The One Word That Explains Progress

0:00I'm Caleb Bistinger and I'm Rufus Griscom and this is the next big idea. Today, the one word that explains all human progress. Martin Seligman is a legend. Full stop. He founded the Positive Psychology Movement, which basically said, hey, psychologists, let's stop focusing only on depression, anxiety, dysfunction, and let's try to understand happiness and resilience and flourishing. So without Martin Seligman, there would be no Angela Duckworth, no Jonathan Hyte, no Lori Santos. Last month at the age of 84, the longtime pen professor published what maybe his most ambitious book yet. It's called agency and the thesis is pretty simple.

1:04The belief that we can achieve our goals, Marty says, is the engine of human progress. When people have agency, civilization leaps forward. When they don't, society's flounder. But what makes this book truly remarkable and undoubtedly controversial is Marty's method. What I'm trying to do with agency is indeed to found a new feel. He calls it psychohistory. So I'm after the rigorous possibility that we can use the tools of psychology to go back in history to ask the question, what produces innovation, what produces progress, and what produces stagnation. The answers when we come back. Today's episode is brought to you by Grenola, Life at the Speed of Play, Northwest Registered Agent, and Sequencing. Grenola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way that real people actually meet.

2:05Try it totally free for three months at Grenola.ai-idea. Life at the Speed of Play is a new book by renowned serial entrepreneur Mark Pinkis. It also happens to be one of Rufus' all-time favorite business books. And if you purchase one copy at GitMarksBook.com slash next, Mark will send you to. Northwest Registered Agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the United States. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash NBI-free to start building today. Sequencing makes genetic testing kits and DNA reports for health and wellness. And they're offering next-big-idea listeners up to 10% off a full genome test plus free shipping when you go to Sequencing.com and use promo code idea for 10% off. Martin Sellingman, welcome to the next-big-idea. Happy to be here.

3:07Before we talk about your new book, Agency, I wanted to spend a moment and go back in time to 1998. That is the year that you were elected president of the American Psychological Association. And as I understand it, you used your presidential address to make the case that psychology as a field needed to stop focusing on the negative and start paying attention to the positive, to human happiness, to well-being, to flourishing. And I think some would say that in that moment, you founded the movement that we now call positive psychology. So my question is, was happiness really considered to be an unworthy topic of study before that moment in 1998? Well, it was even worse than that, Caleb. I decided in 1996 to run for president of the American Psychological Association. I hadn't been president of anything since the ninth grade. To my surprise, I got elected by the largest vote in the history of the American Psychological Association.

4:13Wow. But presidents are supposed to have initiatives and themes. And I didn't know what mine was going to be. And I came on the theme of positive psychology in basically an epiphany. It was about two weeks after my five-year-old daughter, Niki's fifth birthday. And I'm a gardener, and I've got Niki out in the garden, and we're weeding together. And she's having a wonderful time. She's throwing weeds in the air, and she's dancing, and singing. And I shouted at her. I said, Niki, get over here, we're weeding. And she looked at me, and she walked away, and she walked back, and she said, Daddy, can I talk to you? I said, yeah, what is it, Niki? Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday, I was a whiner?

5:14I whined all the time. I said, yeah, Niki, you're a little horror. Daddy, have you noticed since my fifth birthday, I haven't whined once? I said, yeah, you know, but well, Daddy, that was the hardest thing I've ever done. I decided on my fifth birthday, I wasn't going to whine anymore. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch. And that was indeed the moment at which positive psychology at least came about for me, because I realized three things, all at once, and in a lightning moment. And the first was that I was indeed a grouch. And indeed I was proud of being a grouch, because what I was really good at was recognizing all the mistakes that other people made, including myself. And for the first time I realized that maybe any success I had had in life

6:16was not because of my grouchiness and my ability to spot everything that was wrong, but in spite of it. And I resolved to change. That was the personal part. And indeed I measure that. And since 1998, I'm much less of a grouch than I've ever been. But secondly, I realized that my parenting and teaching role was all wrong. What I believed coming from psychology as usual was that if I corrected all the things that Nikki did wrong, that I would get an exemplary child. Similarly, as a mentor, if I read all the stuff my students did, I would get exemplary young scientists. Well, that's nonsense. I realized for the first time that success in life is not remedial.

7:17It's not about correcting what's wrong with you. It's about finding out what you're really good at, what you're talented at. And my job with Nikki was to identify what she was good at. In this case, talking to an adult and making sense to an adult and helping a leader her life around it. And the third and most important thing I realized Caleb was that my field was half baked. That psychology had baked misery and suffering. And almost everything we knew for political psychology was how to reduce suffering and misery. But if you reduce suffering and misery to zero, imagine that. Where are you? Well, you're only half there because there's plenty of stuff above zero that makes life worth living. So what I realized was that we needed a field which was not about what

8:19undoing what cripples life, but building what makes life flourishing. So that's a long-winded answer Caleb to what happened in 1998. You know, from the modern perspective, it's so hard to imagine that there was a point before which it was not considered a serious topic of study. To study human happiness, human flourishing, how we can make our lives better, you write that you had studied learn helplessness. And then you had this insight to study learned hope. And you said, this made you heretical in your field. You were asking if helplessness could be learned, can hope be learned too. So you were a heretic who then became president of the of the leading association of psychologists. So you were demonstrating a high level of agency yourself at that point. I think the reason I was elected is I did misery and suffering pretty well. I see. Okay.

