplessness. My thinking about individuals really went on for almost 40 years, and it began to dawn on me first that I wasn't really working on helplessness. I was working on mastery and agency. I was working on the opposite. But what psychology was all about was about pathology. And what getting grants was all about was curing pathology. So it took me almost 40 years to realize that I was not working on pathology, but it's opposite on flourishing and growth. The question of society as a whole of human history was a new one for me,

starting maybe 25 years ago, Mandy and I have seven children and we've homeschooled them. Mandy felt that I was incompetent for teaching psychology. So I got consigned to teaching history. I never taught history before. And so I started to teach and taught five of our children, American history. And it was reading American history starting 25 years ago that I began to think about helplessness, hopelessness, and agency as a historical, societal situation and not just an individual situation. So I think it started with teaching my children about the history of the world, in which I had to begin to learn myself. This whole topic is so interesting to me

because as I have leaned more into the research and what's happening in the world, I keep looking at the challenges that we're facing in society as more systemic in nature. So in order to fix some of the upcoming things that are going to need to be fixed, we're going to need overall systems change to happen. And so I think what you were discovering with learned helplessness long before me,

I am now leaning into more and more on the changes that need to become part of civilization on a greater level. Marty, as I told you earlier, my podcast is built on the foundations of positive psychology, and your Perma model has been one of the frameworks I've returned to over the years. Over the course of this podcast, I've had the opportunity to interview and get to know many of the people in your intellectual orbit. People like Rebecca Goldstein, Barry Schwartz, David Yaden, and Gabriella Kellerman have all been on the show. And one thing that fascinates me was your collaboration in 2019. with Rebecca, Roy Bimaster, Barry, David, Gabriella, and others on mattering and significance. Where I'm going with this is when you first introduced Irma, meaning occupied a central place

in flourishing. But later in your work, the conversation has seemed to expand towards mattering. When did you come to understand that flourishing and meaning alone couldn't fully capture the M in the Perma model and that mattering needed to take on a bigger role in the model. Meaning has always bothered me. It felt pointy-headed to me, the kind of discussions I had with my roommates when I was in college around meaning. But if I ask you, John, how meaningful is this conversation? That for me is a real head scratcher. I don't have a good handle on me. even though there is a very substantial literature that when people feel a sense of meaning, they're more productive and they're happier.

But the problem for me was its intellectual pointy-headedness. About seven years ago, Gabriela Kellerman and I, with Better Up, called together a meeting of about 10 of us to ask the question about mattering. is mattering a better notion. And what we found both in our meeting and then our subsequent research, that if I asked you, John, how much do you matter to your family?

If you disappeared tomorrow, vanish, what would happen to your family? How much do you matter to passion struck? Would it keep going? People had a very good, handle on how much they mattered. They could talk about it articulately, and they could rate it on a one to seven scale for their family, for their work, and for the world. And so for me, the fact that mattering was a psychologically more accessible notion and meaning has led me to work on M in Perma,

being much more measurable about mattering. And I think we know more about how to change mattering than we do to change meaning. It's the specificity and accessibility of mattering that converted me away from meaning as a basic psychological notion. Thank you for answering that. I have a couple of follow-ons from it. I have really been putting a lot of my attention recently in studying reciprocity. And I've had some really intriguing conversations with people you would know, like Claude Steele, Harry Reese, Sonia, Lieber-Muriski, and others on this topic. And one thing I wanted to ask you about it, when you think about reciprocity,

I kept wondering whether agency and mattering are reciprocal forces. What is your thought on that? I think the crucial thing is our in Perma, which is other people and that relationships matter. And that so much of what we know about flourishing has to do with other people. So I don't think the individual is a fertile ground for happiness, for perma, or for accomplishment. And we are social creatures. And if there was one thing I had to say about flourishing that I'm certain of, is that anything that makes us happy, that increases flourishing, if it's done with, someone else, it multiplies it. So what Chris Peterson said about the heart of positive psychology being other people matter is for me what reciprocity is about. I want to ask this to you a little

bit differently, because I understand where you're going. I was trying to ask, do we first believe we matter and therefore we act? Or do we act and discover that we matter after our actions? Well, I think in development we act and the way we learn what we are and who we are has to do with other people in the world's reactions to our acting. So I think individual action is where things start. But whether or not it modifies the world, that is, you have mastery and agency, or it falls flat. and you're helpless and you're non-agentic is crucial to the shaping of the self and to flourishing. And in general, the more reciprocity, the more our actions produce upward spirals in the world, the more agency, the more flourishing we have.

