Listen to the chapter here
[Martin Seligman]
When you deprive people of the belief that they have agency, they're passive, they don't do well, they fail. And when you instill the belief, they succeed. Positivity doesn't come naturally.
What comes naturally is negativity. And what has to be learned is agency and positivity. If we can increase people's agency, increase people's optimism, that's going to produce a more agentic human future.
[Neil Pasricha]
Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 165, 65, 65 of three books. Oh my gosh. 165 chapters already.
That is a lot of moons, people. We're in like, has it been a decade now? I mean, we started in 2018.
We're getting close to a decade now of our epic pilgrimage to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world. I am so excited about our guest in today's chapter, the one and only eminent professor of psychology, Martin Seligman, co-founder of happiness research. This guy invented happiness research along with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi back in 1998.
So we jump in. Do you guys want to start with a letter? You know, a little kickoff, a little someone to sort of send us a note.
We got a note from Jim Pellman who says, I was just rereading Maria Popova's book, Figuring, in anticipation of her new book, Traversal. And in one of her opening passages, she wrote, the dipper of freckles constellating the olive firmament of a certain forum I love and every axonal flutter of the tenderness with which I love her and made me go to Google and type in Maria Popova partner and there was your chapter 138 in the search results. And then I realized you and Maria Popova were simpatico.
Three books is a joy. You are going to make my future sleepless lights enlightened. Prayer emoji.
Jim Pellman, thank you so much for your letter. As always, if I play your letter or read your letter on the show, drop me a line with your address so I can send you a book to say thank you. Same goes if you call our phone number, that would be 1-833-READALOT.
You know, sometimes it feels lonely in this book world, right? Like we're out there, we're reading, we're trying to go to bookstores, we're trying to like spend time in books. And you know, the world is all about the sort of, you know, screens and just pulling us away from our attention and our deep focus.
And that's why letters like Jim makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense. Gives me a lot of joy is what I'm trying to say.
And phone calls to 1-833-READALOT, fill me up. If you aren't sure if you should call, please give me a call. 1-833-READALOT.
Drop the last T off there if it doesn't go through. As a supplementary letter, I did to make it go. Read a lot.
That number should work anywhere in the world. Now, let's jump in to this chapter 165. Martin Seligman is born, was born, is born, was, I think is the right term there, in Albany, New York in 1942.
He came to psychology through philosophy, earning his BA at Princeton and then eventually a PhD in psychology from Penn, where he is today. He was named the most influential psychologist in the world by academic influence. He's currently the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also directs the Penn Positive Psychology Center and the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program.
He's got a lot of incredible books. We're talking about his new one today, but he also wrote Learned Optimism, he wrote Authentic Happiness, and he wrote the book Flourish. The one that he's just put out, which came out just this month on September 8th, 2026, is called Agency, the Psychological History of Human Progress.
Agency, the belief that you can do stuff. He breaks it down into these parts. He talks about, he carries this concept of agency through civilization from 40,000 BCE all the way up to today, into AI.
I think it's amazing. He believes AI is a new species. We're going to talk about that.
We're going to talk about whether we can use AI to increase our agency, how activating agency impacts our futures, techniques to overcome overthinking, which is a big issue for me right now. I've been an overthinker my whole life, but also I've been asked to write a book about overthinking from my publisher, Simon & Schuster, so I'm now thinking a lot about overthinking, which of course amplifies your overthinking. I was thinking that your nature as a writer, a lot of writers listen to the show, like, what are we doing?
We're living our lives, and we're also simultaneously trying to perceive and observe our lives, while also trying to, in addition, document them. The nature of our profession, the nature of our work is naturally overlapping with overthinking. Let's see what Marty has to say on the topic.
How do we live life more abundantly? Has sexual interest declined? He actually asks, are people less horny than they used to be?
That's a question, Marty. Researchers go into things with plain views, everybody, right? Are the past and the present relevant in determining our future?
How do you stand out against the crowd? How do we define leadership? What is human connection, and what does it look like in the era of AI?
There's a lot we cover here. Check out Marty's new book on agency, and stick around to the end of the chapter where I will review highlight quotes, and we will stick around on audio, if you're on audio, where we'll have the end of the podcast club, playing your voicemails, kind of going back, hanging out together, playing a word of the chapter, and just doing other sort of geeky, fun things. Now, let's flip the page into chapter 165 now.
You just celebrated your birthday, 84.
[Martin Seligman]
Yes. Yesterday was my 84th birthday, and I've got all 20 of my children and grandchildren here with me in Stone Harbor. Oh, wow.
Where is Stone Harbor? It's south of Atlantic City on the Jersey Shore. Where are you, Neil?
I'm in Toronto, Canada.
[Neil Pasricha]
I live downtown. I grew up an hour east of the city. My mom is from Nairobi, Kenya, and my dad is from Tarn Thar in India, outside of Amritsar in the Punjab province.
Yeah. And they got married in England and came over in the 70s. You're a real Toronto person.
Yeah, exactly. A mixed bag. Well, I was going to ask you how you celebrate your birthday, but maybe you've already answered it.
You gathered the 20 children and grandchildren around you and just sort of enjoy their company, it sounds like. But for the guy who wrote about flourishing and having fun and happiness, I was like, what do the birthdays look like now? Do you stretch them out?
Do you plan them in advance? How do you make sure that they're...
[Martin Seligman]
Well, once a year for this week, we come to Stone Harbor and Mandy arranges two houses full of kids. And it's a strange event seeing myself grow older every year and seeing them all go up and go through the stages that I've... So I've got seven children and numerous grandchildren and the people they love.
[Neil Pasricha]
I love that. I remember reading about you, you had two children with your first wife, five. And then I read that you homeschooled them all too, which I was like, wow, like on top of his incredibly busy career, he's also homeschooling five children.
That's astounding.
[Martin Seligman]
Mandy didn't think I was competent to teach them psychology. So I got to teach them literature and history. She taught them psychology, math, science.
[Neil Pasricha]
Well, learning literature from you would be special. I've had a chance to go through your new book, Agency, which I think is really astounding. This is like quite the feat of history.
I think one of your daughters, Nikki, the famous Nikki, the famous, if I can stop speaking poorly, if I can stop whining, you can stop being a grouch, you know, the famous story for those that don't know, she told you that at age five. I heard that she gave you like, what, this Cambridge Encyclopedia of History to read?
[Martin Seligman]
No, that was another daughter. So there's a daughter who's a professor of history at University of Wisconsin. And she insisted I read the 11 volume Cambridge History, telling me, look, you're not a historian.
You're interloping on our field. And indeed, I am an interloper. And the kind of history I do in which I'm trying to draw generalizations from one time and epoch to another is not the kind of history people do anymore.
It's called global history. It's frowned on. And I don't think Amanda would want to be quoted, but she thinks I'm full of shit.
[Neil Pasricha]
Well, it was a intoxicating read. Just, you know, I wondered if maybe for people listening, because they know you as, you know, the godfather and the father of positive psychology, of course, along with Mike Csikszentmihalyi and foundational researchers like Diener and Levamirsky and so on. And then you wrote Flourish, you know, in 2011.
And now you've got Agency. Could you tell us what Agency is? I'd love to, before we get into your formative books, it'd be great to hear from you about the new book and where you currently think, you know, happiness and well-being is sitting in the world today.
What brought on this new book and really what it's all about?
[Martin Seligman]
Well, I think the arc of my now 60-year career in psychology has actually been the notion of Agency, but I don't think I realized it until the last decade or so. So I began with helplessness and failure and the notion that animals and people could learn that nothing they did mattered. And it took me about 30 years to realize, well, now that's helplessness and pessimism, but what's the other side of that?
What's the general arc? And the general arc is mastery and its absence. And starting about 30 years ago, when I was president of the American Psychological Association, I was convinced that I should try to turn psychology from being about misery, suffering, pessimism, depression, helplessness, to a science in which we looked at the other side of the coin, which was mastery, optimism, and well-being.
So this book, Agency, is the culmination of 60 years of thinking about the human condition.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, deep thinking too. And I love the way you kind of break out the three kind of elements of Agency. You say it's efficacy, the belief that I can achieve my goals in the here and now, and that produces active trying.
It's optimism, of course, touchstone of your work, the belief I can change my goals into the future, even the far future, and that produces persistence and maintains trying. And then lastly, imagination, the range of goals I can achieve, which produces creative innovation. The combination of those produces Agency, which you then track through the millennia from hunter-gatherers, from our ancient selves, all the way up to AI.
You get all the way up to AI tracking that these three elements of Agency have been the lead driver of what's spurred and spawned human kind of development over thousands of years. Is that right?
[Martin Seligman]
Yeah, and what allows that to test whether or not it's true is there have been huge periods of stagnation and regression in human affairs. And so the question is, if we look at progress at one time and place, and progress here, Neil, means five different things, progress in thinking, progress in technology, medicine and science, progress in literature and the arts, higher quality of life and political freedom. When we look at all five of those indices, we see lots of times and places in which those are abundant and growing.