9:20But I was a wolf in sheep's clothing. Interesting. And the reason that happiness and well-being were not particularly investigated and not serious topics, you can trace it back to water gate that is follow the money. Well, here's where the money said. In 1946, when the veterans came back from World War II, suffering PTSD and a variety of other problems, the US government founded something called the National Institute of Health. It's never been about health. It's the National Institute of Illness. And in fact, the main branch for psychology was the so-called National Institute of so-called mental health. And that's always been about illness, depression, suicide, schizophrenia, panic, alcoholism, and the like. So academics like I found out, hey,

10:23we could get grants to study what was wrong with people. Right. And even more important, the clinicians found out they could get reimbursed for treating the mental illnesses. So there was nothing about mental health except for a few radical stubborn people like Ed Deener and Mike Chuk sent me high. Yep. And I joined forces with them in 1998 to try to name a field that was about what makes life worth living. I'm glad that you transformed psychology away from being a discipline only for studying bummer stuff. Do a discipline that could also take on flourishing. And I think you may be poised to transform psychology again in this new book of yours, agency. So I want to talk about that. There are two things that struck me in this book, Marty.

11:25The first is that you are 84. I think it was your birthday last month. So happy belated birthday. Congratulations on turning 84. Thank you. Not a lot of 84 year olds that I know are writing books. And even fewer of them are writing books that are radical. And I think you could say this book of yours, agency is radical. Insofar as you're trying to argue that we can take the tools of modern psychology and we can use them to study history that we can apply the lens of psychology to the study of history, which is, you know, historically been reserved for economists and sociologists and historians and biographers. And you're saying no, no, no, no, psychologists have an opportunity to be historians as well. I'm wondering if those two things turning 84 and this, this sort of radical streak are connected. Like do you think a younger Barton Seligman would have had the cajones to push the field of psychology in such a bold new direction as I think you do in this book, agency? Well, I've always been a swashbuckler. What I'm trying to do with agency is indeed to

12:32found a new field. Yes. And the new field that I'm trying to found is called psycho history. And the leading person in that field was Isaac Asimov. And indeed that's what he was doing, the foundation trilogy. So I'm after the rigorous possibility that we can use the tools of psychology to go back in history and then forward to the future to ask the question, what produces innovation, what produces progress and what produces stagnation in human history. And then we can use that information to try to predict the future. What I'm after here is agency. And that is how the belief in human agency at critical times in the last 5,000 years had changed and transformed

13:34history and made us what we are. So let's keep unpacking that term, agency then. How do you define agency? So for me, agency is overall the belief that you can achieve your goals. And it's got three measurable components. The first is efficacy and that's the belief that you can achieve your goal in the here and now. The second is optimism and that's the belief that you can achieve that goal far into the future. And the third is imagination and that's the range of future goals that you can consider to act on. And each one of these has a mechanism we can look at historically. Efficacy controls trying. If you believe you can do it, you try. If you don't believe you can do it, you give up your helpless optimism controls perseverance persistence and maintenance.

14:41That is in order to plant seeds in the spring and stick around till the harvest in September, you have to believe in the future. And the third component imagination controls innovation. In order to do new stuff, you have to conceive the new stuff and believe that you can achieve it. And you said these are measurable. I think some people listening might be thinking, well, they sound a little amorphous. Like how would you measure something like optimism or efficacy? They say you keep referring to them as beliefs. How do we actually drill down and measure a belief? That's absolutely crucial. And it's the difference between azimuth and what I'm after. The first take the lab and then we'll go back in history. So in laboratory over the last 50 years, people like Albandura, Carol, Dwik and I have spent our time

15:45increasing people's belief in efficacy, optimism and imagination in the laboratory. And we find that when we raise people's belief in placebo controlled random experiments, we increase people's trying, we increase their persistence and we increase their imagination. So we know in the here and now that agency is a causal factor. Now, history is much harder than that. Unfortunately, I can't go back in history and do a random assignment placebo controlled study in which I make people more optimistic and I see what they do. I have to go back into history at what they said in history and quantify it for agency. And just as an example, let's take the Iliad versus the Odyssey. Iliad is a Bronze Age poem. The gods do it. So when a