The world doesn't react, and people don't think. and people don't react, that's exactly learned helplessness. We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Dr. Marty Slugman. As you're listening today, I want you to sit with one question. Where in your life have you started to believe that your actions won't make a difference? One of the most powerful ideas in this conversation is that agency doesn't begin when we're certain will succeed. It begins when we act and when we learn through our relationship with the world around us that our actions can create a response. That idea connects deeply with the research behind my upcoming book,

the mattering effect coming this October 6th. Because one of the questions I've been exploring is what happens when people begin to feel that their contributions don't matter, that they can speak and not be heard, act and not make a difference, and show up and still feel invisible. Over time, those experiences can change not only how we see the world, but how much we believe we're capable of influencing it. If you'd like to go deeper into these ideas, you'll find a companion workbook inside the Ignited Life on Substack designed to help you put these conversations into practice.

You'll find the links in today's show notes. Now, a quick break for today's sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. You're listening to Passion Struck on the Passion Struck network. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Dr. Marty Seligman. So, Marty, about 15 years ago, I took a 34-week class on the Bible called Discipleship One. And I had always, I grew up Catholic. I had always grown up around the Bible, but I had found that I had never really studied it end-to-end.

And that's what this course was aimed to do. And during this course, I started to get this subliminal message. I feel it came from God himself, that I was supposed to make a major career change and that the words I was given was that I was supposed to help the helpless, the lonely, the hopeless, the disengaged, the burned out, etc. And for years, I studied and pondered and couldn't sleep because it seemed to me to be such a broad collection of people I was supposed to help. And as I leaned into this more and more, one of my central arguments that I started coming to, and you've brought up loneliness and helpless now a bunch of times, and this is a central argument that's in my forthcoming book,

and before we came on today, you asked me about something that I call the Great Erasure. But the great erasure to me is that I have become more and more convinced that loneliness, helplessness, burnout, disengagement, hopelessness may not be separate epidemics, but symptoms of something deeper. And this something deeper is something I've been exploring with Rebecca Goldstein, and I've called it systemic unmattering. And what I define this as is the erosion of people's sense that they are consequential within the groups and the institutions that organize their lives. So school, their families, work environments could be the military. From everything that you've learned over the past decades about helplessness, flourishing,

loneliness, and now agency, does a society lose agency when people stop believing that they matter to one another? The short answer is yes, but I want to go back and resonate with you about epiphanies in your life, changing one's career. Because I had one too that was not dissimilar from yours. So let me just tell you the story, John, of one of the major changes in my thinking in my life, which may have paralleled yours. And generally, I've had several different careers. And almost each major change revolved around the epiphany. But the first big one was in the early 1970s. I was a young, became a well-known researcher and got tenure very early in my life in the 1970s. And my mentor

was someone named Aaron Beck. And Tim Beck and I worked together. And I was at least present at the founding of cognitive behavioral therapy. But the story I want to tell you, John, is the Epiphany story. So Tim and I would meet once a week for lunch. I was now a tenured professor at Penn. He was a tenured professor of psychiatry, 25 years older than me. And we're having lunch together, and he says to me, Marty, if you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to waste your life. Now, I choked on by grilled Rubin, and I thought I was being pretty successful, and Tim was the most congenial, generous person. It was the first cruel thing he ever said to me. About two weeks later, I had a dream which changed everything. In the dream, John, I'm walking,