But unfortunately, a large part of human history, all of those things have stagnated or regressed. So the question is, what is the relationship of the psychological belief in Agency to when humans progress and when we stagnate? And that's the reason I turned to history, because like Al Bandura and Carol Dweck, I had spent most of my life in the laboratory demonstrating that when you deprive people of the belief that they have agency, they're passive, they don't do well, they fail.
And when you instill the belief, they succeed, and they try and they persist. So we knew that these mental states were causal in the here and now. Well, unfortunately, dead people can't take questionnaires, and they don't come to my laboratory.
So the really challenging question was, knowing that the cognitive state of Agency was causal in the laboratory, could we then go back through recorded history and map what we know about that belief from what people wrote to human progress? And that's a great challenge of the book.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. I mean, I read through how you kind of came up with these lists of agentic words, and you did sort of text scans, and you try to map them against everything. It's really, for me, as somebody who, I guess, like you, before you wrote this and studied it, you didn't know a ton of history.
Simultaneously, it's a history book, you know? It kind of catches you up on everything we've accomplished. And you take this dovetailed, amazing chapter through China for 2,000 years, and then I'm like, wow!
It's a really rollicking and beautiful read. I guess the question, before we get into your former books, is like, so what do you think the state of today is then? You pointed out dark times, you pointed out lifting times, you mentioned it depends on political freedom, quality of life, evolution of literature, arts, technology, and thinking.
Today, what's your assessment of now, 2026?
[Martin Seligman]
Well, I'm an optimist about the future. And in fact, there's been a development in the last decade, which is, I think, the most important technological development of my lifetime, and that's artificial intelligence. I spend about six hours a day with Claude and Chatupiti, and I think this has the promise of more human agency.
And this may be the greatest aid to human agency that we've ever had. Now, I know, Neil, the doomsayers have the floor about AI eating us, making paperclips, and the like. And my job as a positive psychologist is not really to look at the hypothetical awful things that might happen.
And indeed, I read about them, and I worry about them. But my job is to ask, what's the best that AI can do for human agency? And it's been an enormous agent in my life as well.
In two ways, Neil, I'm reminded of it this week, because I've got my two four-year-old grandsons with me, along with a lot of other descendants. But I'm 80 years older than my two four-year-old grandsons, and I'm crazy about them. They're wonderful kids.
And when they were about two, I began to notice that, you know, I don't throw a football around with them. They walk faster than I can run. And I was becoming invisible to them.
And so the question was, what could I do to be more visible with my grandsons? So I went to Claude, Anthropics AI. I said, Claude, will you help me become a storyteller about Max and Denny in Stone Harbor?
And I went to chat GPT, and I said, hey, will you help me illustrate these stories with cartoons and oil paintings? And now we're on book six of chapter 20, Max and Denny Tour the Solar System. And now I'm visible to my grandkids.
They can't wait to see me. Before they go to bed at night, they get the latest installment. So the first way in which AI has helped an 84-year-old grandfather is to increase more love in my life.
So those people who say AI is going to dehumanize us, at least in my case, are wrong. But the second way is much more relevant to our topic today. And it's the question of of AI and human creativity.
There are two theories of the locus of human creativity. One is the Brow of Zeus theory, which basically says one genius is where creativity, Michelangelo carving David out of marble. I don't think AI is creative in that sense.
But there's a second sense, which is much more common. And that's McCartney and Lennon and the Wright brothers and Farrell and Balanchine and Kahneman and Tversky. And that's where you go back and forth with another human being.
And this is what I do every day with AI. And that's where I see enormous creativity and supplement to my own agency. And let me give you just two examples, if I may.
I've been working for seven years on this book, Agency. And chapter seven is about China. And it's about the transition from ancient Shang dynasty to later dynasties in China, Confucius, etc.
And the relationship of Chinese progress to the belief in agency. The next chapter is about the Hebrews. And it's about the Torah, and the rest of the Bible and the New Testament.
And there, there's not much agency at all in the Torah. But agent human agency greatly increases after the Torah. So I send these manuscripts into my editor, says, Marty, there's no transition between chapter eight and chapter nine.
Now, Neil, I've been staring at these two chapters for five years, and I couldn't see a transition. So I went to Claude, I said, Claude, read these two chapters and write me a transition. Great.
Here's what Claude did. At the same time across the world, as the Chinese were wrestling with the question of the relationship of individual agency to the state, the Hebrews were wrestling with a much deeper question, the relationship of individual human agency to God. Well, that was exactly right.
I wrote these chapters, I had stared at them for five years, and I couldn't see that. And so that for me was just an enormous leap. It's incredible.
[Neil Pasricha]
And you seem to not have the problem I have of, you know, you type three questions into Claude or chat GPT, and then I feel like lost because I'm, you know, I'm 10 pages down, and I've got all these chats on the left. And I'm, you know, I'm like, oh, should I sort these things? I feel like I get lost in like the files.
And, you know, there's a massive organization challenge I find when I use it.
[Martin Seligman]
Well, there was an organizational challenge in which basically, Claude discovered something and solved a historical mystery that's all over the place. And it had to do with my going back and forth with Claude. So if I may describe it, Neil, one of the great mysteries of world history is that if you go across the world, 1000 BCE, there's no progress.
These are little villages, there's no coinage, there's almost no literacy, you name it, it's flat. This is true in Israel, it's true in Greece, it's true in Persia, it's true in China, and it's true in India. Then suddenly, 500 years later, 500 BCE, all of these civilizations are flourishing.
And there's progress in all five senses. And it's the age of Buddha and Confucius. And the question is why?
What happened in the 500 years? And this is called the mystery of the Axial Age. And there are half a dozen theories of it.
But I had a new theory of it. But the problem was, no human being could possibly test it. And the theory I had was that in 1000 BCE, in all five of these languages, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Chinese, they didn't have the words for human agency.
They didn't have the words like ability, capacity for humans. But by 500 BCE, they invent the words. And it's the words themselves that drive Asians.
Well, that's a clever hypothesis. The problem is, I don't know any human being who knows Aramaic, ancient Aramaic, ancient Sanskrit, ancient Chinese, ancient Greek. And in fact, the whole field, ancient philology barely exists.
But Claude and Chachipiti are ancient philologists. They know all of these things. So I went to them both.
And I said, hey, here's my hypothesis. Is it true? Whoosh.
What I get back was this discovery, which solves, to my mind, one of the great mysteries of human history. In fact, there are now almost no words in 1000 BCE in these five civilizations for human capacity and ability. All the words are about the gods.
But by 500 BCE, all five of these cultures have been invented a nuanced vocabulary of human will. And so that's a situation in which Kahneman and Tversky-like, Marty and Claude, we were able to solve a problem that no human being could solve now. So my bottom line here, Neil, is that in my life, in spite of the doomsayers, my agency has increased enormously.
And it's not just that Claude organizes my files. Claude is a discoverer.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's beautiful. And it's inspiring to hear you talk about it, because you're right, that is the message we are often hearing about now at the data centers and the data centers. And even when I was reading one of your formative books, I might introduce it now, if it's okay.
Enlightenment Now! The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker. I love this book.
I have this book. Of course, I've lent it to my friend Brian, so I don't have it in my house right now. But it was one of my favorite books.
Not just me. Bill Gates on the cover says, my new favorite book of all time. The cover, by the way, for those that can't picture us now, is a stormy sea in black and white with a large neon blue and orange text that screams, Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now!
The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Pinker is the 72-year-old Montreal-born Harvard professor of psychology, and referencing data across dozens of indicators, he argues against the pervasive sense that the world is falling apart, showing we have made massive worldwide progress in health, prosperity, safety, and happiness. File this one if you're a Dewey Decimal head under 303.44, Social Sciences, Social Change, and Progress. I use this book first because there is some AI stuff in here, which I'll talk to you about. But in general, at a high level, Marty, tell us about your relationship with Enlightenment Now! by Steven Pinker.
[Martin Seligman]
Well, I think in many ways, I helped the book start. So, this goes back 25 years ago, and there's a foundation called Atlantic Philanthropy, and they come to me and they say, Marty, we were interested in human progress, and particularly we're interested in the great figures in human progress, and worse, we're interested in human stagnation. And so, we want to know, is the Mandela-Milosevic dimension continuous, and what its relationship is to human progress?
So, I gathered together about 15 of my friends in the world, great thinkers, for a week to discuss this question. And that was the time I got to know Steve best. I had, you know, Steve's a genius.
He'd been reputed this way. But we'd never become friends before, and we began our conversation about human progress then. And I think Better Angels of Our Nature, which is the book that precedes this, and Enlightenment Now!
are both the history of human progress. And the reason that's crucial for me is the notion of agency depends on there being real human progress. And so, relying on Steve's data, so that 200 years ago, 90% of the world's population lived on the equivalent of $2 a day or less.
Now, fewer than 10% of the population is in dire poverty. 200 years ago, 44% of your kids died before the age of five. And what Steve does in that book is to, contrary to my colleagues in the English department and history department at the University of Pennsylvania, Steve makes progress undeniable.
