Stuff You Should Know - Battle Royale: Optimists vs Pessimists

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Everybody’s always bagging on pessimists and telling everybody they should be more optimistic. Well, nuts to that! There are plenty of benefits from being a pessimist. Although being an optimist still wins in basically every category ☹See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm big rude. Listen to Atlanta is. on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, everybody in Canada. We have a pretty big announcement. We are finally going to do our first big, big tour of Canada. We're going to announce the dates in the theaters and cities here first, and then we're going to give you all the ticket info.

Okay. How does that sound? It sounds great, Chuck. Where are we going to go first? On June 25th, we're going to be in Montreal at the Olympia de Montreal. The next night on the 26th, we're going to be. going to Ottawa, the hard rock live Ottawa, and then on the 27th finish

up in Toronto at Massey Hall. And then we're going to walk to the next show, so it's going to take us a few weeks. That's right. On July 23rd, we're going to be in Vancouver at Queen Elizabeth Theater. Friday, the 24th of July. We're going to be in Calgary at Jack Singer Concert Hall at Art Commons,

and we're going to wind it up in Winnipeg on the 25th at Burton Cummings Theater. That's awesome. So tickets go on sale today, everybody. December 16th, starting at 10 a.m. Eastern Time and going all the way to Friday, December 19th at 10 a.m. local time, we're going to have an artist presale. You can buy your tickets early. Just go to Stuff You Should Know.com and click on the tour button and then click on your city. And when you

go to checkout, use the promo code Sysk Live. And if you miss all that, don't worry, tickets go on general sale on Friday, December 19th at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. And again, you can get all of the tickets and info you need at Stuff You Should Know.com. and we will see you this summer, Canada. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan, and we're just going to do a great job here today on Stuff You Should Know.

Hi, everybody. Feeling good, Chuck. Feeling great, Lewis. That's right. Looking great, Lewis. You want to hear something funny? I do. Always. You hear that? Is that your new windows?

No, that is new windows. What does that mean? That is, we were not able to stay in our home this week because, as you know, because I've told you this, because we're getting our electric panel redone. So I was not able to print out my stuff as usual. and where we were staying, you know, at a friend's, they allowed me to print. But all they had was card stock. So that is the sound of heavy-duty research. Man, that's like half a tree right there.

I know. I feel pretty bad, but God, it feels so good in my hand. Oh, well, is this your new thing? I could not justify that, but boy, it feels good. Maybe for the live shows because, you know, over the course of a tour, which is happening next year, everybody. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, we're going out on tour, everyone, soon, starting January, then April, and then the summer for Canada.

That's right. But, yeah, you know how that document gets a little tattered over time? So I might card stock it. I like that. I call that Tour Kisses. Oh, I thought that was something else, like after the end of the tour when we make out a little bit. We don't talk about that. All right.

We don't have a name for that. No. Chuck, we're talking today. Not about tour kisses of any variety, but about optimism and pessimism. I like this one. Yeah, I do too. Olivia helped us with this. And this is one of those ones where, you know, it was, I knew very little about what it actually is compared to what I thought I knew.

And I love words like that. Yeah, same. Optimism and pessimism, as pretty much everyone knows, is this, the idea that you have like a sunny disposition or maybe you're gloomy. and E. Orish. Yeah. I was going back and reading some E.R. Quotes, man, that guy was great.

If you want to entertain yourself, just read A.A. Milne E.R. quotes And you'll be delighted. But the upshot of this is that that's not really the best description of optimism and pessimism. That may be your earliest upshot,

by the way. Oh, is it? I need to break that record next time then. Yeah. I'll say, hey, and welcome to the Upshot. If you ever go solo, that'd be a great Josh Clark-only podcast. The Upshot with Josh Clark.

And if I need to break that I can say upshot and an upshot to the upshot. At any rate, the long and short of what I'm talking about is that our views of optimism and pessimism aren't exactly right, at least as far as psychology is concerned. And in that sense, it kind of confounds things because I found some of this stuff a little hard to wrap my brain around because my brain's been so primed by pop psychology to think of these things as this when actually we're talking about them like that. Is that what it was?

Because I had the same thing where, like, I spent more time on this than things that were seemingly more difficult to understand. That's the only explanation I can think of. It was preconceived notions. Yeah, I think you're right. Shall we go back and just talk about the word? Because I thought that was sort of interesting in itself. Yeah. Was that the original word comes from French optimism.

that was coined in the early 1700s by a philosopher named Gottfried, Wilhelm, Leibniz, or I guess Leibniz. And that's interesting enough. That's fine. The idea was that God optimized the universe for good and minimized evil. But what I thought was super interesting, the word pessimism was literally made up just to counter that, like as a straw man term for people to write and say, well, no, I don't really think so. So they made up the word pessimism. Yeah, I thought that was interesting, too. Although, if you look at it from, you know, this whole thing finds its roots in philosophy,

it's not surprising because philosophers love to make up stuff to tear one another's arguments apart, right? Yeah, good point. I read that Voltaire wrote Candide to mock Liemitz and his idea of the optimized universe because he thought it was so preposterous. Interesting. But you hit on something here, like the entire concept of optimism and pessimism is rooted in philosophy, not psychology. Yeah. And there's, pessimism kind of went on to have its own career, aside from optimism.