I'm at the Guggenheim Museum and I'm walking up the ramp in the Guggenheim Museum. I don't know if you know the museum. I do. It's been years since I've been there, but yes. And I'm opening doors on the right-hand side and in each room there are people playing with cards. And so I say, I ask,

why is everyone playing with cards? whereupon the roof of the Guggenheim opens and the godhead appears. And the god I saw actually had a white beard, very biblical, and in a loud voice said, Seligman, at least you're starting to ask the right questions. Well, that changed my life. I went from working on helplessness, individual pathology to working on people and hopelessness and flourishing. Like you, I've felt

called to my work, and it indeed has changed my work. I just wanted to start by saying, the background here for me has been a science change by epiphany. It's eerily similar how much Our two stories are separated by years, but have a lot of commonality in them because the version of God that appeared to me was a very similar individual who kept showing up and still shows up in my dreams guiding me. In general, with my Map students, so Map is the course I teach for pretty much adults, people your age, masters of applied positive psychiatry. psychology. And I have 50 new students every year at the graduate level. And I asked them,

are you, were you called to be here? And these are successful, smart adults doing well in the world. And about 80% of them echo what you and I are saying, that they've been called to this work on flourishing. So it's a mysterious phenomenon for me, but it's close to universal among the people I work with, having been called to their work, having a vocation and not just a career. Marty, I wanted to return to the second part of that epiphany that I was telling you about, and that is when you look at all these things that are plaguing society today, the number of people who feel burned out, the number of people who increasingly report feeling numb, the disengaged workers we have, the rise in people who feel helpless, the people who feel

invisible. Do you think there's something that sits at the core that is creating all these what I think are symptoms to emerge? By coincidence, this is what I've been working on for the last week or so. So I'm first trying to find out, is it true? Now, for me, that means we don't have questionnaires over the last 100 years about agency, about optimism, and about hope. So what I've been doing with AI, with Claude and ChatGPT, is assembling a vast data source magazine articles, books, speeches, scholarly commentary, literally hundreds of millions of words. And I scan them for agency, for optimism, and for hope. Because I now have mechanical ways of using AI to read whole passages and to make judgments about optimism.

optimism, agency, and hope. And so far, as of this morning, John, I have not found much of a change across the last years in American rhetoric, speeches, songs, novels in hope and agency. So the first thing I want to say is that I'm not convinced that we're in the middle of an enomic period in which people are feeling more helpless, less agentic, and more pessimistic. Before I can begin to answer the question of why, what I've been trying to do is document whether or not it is actually true. So I started where you were, which is my impression from reading the newspapers, and the depression statistics are that depression has gone up, and anxiety has gone up in America.

But so far I've not been able to find that agency has gone down and that pessimism has gone up. The big fact is depression is up. Now, the question is why, and I've always been interested in the history of depression, I did a horse race recently between John Heights theory and your and my theory. Okay, so I started with the theory, which is very much like yours, that agency, mattering, helplessness have all gone up, and that's why depression has gone up. And I think that's where we're both starting from. John Hight has a very different view.

He says it's the social media and that participating in the social media, particularly with girls. females and with young people is the cause of more depression. Because I've got a lot of data both on depression going up and a lot of data on agency changes, helplessness changes over time, what I did is created a statistical horse race between the increase in young people using social media and the increase in agency as predictors of more depression. So is it clear what I was after here? So what I found was that John won that once you canceled out the increase in social media statistically, the changes in agency were no longer predictive of depression. So I wrote John about three weeks ago, I sent it to him. John, it looks like you're right here and that social media

are having more of an effect on depression, particularly in young females, than any changes in agency and helplessness. So I've been disconfirming what both you and I intuitively believe that we're seeing an increase in, decrease in mattering, a decrease in agency. and a decrease in optimism, and that those are the causes of more depression and anxiety. So as of June 30th, that's where I am statistically about this. It's fascinating. Obviously, the court cases that have happened in New Mexico and Los Angeles with YouTube and META have really opened the ideas of how damaging this can be in addition to what John has written

and others have talked about with social media, I guess what I keep coming back to is that might explain this for this next generation that's been coming up, but it's still not explaining it to me for the adults who are also feeling this way. And so AI, John, has put us in a new world in which we can actually check our speculations. So I started out believing exactly what you believe that the increase in depression has to do with a decrease in agency. And I was actually repelled because I'm a great fan of AI and the media. I was repelled by John's notion that it was the social media that was causal here. Ten years ago, you and I could speculate forever about this.