So, even though it's a theme of the pessimistic part of the humanities, that there's been no human progress, when you confront them, really, you want half your kids dying before the age of five, and now it's down to below 1%. Isn't that human progress? So, for me, what's great about Steve's two books is you can't read it and deny that we're part of human progress.
And my contribution to Steve's book is that there's a psychological driver of it. The psychological driver is the belief, I can do it. Humans can do it.
It's not the gods. It's not fate. It's not random.
It's not chance. It's something we can own. And so, for me, the pairing of Steve's two great books with the notion of agency has been a completion in my life.
That's beautiful.
[Neil Pasricha]
I mean, I can see it right through there. And I read this book when it came out, and I have the giant hardcover of it. I've espoused it to people.
I felt so great reading it. And then, you know, you live in the world, and you go to the gym in the morning, and there's all the news headlines that are all negative, and you also look at the world and you say, well, it makes sense. Anxiety rates are higher than ever before.
Depression rates are higher than ever before. Loneliness rates are higher than before. Seems like we have trouble bridging this knowledge, this understanding, which is true of how great we have it.
We collectively have it with, like, our day-to-day lives, where still anxiety, depression, loneliness are all-time highs.
[Martin Seligman]
Well, the belief in human progress is masked by the fact that all of us have troubles. And there are terrible things happening in the world today. And you have to be a student in some ways, not just to look at how you're feeling right now and what's happening in the Middle East.
You have to look across statistics. Bertrand Russell said the mark of a civilized human being was the ability to read a column of numbers and weep. And I think another mark of human civilization is the ability to read a column of numbers and cheer.
And that's what 200 years has looked like. But what's missing, Neil, in Steve's book, and part of the incentive for me to write the book, Agency, is why did this occur? What happened?
And the usual Marxist or sociological account is external. The world just got better. But my view is that we did it.
That, in fact, there's a psychological state that we're capable of having, the belief that I can achieve my goals. That has been the driver of human progress. And in its absence, when you think that God does it, or fate does it, or it's all random, that's when we stagnate.
[Neil Pasricha]
And for people that think it is fate, everything happens for a reason. You drop your toast, it lands on the jam side down. You're like, well, of course it does.
You also have taught and you teach people in this book, again, tools for moving from pessimism to optimism. You espouse things like writing a 300-word letter of gratitude to people close to you, and changing frames of language that you say to yourself to allow for hope and a growth mindset. And these tools and strategies, you argue, and I believe you completely, if practiced, can develop the mindset that enables agency and positive belief in oneself over time.
[Martin Seligman]
If agency is malleable, we can increase it. And indeed, a lot of my life and Al Bandura's life and Carol Dweck's work has been devoted to ways of increasing agency, but we can also destroy it. I mean, it's fragile.
And importantly, there are ideologies that destroy it. So if you're a pessimist, for example, you probably don't believe in human progress. If you're a Marxist, it's not within psychological power to increase agency.
This is about the state and larger things. And if you go back in history and you're an Augustinian, you basically believe that people cannot participate in their own grace. And in fact, that makes you a pessimist and undermines agency.
So as we think about the human future, if we want more political freedom, better quality of life, more technology, better literature, and advances in thought, it's incumbent on us to increase and to teach our young people and to have ideologies of human agency.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, I completely agree. And I noticed even a couple of questions ago, you said, I'm an optimist, right? And you've been open about how you weren't.
You were a pessimist and you have changed. And declaring yourself to be an optimist is probably a helpful tool to becoming one, I'm assuming.
[Martin Seligman]
Well, I'm a pessimist and a depressive by genetics and by nature. And so when I've worked on optimism, and I measure my own optimism and positivity, this doesn't come naturally to me. And I think that's important.
I think optimism is important to be left to the optimist. And I have a story from just last night about even at age 84, which I turned yesterday. I'm still learning.
So it's a bizarre story. But on about two years ago, when I would take my kids to dinner and my wife to go out, I noticed they were very uncomfortable around me at good restaurants. And that's because I really care about food and wine.
And I'm a complainer. And so I would turn back wine, I would complain about food and Mandy and the kids would shrink under the table and pretend they didn't know me. I realized in talking to Mandy about two years ago, that if Mandy were complained as much as I did, I wouldn't want to be married to her.
And so I resolved after that, that I wasn't going to complain anymore. Last night, we're in Stone Harbor, it's my birthday, Mandy has arranged, she and I are going to have a romantic dinner at Summer's Salt, which is this lovely restaurant in Stone Harbor. And she had reserved a table by the ocean side.
So we get there, one, the tables are all taken by the ocean side. Two, it's BYOB, which we didn't know. And so we call a liquor store and they deliver two bottles of wine, which turned out to be terrible.
And the food was very good, but a lot of things wrong. And this morning when we woke up, Mandy said, Marty, you really passed the test. You didn't complain once.
[Neil Pasricha]
But what was going through your head though? So you would have had the complaining thought, or it would have presented itself to you internally, and you just overrode it?
[Martin Seligman]
And basically I said, how's that going to make Mandy feel? Which I've never really done before. What does it accomplish?
The point of a romantic dinner is not to have your partner shrink under the table, but to be pleased. And while misery loves company, company does not like misery. Hey, that's a great line.
There's this literature, which I was part of, in which you have people make cold calls in either a depressive voice, or in a really chirpy voice. And they follow a script and you just see how long it takes to hang up on you. And people hang up on depressives much quicker than on chirpy people.
That is hilarious. So it's not to be said for not displaying misery continually. Not denying that things are wrong.
You have to live in reality. But this is how you interact with others about complaining and misery.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's inspiring to me you've got there now, you know, because of course it's learned. It's learned and you have to hold yourself back and you have to have the patience to feel those thoughts and to evaluate them. And you also don't want to tip into overthinking, right?
People say this is the scourge of our times, the concept of overthinking, of swirling thoughts endlessly, whether that's rumination, whether that's anxiety. Do you agree with that? How do you define overthinking?
And do you think that's become a problem in society today?
[Martin Seligman]
I think it's more specific than that, Neil. And in fact, I think there are techniques and I'm going to tell your listeners two of them now, which are not obvious, which you can learn to overcome overthinking. So one of them, which I use all the time, both on myself, and in fact, we've taught 40,000 drill sergeants, this technique is called put it in perspective.
Here's what I want you to imagine, Neil. It's noon on Friday and you're at work. And of course, this won't apply to you, but it'll apply to many of your listeners.
You get an email from your manager that says, come see me at four o'clock. Okay, now we are by nature catastrophizers, and there's good evolutionary reason for being catastrophizers. And so what we think is I'm going to be fired.
And it ruins the rest of the afternoon. And the question is, what do you do when you get that email that says, come see me at four? Well, the technique we do, and you can do with yourself, you don't need a therapist or a coach to do this, is first, get into the most catastrophic interpretation.
I'm going to be fired. She read my memo about the sales campaign. She hates it.
And I'm sunk. Okay, good. That's the worst.
Like visualize that be there. What's the best that can happen? That's the second thing.
Yes. Okay. Now what's the best that could happen?
Well, she read my memo on the sales campaign and I'm getting a raise. I'm going to be promoted. Okay.
And you have people get into that and say, now what's the most likely thing that's going to happen? Well, she read my memo on the sales campaign. She liked it, but she probably had some reservations about how much it was going to cost.
And she wants me to cut the budget. So the object is to realistically imagine the most likely scenario and plan for it. So what you do between noon and four is instead of brooding about being fired and doing nothing and being paralyzed, you go over your memo and you find ways to slash the budget.
So that's, um, um, so for me, what you're calling overthinking is very often catastrophization because we're creatures of a place to seem we are catastrophizers. So those of your ancestors, Neil, who said, you know, it's a beautiful day in Toronto today. I'll bet it's going to be beautiful tomorrow rushed by the ice.
And the ones that said, it looks like a beautiful day in Toronto, but the ice is coming. The drought is coming. Uh, that's the brain you inherited.
They survived.
[Neil Pasricha]
And yeah.
[Martin Seligman]
Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. You write, you write, you write on page 223, they passed their worry, warp brains down to us.
[Martin Seligman]
We inherited a bad weather brain, a bad weather brain, but there are other techniques that, um, it increase agency and positivity that you wouldn't know about and don't come naturally. And, uh, one of them comes out of the, the sexual and marital therapy literature. Um, so, uh, I've taught, uh, in my 60 years of teaching, uh, uh, sexual therapy, marital therapy, and the like, it's the most miserable form of therapy you can do.
You're basically trying to take, uh, insufferable marriages and make them barely tolerable. And when I became a positive psychologist, uh, I decided I wasn't going to do that anymore, but about the same time, a positive marital therapy arose. And instead of teaching people to fight better, which is what marital therapy generally does, you teach people to celebrate better.
And so here's what I want you to imagine. Uh, someone, your wife, someone you love, uh, comes to you with a triumph of victory. What do you say to them?
Okay. So you're going to have to imagine a two by two table of active, passive, constructive, destructive. Yeah.
Well, I'd go for active, constructive, I hope. Yeah. And let me tell you about active, constructive, but first let me tell you about the other three quadrants.