Schopenhauer came up with philosophical pessimism, which is the basis of all life is suffering. Everybody's heard that one. Yeah. And then there were a couple other versions of philosophical pessimism that I thought were pretty interesting. The most, the one that grabbed me the most is this idea that there's more evil in the world than good. So evil exists in greater quantities, but it's also of greater quality, too. So a small amount of evil can spoil a very large amount of good. Oh, I agree with that, I think.

I do, too. I thought of a good example is, let's say you have an executive who works at a charity, and they get caught stealing money from that charity. Well, when word gets out, a lot of people probably are going to stop giving to that charity, and then the good that charity was doing for other people is going to dry up all because of the one act of that one person. Yeah. Or let's say you throw a birthday party for your kid and the whole day goes great. And at the end, some some little jerk kid spoils it all by doing just this one thing. Like smashes your kid's face in the cake or something. Oh, man. Talk about an upshot.

But I think the long and short of this sort of the early philosophical stuff was it was way more sort of broad. as like, you know, the whole morality of the universe. And since then, we've really narrowed it down more to like, like you're just very personal outlook on stuff. Yeah. And it's gotten even more kind of refined than that. The idea that that we should use or seek optimism, we should optimize our optimistic outlook.

Right. It's pretty old. William James, who essentially founded modern psychologists, as a field, the late 19th, early 20th century. He was basically talking about that very issue, too. It got picked up about 50 years later by Abraham Maslow, who came up with the hierarchy of needs. He also said, hey, yeah, we're really into this abnormal psychology because it's really interesting. But we should focus on optimizing people's happiness.

We'll call it positive psychology. And I remember that. Do you remember when we started writing at How Stuff Works? And like every third article we wrote was about happiness. Yeah. There's like a whole happiness craze. That came out of Maslow's whole positive psychology thing being picked up and dusted off in the late 90s. Yeah.

And I remember even in the 80s and 90s, and I don't know if this came from, and we're going to talk a lot about this guy, Martin Seligman. He was in the 90s. He was the president of the American Psychological Association. He talked a lot about positive psychology, but I remember a lot about just PMA. your positive mental attitude and improving your PMA. And that was just sort of the key to everything, man. If you can just get your head right and that PMA right, like everything's going to fall into place for you.

Yeah. And I mean, I remember thinking Martin Seligman, I thought he came up with positive psychology. I didn't realize it was an already existing thing. But that was so pushed and peddled what you just described around 2008, 2009, that I thought this guy was a total fruit loop. But then looking into this stuff, his research on optimism and pessimism, I'm like, oh, this actually, this dude's pretty

with it. And I guess maybe being grown up a little less cynical, certainly less cigarette smoky. In that kind of hindsight, I'm like, I think there's actually nothing wrong with trying to figure out how people can be as happy as possible. There's a problem with foisting it on people and saying, you have to be happy. There's something wrong with you or not happy. That's not what these people are talking about. They're just trying to figure out things that people can do to make themselves happier if they feel like they need to make themselves happier. Yeah, for sure. And as we'll see, you know, we'll get to like studies and stuff. But there's definitely plenty of benefits to trying to be positive and have an optimistic outlook as far as, I mean, we'll get to all the

different things, including like real health outcomes. Right. But there are also some positives to pessimism, as we'll learn, which was not surprising. But once I read, it kind of you know a lot of that makes a lot of sense to me bravo baby uh one big thing if you look at the like the how psychology really views it today um and this is sort of true across a lot of psychology is sort of a nature nurture thing or in this case they they refer to it as state versus trait uh state meaning like are you feeling that way right now uh or is it generally your trait as a person of like oh nothing good ever happened to me. And it's not just like I'm having a bad day or something. Right. You can kind of think

as states as moods and traits as your personality. Yeah, exactly. One's way more stable than the other. And psychology tends to focus more on the trait side because they want to figure out what it is that makes people actually adopt or grow up or be bestowed genetically. Who knows? With an outlook on life that's way more positive than somebody else who may even have been like in the womb with them, but raised in a different house, you know, like twin studies have shown there's actually huge variations in pessimism and optimism among twins who were separated at Perth. Yeah. Those studies are always really telling to me because that's probably not the hugest cohort,

but I think it just speaks a lot to a lot of different things. Yeah, and there's a lot of really unethical studies that were carried out with twins, too. Like I imagine splitting them up, right? Yeah, I don't, yeah. I think there was a researcher at some point in the 70s, maybe, who specifically was splitting up twins to study them. All right. I'm going to put on my optimist cap and just think that everything worked out great for them because they were eventually reunited. That's wonderful.

So when you talk about the psychology side of things, there's a couple of ways that they like to look at it, which are dispositional and attributional. Dispositional is how we predict future events, and attributional, obviously, is like, basically saying, like, this happened because of this, assigning either credit or blame for the reason that something good or bad happened to you. Right. And those two are trait-based optimistic or pessimistic views. It's not, we're no longer talking about state and trait. These are all traits from what we're talking about. Like, this is how you view life, right? Yeah.