But right now, because of the analytic power of Claude of ChatGPT, I can within a day statistically check whether or not you and I were right or John was right about the increase in depression. So one new age we're in is the kind of psychological speculations and biases that you and I share. We can actually check. And in this case, for me, disconfirm. Marty, I want to take us back to the book. I had the unusual privilege of reading both an earlier version of the manuscript, which I received several months ago, and more recently, a different and updated draft. And what struck me was that the later version, as I was reading it,

places much greater emphasis on collective agency and on the balance between, quote-unquote, I can and we can, and on meeting relationships and contribution as foundations for progress. What changed in your own thinking between that earlier draft and this newer draft, if I'm reading these two drafts correctly? There are two big changes, and let me start with the one that I think is a major discovery, and then turns to the question of individual versus collective. So what I do in a lot of the book is to go back to one of the great mysteries of human history. I think I solved a mystery. Let me tell you what the mystery is, and that's what's in the version that you would see recently. The mystery is that something big happened across the globe between 1,000 BC and 500 BCE.

Now, it's called historically the Axial Age, and basically, basically, the portrait is, if you look at the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Persians, the Indians, 1,000 BCE, no progress, no technology, limited thinking, no medicine, very little progress in the arts and literature, no political freedom. 500 BCE, in the 500-year stretch, there appears progress, technology, villages become cities, money is coined, political freedom breaks out, and the great thinkers like Buddha and the Socrates and the Confucius all occur. The question is, why did human progress break out between 1,000 BC and 500 BCE? And this has been a mystery for all historians of the ancient world.

So I had the hypothesis that maybe in these five civilizations, 1,000 BCE, they did not have the words for agency. They did not have words like I can do it and we can do it and human ability. and that their words were all about the gods doing things. But in the 500 years, in all five of those civilizations, they invent new words of a form agency. I can do it. We can do it. Now, I never could have tested that in my lifetime.

But Claw and ChatGPT contested, because unlike any human being, they are fluent in ancient Aramaic, ancient Hebrew, ancient Greece, ancient Persian, ancient Sanskrit, and the vocabulary 500 years later. And so I turned to them, and it turns out in every culture, new words are invented. They don't have the words for agency 3,000 years ago, but by 2,500, all of these cultures have agenetic words. And what we basically discovered, it's the invention of new words that produces human progress.

And that in many ways is the theme of the new book. So that's part one, John, of what's new. It's about what all of the ancients across the world discover in this 500-year period. Now, the second thing that's in the book that you raise is the difference between I can do it and we can do it, between individual agency and collective agency. So when I wrote the history of Western progress, it's essentially a story of a growth in individual agency. But then I began to work with the leading Chinese scholars about the history of China. And the history of China looks very much like the history of the West in that when agency goes up, progress occurs. When the belief in agency goes down, stagnation occurs.

But the difference is in China, it's the balance between I agency and we agency. So for China, when I agency is crushed by WE agency over, and now we've done it for all of the history of China, that's when technology, freedom, thought all stagnate. But when there's a balance between I agency and we agency, that's when you get progress. So when I think about our future, I think there's a lesson from China. So mostly the West has been about I can do it, individual agency. But I think the role of collective agency has become more and more important. And our future may have more to do with the balance between I agency and we agency, as in the history of China. I often think of it as the difference between either or thinking versus both and thinking

and how differently the West approaches problem solving versus how the East does problem solving, which I think touches on what you were just saying. But I do have to say one thing about it, which is one of the things about being an academic for 60 years. So I've been attending faculty meetings for 60 years. and basically what they do is form a committee to solve problems. We agency. And I must say in my individual experience over 60 years, the collective faculty meeting is a poorer problem solver than individual.

So one of my worries about collective agency is the mediocratizing of agency. And so that's something that I think we have to worry about as we seem to have in America now, according to my statistics, a growth in collective agency. And one more caution about it. So as I plot modern America, and this is tentative, that when individual agency goes up, productivity goes up, GDP goes up. but depression also goes up. If you plot collective agency, GDP goes down,

patents go down, productivity goes down, but depression goes down as well. So there's a way in which the collective makes us feel happier and more consoled, but it may interfere with progress, whereas progress may be individual and it may bring about depression and anxiety. So those are the very topics that as we speak, I'm trying to analyze carefully about modern. I guess I want to ask this more directly.