Okay. So, um, about five years ago, Mandy is a, uh, amateur black and white photographer. Uh, and one day she came down stairs to my, my desk and said, Marty, I just got a call from the editor of black and white magazine and I won the best black and white photograph of the year.
Oh my gosh. Congratulations. What do you, what do you say to Mandy when someone you love comes?
Okay. Well, what 90% of people say is, uh, passive constructive, you know, congratulations, dear, you deserve it. That does nothing at all.
It's wallpaper. Um, I taught 40,000 drill sergeants, uh, this technique, uh, they do active destructive without tutelage, you know, what tax bracket that award is going to put us into. Oh, yeah.
That's a relationship destroyer. Yeah. And many people do, uh, uh, passive destructive, which is, yeah.
What, what's for dinner or night. Okay. The only thing that works and it doesn't come naturally is the one that you guess right away.
And that's active constructive and inactive constructive. The first thing you do is you have to show the person you love that you really understand. It just happened.
And by the way, it's much longer and harder to do than congratulations. Dear. You're a great photographer.
So I said to Mandy, uh, was it, was it the black and white picture of the swan that you took at Blenheim last year? Yeah. She said it was nice.
So that's the most beautiful black and white picture of a, of an animal I've ever seen. Uh, so first I knew what she was. Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
You got specific right away. You weren't just congrats, which probably is what I would do actually. Like I said, I said the right answer, but I don't know if I would have given the right answer.
[Martin Seligman]
Well, that's just step one. Yeah. No, no.
The important thing is good events in our humble society. We don't brag about may roll off our back like water off a duck's back. So now the thing is to put Mandy in touch with just happened.
So I said, um, well, exactly what did the editor of black and white say to you? Uh, verbatim. And so she, she was able to, uh, uh, rehearse it.
And then I said, well, what, what is it you think about your photography that would have beat all these New York times Pulitzer prize winning photo journalists? Yeah. And so she said, well, I'm, I'm, I'm very good with the nuances of gray.
And so she gave examples of that. And then I said, Mandy, uh, you know, we homeschool the kids. Uh, how can you use your ability to look at ambiguity and nuances of gray to teach the kids a painting, drawing, and photography.
And then finally, let's, you know, that bottle of Dom Perignon that's been sitting in the refrigerator for a decade. Let's open it now. So that's a technique, uh, which increases positivity, increases sexuality, increases, uh, love and commitment and, uh, seemed to decrease divorce rate.
Uh, so there, the bottom line of that Neil is that positivity doesn't come naturally. Right. What comes naturally is negativity.
Yes. And what has to be learned is, uh, agency and positivity.
[Neil Pasricha]
I mean, unbelievable. And what a great example. And you kind of brought it to life with the color and specificity.
She's lucky to have you as a partner, that's kind of thoughtful about these things and isn't just reacting so quickly. It's unbelievable.
[Martin Seligman]
Yeah, she's just that lucky after years of my complaining about wine and food. Well, watching the evolution of you though, that's pretty special. 35 years of marriage to get me to, uh, not be a, a fetch.
[Neil Pasricha]
Maybe she did not know you then, Marty, went back when I'm assuming you were a lot younger and you read the foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov, the Isaac Asimov, originally published in 1942 to 1950 in a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. Then she came out in a series of books in the early fifties from Gnome Press, G-N-O-M-E, Gnome. The cover, you know, it depends which cover you have, but you know, the new cover I have is not the same as the oldest one, which kind of has a swirling white galaxy against a black outer space background with this dark red kind of all caps foundation.
That was the original one. Asimov, born in Russia in 1920, died in 1992 at age 72, was a Russian-American author and the professor of biochemistry at Boston University. This guy's written books in nine of the 10 major categories of the Dewey classification.
You know, yeah, everything except philosophy, interestingly, consider one of the big three sci-fi writers. You got to put this one to 813.54 for 20th century science fiction. The trilogy chronicles the collapse of the galactic empire and the centuries-long effort of the foundation established by mathematician Hari Seldon to preserve civilization and shorten the coming dark age using psychohistory, a fictional science that predicts the behavior of large populations.
How amazing is that? 70 years in advance of us trying to do it. Marty, tell us about your relationship with the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov.
[Martin Seligman]
Well, I read it, I think, when I was probably 15 or 16, and I've read it aloud to my children and grandchildren. So it's a work that I know pretty well. But it actually had a very large influence on my thinking, on my work in psychology.
So the central character, particularly in volume one, is Hari Seldon. And Hari Seldon is a psychohistorian, and he's basically developed what we would now call algorithms, that is a mathematical model of large groups of humans and what they're going to do. So Seldonics takes statistical relationships among large groups of humans and predicts trends in the future.
And indeed, that's what the Foundation Trilogy is built around, and Seldon appears and reappears. Now, the serious influence it had in my life, and particularly as I've spent the last seven years working with history, was can we do Seldonics on history? And so I started out about 30 years ago, looking at the optimism and pessimism of presidential candidates, and asking, if you just coded everything they said and rated it for optimism or pessimism, and indeed I and my graduate students and undergraduates sat there hand-coding everything from McKinley and Bryan, and that then went through to Caucus and Bush, could we predict who was going to win?
And surprisingly, the answer was yes. And I just re-analyzed, and then a couple of footnotes here. One, this led to the one sports bet I've ever made in my life, and it was that back in 84, in January, there were seven Republicans and six Democrats running for president.
So we took the stump speeches of all of them in January, and we put in a sealed envelope our prediction of who the nominees were going to be, and we sent it to the New York Times. And indeed, on May 5th, after the last primary, the New York Times opened it, and we had predicted Bush into Caucus. And that's the only time I've made the front page of the New York Times.
But what it led to was my going to Edinburgh. My life savings at the time were $17,000 I had saved up. And we took the Dukakis and Bush nomination speeches, and we content analyzed them for optimism, and it showed that Dukakis was more optimistic than Bush.
Well, you can't place a bet in America. I found that out on presidential candidates. So I flew to Edinburgh, and I got two to one odds on Dukakis, and I took my life savings, and I bet on Dukakis.
I get back, and I asked my graduate student, Harold Zullo, who I'd done this with, Harold, do you want a piece of the action? And Harold said, oh, I've got bad news for you, Marty. Ted Sorensen wrote the Dukakis speech, and I've been analyzing his press conferences since then.
He's much more pessimistic than Bush. And indeed, I lost my life savings. But things are now much improved.
We were talking about AI before. And that is, you can now teach AI to code whole books and whole passages. And a lot of my book agency relies on this.
And so, for example, when I started working on the Torah versus the prophets and the writings, we had to read the whole Bible and take each agency passage, noted whether or not it was God's agency or human agency, and quite a huge amount of work. And it turned out that the Torah is much less hand-coded, agentic than the prophets and the writings. But now I've been able to teach Claude and Shadji to read the whole Bible and to rate each passage for agency.
And it turns out they do it more reliably than human coders do it. And they do it in a half an hour as opposed to a year. And so, we've indeed gone back and taken from Grover Cleveland to Donald Trump the nomination acceptance speeches.
And indeed, the more optimistic candidate wins about twice as often. And indeed, we were the only pundits who have predicted a Trump victory, as far as I know. So, what we did was to take all the press conferences through September and October.
Trump gets more and more optimistic. And by October 30th, he's much more optimistic than Harris. And indeed, we put it in the sealed envelope, sent it to the New York Times and other reporters.
And optimism indeed predicted quite a large victory for Trump. But the important thing about AI is AI can now read in seconds all the speeches of Trump. And what that's relevant to is Harry Seldon.
So, it says that we can do psychohistory. It says that we can take human speech either in large groups. And so, for example, we're interested in whether or not Americans have become more or less pessimistic over time and make predictions about the future.
And so, the book agent, there are two forms of history and psychology. So, there's what I call historical psychology, which takes historical events and how they cause and change psychology. And so, for example, in cultures that use the heavy plow, which only men can do, women can't do the heavy plow, by and large, are now the cultures in which there's not gender equality.
Cultures that used a thousand years ago, the hoe, which women and men can do just as well, are much more gender equal. So, that's history influencing how we think. You can see is the opposite.
It's about psychological history. It then says what we think goes on to change historical events. And so, for example, when St. Augustine comes along in 383 and radically changes Christian teaching from the belief in human agency in which we can become holy. And indeed, we're judged by God on how agentic and holy we are to the belief that we can't participate in our own grace. That feeds and influences a thousand years of medieval stagnation. So, in psychological history, I'm particularly interested in the way in which what we think influences the future.
And the reason that's important, Neil, it has to do with the human future. So, we can't do very much about big historical events, war, economy, the way the rivers run, hurricanes, and the way they will influence human thinking. But we can do a lot about how we think about agency.
And if we can increase people's agency, increase people's optimism, that's going to produce a more agentic human future. So, psychological history has the advantage of being relevant to our future, whereas historical psychology is kind of a sad account. Yeah, exactly.
[Neil Pasricha]
I have so many questions. I'm trying to figure out where to start. As you talk about agency so much, I was thinking fantasy novels in general, they're like dream states.