One of the first tests of this that has proven. to be really viable and valid. It's called the life orientation test, the lot. That was in 1985. And I think of the mid-90s, they revised it. So it's the lot-dash-R, the lot-dash-revised. Is that what it stands for? I kind of figured, but that didn't bother looking. Sure. Anytime you see the R with it something like that, it almost certainly is revised. Yeah, yeah. It could also be revved up, I guess. Yeah. Or really the right test. right the other letters are just kind of implied yeah uh the lot was conceived by uh two dudes

named michael shire and charles carber uh and what they were trying to do and did a pretty good job of it i think was measure uh you know i talked about dispositional which is how we predict future events they're trying to measure dispositional optimism and pessimism with this test yeah so what they found is that um like i said the the test is actually really reliable. That was the word I was looking for before. Yeah. Because if you take this test, you know, at 50, you take it again on a totally different day in a totally different state and a totally different state of mind. Yeah. At 55, you're probably going to get roughly the same score, right? So it is a very reliable test. Interestingly, what they found is that over the course of life,

optimism tends to rise and pessimism tends to fall from young adulthood to middle age. Yeah. And then it starts to decline. Which I can tell you firsthand, that is totally true. I don't want to self-reflect too much on this one. Well, it's something that I'm really hanging on to is I've been told that like your 40s are far and away your worst decade. Yeah, I've heard that. Almost across the board, you've got way more responsibility. Like you're not as young anymore.

Your body's starting to change. Like, it's just a bad decade. 50s it starts to pick up. But I remember we talked about this before. In your 60s, your happiness starts to go back. up to levels that it was when you were younger. Awesome. So I'm really holding out for my 60s, man.

I'll tell you that. Well, I'm closer than you that for once, it's a benefit. I know. I'm jelly. So the lot R, which I guess it could stand for reliable. Yeah. So the lot R comes along. The revised test, it is 10 questions, six of them are scored, four of them are fillers,

and the scored ones are things like, I think Livy have found these exactly. questions. In uncertain times, I usually expect the best. If something can go wrong for me, it will. And you're responding to how much you agree with something. And they score it in a pretty straightforward way where from zero to 24, where zero is very low optimism and high pessimism. And 24, man, you are maxed out optimist. I know. Yeah. You got a permigrin, right? I guess so. I took that test. I actually found the test that like a clinician would give to like a patient. It had, like, all the, all the explanations and all that stuff on it. Yeah.

You're going to reveal your score? So out of 24, I scored 11. And I was like, that doesn't sound very good. And I looked at the explanation in scoring, and it says, below 13 is lower than typical optimism and may warrant clinical attention. So I got really upset about this, because that's, like, basically, the test scoring academic version of going, oh, yeah. I want to take that test. So send that to me, will you? You should.

I'll send it to you. Okay. But I went on, I guess, a bit of a tailspin. So I tried to make myself feel better. I went and listened to some Kenny G. Right. To brighten my mood. That'll do it.

And I was just sitting there. I realized I was just sitting there waiting for him to screw up eventually. So I stopped listening to Kenny G. That's not going to happen to alone again naturally. And then everything was all right again. Okay. That's good. Attributional optimism or pessimism is what we mentioned earlier.

It's the other side of that coin. And that's when you're either saying like, this thing that was good in my life has happened because of this good thing only or this bad thing that happened because of this bad thing only it's basically assigning blame to what happens in your life

and if you're, you know, some of this stuff is kind of no-brainer. If you're optimistic you are much more prone to attribute negative events to a specific thing like hey things usually work out for me and this didn't just because of this. Whereas if you're a pessimist It's like, no, this happened to me just because this kind of stuff always happens to me.

Yeah, and in the same vein, if you're a pessimist and something good happens to you're like, that was just one in a million chance. It's never going to happen again. That makes me so sad. It is, but that's usually how it works on this test, the attributional style questionnaire. I looked at that one, too.

That's a Martin Seligman joint. Uh-huh. And it's 12 questions, 12 situations, actually, where it says, so for example, one of them will say, a friend compliments you on your appearance. And then it asks you to write in what the cause was, right? Like you got some new duds or something like that.

Right. Fresh-haired gut. And then I've got an even better example. There's one. It said, you've been looking for a job unsuccessfully for a long time. Then you'd write in the cause. Say you said it was a bad economy. Or you even said, I'm not good at interviewing. Then it says, okay, they ask you questions about the cause.

Like, how much of that is due to the actions of yourself? versus other causes. Yeah. And so you might say, like, well, I'm going through a bad spell right now. So, you know, it's probably me and my gloomy nature right now. And they'll say, well, how likely is it that the issue is going to be present the next time that you interview? You can say, well, I expect to be feeling a lot better next time. So maybe I'll be doing a little better.

And then how much does it extend to other parts of your life? So there's 12 of those. And from that, apparently you can glean quite clearly whether some, leans pessimists or optimist based on their responses because again it's do things happen because you screwed up right or because you are capable of achieving good things is it always that way if you if if things go wrong for you is that just par for the course and then if something goes wrong for you does your whole life just get disrupted like those things he figured out are actually really predictive and it makes a lot of sense yeah it's it's interesting it's almost like uh someone who is

like a self-actualized person as opposed to someone who feels like they're just sort of a victim in life? Yeah, for sure. You know? For sure. So Martin Seligman once again, he put forth this idea that though there was an antidote to this idea of learned helplessness, which is this, I imagine it's awful, this really draining thought that I just can't control anything that happens and all these negative things

that happen to me, like I can't do anything about that. that. He put forth the idea of learned optimism, but that has to go on the assumption that optimism and pessimism aren't just these fixed things in your life, and it's more of a strategy that you employ. Yeah, which is really significant, because I think it's easy for people who say, have a generally gloomy outlook to forget that there's plenty of times where they are excited about the future, where they do expect something good to come for, like, down the road for them. Right. It's just easy to get caught up in that. So to look at them as like, no, this isn't like just your jeans like making you move and walk like Master Blaster from Mad Max, right? This is just

you not even being aware that you're adopting these things as strategies to kind of negotiate life because this is the strategy you learn based on all these other different events in your life that led up to this, which means, Chuck, and this is the most hopeful thing of all, you can learn and unlearn strategies that you're not aware you're using by recognizing them as strategies. Yeah. And by the way, I just realized I cannot say that movie character named from the Mad Max without saying it like Tina Turner. I could only say master blaster.