So what you're analyzing is do hopeful people build flourishing societies or do flourishing societies give people permission to hope? Is that one of the fundamental questions you're trying to answer? I think what I'm tackling is that flourishing has different aspects and progress has different aspects. So on the one hand, we can care about human happiness, how we feel the P in Perma, how much depression we have. On the other hand, we can care about the A in Perma, which is accomplishment. Now, I would have liked to believe that P and A go together and that the forces of that produce more accomplishment, produce more happiness and well-being.

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

a capitalistic society that's based on I rather than we, then you may get more GDP, more productivity, more patents, but at the expense of more depression and anxiety. So I want to fractionate perma into what are the different drivers of P-E-R-M-A. And I am worried at the moment, John, that P, positive emotion, and A, accomplishment may have different and antagonistic drivers. Marty, what do you think happens when collective agency becomes conformity or authoritarian? agonism in its approach. I think that's the lesson of China. So when we look at the balance between we agency and eye agency in China, when collective agency is very high, it mediocratizes

and squashes individual agency. But on the other hand, I think when individual agency is very high, it squashes the benefits of collective agency. And that's what occurs in China. And we don't know about the West for that. And indeed, what I'm working on as we speak is the importance of collective versus individual agency now in America and also across history in the West. And you are doing some extremely deep thinking. As you and I were coming on the podcast, you were talking about, how much AI has opened up research portals to you that didn't exist in the past. How has AI helped you rethink, in addition to the example that you gave about John Height's research, your own thinking on so many of the things that you've been studying for

decades? And what do you think are its potential harms in the future? And what do you think, its overwhelming benefits maybe. Let me tell you the story of what happened the day before yesterday. So there was this lovely article in the New York Times, which said that the reduced fertility rate in America is producing depression. And that's because the more siblings you have, the less depression will occur. Because you've got siblings who will take care of you, who will babysit who you can learn from. That's a beautiful idea. So I thought I would check it with AI. Now, 10 years ago, there was no way

of checking this. It would have taken me a full year to go back over the century, look at the number of siblings, look at the amount of depression and anxiety, and plot them together. But yesterday morning, I was able to go to Claude and say, Claude, give me the sibling size and the rate of depression over time. And is it the case that the more siblings you have, the less depressed you are? Wush! One minute later, I have the complete statistics. And the answer is no. There's no difference in depression by number of siblings.

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

which I would have sentimentally said, oh, it's great to have a lot of kids. and it's great to have your mother at home because then you'll be less depressed. She was wrong, and I never could have found that out without a year's work on my part. So that's one way in which the AI is agenic for me in a way that's never been before. The other has to do with the question, and this is the big one, is AI creative. Well, I work on creativity, and that's really interesting for me. There are essentially two theories of what the unit of creativity is. One is the usual Michelangelo theory, that the brow of Zeus, one brain creating a David.

I don't think AI is creative in that sense. But their second theory is that the creativity is two people, going back and forth, the Wright brothers, McCartney and Lenin, Dalin, Farrell, correcting each other. Now, that's the sense of which I interact with AI. So the story I told about discovering new words, I have the hypothesis that the idea. there were new words that the ancients discover about agency. I asked Claude and chat, and they were able to answer it going back and forth with me. That's the kind of creativity that AI has. It's the best companion I've ever had.

And just one last example of this, John. It's the book you've read. Chapter 8 of agency is about the Chinese and agency in China. Chapter 9 is about the Hebrews and the Bible and agency. So I had written the book that this is a draft you saw, and my editor said, Marty, there's no transition between chapter 8 and chapter 9. Well, I've been staring at these chapters for five years, And I didn't write, so I went to Claude and said,

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

is that in a sense of creativity going back and forth with another person, a human being going back and forth with AI now, produces an enhancement of agency unlike any agency I've ever had before in my life's work. Marty, I have two questions where I wanted you to apply this book to modern environments that we find ourselves in. If you were redesigning education around agency rather than performance, what would schools teach differently in the future? That's very important. You and I, John, you at the Naval Academy, me at graduate school, we were trying to be the smartest kid in the room. And in many ways, we're both raised and raised our children to be smart. Well, is that what education should be about being smart? How much you know?

Well, it turns out we can never be the smartest kid in the room anymore. AI is so much smarter and more knowledgeable than we are. AI levels the playing field about knowledge, about IQ, about being smart. So what should we be teaching our children? and what should education at the Naval Academy at the University of Pennsylvania in grade school be about? I think it has to turn now on questions like character, well-being, leadership, kindness, cooperation, and not how smart you are. For me, the machines level playing field and are going to transform education to be what I think of as positive education about flourishing, not education about being clever. I couldn't agree with you more. I love that answer. The second question I wanted to ask is,

parents today often oscillate between overprotection and achievement pressure. Which of those poses the greater third? threat to developing agency in their kids? They both have an upside and a downside. Overprotection means your kids are going to be safe, but will they be resilient? How will they do when they out in the real world when they come across events that are uncontrollable? On the other hand, teaching kids about achievement and resilience and overcoming runs the risk of danger of failure of death.

And I don't have a good answer about the balance between overprotection versus over achievement. Mandy and I have raised our children. She's an overprotection person. I'm an overachievement person. We compromise. But she already wanted two kids and I wanted no kids. and we compromised on five. Marty, my last question is this.

We began our discussion and you began your career by asking whether helplessness could be learned. This book asks whether agency built civilizations and you dedicate this book to two of your grandchildren. When your grandchildren grow up and inherit the world that we're creating today, what is one belief about human possibility you most hope they carry forward? I think it's a strong belief in progress that the human story has been a story of progress. Just the fact that my grandchildren are alive at age four, 200 years ago, one out of two of two of them would have been dead. Yes.

We often hear the notion that there's been no progress. and that progress is not an important human value. So what I want my grandchildren to believe and to be part of is the growth of human progress, not just technological progress, John, but spiritual progress as well. Marty, it has been such a profound honor to have you on the show today. And thank you for the amazing contributions that you have made to so many people over the years, including myself. I am so thankful to finally interview you. And I do have to say I had the opportunity to talk to Angela Duckworth last week. And every time I talk to her and she talks about you all the

time, she always refers to you as her second father. And so one of the things I thought was so fitting is that your two books are both coming out in September one week after the other. And I thought that was just an amazing coincidence. So I will end there and just tell the listeners that I love this book. And I read the first version end to end, and then I read the second version end to end. And I think it may be the best book that you've ever written, Marty. And that says a lot. So thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Sean. I hope today's conversation gave you something to think about. For me, one of the biggest takeaways is that agency begins with a simple but powerful belief. What I do can make a difference. That doesn't mean we control everything. We

don't. But we can choose to act. We can choose to respond. And over time, those actions help shape both the world around us and the person we're becoming. If something from today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. Send me a message on Substack, LinkedIn, or Instagram or share this episode with someone who may need a reminder that their actions still matter. And if you haven't already, make sure you're following passion struct so you don't miss what's coming next. Because in our next episode, I'm joined by best-selling author, David Epstein. You probably know David from his best-selling book range, where he made the case that broad experiences can help prepare us for an unpredictable world. But his new book inside the box

asks the question that naturally comes next. Once you develop, all those capabilities, how do you actually channel them into something meaningful? We talk about why more options don't always lead to more progress, why boundaries can sometimes create freedom, and how to focus your energy when the world keeps giving you more things to pay attention to. And I think it creates the perfect next question for this series. Agency gives us the belief that we can act. Adaptability helps us learn where to direct that action.

I think you're going to love this conversation. I actually think the gap between the Mendele of Myth and Reality, is symbolic of something important, which is that we overvalue the complete freedom of something like the dreaming brain and undervalue the power of constraints to channel us into productive experimentation. I think most breakthroughs do with a much smaller problem that opened into something that changed the world. Until then, remember, you don't have to control everything that happens next to influence what happens next. Sometimes it starts with simply believing that what you do can make a difference. I'm John Miles and as always stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion-struck.