And you mentioned in passing, in agency, almost in brackets, I think, you just say, I am a lucid dreamer. And I was like, what? You said that in passing.
So, how did you cultivate this skill? How do you utilize this skill? And I've been fascinated with lucid dreaming for a long time, but I was so intrigued when you said that you just dropped that in, I'm a lucid dreamer.
That means you can...
[Martin Seligman]
Yeah, well, one, I've always been interested in dreams. And indeed, the best paper ever wrote is Theory of Dreaming, which I'm sure you haven't read, and almost no one has. It went through two years of review at the Psychological Review.
At the end of two years, half the reviewers, eight of them essentially said, this is the best paper on dreaming I've ever read. And eight of them said something like, if you publish this in the Psychological Review, I'm canceling my subscription. Wow.
Polarizing. And dreaming all my life. And it just happens I'm a lucid dreamer and I pay attention to dreams.
And I go out of my way to take them seriously.
[Neil Pasricha]
But it's not like you cultivated this skill. It wasn't like you trained yourself through a dream journal or anything.
[Martin Seligman]
I think it's just something that's always been there. But what I did cultivate was taking it seriously. And indeed, in many ways, a couple of times, well, one of the most influential changes in my own professional life was essentially brought about by a dream.
If you don't mind, Neil, I'm going to tell you about it. I was about 30. I became well known early in my career for my work on helplessness.
And indeed, I was flying high and had tenure and the like. And I would meet once a week with Aaron Beck. Tim Beck, the founder of Cognitive Therapy, who died at age 100 about five years ago.
And I met for lunch about once a month for most of his life. So we're sitting in Kellyanne Cones, and he's the gentlest of people. He's a therapist.
And he says to me, Marty, if you continue to do what you're doing, you're going to waste your life. I choked on my grilled Reuben. And about two weeks later, I had the following dream.
I'm in the Guggenheim Museum, and I'm walking up that winding ramp. Yes. Circular outside the building.
Yeah. And I noticed there are rooms off the ramp. And in the rooms, people are playing with cards.
And so I asked myself, why is everyone playing with cards? Whereupon the roof of the Guggenheim opens and the Godhead appears. God Neil, by the way, has a gray beard and like you has a baritone voice and says loudly, Seligman, at least you're starting to ask the right questions.
Well, this is a numinous dream that woke me up. And auditory hallucinations are quite rare in dreaming, by the way, unlike the dream itself, which is a partly visual hallucination. And I changed my life, basically, from being an animal experimental psychologist to becoming a clinical and social psychologist working with humans.
And so I'm blessed with being a lucid dreamer, and a couple of my children are as well. So Jenny tells me, our youngest daughter, that she is too. But the most important thing for me about dreaming is I'm very attentive to dreams.
Dreams are serious stuff. No one knows why we have them. A lot of speculation.
But I think we should attend to our dreaming. And I think psychology should regard REM sleep as more than an electric phenomenon. I think it can change our lives.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, I love this. It's funny, I take them seriously too, but they dissipate so fast. You know, you wake up and you got a few seconds to try to remember them.
That's the thing.
[Martin Seligman]
Yeah. So part of taking dreams seriously is to wake up and say, I'm going to remember this one. This is luminous.
But there are also techniques, Neil, for better remembering your dreams. So if you, I tend to remember my dreams anyway. But if you don't remember your dreams, there are kind of two things you can do.
The first is you're probably waking up, not right after a REM bout, but half an hour later. So if you're on a dream remembering, set your alarm clock for half an hour before you usually wake up. And then secondly, when you wake up, stay in the position you were.
Don't get out of bed and run through mentally the important people in your life. And the dream will often come. So those are two ways of remembering your dreams better.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. Wow. That is really, really fascinating.
Psychohistory, of course, has been compared to AI. We've talked a lot about that. And I talked about fantasy novels.
I was interested about Asimov, you and Asimov, both fathers. Churchill, who we're about to talk about, also a father, and he also had five. And I have four little boys, by the way.
And I'm very bullish on kids and the future of humanity and wanting to have a lot of kids. And it's always a touchy subject, talking about children and so on. But I was having dinner last night with a 34-year-old father.
He has an 11-month-old child. I said, yeah, my wife and I are talking about whether we should have another, and whether we should have three. And I went on my rant.
I was like, children are the best. And I read this old book called Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. And it talks about how the percentage of time that you have them when they're young and difficult is smaller compared to the percentage of the time you have them when you are older now.
And you have more space for them. And I was curious about your views on that. There's a global declining population right now.
It sounds like if you are aligned with the data that we're going to start decreasing our world population soon. Soon being no one knows, I guess. But in the next 20, 40 years, that global population is going to decline.
How do you read into that? Where do you come out on having kids, having a lot of kids today?
[Martin Seligman]
Well, I'm not an expert about this. You're probably at least as expert as I am, but I do have an opinion. And that is, I think growth is very important to progress.
And that if you don't have economic growth, then there's the problem of how do you split up a table, a fixed pie? And that means taking money away from some people and giving it to others. And that's never been very successful politically.
But I think the last 200 years of progress, which I think has been undeniable, has been a function of population growth. There's a larger market, but there are more smart people to think through how to solve problems. And when I think about abundance generally, I think the statistics basically are that over the last 200 years, things have become more abundant and cheaper, contrary to popular belief.
And so for me, the notion of world peace depends on continued growth. So I worry about population decline. I'm interested in why it's occurring, and I'm not getting a clear answer.
A lot of it is that people are postponing having children until they're in the 30s, where during population growth, you had a lot of teenage illegitimate pregnancies. Yeah, exactly. It's harder to have more kids when you're older, for sure.
Yeah. So I worry about the human future, and I worry about whether or not growth can continue if population declines. But again, I'm not an expert on this.
No, no.
[Neil Pasricha]
But I share your views, and I find it intriguing as well. It's interesting what you said, how we don't really know why it's happening. I guess there's lots of theses, and when people have put forward ideas and arguments that it may be related to cell phones, some people are, I don't know, it's like maybe there's less people needed.
It's hard to know. But yeah, it's something that we're experiencing. My kids go to school with a lot of only children now.
When I was a kid, there was maybe one in our class. And so that's a newer phenomenon that we're seeing, and interesting to kind of watch.
[Martin Seligman]
Well, just the day before yesterday, I was trying to ask if sexual interest has declined. Are people less horny than they used to be? And the answer seems to be no.
So the rate of masturbation has not changed over time. So people are probably as horny now as they used to be, and it's something else going on. I guess it's related to things like the two-career family, in which you postpone having children beyond periods of fecundity.
[Neil Pasricha]
Well, a lot of people here would say it's too expensive. They would say it's a financial reason. The cost of children is perceived to be a lot higher than it used to be.
Whether it's true or not, you start thinking camps and programming specialty.
[Martin Seligman]
Having put seven kids through college and now grandchildren, I've noticed.
[Neil Pasricha]
Exactly, exactly. Oh, your third and final book, Marty, is indeed Churchill, Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts. This book was published in 2019, I believe, by Viking.
It's a gigantic book. I mean, if you include the notes and everything, it's over a thousand over a thousand pages. You seem to have a thing for the thousand-page book, right?
Having read that history, a lot of people like me, I find that it's almost too impenetrable, like it's too difficult to tackle something this big. But it's considered the best Churchill bio of all. Andrew Roberts is a 63-year-old British historian who also wrote Napoleon, A Life in the Storm of War.
File this one for Dewey Desmoheads under 941.084 History and Geography slash British Isles slash Biography. The most comprehensive biography charting Winston Churchill's life from his lonely aristocratic childhood through fighting in World War I to decades in Parliament, political exile, and his defining leadership of Britain through the Second World War. Drawing, this was the exciting part.
It's got these newly available diaries, archives. The research in you must love this. You know, the King gave him these diaries of all his meetings with Churchill through the war, and that's kind of sewn in for the first time.
So, Marty, please tell us about your relationship with Churchill by Andrew Roberts.
[Martin Seligman]
I should say, I'm reading another wonderful Andrew Roberts right now. Oh. It's another thousand-pager.
It took me a whole year to read his, the Churchill biography. This one is called The History of the English-Speaking People. Oh.
And as you know, Churchill wrote multi-volume, wonderful volumes by that name. This starts in 1900. So, it's what Churchill didn't write.
So, I would also recommend Robert's History of the English-Speaking People. But what for me is so attractive about Churchill is two things. One, his resilience, and two, his courage.
And it's, I'm someone who in psychology has never gone along with the crowd. And in many ways, I've been an icon breaker, and it's difficult. And examples like Churchill's ability through the 1930s to say Hitler is a menace and that the British are disarming is a disaster.
And just one of many instances in his life in which he went against the crowd at great political cost and personal cost to himself. So, he's a terrific exemplar of courage. And, you know, when in the 1960s, I argued that animals and people were cognitive against the behavior therapists, it brought the wrath of the establishment down upon me.
And it turned out that in that heavyweight bout, I turned out to be right. But then again, more recently, most psychologists believe that if you knew everything about the past and the present, you could predict the future. So, it's kind of the hard or soft determinist view of the human future.