It sounds like, it sounds like Tim Curry doing Tina Turner. Wow. All right. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, I like that too. How's Tim Curry doing these days? You know, I actually saw something recently where he was interviewed, and he has recovered from his stroke such that he can speak. And, you know, I mean, I think he's doing as well as he can be for, you know, such a, I think it was a pretty massive stroke.

But the interview I saw was like, he had a sense of humor and was engaged and people really, really loved hearing from him again. That's wonderful. I'm glad I asked then. Yeah. I just saw that kind of recently, too. That's funny. You must be in my algorithm. I'm all up in there.

Should we take a break or should we go through this last bit? We should go through last bit. Okay, so here's something that's probably not surprising. Is it dispositional and attributional optimism are really correlated to one another? And really no surprise. They're also, I was about to say comorbid, but that always sounds bad. But correlated to high self-esteem, positive affect, feeling like you're in control. of your life and your outcomes and obviously negatively correlated with feeling depressed or stressed

or alienated or having anxiety or hopelessness. Yeah. And as far as Big Five personality traits goes, it's most closely related to emotional stability, optimism is. Yeah. So essentially, if you put all that together, that's the kid from your high school that you hated because everybody loved him and he was in a great mood all the time and he loved you. Yeah, that was kind of me. Oh, no. Oh, really? Yeah, sort of. Mine was Scott Galvin or Tony Appie. Oh, man, Tony Appie, that guy. Mm-hmm.

So I say we take a break. Okay. We'll take a break. We're going to think about our lives and where this podcast is headed and I'm feeling pretty good about it, not domestic. We'll be right back.

Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault.

I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar conference. which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people.

Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. You know the shade is always Shadiest right here. Season 6 of the podcast Reasonably Shady with Giselle Bryan and Robin Dixon is here dropping every Monday. As two of the founding members of the Real Housewives Potomac were giving you all the laughs, drama, and reality news you can handle. And you know we don't hold back. So come be reasonable or shady with us each and every Monday.

I was going through a walk in my neighborhood. Out of the blue, I see this. huge sign next to somebody's house. The sign says, my neighbor is a Karen. Oh, what? No way. I died laughing.

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Listen to Atlanta is on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Stuff you know. Stop, stuff you should know, no. Stuff you know. Stop. You should know. All right. So the thing that was on my mind, and I'm glad she included this bit, Livy,

did is like, you know, is this stuff nature or nurture? Like, are we kind of born this way or are we made this way? And no surprise, it's a bit of both. I think generally speaking, they've come to a consensus that about 25, and anytime you hear percentages like this is sort of take, take it with a grain of salt, but about 25% genetic and the rest is a mix of like your childhood and the environment that you were raised in, obviously, and then stuff that happened to you since then. Yeah, and a lot of it's pretty intuitional, right? Yeah, intuitive. Sure.

Yes, that's why I was like, that doesn't sound right. Yeah. Like if you are a developmental psychologist, you would say, well, your early life experiences and being raised in a family that neglected you or abused you or criticized you constantly, you're going to develop negative patterns of thinking and they're going to frame the way that you look at the world, of course. Yeah. So, I mean, it makes sense. It jibes. it's not one of these things it's like this one subgroup in psychology is working on optimism and pessimism and having to try to do all these mental gymnastics to reverse shoehorn it into other

stuff. It just fits with other concepts. So it's very clear that there are, there's something to optimism and pessimism. They do exist as a thing, psychologically speaking, and stuff like that just backs it up. Yeah, for sure. There was a study this year actually pretty robust where they had 200,000 adults, and this one's good because it was spread out over 22 different countries, and we'll talk about a little bit of the bias of just studying sort of Western countries with optimism and stuff. But they compare their levels of optimism with how they, you know, remember their childhood. And across all the geographies, and again, no surprise, people who had positive relationships in their family with their parents and siblings, they had better financial

status, better health outcomes, and obviously were more optimistic. Interesting. If you had frequent religious attendance when you were a kid, they associate that with optimism, but most strongly in more secular countries, which I thought was pretty fascinating. Yeah, I was trying to figure that out. And the best I could come up with is that they just, they stood out more because they were fewer and farther between. I'm not sure. I don't know. Or maybe in more religious countries, you're just sort of more expected to be dragged to church. And it wasn't like a conscious choice you made to go.

I don't know. That's a better interpretation. Okay. And also, like I was saying, divorce, abuse, feeling like an outsider in your family, all associated with lower optimism. Yeah. And they did say, like, okay, there is possibly something we should mention here. It's possible that these people who are recalling their childhood are the optimists are recalling their childhood in more favorable terms and the pessimists are recalling them in less favorable terms. And there has to be like a word for when the thing you're studying acts as a common.

confounding factor in the study of itself. Yeah. Could not find it to save the life for me. So if you're a researcher out there and you know what that is, tell me because I've been dying. But that's essentially what they were saying. They still said, no, this study still stands. But they at least did acknowledge that it's possible.