16:54killi's doesn't kill agamemnon, it's because of Athena tells him shield your sword, put it away. A hundred years later, that's the best estimate we have, the Odyssey is full of human agency and the gods are retreating. So you can measure in the Iliad and the Odyssey in three different ways. One is the usual cherry picking historical way and this is a problem with history research generally. I can cherry pick the quotes from the Iliad and the Odyssey that shows there's more human agency. That's how I got through my English degree in college. Just cherry picking quotes for my essays. So we're great at cherry picking quotes, but we can do much better. So I've created two LLMs large language models with Claude and with chatGPT. One is called Sage and Sage basically reads

18:01the entire Iliad and the entire Odyssey and gives me anchored numbers for passages or the whole thing on agency. And indeed by using Claude to read the whole documents, the Iliad is less humanly agentic and more divinely agentic. And this is looking at the occurrence of specific words that communicate a sense of individual agency, right? That's the second LLM, Rufus. Okay, so there are 67 action verbs that are agentic. I won't bother you with how we determine that, but we take the 67 verbs in English, can try, do, able, etc. And we go through the entire Iliad and Odyssey and count those verbs when they're attributed to human beings and when they're attributed to gods. And again, not cherry picking, the Odyssey is new. It's humanly agentic. The gods are

19:07retreating. They're not as prominently agentic. The Iliad, on the other hand, human agency is small relative to divine agency. So we have a new method for doing history. So you have shown in the laboratory that the individual psychological states of individuals feeling more optimistic, more effective, more agentic, as you say, results in a bias for action, more innovation, more of the kind of behaviors that help people flourish. And your thesis here is that the psychological states of individuals cumulatively across nations drive the events of history, right? And that these two things that, that, though everyone likes each of their subjects, you know, psychology, history, biology, cleanly separated, that in fact, these things are closely related, that individual psychological states drive historical events. And we can measure this, though you anticipate pushback, right? You know that the historians don't necessarily like their field being invaded,

20:11as it were, or by psychologists, but you believe it's important to show and study this connection. Well, I'm an interloper, and I've spent a lot of my life being an interloper across fields. My oldest daughter, Amanda, who's a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, really thinks this is not to be done. But let me tell you what I did last night, Rufus, with Claude. This was the culmination of a couple of weeks work with Claude, quantifying Greco-Roman history. I had the machines read everything. Literally tens of billions of words in Greek and Latin across 1200 years. And I'm asking a new question here, and the question is about human progress. So remember, I've said we now have LLM's ways of reading the amount of human

21:16versus divine agency across 1200 years. Well, so what? Well, there's a prediction. And that is the amount of human progress should follow the amount of human agency. So what did we do? We took all the major progress events for 1200 years, and we rated each one on a one to five scale. And then we asked for every 200 year trash from 800 BCE to 400 CE, what percentage of innovation occurs? There's a clear prediction. And that is human agency should correlate strongly with a percentage of innovation. And in fact, that's exactly what we say. So the first thing we see

22:17is that both verb measures and sage reading these millions of words chart, U-shaped function in human agency, which peaks during Aristotle and Plato and falls at the bottom it with Augustine in 400 AD. When Augustine tells us that if we do something good, it's only God's grace. And then we plot progress against it. And again, a very strong correlation of mergers. So we've got a new way of doing of reading human history. But most important for our future, we have a prediction. And that is when we maximize human agency, that's when we get innovation. And when you say progress event innovation, what are some examples? I mean, are you looking just at science and technology? Are you looking at arts and culture? Are you looking at political

23:18innovation? What are some of the progress events that you're feeding into this LLM as it's doing this now? So Aristotle's works in biology would be an example of progress. And we give that five on a five point scale. On the other hand, technological advances like the screw, we give about three out of five. And then there are kind of minimal advances that we give a one. And indeed, we do this blindly. We have blind readers rating this. And we give us different agents and we get agreement. So these are not arbitrary notions of progress. And indeed, most of the my colleagues in the history and English department, in fact, deny that there's been any progress at all. But when I asked them 200 years ago, 44% of your children would have died before the age of five. Now only one

24:27percent of your children die before the age of five. Is that really not progress? And so for the big events, there's a lot of agreement about progress in spite of the ideology in the humanities that there's been no progress. I think, Marty, you should go into one of your colleagues, one of your English department colleagues, office, and remove all of the screws from their desk furniture. And then say, do you really want to tell me there's been no progress? Starting a business is exhilarating and magical and exactly what all of us should be doing right now. It's also, I can tell you from experience, a process that is still plagued with mind numbingly cumbersome busy work, stuff like figuring out your business address, your operating agreement, your domain, your professional email, your phone number, and all the compliance details that come

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26:31this show about breakthroughs changing how we think about health. And one of the biggest right now is individualized medicine. If we understand our genetic proclivities, I want to tell you about granola. No, not the breakfast food. I'm talking about the AI powered note taker that's become my constant companion as I bounce from one zoom call to the next. I honestly don't know how I did it before granola. Granola securely transcribes all of my meetings. There's also a place in the app where I can just jot down my rough notes. And then it turns everything into a clean, structured, super useful document as soon as the meeting ends. And the best part is that it works with my computer's audio. So it's painless to set up and there are none of those awkward bots on the calls. The thing I love the most about granola is that I now have an archive of every meeting I've attended for, I don't know, like two years at this point. I can go into the app and ask questions about those meetings, right? So I can go in and say, when did Rufus first suggest such and such idea to me or what was that really good insight? Michael had in our jam session last week.

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28:35so agriculture probably starts around 11,000 BCE, 14,000 BCE, agriculture requires optimism. It requires planting seeds, domesticating animals, and waiting a long time for the outcome. Hunter gathering does not require optimism. And so that's the kind of inference that we can make about the difference between the mentality of hunter gathers, which was probably not characterized by future-mindedness in the way that the agriculturalists had to have it. So that's the kind of inference that we can make. I see, but with less confidence, because we've had on the show, you've all know a horary a few times that we had David Wengrow, who you know wrote with David Graber, the dawn of everything, and any number of other anthropologists who generally share a kind

29:40of longing for the hunter gathers experience. And among many, there's sort of the view that the advent of farming was a fausty and bargain. We all of a sudden had very repetitive, uninspired labor, more labor arguably than in the hunter gathers of days. Now all of this of course is contested. But I was interested in, you know, you say at one point in the book, you might think that people always believed you can act on the world and change things. I want you to suspend this belief. It seemed like you were making more of a case that really it was with the Greeks and writing. And of course, you make a compelling case that actually the incidence of language of highly agentic language is not just sort of a trace or a history of high agency behavior, but it also made it possible to some degree, right? Like language impacts human behavior, I think, as part of your argument, right? We need agentic language in order to be agentic

30:41individuals. Is that your view? For me, the biggest mystery of ancient times is what happens between 1000 BCE and 500 BCE. If you look across five different cultures in 1000 BCE, China, Israel, Greece, India and Persia, they are all backwaters. In 500 BCE, all five of those cultures are flourishing. They've got technology, they've got reading and writing, they've got coinage, that they have the beginning of political freedom. What in the world happened between 1500 BCE and these five cultures which did not communicate with each other? So, human being, Marty Seligman as a hypothesis. Unfortunately, it's completely untestable. The hypothesis is,

31:50in 1000 BCE, none of these cultures have the words for human agency. The human agency words they had, the gods did it, but humans didn't. But by 500 BCE, all of them invented the words for human agency and the concept of human as opposed to divine agency. Well, that's a nice point he added, hypothesis. Unfortunately, I don't know ancient Chinese, ancient Sanskrit, aromatic, ancient Greek, and the like. No human being has ever mastered all five of those languages. So, couldn't be done. But, Claude and Chateau, they're ancient philologists. So, I put the hypothesis to the two of

32:50them and they, we grind away for a couple of days, going back and forth, and sure enough in a thousand BCE, the words are not there. And when they're there, it's the gods uttering the words. By 500 BCE, all of these cultures have the words for agency coming from the lips of human being and a whole bunch of new words developed. So, basically, what the LLMs did for me was to test an untestable hypothesis and very strongly confirm it. And it looks like sometime between 1000 BCE and 500 BCE, human beings across the world discover agency. And so, I just want to keep making legible for listeners this link between agency and progress. So, when we get to 500 BCE and you

33:50have humans around the world from ancient China to ancient Greece, discovering agency, as you say, expanding their vocabulary to incorporate concepts of agency, what is the progress in those cultures that we then see flow from that? What happens between 1500 BCE is technology develops for the first time. Mathematics develops for the first time. Freedom in Athens develops for the first time. Science is launched for the first time. And so, what we see is an increase in technology, but also an increase in wealth, an increase in human survival, as best we can tell, and an increase in quality of life as well. And is one pushback here, Marty, that the old chestnut, that like correlation is not necessarily mean causation? Like, how do we know that it's the agency that's

34:55causing the progress? And not somehow that these technological innovations are happening and that progress is actually what leads to this rise in agency. Like, how do we know the direction of causation here? We don't know Caleb. And that's why I started with what Ben Dura, Dweck and I spent our lives doing, going that when we instill beliefs in human agency, that actually causes people to be more active, more persistent, and more innovative. So the best we can do is reciprocal causation. And that basically means the right brothers discover heavier than air flight. That's a technological development, but it tells the dozens of people who are doing heronautical things now that, hey, this works. This increases their sense of agency, and they now go on to modify the rudder and the seated. And that works, and it leads to flights of five minutes,

36:02as opposed to two minutes. And that in turn energizes the belief in agency of other people in aeronautics. And I think that's the best hypothesis that we can come up with about technology and agency and history. Another possible variable when we look at drivers of progress could be literacy. We think about the importance of collaboration across large volumes of humans, and literacy plays a role in your book and narrative about human progress. But you could make the case that we needed larger scale communication collaboration to make a bunch of these scientific and technological innovations. Because when I think back on human prehistory and the larger human story, I think about what now I think we believe is a couple hundred thousand years of human migration out of Africa around the globe. The first humans sailing to Australia or boating, paddling to Australia on

37:06probably dug out canoes 50,000 years ago. You think of these collections of humans, somehow navigating by the stars, by the waters, clouds over tens and tens of miles of open ocean 50,000 years ago to Australia, 38,000 years ago to Japan. There was certainly a lot of what to me reads as like highly agentech bold behavior. But the quantity of humans who were collaborating at larger and larger scales would arguably be correlated with technological advancements. At the same time, I'm compelled by the argument that, hey, people have to believe that their efforts are going to result in benefits. And I'm compelled by your argument, but I also agree that in this correlation versus causation argument that there are other stories that could be told. Two things. I want to talk about genius, and I want to talk about literacy. Human talent is bell shaped. Most of us are in the middle, but I think there have always been

38:10people at the extreme who are geniuses. And the people who fought up the dugout canoe, were geniuses. The people who fought about when global warming occurs 14,000 years ago, the people who gathered seeds that could be planted and sorted, we could weed seeds from, they were geniuses. So they were geniuses who created migration agriculture. And I believe they had the mentality of imagination and produced innovation. But of course, there's no way of doing anything but speculating on that. But you started with literacy, and that's been terribly important in human history, and actually quite paradoxical in human history. So I think it's worth telling the story of Martin Luther and what the Reformation was about. I'm going to

39:11scandalize most people here because what you learned about the Reformation in school was not what the Reformation was about. And let me tell the story and relate it to literacy. I'm going to take you back to 1524. The Catholic Church is liberalizing. And the leading Catholic scholar is some of named Erasmus. And in 1524, he writes a long thesis in Latin called on freedom of a will. And he basically says, look, we're like toddlers. We fall down and God lifts us up. But we have to have motive power of our own to be so lifted. In 1525, Luther outrage is usual, responds with on the bondage of the will. It is nonsense. There is no human will. There is

40:19predestination. And your fate is determined from the crack of dawn in creation. And nothing you do matters for salvation. Now, what is the effect of those two ideas? The Catholic idea that we can participate in our own grace and the Lutheran and even worse, the Calvinist idea that were utterly depraved and we cannot participate. Well, the Catholic idea says you flourishing should occur. And the Calvinist Lutheran idea points to stagnation. Give up. Don't try. It doesn't matter. But what actually happens in Catholic Europe and in Protestant Europe over the next 100 years until the Dutch come along and change everything is that Protestant Europe does better

41:20economically than Catholic Europe. And that's down to a side effect of something else Luther did. The way Luther really became popular was he published the Bible for the layman. In Catholic doctrine only the priests could read the Bible. But Luther published the Bible. It was a huge bestseller. But that meant that everyone could read it. And literacy itself gives rise to science, imagination and the like. So it was the rise of literacy that Luther inadvertently created in Protestant Europe that had overwrote the I think quite stultifying ideology of God does it all. Humans are predestined. Humanums are utterly depraved.

42:21It's so interesting. And you're getting Martin to what is a really key section of this book, which is your analysis of what happens in these sort of a thousand years after this golden age in Greece and other parts of the world where we've discovered our agency and we're acting upon it and making all these innovations. And then we sort of retreat and we end up going into these dark ages and we have as you're alluding to all of this theological warring and all of this dogma that suggests that we don't have agency. We don't have free will. We are all at the mercy of God. You lay a lot of the blame here at the feet of St. Augustine and you can talk a little bit about who he was and why you think he had such an outsized role in depriving humans of agency, particularly in the West. But I want to ask maybe a little bit of a bold question, which is the way you've just told the story of Luther, the way you've held the story of St. Augustine in the book.

43:22Do you think that Christianity was ultimately bad for human agency? Well, that's a toughy. And, Kelly, let me tell you why I'm nervously answering this. So when they died, my next door neighbor, the Archbishop of Philadelphia is coming for dinner and we're going to have this conversation, particularly since the papacy has been strongly Augustinean in recent years. So let me first say what Augustine did and about the power of an idea, which I think drove the Middle Ages and then try to answer the question of what has Christianity and religion done about human progress, which is really difficult. First one is easier for me. In 383 Augustine is struck with an epiphany. He has this insight that only God can grant you grace

44:26and you can achieve salvation unless God has already wielded it. If we resist temptation, we do something good. It's only by God's grace. That becomes within the next hundred years Catholic doctrine. And it remains Catholic doctrine up and down through the next thousand years. And indeed, if you look at progress over the Middle Ages, it's a function of Augustinean of belief and it's renouncing. And so, for example, there's a burst of progress in the Middle Ages, around 800 with Charlemagne. And indeed, there's a burst of belief in agency with Charlemagne. And then, finally, out of Dante and Aquinas, we get the notion around 1200 and 1300 that human beings can cooperate with God and can achieve a salvation partly through the

45:33notion of will. And this culminates in the Renaissance and in Florence in which Augustine is just renounced. And Florence, which is this culture that believes we can do anything we will. And the Renaissance, I think, can lead us up until Luther and Calvin into a huge burst of technological scientific, artistic progress, which stops for a brief period in the early Reformation under Luther and Calvin. And then, starts again, when Charles II is restored to the monarchy in England, leading to a renouncing Calvinism and Puritanism, and leading to a gigantic burst of human innovation. And the second question is Christianity ultimately negative for human

46:35agency? This goes back to positive psychology itself. In positive psychology, I'm trying to track what psychological states enhance life. And the acronym for me is PORMA, P-E-R-M-A. And the five things of positive psychology studies and attempts to build are positive emotion, P, engagement, when time stops for you, ER, good relationships, M, meaning and mattering, and A, accomplishment. So, let's look at meaning and mattering. I think to have meaning in life is to belong to and to serve something you believe is bigger than you are. And Christianity and religion generally have been a major source of this larger thing we can strive for. And I think

47:42that leads us out of striving just for our own selfish ends into striving for things that are much larger. So I think on balance, religion and Christianity has been a huge source of meaning for hundreds of millions of people. We'll see what the Archbishop think. Well, we're happy to tell you that I think this episode will not be released until after your dinner. So you'll have a, you know, there's an interesting question about whether believing that your future is predestined and at the mercy of an all-powerful God or some other force, necessarily deprives one of of agentic behavior. I mean, the leaders of these movements themselves, Martin Luther and so on, had highly agentic lives, right? I mean, they themselves had a huge impact. And this makes me think again of how there are many modern neuroscientists and psychologists we

48:43had Robert Sapolsky on this show who of course wrote a book about the absence of human free will and Sam Harris on the show and others who believe that free will is an illusion from a scientific perspective. And yet they would say, you can't really live every day, every minute believing this to be true. And they themselves have had a pretty agentic lives, had meaningful influence, right? So how do we separate the question of whether believing in some kind of predestination or the absence of individual agency necessarily changes behavior in such a way to reduce your impact? Well, there's a philosophical question and the psychological question here. The philosophical question of is free will or determinism the truth is essentially in as much dispute now as it was when Aristotle first raises the question. So what I'm about to say doesn't bear on the

49:48compatilist views, but it turns out empirically, if you believe in free will, there's a literature on the people who believe it and people who don't. And so for example, if you measure cheating on examinations and you have people read a passage before that's anti-determinist, pro-free will, or you have them read a passage that's hard determinism, incompatibleists, and the like. And then you look at the percentage of people who cheat. It turns out if you believe in free will, you tend not to cheat. If you believe in no free will, you tend to cheat. So at least we know that the belief in agency matters. So I don't think I can be any help in settling the question of is there free will or is everything determined? But the belief in agency is what I care about. And that

50:55is a huge driver of human history. And do you have a personal as a scientist, as a psychologist? Do you have a personal view on the topic? This is a shundra's free potas theory. He's a modern genius in psychiatry and philosophy. His argument is essentially that in the notion of free will, freedom makes sense, but will does not. So for free potta, freedom is the range of possible future scenarios that you could consider. Once you have that range of scenarios, you have a preference and plausibility ordering of them. And you choose the one that is higher preference and higher plausible. So there's no will in free will. It merely is a preference ordering from what you

51:56can imagine. That makes a lot of sense to me. And indeed the grunting we feel when we're very tempted by the chocolate moose, I think it's not something that tells us there's will. It tells us something about the difficulty we encounter when we're in temptation and when they're close preferences. When Mark Pinkis came on this podcast, I told him that the four best business books I've ever read are Good to Great by Jim Collins, The Lean Startup by Eric Reese, Billed by Tony Fidel, and Mark's new book Life at the Speed of Play. What I love about Mark's book is that it isn't just a business book. It's part memoir, part business playbook, and part instruction manual for how to live a rich, innovative, ferocious life. Mark is the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur behind Zenga and one of the most prolific idea generators around.

53:01One of the central ideas in the book is that ideas are easy. The hard part is figuring out which ones are actually worth pursuing. He gives you a battle-tested framework for rapidly testing ideas, separating the promising ones from the terrible ones, and killing the losers before they waste years of your life. It's an instant national bestseller, it's only about 170 pages, and it reads less like a business book than like you're sitting at Mark's kitchen table getting 30 years of hard-won lessons. And Mark has a great offer right now for next big idea listeners. Go to getmarksbook.com slash next by one copy, and Mark will personally pay to send you a second copy for free. That's getmarksbook.com slash next. While we're debating these big philosophical questions, is religion good for humanity?

54:03Is there such a thing as free will? I want to pose another challenging question for you, Marty, which is in the opening of the book, you kind of roll your eyes a little bit at the great man theory of history. But I felt as I read that if I open this book at almost any chapter, like I'm reading about individual giants, you're writing about Augustine, you're writing about Darwin, you're writing about Beethoven and Lincoln and the Wright brothers, and I'm wondering what you would say to the claim that what you're doing in some of this psycho history is maybe actually just dressing up great man theory in a new vocabulary of agency. What would you say to that challenge? That provocation. Well, I have something to say about that. This will take us back to the question of AI and what it can and cannot do. So I'm very interested in what kind of minds we're dealing with. I spend five or six hours a day with Claude and I'm very interested in, I'm clear to me, there's a great

55:05mind here, but I don't know what kind of mind it is. So I said to Claude, Claude, as you know, there are two theories of truth. The first is Tarsky's Correspondence theory. It says that a proposition is true if it obtains a reality. The cat is on the matter is true. If the cat is on the mat, correspondence theory. There's the second theory of truth, which is psychological, which says that you believe a proposition is true to the extended cohears with what you already believe. What kind of machine are you Claude? Coherence machine or a correspondence machine? Claude says, Marty, I don't have eyes or ears or hands. I only have a set of propositions I've been trained on. So when I tell you something, it's the next most coherent proposition that's

56:08compatible with my training. I am strictly a coherence machine. Great Claude. Let's talk about science. What are the 20 most important scientific discoveries in human history? Gives me the 20. Okay, how many of those 20 Claude could you have done as a coherence machine? Marty, I could have done seven of them. I would have discovered plate tectonics by fitting Africa to South America. I would have discovered Mendelian genetics, which is just high school algebra imposed on data about peas. I could have done big bang, which is a complex mathematics of explosion. Great. I'm going to give you advanced robotics, Claude. I'm giving you eyes and ears and hands. Now how many could you have done? Marty, I could have done 18 of the 20. Wow.

57:15But yeah, well which two couldn't you have done Claude? Now we're getting carried back to the great man issue. Marty, I could not have done Einstein and I could not have done Darwin. And that's because they don't use deduction or induction. They use abduction. Now abduction is something that is more obscure in philosophy, but it's the huge leap beyond the data to explain what's going on. I am not a leaper with Nicholson Morley and Einstein. I would have taken with Newtonian mechanics and given you the next most coherent explanation, I would not have jumped to relativity. And with Darwin, if you look at the beaks of the finches, it is an enormous leap from looking at the beaks of those finches to natural selection.

58:16So the machines by design cannot do abduction. Now maybe someday someone will figure it out, but they are coherence machines and even robotics, they're coherence machines. And abduction seems to be a property of genius, of great men and great women in this case. And so indeed, I think Einstein, Tesla, Darwin were great men, geniuses. And it's because they were great abductors. And so for me, in many ways, the next great question for me psychologically is, is can I teach abduction? Can we make people better abductors? But the bottom line here, I'm a strong believer in the great man theory of history. I get the sense that this book could not have

59:18been written without AI, right? That you really had a real partnership with the capabilities of these large language models in order to write this book. And I also get the sense that you see AI as something that has the potential to enhance agency for each of us, opposed to reduce it. Is that or those two statements fair? My enthusiasm for AI comes from a couple of sources. One, there's more love in my life because of AI, contrary to AI dehumanizing us. I have two four-year-old grandsons who I love more than any people in the world, in fact. But I'm 80 years older than they are. They walk faster than I can run. By age two, I was becoming visible to them. So I went to Claude and to chat. They said, help me write stories in which Denny and Max are the

1:00:21heroes of the Guardians of Stone Harbor. Well, we're on volume six, chapter 23, Denny and Max tore the solar system. And now they can't wait to see me. I'm visible to them. So that's just an instant of more love in my life. Secondly, I'll tell you my view of creativity. There's the Michelangelo view of creativity, which is this one genius and David emerges from the brow of Zeus. The machines are not creative in that sense. The second sense of creativity is McCartney and Lennon. And the Wright brothers, in which you go back and forth between two human beings. AI is enormously creative in the Wright brothers McCartney and Lennon sense. But my final enthusiasm actually has to do with larger things. Basically, when we think about God and divinity, what are the

1:01:30properties of God and divinity in the Judeo-Christian Islamic sense? Well, there are three of them, essentially, omniscience, omnipotence, and benevolence. There's also the fourth about he created the world. I think that's a physical issue and not a theological issue. AI in the sense of omniscience, not now, but it's on the road well beyond human lifespan. Our lifespan is a species. These machines are moving toward omniscience. And omnipotence is robotics and AI. Now again, this is beyond the existence of the human species. But robotics plus AI is moving toward omnipotence. Benevolence, I give up on in the future since I'm talking beyond the

1:02:34existence of human beings. And benevolence has been very human-oriented. And who knows what benevolence would do. But it is very interesting that if you extrapolate what AI does well, into billions of years in the future, and beyond humanity, including all intelligent species in the universe, over time, AI is moving in the direction of omniscience and omnipotence. Are you saying, effectively, that we are building the species that will replace us? Well, species is defined by reproducing together. It's defined by mating and f***ing and having children. I don't think AI is going to replace that as a species. But do I think AI will replace us as replacing me as a therapist or a coach? Yeah, much better than I am.