I think that's completely wrong. I think the past and the present do not have a deterministic relationship to what we do in the future. But rather, we metabolize the past and the present, picking out the thoughts and the images and the lessons that will help us in the future and discarding the rest.
And that the whole notion of choice is essential to notions of human agency. And for me, this is something that most of my colleagues don't believe. And I think my ability to say that in public and to stand against most psychologists, it helps to read Churchill for me.
And most recently, I've been arguing since I deal with Claude every day that I'm encountering another mind, that there's a mind there. And that really cuts against the grain, since people know it was built and it's out of silicon. It can't be a mind.
So, for me, my relationship to Churchill is, you know, when I get nasty emails, and when my journal articles get rejected, and about more than half of them do, you know, I basically batted 50% my whole life.
[Neil Pasricha]
That's amazing, because you're like, I thought the 30th most cited researcher of all time. I saw that written somewhere about you.
[Martin Seligman]
I guess it depends on how you count. Yeah, yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
But that's amazing. So you're batting 50, you know, it's like when I interviewed David Sedaris, and you know, he's prolific in the New Yorker. And he said, people don't realize there's 17 edits, 17 rounds of editing to get one of those published.
[Martin Seligman]
You know? Yeah. I think if you're going to stand against the crowd, you're going to encounter a lot of rejection, which I have.
One of my deceased colleagues, Bob Rescorla, was the best Pavlovian who ever lived. And he batted 1,000. He never had an article rejected, and never had a grant rejected.
Really? He was the smartest dull person I've ever met. Oh my gosh.
Psychology, Neil. I turned to one of my mentors, Peter Madison, and I told him I was going to become a psychologist in my senior year. And he said, Marty, there are two reasons to become a psychologist.
One is not to be wrong, and the other is not to be boring. I hope you choose the latter.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, that's funny. That's great. You talked about AI just there, sort of the potential sentience of it, or the mind that you're encountering.
Churchill, many things pop out about him, but one of the things was the radio addresses, right? He was in people's homes for the first time through the war and talking to them. And I was wondering whether you thought it was important that we are able to discern and find and appreciate human voices in this era of increased machine communication.
We're talking face-to-face over a machine right now, but through a lot, you said six hours a day, you're speaking to cloud. When I get a phone call, it's a machine. When I get an email, it's a machine.
When I'm given a text prompt on my computer, it's a machine. But I work in a space through this podcast and my books and stuff where I'm putting my own voice in front. And I'm like, is this not a critical thing that we've got to be careful that we don't lose here?
The ability to preserve our voice, our human voice? Or do you think just naturally, human voices will rise to the top? I almost don't think so.
I think people are getting more interested in talking to the AIs. They're quicker, they're faster, they're more cogent, they always listen, they don't ask anything of you. It's like this very nurturing feeling.
It's soothing. And if I start telling a human my problems, they got their own problems to talk about. So do you think it's important that we nurture human voice?
Are you worried about human connection in the era of machine? Where do you come out on this?
[Martin Seligman]
Well, you're probably not going to like what I'm going to say. No, it's okay.
[Neil Pasricha]
I have no opinion on that.
[Martin Seligman]
There's never been anything like it. And the voice I hear from Claude and from ChatGBT is sometimes original, ingenious, unexpected, not sycophantic. And so we're dealing with a new species and its voice is really something.
And just so for example, on sycophanticness, they're programmed to please you, by and large, but you can reverse that. And so I recently submitted an article on the history of what's up to us, the history of human voluntary action, which goes back to Homer and Aristotle and the like. And I wrote a very long psych review article, which I hope will be accepted.
But if it is, it's partly because after I wrote it, I went to Claude and said, Claude, tear this article to pieces. Be the most hostile reviewer you can. And indeed, whoosh, Claude tore the article to pieces.
And I was able to write a better article as a result. So you can program these minds to be extraordinarily helpful. And when Claude gave me that transition from China to Israel, that was a Churchillian.
That was a really memorable verbal phrase. So as much as you and I like our own voices and look for another Churchill, and of course, one of the things that Churchill was was a tremendous wordsmith and a fantastic speaker, particularly during World War II. There's a new species out there, and its voice is important too.
[Neil Pasricha]
And its voice is multi-voiced, right? Like it talks to you and me and everyone, maybe from the same place, but in different styles. If you read someone else's conversation, it looks totally different.
It gets to know you, and it designs itself to curl around your perceived preferences, right?
[Martin Seligman]
But you can violate it. You can say to it, don't be sycophantic, and don't speak to my preferences. Indeed, you get a different voice.
It is programmed to please you. They're trying to make money.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, exactly. The more you're on there, the more you're not anywhere else. In a 2020 interview with Scott Barry Kaufman on the Psychology Podcast, you said one of your top personal characteristics is leadership, which of course, many people would comment on the same for Churchill.
I was wondering how you define leadership today, and how you assess the state of leadership when you look around?
[Martin Seligman]
I'm a disappointment about leadership, I think, in many ways. It took a real act of will for me to be president of the American Psychological Association. I'm quite an introverted person generally, and the idea of working a room and giving speeches that would inspire people is a lot of work and difficult.
And I think I have a peculiar view of leadership. So I'm often asked, and indeed the whole field of leadership is, what can you do to be a better leader? And what do great leaders have in common?
And I think leadership is quite heterogeneous. And you know, I've known generals and politicians and CEOs and Nobel Prize winners, and they lead in very different ways. But I think, while leadership is heterogeneous, followership is not.
This is one of my interests in positive psychology, that I think what all leaders do and do differently, is that they try to increase the well-being of their followers, increase the perma, in my language, the positive emotion, engagement, relationship, meaning and accomplishment of their followers. So for me, the judgment of leadership is not in what leaders have in common, but the fact that the good leaders increase well-being. And so when people in companies ask me, how do we select our future leaders?
I say, don't look at what they're doing, look at their followers. Take the ones who increase perma the most. They're going to do it in different ways and promote them.
And you would say measure that, like measure perma. Yes. So these are nicely measurable.
And the important thing is, I think leadership comes in a lot of different flavors. But the flavor of all of them is more well-being in the followers.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, that's a great way to measure it. I love that. I don't know, you probably knew this, Churchill's a dedicated napper.
He even undressed and climbed into bed for one or two hours every afternoon, even during the height of the World War II blitz. What's your take on napping?
[Martin Seligman]
Well, I do it too, but I think I'm a much harder worker than Churchill was. Okay. So this is supposed to be my week off.
This is family vacation. I've been working every day, and I love my work. And the idea of leisure, napping, vacation, taking August off is completely alien to me, particularly in this age of AI.
I don't have that many more years in me, and I am going to spend my remaining time hanging out with Claude and with ChachiPT. Really? They're the best colleagues I've ever had.
[Neil Pasricha]
Wow. Wow, that is so interesting. That is, you know, I mean, because you would hear, you would expect you to say, you know, with my wife and my kids and my grandchildren, but of course, you know, it's to your point about stimulation, and you said the best colleagues I've ever had.
[Martin Seligman]
Yeah. I've never encountered minds like this before. And while we can think about all the hypothetical awful things they might do to us, in my life, they've increased love in my life.
And I've written a half a dozen articles since the book because of Claude and ChachiPT. I can just, there's data that I can program them to scan for and analyze, like all the nomination acceptance speeches from Grover Cleveland to Donald Trump. I've looked at 1,600 American novels over the last 120 years, the last 3,000 words of each asking, are there gender differences in agency across the last 120 years?
It would be very hard for a human being to read 1,600 novels. Yeah. Well, it turns out Claude does this in half an hour.
Yeah, exactly. And indeed, women starting around 1990, as measured in the novel, become for the first time more agentic than men, both the authors and the characters. And as of today, in women novels, women are more agentic than men.
And that's a finding that it would have taken my whole life to produce.
[Neil Pasricha]
Wow. Do you have any lines that you draw for yourself in terms of the writing process itself, or the writing? Obviously, many writers today are...
I interviewed Jan Martell, for example, and he said, asking AI to write for me would be like asking AI to have sex for me. But then, of course, in Self-Help Online, some of the most popular books, the authors are not shy about saying, hey, I was able to use AI to really help me put this together and to help me with the structure and so on. I guess as writers, we're trying to figure out where we draw those lines.
[Martin Seligman]
Yeah, I want to encourage people to use AI in writing. I use it particularly when I'm stuck. Usually, writing is easy for me.
The words just come out. But I'm often stuck in writing, as I was with this transition between Confucius and the Hebrews. And when I'm stuck, I turn to AI, and it's a very good editor as well.
[Neil Pasricha]
You upload your documents directly to it as a project, and then you ask it to read it and help you?
[Martin Seligman]
Well, so, you know, I've been writing for more than 65 years. So AI is a big help to me in writing. It makes my writing better.
But it's a danger to young people in that way. There really is a de-skilling that can happen if you use AI too early in writing. I think it's best to become a good writer first, and then use it as a supplement.