Yeah. The thing being studied, optimism was influencing the study itself. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, there's got to be a certain bias, like a blank bias, you know. Blank bias, good enough. If you're wondering about the brain itself, like just your physical brain, your noodle, as they say, they have found differences, obviously, in optimist and pessimist brain and how they're built, like your gray matter volume, but also how they activate. There was a study, again, from this year in 2025, where, and I thought this is pretty interesting, where optimists share patterns, like the wonder machine lights up in kind of the same way when optimists. imagine future events, whereas when pessimists imagine future events, they may all be imagining

something negative, but it's all individual to that person and how the MRI machine lights up. I think this is maybe the most interesting thing that has been turned up about this so far. Yeah, it is. It's just like group think versus like, no, I have a personal negative outlook that's only mine. Yeah, I mean, I saw somebody point out like maybe this is why. Some people will click with other people. Like, they share a literal brain pattern in the way that they think about the future outlook on life. Whereas, you know, people who have lower optimism or higher pessimism are tend to think be thought of as like, Mopee alienated off by themselves.

So they can't even connect with one another because they have varying brain patterns. It's not like optimists all have one brain pattern and pessimists all have one brain pattern. Optimists are the only ones that share the brain pattern. I find that super fascinating. No, totally. And it also sort of lends itself to like if you're pessimistic, you may have a harder time finding a community because it's your own and not one that you share. Yeah. As you know, we're talking about health outcomes. If you read, you know, especially like when you were saying like the earlier 2000s when it was all this happiness stuff, like it makes it seem like optimism is basically just the key to life across every single factor from health to your finances, everything, your focus. and your decision-making and your motivations.

And a lot of that is true to a certain degree. It's not a magic pill. But there's no doubt that optimism is linked to better, like literal health outcomes, better heart health, lower inflammation, better immune responses, sleeping better, overall mortality rates. One suggestion is like, yeah, because, you know, you're not as stressed out and stress is the cause of a lot of that stuff. So that just sort of makes sense.

Yeah, you have less inflammation, which is a big one. I mean, that could explain it right there as far as health outcomes. But also, they're like, well, hold on. I mean, like, optimists, one of the things that defines optimists is that they are undeterred in seeking their goals because they generally believe they're going to be successful. Right. Whether all odds are against it or not, it doesn't matter. They're just going to go and do their thing because they think it's going to be fine. So that would include things like quitting smoking.

exercising, eating right, having goals and then just working toward them is almost always aligned with better health and like having better health habits too. So that would definitely explain one reason why they are probably healthier. Yeah, there are some big caveats that Livy was keen to point out in a lot of these studies. That sort of, you know, tie between being optimistic and having good health, it gets ticked down. quite a bit when they look into the details of like someone's, I don't know, bank account. And they're like, oh, well, yeah, this person that's got loads of money, yeah, they're more optimistic.

And so, yeah, they're healthier because a lot of that just financial stress and all that stuff goes out the door. And, you know, when you're stressed out about money, like that may lead to like drinking more or starting smoking. And so you really have to sort of caveat that to death, you know. Yeah. And similarly, these studies are usually just taking a snapshot of what that person's like right then, right? So you score very high on an optimistic, the life orientation test, right? And you also say, like, I don't smoke. I eat five servings of vegetables every day. It's not clear from that study. They're correlated, but is it that people who eat better and don't smoke tend to have a more positive outlook? Or do you not? smoke and eat better because you have a positive outlook. There's a whole chicken and the egg thing.

I just coined that phrase, but I think it's going to stick around. Then there's something called optimism bias, which I thought was pretty interesting. As a human race, we have an optimism bias. They've studied it to death, and they found that just for the general population, the default is about 80% of people are generally optimistic. 10% are generally pessimistic, and about 10% can go either way or maybe are neutral. And there was a psychologist named Neil Weinstein. I think this was in the very early 1980s.

Yeah, 1980 was his initial study where he was the first guy to say, yeah, I mean, we're pretty much biased toward being optimist. And, you know, one reason may be because it's so shoved down your throat that that's the key to everything good in life, you know? Yeah, maybe. What Weinstein, I'm going with Weinstein, but I get Weinstein too. Yeah. I think one thing that his study, it was a landmark study from what I could tell in 1980,

he tested, I think, 200 students and said, okay, of these positive things and of these negative things, what is the likelihood it'll happen to you and what's the likelihood it'll happen to your classmates? And just across the board, students said that positive things were much more likely to happen to them than to their classmates. negative things were much more likely to happen to their classmates than to them. And we're talking things like liking your post-graduation job or your house doubling in value in five years. Or this one, I love this one, your achievements being written up in the newspaper. Like all those things were much likely to happen to the test taker than they were to their fellow students.

And that kind of gets to the basis of this optimism bias that everyone's, thinks that they're above average in a lot of different ways, which is, of course, impossible because there have to be people that isn't true for, or else there wouldn't be an average. We'd all be above average that's not possible. And so here's where we get to stop talking about optimists as if they're the greatest thing that ever happened, because one of the big problems with optimism is this bias in making terrible predictions about the outcomes of events. Yeah, well, there was another study that kind of tied into that is from Tali Sharott, who's a cognitive neuroscientist at the University College of London, and kind of took that experiment and ran with it and said, all right, I'm going to ask you about the likelihood of something good or bad happening in your life, get that answer, and then they say, well, here's actually the average likelihood of that kind of thing happening. And now let me ask you again. And they found that people changed their answers.

more in response in the positive way than in the negative way, which I thought was sort of counterintuitive. It is because you'd think if you said, like, what's your chances of winning the lottery tomorrow? And so they said 80%. And then the people said, actually, it's 90%. And they'd go, great, let's say 100% for me. Right.

So that's what people would do. But if the researchers said, actually, it's more like 20%, they'd be like, oh, 80% for me. And that's what I was talking about. People tend to think that good things are likely to have. happen for them. Even in knowing that statistically speaking, overall, it's very unlikely to happen to just anybody, but they're not just anybody. This is the optimism bias that's been turned up and reinforced year after year, every year. It's an annual thing. And speaking of

reinforced, it seems that optimism reinforces optimism. If you, when they've studied this, that positive life events just tend to make you even more optimistic. which makes a lot of sense, but if you have something negative that happens, it doesn't generally all of a sudden make you more pessimistic. It's just like, well, that happened. Yeah. Some other examples are when you expect things to be easy for you. A lot of people do that.

I understand that one, too. I can be bad. And that you'll be more successful than you would. I mean, again, just statistically speaking. And then also that we spend a lot more time thinking about good things that are coming down the pike than bad ones. which I also can associate with. I mean, it just seems unusual for the average person to sit around and be like, well, I'm probably going to get a flat tire in the next year and a half, statistically speaking.

I should probably think about that for a little while. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. But there is some sort of like, I guess, prophylactic influence of that, which is you might go make sure that your spare tire is doing okay. And that kind of belies this, I'm not sure if I'm using that word correctly, but that goes to show that the optimist bias can actually be harmful in some ways because it will prevent you from doing something like going to check your spare tire because of course you're not going to get a spare tire because that wouldn't happen to you. Yeah, Emily and I talk a lot about it, like the Polyana thing. That doesn't seem to serve people well because then you're all of a sudden ignoring.

ignoring, or maybe not ignoring, but at least not putting as much weight into the things you do and the decisions you make day to day that like might have a bad outcome. And all of a sudden you're caught unaware when that bad outcome happens, which is it's bad enough when you're just an individual. But if you're a corporation or a frigging government and you're caught unaware because you thought something was going to go too well or you didn't put the budget or the, the time into something that you should have because you just thought it was a no-brainer or something like that, that can be really destructive to a business or to a nation. Yeah, I feel like just believing that artificial intelligence will be great with no downsides that are worth considering is an excellent example of what you're just talking about. Yeah, for sure.

So you might say, okay, well, then if 80% of people are optimistic, that kind of suggests that this is like maybe humanity's default setting and that pessimism is like maybe a malfunction even. The thing about that is that it doesn't really make sense that it would be evolutionarily favorable for us to be optimistic because of this optimism bias that can get us into trouble. But you can look at it a certain way

and say, like, actually, it does make a lot of sense because if we didn't have an optimist, bias, we might not go try new things. We might not make it out of the cave and learn to make fire ourselves. Or kind of put differently, if you have a problem that's life or death, and you throw a bunch of people at it, and all of them are kind of pre-tuned to expect their attempt at being successful to work, the ones who die trying don't get to reproduce. The ones that succeed do get to live to reproduce. And not only do they get to live to reproduce and pass on that, that optimism bias, it's reinforced because they were successful and they think all the more now I can

successfully predict my future and I'll be successful in that future. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, I mentioned the caveat about the Western societies being the most studied. A lot of these are definitely, you know, slanted toward, you know, the American way of life or the Western way of life and thought, they're really not super sure about sort of worldwide. There is some evidence that like in Japan, that like they might not anticipate positive outcomes as much for their own selves like we do here in the United States. But they also make the point like, well, we're also, you know, all of these things are people self-reporting. So in places like the United States or Australia, they may just be more likely to say out loud that they're optimistic,

whereas in another country they may feel that way, but just, you know, no whammy kind of style, or maybe they just are not as outwardly optimistic, but they really feel it. They just don't want to say it. Yeah, it's not cool to be optimistic in those countries. Yeah. You want to take a break and then come back and talk about some variations on this theme? Let's do it. Okay.

Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person?

I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app Or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast Family Secrets.

We were in the car, like a rolling stone came on, and he said, there's a line in there about your mother. And I said, what? What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is shoes and identity that other people can't have. I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened. These are just a few of the moving and important stories I'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets.

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So come be reasonable or shady. with us each and every Monday I was going through a walk in my neighborhood out of the blue I see this huge sign next to somebody's house the sign says my neighbor is a Karen no way

I died laughing I'm like I have to know you are lying humongous y'all they had some time on that hand listen to reasonably shady from the black effect podcast network on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast stuff you know stop you should know okay chuck okay chuck we said we're going to talk about some variations. And I think one thing we should point out is that

optimism itself is almost a variation on a theme. When people say like somebody's just happy all the time. They're just going through life. They have like the best attitude. That's actually not optimism. Optimism is either like we said, you are expecting good things to happen down the pike or you assume that you can overcome obstacles. You don't blame other people for your issues. Like, that's optimism. With the other thing that I just mentioned is positive affect, which is more enjoying the present and optimism is thinking about the future, essentially. Yeah, that's a good thing to point out for sure.