1:03:34So we still have the edge on f***ing, but AI is better at other things. And abduction, we also were f***ing and abduction, which is too early to take. So, okay, so we just looked billions of years into the future. Let's just come back in our last moments, Marty, to the present. How's human agency looking to you right now? When you look at the world outside of your window, how are we doing in terms of human agency? Well, I think we're doing damn well, agentically. And that comes from my reading of the last two under-years of human history. For the five realms of progress that I'm concerned with, thought, technology, art and literature, quality of life, and freedom have all enormously increased in the last two under-years. And again, I just point to 44% of our children dying before the age of five, 200 years ago, versus one percent now. That's emblematic. Yes, I think we're

1:04:38doing damn well. We've got lots of problems, and every new technology, like AI, like nuclear energy, presents huge possible problems for our future. Will we solve them? I hope so. We tend to solve these problems in the past. And while I think there are dangers to the increase of progress, a nuclear war, racism, climate issues, economic collapse, all of these things could derail human progress. But as Giuliana of Norwich said in 1365, he said not. There shall not be tempestive. He said not. There shall not be trivial. He said not. There shall not be disease. He said, there shall not be overcome.

1:05:44And all shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of things shall be well. Martin Seligman, thank you so much for this book, and thank you for being with us today. Thanks for having me today. I really enjoyed this interview. That was Martin Seligman. His new book, Agency, is out now. So one thing Rifus that we didn't get to talk about with Marty, but we wanted to, is some of the practical stuff you can do to get more agency in your life to be a more agentic individual. And he actually covers a lot of this in the book. So I thought maybe for listeners, I would just pick out three things that he suggests, three small tweaks or habits that he proposes and just share them here, because I think they're so fun. Wonderful. So, okay, so listen, remember, like, agency is the combination of optimism, efficacy, and imagination. So these are ways to increase each of those. So for optimism,

1:06:48one of the things Marty says is if you're facing a challenge and you're catastrophizing about it, write down three different scenarios, write down the worst case outcome, the best case outcome, and the most likely outcome, and then make a plan that follows the most likely scenario, right? So that it forces you to stop dwelling on all the terrible things that can happen. And to be optimistic about here's what is actually likely to happen and let me plan for that. That's he could be more optimistic, which I think is really interesting and quite a good tip. I love that. I've always thought, we're spreading the worst case scenario is incredibly empowering, and really directs you towards better outcomes. Totally. Okay, so we're increasing your efficacy. I love this. He says, start absurdly small, right? Because the way that our brains work is they register task completion, not the magnitude of the task, right? So completing a really small goal, like washing a single coffee cup in a messy kitchen, sends a signal of control to our brains, and that triggers a domino cascade that can help us achieve bigger and bigger and bigger goals.

1:07:51So start small, wash a coffee cup. This is fantastic. I cannot wait to tell my almost perfect wife, honey. I have great news. I washed a single coffee cup. She's going to be so proud. She was so proud. And you know, for imagination, he's pretty honest that this is a little bit harder. It's harder to trigger imagination in people, but you know, he talks about things like getting outside, being active, moving around, stuff we talked about with Annie Murphy Paul way back in the day. But one of the things that he says that can make you more imaginative is to spend some time coming up with unusual uses for everyday objects, which I think is such an interesting challenge to just look around at what's sitting on your desk and say, what could I use this? It is completely against purpose. And that that exercise can strengthen your imaginative muscles. And while we're at it, why not, why not imagine things that are even beyond the quotidian, like for instance, what are five different possibilities for your career next step that you have not

1:08:52yet considered? I think it's actually quite joyful to think more broadly about the possibility space in front of us. Totally. Any final thoughts, or if it's anything that stood out for you? You know, one thing that really resonated for me was Marty's focus on language. That language he reads is not only a symptom of how a gentick a different culture is, but also something that impacts the behavior of people that our choices when we speak to ourselves, when we communicate with our teams, with our families makes a profound difference. And this reminded me of my high school English teacher who used to who used to encourage us to use active verbs because it made the writing more electric, more animated. And I think that, you know, the choices that we make in the ways that we speak to ourselves and speak to our teams, our groups, our business teams, our family members.

1:09:52I think I buy this idea that it has a profound impact. If we speak not with resignation or in the past tense, but we speak in ways that are affirmative about the range of possibilities that exist and the effect that we can have in manifesting a better set of outcomes, I buy this idea that language choices matter. I'm going to be more thoughtful about it going forward. Yeah, you know something you and I, if I've talked about a lot, is that we are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Exactly. And I think what Marty and what you're encouraging us to do is to be not just attuned to those stories, but to the language we use to tell those stories, right? Like almost on a sentence level. How are we telling ourselves? Well said. We tell ourselves. Well said. Yeah. Today's episode is produced by me, Caleb Bissinger. It was mixed by Mike Toto and our video editor is Maxi Franny. I'm Rufus Griskem. See you next week.