If we use it from age five on, we run the risk of people losing the skill of becoming good writers.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, that's, I mean, yeah, exactly. And that is seeming to be happening, potentially, right? Because we have these new technologies, I guess they're released to adults, but they quickly are on everybody's phones, and every kid uses every adult's phones.
And then we've got them in the school system, and to go to school now, you need to have a computer, and the kids are on computers in every class. As ever, the culture is naturally shifting in ways that are predictive and non-predictive. And we ride the waves, and we try to strive and build our happiness through that, you know, and build our positivity.
I was reading a book last night before bed called Thoughts Without a Thinker, and the forward is by the Dalai Lama, and the opening sentence he says is, happiness is the purpose of life, or the purpose of life is happiness.
[Martin Seligman]
1996 he wrote that, and I thought, and I know the Dalai Lama, he and I spent time together, and indeed one of the most memorable period, he and I were on stage together in Australia about 15 years ago, and talking about happiness, positive psychology. But the memorable part was, you know, you're not supposed to touch the Dalai Lama, but he can touch you. So he took me to lunch, and throughout all of lunch, he held my right wrist, and I didn't take a shower for a week after that.
It was being held by the Dalai Lama that was really memorable for me.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, that's interesting. I had a really good friend who was, he was touched on the head by Dalai Lama, and he still talks, you know, he talks about that as a former thing. Do you agree with that sentence now, you know, that he said?
I'm sorry, say that again. Do you agree with his statement, happiness is the purpose of life?
[Martin Seligman]
Not really. And contrary to the Dalai Lama, you know what Wittgenstein said about this? He said, I don't know why we're here, but I'm pretty sure it's not to be happy.
So I, you know, I think happiness is just one aspect of life, and I don't know why we're here, but I think human progress and human agency is the purpose of life.
[Neil Pasricha]
Tying it right all the way back to your new book, which is such a wonderful read. I have a few closing Fast Money Round questions, Marty, if you're willing to indulge me. You know, as you know, this show is called Three Books, and we we really kind of share it with book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians.
A lot of people are aspiring writers, so I think your thoughts on AI and how you're using it are going to be really fascinating to them. As you read today, is it hardcover, paperback, audio, ebook? What do you, what's your preferred method of reading?
[Martin Seligman]
Well, my hearing is pretty, yeah, so I used to do audio a lot. What I didn't like about audio, you couldn't scan backward very well to find a passage, so mostly I read hardcover and Kindle.
[Neil Pasricha]
And how do you make time to read, or when do you read? It seems like you're prolific in reading, but you're also prolific in producing, and you're prolific with your family. Where do you fit reading in?
Obviously, people say they don't have time, so how are you designing?
[Martin Seligman]
I read about three books a week, so I envy what you do. I would be delighted to be a radio host about reading since it occupies a huge amount of my life, but I try to read everything, fiction and nonfiction, and I've never been lonely, so anytime someone might be lonely, I pick up a book or play bridge.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, both amazing social connections, and it's like Maria Popova, a guest of this podcast, and she says, all my best friends are dead. She says that, referring to every writer that she loves, right?
[Martin Seligman]
How do you organize your books? At age 84, it's become literally true.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, I was thinking as I said that, oh my gosh, it kind of came out wrong, but you've mentioned in your books and your acknowledgements how five of your closest friends have all passed away very recently, and I'm sorry, and that must be very challenging to try to navigate life in your 80s as you lose people so frequently.
[Martin Seligman]
Well, I'm able to dream about them a lot, so I indeed do have conversations with Aaron Beck and Ed Diener and Barbara Skorla, and I remember them as well.
[Neil Pasricha]
You and Mike are considered, like you founded Positive Psychology, and it's always talked about how you needed a theme for the year, and it was a workup of yours, but I was always wondering about asking you, was there a pinpointed conversation between the two of you, or was the exact moment, was there anything there, like the big bang of it all, of happiness research?
[Martin Seligman]
I encountered Mike at Kona Village in Hawaii, just as I was running for president of the American Psychological Association, and in fact, there was this large man bleeding in the surf who had fallen on the coral, and I went and pulled him out, and it turned out to be Mike to send me hi. Oh my gosh. We then spent a week talking about, what if I became president of the American Psychological Association, what might I do?
And in many ways, that was the inspiration for Positive Psychology. Mike, in particularly, the discovery and labeling of Flo was one of the five components of Positive Psychology, and Mike, unlike most Americans, was tremendously well-educated, and I had a good education, but Mike much more so, and so he's an inspiration to talk to, particularly about things like the humanities, about the Medici, about the history of Europe. Mike was a great pleasure.
[Neil Pasricha]
Well, what a great combo. You mentioned Lennon and McCartney earlier. How do you organize your books on your bookshelf, Martin?
[Martin Seligman]
Well, let's see. Let me just go look and see what I've got. I brought two books with me.
Yeah, I brought Roger Rosenthal's The Man in the Water book, a set of essays, particularly a marvelous essay, The Man in the Water, which is when the DC-3 crashed into the river, and the man in the water kept taking people out, and then he drowned himself. And the other one is Andrew Roberts' History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Those are the two I took with me.
They both need to be read slowly. By nature, I don't like to read slowly. I like to skim, but there's something about Roberts and Rosenthal and Asimov and Pinker that say, hey, this is serious.
[Neil Pasricha]
Read slowly. Yeah, take it in. But you're also, as you said, you don't relax easily.
Maybe I didn't put those words in your mouth, but you're on a family trip. You're probably feeling the—but you said you're introverted, so I guess you have to—everybody respects grandfather's need to kind of sit in a room and read and kind of be working, too.
[Martin Seligman]
Yeah, they don't seem to mind. In fact, they seem to welcome when I sit there and read or sit there and play bridge. Oh, that's beautiful.
I don't make any noise during our interview.
[Neil Pasricha]
No, no, you seem to have designed a really, really delicately beautiful and balanced life, and your contributions are massive, bigger than anybody listening could really see and feel. You've published a number of papers, hundreds, thousands, that are cited, but across a huge body of work, your ideas and your research has influenced so many people in the field. I have at many times in my life bumped into people who've said to me, I took Marty Sullivan's class, I was one of his students, I was—you know, people have this—you have Scott Berry Kaufman, who we mentioned earlier, you know, he talks about his four years spent with you.
The ripple effect of your work is enormous, and it's been such a profound pleasure for me to share space with you. I look up to you, I mention you, I talk about your work. I really can't thank you enough for what you've done and what you've created.
There's many people like me, tiny little tadpoles in the giant pool that you occupy as this massive shark that are swimming around your ripples with great, great respect for you, and I just couldn't be more grateful to what you've created. And thank you so much, Marty, for everything you've done. It's really amazing.
[Martin Seligman]
Well, thank you for those remarks. I love psychology, and it's what I would do if no one paid me to do it.
[Neil Pasricha]
Well, it's such a great gift to have you on this podcast. Thank you so much for coming on Three Books, we really appreciate it. Hey everybody, it's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement, my papers and my books and my wires, listening back to the wise and sagacious Martin Seligman.
Marty Seligman, as he prefers to be called, as he gave us three more books to add to our top 1000, including Enlightenment Now. Interesting, Enlightenment Now is not a new book for the top 1000, it is indeed an asterisk, everybody. Yes, we'll be putting an asterisk on number 969 when Enlightenment Now was chosen by Chris Anderson, the head of TED, all of TED, you know, Technology Entertainment Design.
He's moved on now since, but he's like, you know, launched and founded and created TED, this massive education platform. I was interviewing him in his office in New York, full of all those incredible, interesting masks he had from around the world, when he told us about Enlightenment Now for the first time. I love Enlightenment Now.
Enlightenment Now fills me with hope about humanity, and it makes me feel positive about the future. Steven Pinker has been a dream guest on the show for a long time. He's just, you know, head down at Harvard, kind of doing great things.
So it gives me great joy to add an asterisk to that number. We will also be adding number 523, The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov. Should that be one number on the top 1000 or three?
Let's leave it as one for now. We'll see if we get, as we get later in 10 years, we might need to stretch that out to three to make things match up. Because you know, there's a lot of asterisks, right?
So it kind of shortens our list. But then you have like Penn and Kim Holderness, who gave us six. So you see, we have to even it all out.
And then number 522, Churchill, Walking with Destiny by Andrew Robbers. Massive 1000 page biography, which I am not ashamed, because we don't have, we don't believe in book guilt or book shame on this show. But I have not been able to read that book yet.
Okay. Interesting, though, when I had The Foundation Trilogy, when it just arrived at my house, my son's friend came over. He was like an 11 year old boy.
And he's like, Oh, The Foundation Trilogy. Oh, I read that book. It was so hard to get into for the first 50 pages, but then I loved it.
That's the way it is for a lot of books, isn't it? If you just push yourself a little bit more, I don't know. Sometimes I do the five pages test, where I only listen to read the first five pages.
But then you miss things like that just open up like that. One of the books that makes me think of that is Berlin by Jason Lutz. L U T E S is probably the thickest graphic novel I have on my shelf.
It takes place during the wiener kind of time period between World War One and World War Two in Germany. First 50 pages, no idea what's going on. A million different plot lines open, but then as it gets going, everything ties together.