Some of these variations that you mentioned we were going to talk about, I thought all these were pretty interesting. One is called depressive realism. And I think they all have their place. Depressive realism is this idea that if you're, you know, maybe a little depressed or moderately depressed, then you're actually a realist and you have a way more accurate view

of the real world around you. In other words, you're not that Pollyanna. You're a realist. And this came from a study in the 1970s by psychologist Lauren Alloy and Lynn Yvonne Abramson where it's kind of a funky study, but they had participants push a button

and then judged how effective that might be for causing a light to go on. Like, I'm going to press this button, but. I don't think it's going to do anything. Right. Or, man, this room's going to light up when I press this button. Right, exactly. And they said that people with depression tended to more accurately predict

whether that button was going to turn the light on or not, right? Yeah. And so they extrapolated that to say, like, well, you know, that means that people with depression or depressive symptoms are, they have just a greater handle on the reality of reality, basically. Yeah. They're less likely to make wild predictions about their success. and so they understand reality better.

And this was a landmark study that people just immediately put into the pop psychology grind because it's just so contrary and it's delicious. And it's also one of those landmark studies that people have loved to kind of try to take shots at and apparently it's not very well replicated. So I don't know its status right now, but it seems like it hasn't been debunked

and it's not unfounded as far as. as the field of psychology is concerned, but it doesn't seem like it's as golden as it once was. To like a dented landmark? Yeah, I think that's a great one. Like that ball of foil. That's right. There's another variation called defensive pessimism.

I like this one. I mean, this isn't really me, but I think there's a lot of validity here in that if you have lower expectations and you're sort of planning for the worst, that's almost the same as being optimistic in a way as far as it helping you in life because it can really help manage your anxiety.

It can make you feel like you have some sense of control. And you're not, you know, like during COVID, they found that if you were a defensive pessimist, then that correlated with taking more precautions and being safer and, i.e., I guess, being healthier. Yeah, if you ever put two words together to describe me, it's defensive pessimist. Yeah, for sure.

I could see that. And I think there's no greater description than this, but defensive pessimists don't focus as much on pursuing happiness. They focus more on avoiding regret. Yeah. Which is, I mean, they can still have the same outcome, but it's what you're chasing is different. You're avoiding a negative outcome rather than pursuing a positive outcome, but the outcome's still the same. You succeeded.

Because you're pursuing something. Yeah, you're actually, it's based on the idea that you can change your fate. Right. Like you can take actions to affect this outcome and make it as a very important. close to the outcome you want as possible. That's the same thing as optimism. It's just coming at it a different way. Yeah, I really like that idea because, I mean, it's not me, but I love it for you because

it's not like, well, this is just going to happen to me no matter what. It's like, boy, I have a bad feeling that this is going to happen to me unless I'd take these steps. Right. The only downside of it is like you won't let yourself think about the future being good because you'll jinx it, essentially. Yeah. Yeah.

Jinks is a whole other part of this thing. So what you just described, though, is what I think is the worst one, fatalistic pessimism, which is everything's wrong and I can't do anything to change it. That is a sad, sad disposition that I like to think that is not set in stone. It's just because of life circumstances or it's a particular low point in your life. I don't know, but I don't like to think that anyone out there is at their base of fatalistic. pessimist that's just sad yeah agreed um on the flip side of that coin you have toxic positivity i mean we almost don't even need to say anything else because i think everyone knows what that is

it can lead to bad things because like that's sort of the polyana thing i was talking about you're ignoring anything negative to like basically you're delusional about that and so you're not going to attempt to improve things because you're just like no it's all going to work out it's going to be great one of the ways that this pops up i think for people and they don't really recognize that that's what they're doing is when somebody shares their feelings or confides in you that they're afraid of something or anxious about something, and you just say, oh, it's all going to work out. You're being toxicly positive right then. You're actually dismissing their fears. Yeah. And you're probably doing it because you're uncomfortable right then. You don't know

what else to say. So you're just going on, well, I can't go wrong by being positive. You actually can, and that's toxic positivity. Yeah. And that's, I mean, true in all relationships, supporting a spouse or a friend, but also a lot with parenting, like, that's not a great road to go down with a kid because you're teaching them the wrong things. I feel like you should be saying, like, well, hey, let's think about this. And maybe if you take these steps, you can help affect the outcome rather than like, it's going to be fine. You're going to be great. Yeah. Because you're not always going to be great. No, that is a good thing to teach a kid for sure. Yeah. There's also tragic optimism. It was coined by a guy named Victor Frankel, who is a psychologist

or sorry, psychiatrist who actually did, he was interned in a Nazi concentration camp and lost essentially everyone he knew. And he wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning from that. And it's like a seminal book in search for the meaning of life. But he coined tragic optimism to basically say this is the mindset where you are aware that in life you're going to suffer pain, guilt, loss, and that you can accept that that's true and still seek the, most positive outcomes you can you can get i like that one too try to be happy even knowing that yeah yeah i like that and then what's the last one chuck uh cultural pessimism uh i'm not going to editorialize here that's basically just like the belief that the society was better at a different time um you know

decades ago everything was great in this country and everything is just going straight down the the toilet today it's called getting old um yeah uh uh uh It's interesting in that you have a tendency, in this case, toward optimism, bias about your own life, while also at the same time being pessimistic about society as a whole, which I think is super fascinating. It is, for sure, especially when you talk about, like, my economic outlook is sunny, but not for the country. Yeah. I've also seen it called declineism, too. Oh, eesh. So let's say you're like, all right, nuts to all this pessimistic outlook that I've got, I want to be an optimist.

I'm even willing to try to navigate optimistic bias. That's how bad I want to be optimistic. There's actually some stuff that they figured out that you can do to essentially shift your outlook some. I don't think anyone's saying like this is going to rewire your genetic code or anything like that. But there are some proven interventions you can take to help that along. I think probably it's based on your willingness to want to change too. Yeah. I think intervention is a good word because it's like, hey, this is happening. Let me use this specific technique to stop it in its tracks. In the first case, it's the ABC technique. Our old buddy Martin Seligman came up with this one. It's used a lot in CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy. And the A is the antecedent or adversity. So you encounter something difficult. Livia used a great example of like you, you know, like you flunk a test maybe. Then you have your belief and behavior. which in this case might be like I just I can't pass this test I can't understand this stuff I'm too dumb

and then the consequence is the C which is because you have that fatalistic attitude I'm just too dumb to pass this test you don't study and you fall further behind and the key here according to Seligman is you got to get in there between the difficult situation the thing that happens and the B thing between the A and B and change the attribution so in other words don't go to like oh i'm too dumb to do this uh go to like now that happened because uh i've been really stressed out i didn't put the time in that i needed to to study i was really had my priorities priorities out of whack i didn't sleep well that week uh and that's an immediate intervention where you're um putting the attribution on something uh that was temporary that happened

and not this is how i am right and that you can also change too exactly and then conversely too You can also say, like, I got a good grade. It wasn't just because, you know, I was lucky. You tell yourself, I got a good grade because I worked really hard. I got good sleep this week and I paid attention. I found this interesting. You can do the same thing, too, the opposite, too, to achieve the same goal. I think you probably have to do both to tell you the truth.

Yeah. And this is also a good thing to remember when you're parenting because when your kids are in school and they maybe get a bad grade. And the first question I think you should say is, well, why do you think you got a bad grade and see what they say and then just kind of go from there. Right. And then if they get a really good grade, you say, well, why didn't you get 100? Exactly. So there's another one that's even better than the ABC technique that's called the best possible cell for BPS intervention. And apparently everybody loves this one. There's a way of dealing with trauma that they used to have. It's called trauma writing where you would write out essentially. like the worst stuff that happened to you and it would make you feel better having gotten it out on paper it would also be pretty traumatic to do right yeah the whole basis of that trauma well laura king back in 2001 said let's try something different let's write out this this um sketch

of yourself down the road in the future where you've achieved everything you wanted to achieve it was through hard work write that version out and it's less traumatizing but it also has the same effect like it improved your sense of well-being and apparently increases your optimistic outlook on things. Yeah. It's the idea of that sort of hippie-dippy thing where, you know, close your eyes and envision your future, where you were strong and you're not doing the things that you're doing now that are holding you back. And it sounds kind of corny, but I think when you write it down, there's something to that, just the same as trauma writing. It's different than just sort of mentally visualizing good things happening. Way different. There's something about writing that's

definitely a step plus. you know yeah um and then so just real quick there are some benefits to pessimism too it's not just you know being optimistic like if you are pessimistic there's some upsides to it but also even if you're optimistic there's maybe a little pessimism you should adopt too like if you want to enact social change that usually doesn't happen through optimistic leaders it happens through people who are skeptical and are not falling for the false advertising or uh false promises essentially Right? Like you can't really be optimistic and get good social change, I think. Yeah. And then also, if you are a group that wants to spur social change, it's probably because you're unhappy with your current situation. And then lastly, this one's always stood out to me. If everyone's looking on the positive side of things, then the people who are doing negative stuff are much likelier to get away with it. Oh, interesting. So I feel like if you have the ability to shift between pessimism and optimism as the situation calls for it, that's probably ideal.

Yeah, for sure. Or, you know, if you're a defensive pessimist, it's not about aiming low. It's about not expecting too high. And then if you have, and it sounds bad to have like you should have low expectations. It's more like realistic expectations. And then you outperform those, like that's got to feel great to a pessimist. For sure. It's like planning for the worst but hoping for the best.

Yeah, that old t-shirt. Isn't there a cat hanging from a tree or something? I think that's hang in there, baby. Okay. You got anything else? I got nothing else. That was a good one. I enjoyed it.

Agreed. Well, Chuck enjoyed this one, which means he automatically unlocked listener mail. You know what? I don't have a great listener mail prepped for today. So let's just mention, once again, that we are going on tour again next year. We are super excited. We got shows lined up in January, out west-ish, in the Midwest, in April, and then we're finally going all across Canada, you guys.

We're reaching out with an olive branch, such weird times between our countries and saying, hey, don't boycott us. We want to come visit you. We're going to Montreal. We're going to places we've never been before. And tickets are on sale now, and we'd love to see everybody. Yeah. Starting out, we're going to be in Denver and then Seattle.

Seattle and then San Francisco on January 27th, 28th, and 29th. Yeah. And for those tickets and all tickets as they come on sale, you can just go to Stuff You Should Know.com, click on the tour button, and it will take you where you need to go. That's right. Can't wait to see everybody, eh? Yeah, A. And if you want to get in touch with us in the meantime and send us an email, we would love that. You can send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com.

should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people.

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