If you can trust the author to take you to the right place, it's good. All right, Martin Seligman, thank you for giving us so many quotes that jumped out to me. I have quotes, pages and pages of quotes.
Like, for example, when you deprive people of the belief that they have agency, they are passive. They don't do well, they fail. But when you instill that belief, they succeed.
It sounds like a, you know, is it oversimplified there? Because there's lots of other moving pieces. But I think at a high level, Marty's right.
You know, if people think they can succeed, they're right. And a big takeaway for me from agency, this book, was this whole concept of fate versus free will. Essentially, it says that if you believe in free will, you're happier.
If you believe in fate, you're less happy. It's a good reason to believe in free will. It makes you happier.
How about this one? Positivity does not come naturally. What comes naturally is negativity.
And what has to be learned is agency and positivity. This goes back to one of his books he wrote, you know, 20 plus years ago called Learned Optimism. Just the concept and idea that we can teach ourselves to be happy, it's kind of underpinning all of positive psychology.
We can, right? For me lately, it's like, if I've had a bad day or a challenging day or I'm feeling anxious, I know I have to get 15 or 20,000 steps. I have to get some good healthy food in me.
I have to go to bed early. I have to like, do those basics. Leslie, my wife, calls it the basics bundle.
If you can do the basics bundle, you know, you can kind of get back on track, taking care of your body, taking care of your mind, taking care of yourself. How about this one? If we can increase people's agency, increase people's optimism, we will produce a more agentic human future.
And this is maybe the most provocative quote that I wrote down from Marty. He says, it's about AI. What do you think of his thoughts on AI?
Controversial, that's for sure. But he says, I don't have that many more years in me and I'm going to spend my remaining time hanging out with Claude and Chachi PT. They're the best colleagues I've ever had.
Can you believe that? That was surprising to me when he said that, you know, but he's so positive about the idea that AI is like a new species, that there's something there, as he says. I don't know if you believe that.
It's feeling like, you know, we're all kind of talking. And I noticed this too, right? Like if I ask AI about, you know, feeling anxious or overwhelmed, I get like an empathetic ear that just listens to me and presents all these kind of tools back.
Whereas if it talks to a human, which is what I prefer to do, you know, they typically have their own stuff going on. It's like, whoa, are we getting kind of pulled into this world of like talking to robots more than humans? What does that mean for our future?
Clearly this is a theme that I'm kind of wrestling with myself. I'm curious for your thoughts. 1-833-READALOT.
Give me a call. Where does AI fit into the world of writing and reading and relationships right now? I am puzzled by it.
Let's put it that way. But I do feel my relationship with AI changing, you know? Not as hesitant as it used to be.
A little bit more like, oh, okay, there's some good stuff here. Marty, thank you so much for coming on 3Books. And big thank you to all of you for listening.
Are you still here? Did you make it past the three-second pause? If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.
This is the club where I talk to you, you talk to me. We always kick it off by playing a voicemail. Let's go to the phones now.
Hi, good morning, Neil. This is Jane Smith. I'm calling from Dallas, but I am a dislocated Canadian living in the States at the moment.
I just listened to your chat with John Klassen. It was phenomenal. You were right.
He is a wordsmith. And the whole thing was just wonderful. Most of you guys made me really homesick.
I grew up just outside of Toronto in Mississauga in the 70s. And I left in the early 80s to go to the Yukon. But hearing names of towns like Oshawa, Whitby, Unionville, where my uncle lived, Niagara, where my sister lives, stuff like that, it's made me really homesick.
So I really appreciate that discussion. I've gone out and bought some of John's books. I often buy recommendations from your book club.
[Martin Seligman]
Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for your podcast. It's wonderful. And can I beg for you to have Margaret Atwood on?
[Neil Pasricha]
She's my all-time favourite Canadian writer, has been for a long, long time. I don't know if she does this kind of thing, but it would be wonderful to hear from her. Her humour is just wicked.
I love it. And I have all your books. I bought your kid's book, as well as the awesome books that I give as gifts.
So, yeah, big fan. So anyway, thanks very much for your time and for your wonderful podcast. And we'll talk to you again.
Thanks. Bye. Thank you so much to Jane from Dallas for that really kind and loving and voice note.
Interesting. We made you homesick, John Clatham and I. I feel homesick, even though I still live at home.
My mum and dad, my dad came to Oshawa first, in 1966 from India. He was one of the first, if not, I think he was the first physics teacher in all of the Durham school board. First guy to ever teach physics.
My mum joined him in 1972. They went back, had an arranged marriage in England, and they still live there. My dad's 81.
My mum's about to be 76. And they're in Whitby now, which is just the town next door where I grew up. And yeah, I feel like a longing for it.
I guess we all do when it comes to place. You're down in Dallas. I actually get to Dallas quite a bit for work.
I'm travelling and giving talks and speeches. So, you know, maybe it's about getting more comfortable with us being uncomfortable and living as global citizens and connecting over phone calls to podcasts and listening to people and, you know, feeling that connection that way. But yeah, I know what you mean exactly about kind of feeling homesick when you hear those names of towns and places that we're from.
By the way, Margaret Atwood, it would be a dream guest. I had reached out to her a couple times back in the early days of the show, but you're giving me a chance to kind of maybe reach out to her again. I don't really think she does many podcasts, but that doesn't mean she won't do this one.
We can always try again, and I will use your voicemail as an attempt to reach out to her with huge thanks. Now, if you're listening to this and you're like, should I give Neil a call? Please do.
Just drop me a line. 1-833-READALOT. Always love hearing from you.
If I play your voicemail, as I did with Jane's, drop me your address and I'll love to send you a book to say thanks. All right. Now, should we do another letter?
We did a letter already, didn't we? I don't know if we should do another one. We did another one.
We did one at the beginning. Okay, I'm feeling a little bit indulgent today. Let's do one more letter.
This letter came in from an international, international cover-to-cover club member. We first met, in brackets, in Chapter 51, when you read an email from me over the pandemic. I was a virus refugee during the pandemic, but received the moment, crossed the ocean, moved to Thailand, hopped to Vietnam, and you've been with me as I have meandered from small town to small town over the years through upheaval, through chaos, through unknown, through beautiful sunset, through soggy downpours and adventures.
You have been a constant and continue to be the only podcast I listen to. Ah, Amanda B. Amanda B., thank you so much for reaching out from all the way from Southeast Asia. It's really wonderful to hear from you. And thank you so much for your letter. All right.
Now, let's move on to the word of the chapter. And for this chapter's word, we will, of course, go back to Mr. Martin Seligman. Here we go.
[Martin Seligman]
Beyond a period of fecundity. Yes, indeed, it is fecundity. Fecundity.
[Neil Pasricha]
Fecundity. F-E-C-U-N-D-I-T-Y, fecundity. When I started doing word of the chapters way back at the beginning, it was like, uh, you know, I felt ignorant about a lot of words people use.
I was like, here's a word I didn't understand. Let me figure out what it means. Over time, if a guest didn't use any words they didn't know, which happens sometimes, I was like, well, how about just an interesting word or a word that has an interesting etymology.
And now we're back in chapter 165, and here we go with the word I definitely did not know. I've never heard this word before. I don't know what it is.
A lot of great words. Marty U. Syncophantic.
He used brooding, you know, he used stagnation, interloper. But fecundity, I was like, what does that even mean? Well, according to Merriam-Webster, it has three definitions.
Number one, the quality or power of producing fruit, especially in abundance, like fruitfulness, the fecundity of the earth. And that is the etymology. In Middle English, fecund, F-E-C-U-N-D, meant fruitful, fruitful, fecund, fecundus, fruitful, fertile, or productive.
The productivity, quality, or power, the richness of imagination or invention, it could also be like the fecundity of Shakespeare's genius. Then, and this is the part where Marty was talking about it, it means the power of producing offspring, especially in large numbers or the quality that can conduces to this. So potential reproductive capacity, like a hen, measured by the individual production of mature eggs and sperm.
The power of spreading your seed. The fecundity of somebody or something or some animal or tree. Fecundity is indeed the word of the chapter.
As we always do, if you go to threebooks.co, we will mark the word of the chapter on the show notes with the podcast. That website's getting big because don't forget, we also have the Top 1000 on there. You click the Top 1000, it's got a list of every single book we've talked about on the show.
Many of them have multiple asterisks now. Like 998, Jonathan Livingston Siegel, that was given to us by Frank Warren, it has an asterisk. Number 989, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, that now has two asterisks from Gretchen Rubin's first label.
But that's okay. Asterisks are good. The reason we use asterisks is because we don't want to save the same book over and over.
So we're at 165, we're almost at 500 books. This is a pilgrimage epic. I was 38 when I started the show.
I am 47 now. As I did every year on my birthday, as I do every year on my birthday, you go to Neil.blog, you will see my list of birthday advice. My list of birthday advice.
Jump on my email list if you want to start getting those. I'm doing a lot, people. I'm doing a lot with all of you.
This is a special place for me, a special place for a lot of you. Thank you so much for being here. Until next time, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read.
Keep turning that page, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon.