Modern WisdomPositive Psychology Founder: How To Stop Your Negative Thoughts - Martin Seligman
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
55 min read · 10,704 words- 0:00 – 3:07
Has Martin Always Been a Scientific Rebel?
- CWChris Williamson
Over the last 50 years, you've maybe done more than anyone else to increase our understanding of human flourishing, 30 books or more, hundreds of articles, and you just turned 84, so happy birthday, by the way.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Thank you.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. What's been the common thread between all of your work? Is there a unifying trend across all of it?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Yes. Yes, there is, and it's the question of, of, uh, human mastery and human agency, Chris. So, uh, when I started work in psychology more than 60 years ago, um, there were three huge blind spots that psychology had that made asking questions about human happiness and human agency almost impossible. Uh, the first blind spot was happiness itself, and that is, uh, psychology was all about misery 60 years ago. Uh, trauma, suffering, panic, depression, anxiety. Uh, happiness was a dirty word. No one worked on it. Uh, the second blind spot was thinking itself. So a, a common thread in all of my work has been that what you think determines how you feel. But psychology excluded thinking 60 years ago. It was, uh, if you're a psychoanalyst, it was just, uh, effluvia that came out of underlying conflict. If you're a behaviorist, um, thinking didn't exist. So that was the second blind spot. And the third blind spot that made it impossible to work on human mastery and human happiness was determinism, that psychologists believed that the past plus the present made a puppet of us into the future. All of those three premises have turned out to be wrong, uh, enem- inimical to, uh, human well-being, and one of the great joys of my 60 years in psychology, I've been one of the people who overturned all three of them.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. It's a rebellious career upending the status quo in that way.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Uh, yes, I think, uh, I've been a, a rebel and an overturner, and my scientific technique has generally been, uh, uh, to look at the basic premises of what people were doing in science and say, "What if the most basic premise is wrong? What follows?" Uh, and, uh, uh, the basic premises of psychology 60 years ago excluded human happiness, excluded thinking, and excluded the notion that we could choose our
- 3:07 – 9:24
Why Martin Chose Mastery and Agency
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
future.
- CWChris Williamson
Why agency? Why did you get interested in that?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Well, I first worked on something called learned helplessness. So I basically found in the 1960s and '70s that animals and humans, when they were exposed to events that they couldn't do anything about, uh, showed, uh, several basic disturbing symptoms. Uh, first, they became profoundly passive. So Chris, if I put headphones on you and I put a button in front of you and I played a loud, annoying noise, and the button-- nothing you did could turn off the noise. And then the next day, I put you in a human shuttle box, which is a box about six feet long, put headphones on you, you put your hand in on one side, noise went on, you just sat there and didn't do anything. So the first thing that we found to our shock in learned helplessness was that people and animals became profoundly passive. And the second thing we found was, uh, that they became stupid, that they had a lot of trouble finding out when they moved their hand, turn off the noise, that mastery actually worked, and they went back to sitting.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Uh, so where my interest in this started was the opposite of agency. And that is, um, uh, what impedes agency? What makes us helpless? And, uh, uh, 20 years of work on finding out what makes us helpless brought me out of the notion of helplessness and into the notion of, of mastery and agency. And most importantly, every time we ran an experiment in which there was inescapable noise or inescapable shock, there was always a third group that got the very same noise, but pressing the button worked. So the groups are matched for trauma or adversity, but the group that's had first experience with mastery, with what I now call efficacy, did fine. And then when we started to measure them, they were even better off than the control groups. So the v- very first hint of efficacy, agency, and mastery was that traumatic events that you can do something about are actually energizing.
- CWChris Williamson
What was the arc from learned helplessness to learned hopefulness then? Because we spend all-- you spend all of this time doing this research, finding something that sounds very exciting and gets taken on by the field for it to then need to basically do a U-turn.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Well, it was something I was trying to sweep under the rug. But after doing m-more than 10 years of research with people and animals, when I gave people and animals events they couldn't control, they became passive. But only five out of eight on average became passive. One-third of them I couldn't make helpless. Uh, so, uh, there's a s-big effect to look at. I mean, uh, just not moving and doing anything. But importantly, uh, three out of every eight people, three out of every eight animals didn't become helpless. I tried to sweep that under the rug, and finally it became interesting to me. What was it about some people and some animals that made you resilient, resistant to helplessness? Uh, well, that took another 10 years to find out, and basically the key to that seemed to be optimism and pessimism. So what we developed, uh, was a way of measuring by questionnaire optimism and pessimism. So, uh, pessimistic people, when we gave them questions like, uh, uh, you fail a, a mathematics examination, pessimistic people say, "It's me, it's gonna last forever, and it's gonna undermine everything I do." So they say, "I'm stupid." And the problem with saying, "I'm stupid," it's a very pessimistic explanation. Stupidity lasts and lasts. It hurts you in many circumstances, and it's something about you. Uh, but we found that optimists when they failed examinations said things like, "I had a hangover. I didn't try hard enough." Now notice a hangover, unlike being stupid, is temporary. It, uh, doesn't mean the next time you have an exam you're gonna fail it. Uh, so, uh, hangovers and not trying hard enough are optimistic. So having developed first questionnaires, uh, and then ways of looking at verbatim speech for optimism and pessimism, we then went back and asked, "Well, who, who didn't become helpless?" And it turned out it was the optimists who didn't become helpless. And, uh, that led me in my arc from thinking about the dangers of, "It's me, it's gonna last forever, it's gonna undermine everything I do," to the virtues of thinking, "It's temporary. It's just this one situation, and I can do something about it." So that led me from believing I was working on pessimism and depression and helplessness to realizing, hey, uh, I was working on optimism and hope and agency.
- 9:24 – 17:50
The Epiphany That Changed Martin’s Career
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
So that was the, the, uh, uh, second big arc in my career. Uh, I'll tell you about the third one, uh, which had to do with, uh, uh, bringing this to scale. Uh, uh, when I turned, uh, 50, I decided I was gonna run for president of the American Psychological Association. I hadn't been president of anything since the ninth grade, and I wasn't a very good president of the ninth grade. And, uh, uh, so I put my name in the ring, and I was told by everyone I'd be defeated, and I campaigned for it, and, uh, I won by the largest vote in the modern history of, uh, of American psychology. But that led me with a problem, and the problem was that, uh, presidents are supposed to have themes, initiatives, and, uh, I didn't know what mine would be. And it was an epiphany that happened to me that, uh, gave me my initiative and changed my work from being about misery to being about wellbeing.
- CWChris Williamson
I suppose it might seem strange to a lot of people in the modern world that psychology wasn't particularly worried about how to make people's lives better, but that for a long time it was preoccupied with why are people's lives bad. It wasn't really focused on improving. It was more focused on diagnosing problems.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
It got paid for doing that.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
And so the crucial event for modern psychology occurred right after World War II when something called the National Institute of Mental Health was opened and gave money to psychologists. And it gave money to psychologists not for making people happy, but for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, treating depression, treating anxiety, and the like. And, uh, 30 years later, the American Psychiatric Association published its diagnostic manual, and, uh, reimbursement for psychotherapists was for treating depression, anxiety, alcoholism, schizophrenia, panic. You didn't get paid for making people happier. And so, uh, psychology followed the money essentially, both in getting grants and in treating people at the expense of asking the question, "Hey, uh-" Can people flourish? Is there something more to life than the absence of being miserable? And, uh, that's what greeted me as president of the American Psychological Association. And, uh, the following thing happened to me which, uh, changed my mind about psychology and gave me the theme of, uh, my work and then the next 30 years of my life. And, uh, what it was, Chris, I was, uh, uh, thinking about the question of what would my initiative be, and, uh, I was in the g- I, I'm a gardener, and I was in my garden with my five-year-old daughter, uh, Nicole. She had turned five about two weeks before. And we're weeding together, and I'm having the usual miserable time pulling weeds. But Nikki is running around, dancing, throwing weeds in the air, singing. And I, I shouted at her. I said, "Nikki, get to work. We're weeding." And, uh, Nikki looked at me. She walked away. She came back and said, uh, "Daddy, can I talk to you?" I said, "Yeah. What is it, Nikki?" She said, [chuckles] said, "Daddy, do, do you remember before my fifth birthday that I was a whiner? That I whined all the time?" I said, "Yeah. Yeah, you were a little horror." Uh, "Well, have you noticed, Daddy, since my fifth birthday two weeks ago, I haven't whined once?" I said, "Oh, yeah, you haven't, have you?" She said, "Well, Daddy, on my fifth birthday, I decided I wasn't gonna whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I've ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch." This really happened, Chris. And, uh, in that moment, I realized, uh, a- and I call it an epiphany because it all happened in an instant. I realized three basic things about myself, about being a parent, and about psychology. So the first was about myself. I was indeed a grouch. Uh, and indeed, I was proud of being a grouch. Uh, I had that critical intelligence that made me see right to the heart of what everything that was wrong. So I was really good at pointing out what was wrong.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
It occurred to me for the first time maybe some of the success I had in life was not because I was such a grouch and such a negative person, uh, uh, but because of something else, uh, something positive, uh, and that perhaps there were virtues in not being a grouch, and maybe being grouch got in the way.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
That was the first thing I realized. The second thing was w- what my job as a teacher or as a parent was. So my view of being a parent was your job was to find out everything your kid did wrong and correct it. And somehow if you corrected all the bad things that Nikki did, you'd get an exemplary child. Well, it occurred to me that was nonsense. W- where you got was to zero, and that for Nikki to be a, a... to grow, we had to find out what she was good at, like talking to an adult, which she had just done, reinforcing it, and helping her to live her life, not correcting her errors, but capitalizing what she was good at. And the third big thing I realized was that psychology was half-baked. It was baked on misery, suffering, divorce, panic, and there was no psychology of flourishing, of happiness, of well-being. So I found my initiative there, and it was to create something which we've gone on to call positive psychology, which investigates not correcting your errors, but finding what your strengths are and living around your strengths. Uh, so that, that was the third major, uh, change in the arc that went from helplessness to pessimism to positive psychology.
- CWChris Williamson
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- 17:50 – 27:50
Can You Train Your Brain to Be Optimistic?
- CWChris Williamson
How much have you come to believe people can train themselves into optimism, train themselves into agency? How much are they constrained by their predisposition or their set point?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Uh, i- indeed, uh, uh, the great body of the work I've done was on the question: Can you change? Uh, can you stop being a pessimist? Can you stop being a tic-- a cat-a catastrophizer? Uh, uh, can you come out of hopelessness and helplessness? So, uh, a great deal of my work has been on can we change? Uh, the answer is yes, but, uh, uh, let me, let me tell you some of the techniques. And when I talk techniques here, these are not armchair techniques. These are things that we've now done with hundreds, and in many cases, thousands of people, and we look at them across time. Uh, so, uh, let's take pessimism, uh, seeing the worst side of everything. Uh, well, pessimism comes quite naturally. Uh, we are the creatures of ancestors who lived through the ice ages, and those of our ancestors who said, "It's a beautiful day in Pasadena today. I'll bet tomorrow would be beautiful," got crushed by the ice. And we inherited a brain that, uh, biased toward catastrophization and automatic thoughts about the worst. Uh, so being negative, being a pessimist comes naturally. What does not come naturally and needs learning is being an optimist. So let me give you some examples of the kinds of things that we do. Um, the first thing we do is we put people in touch with, uh, the most pessimistic things they say to themselves. Uh, and, uh, so for example, uh, before this show last night, I-- by the way, I am still a pessimist, but I've learned optimism. I wake up Chris at four in the morning thinking, "Gee, in twelve hours, I'm gonna face someone who is reputed to be a really difficult interview." Uh, said, "Geez, I'm eighty-four years old. Uh, uh, Chris is in his thirties or forties. Uh, he probably knows the literature better than I do, and I'm, I'm not quick anymore." Okay, so I hear that voice, and it's saying, you know, "Marty, you're over the hill. Uh, you, you can't, you can't face Chris Williamson." Uh, but I have learned to be, uh, an active disputer, realistically, of my most catastrophic thoughts. So at four in the morning, uh, I said, "Hey, wait a minute. Uh, I did an interview last week with someone like Chris." Uh, and again, I thought it-- I can't do it at all, and it was super. And, uh, well, I was only eighty-three then, and I'm eighty-four now. Uh, I basically, with realistic arguments, treated the voice that said to me, "Seligman, you're over the hill," as if it was a rival for my job or my wife, uh, whose mission in life was to make me miserable and to argue against it, uh, is as with realistic evidence. Uh, uh, uh, and that, uh, when you learn to become a good disputer of automatic thoughts, uh, pessimism changes to optimism, uh, and it's, uh, fun. And in fact, when we do experiments, uh, on this, uh, six months later, people are more optimistic, less depressed, less anxious. Second technique, I'll just limit it to two now, but I could go on for the rest of our show about how to change from being an optimist to a pessimist. And part of the reason for wanting to talk about the book Agency is I'd like people to read about this as well. Here's something I've done with, uh, forty thousand drill sergeants in the United States Army. So, uh, during the Iraq War, uh, the United States Army came to me, said, "Post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide. What does positive psychology say about that?" And so, uh, uh, basically, the Army commissioned me, uh, to teach the drill sergeants to teach positive psychology to, uh, one million, uh, men and women in the United States Army. So here's a technique that, uh, uh, works very well, uh, and I'll modify it, uh, not for the Army, but for, for the rest of us. Uh, it's called putting it in perspective. Uh, noon on Friday, you get an email from your manager that says, "Come see me at four o'clock." What do you think? "Oh my God, I'm gonna be fired. She's read my memo about the... Ugh, it's all over." And, and naturally, we're attracted to that. Uh, now, we're catastrophizers for Pleistocene reasons. What can you do about being a catastrophizer? So here's what we do. First, uh, we have people imagine the very worst that could happen at four in the afternoon. They get into it. She's gonna, uh, take me apart, and I'm gonna be fired. Okay, great. Then we say, "Okay, that's the worst that can happen. Now, what's the best thing that could happen at f- 4:00 in the afternoon?" And she'll say, uh, she's read my memo on the marketing campaign. She thinks it's wonderful, and she's calling me in to give me a raise and promote me. "Okay, great. Now, what's the most likely outcome? Uh, what's in between and most likely and most realistic?" "Well, she's probably read my memo on the marketing campaign. She likes it. She thinks the budget is much too high, and she's gonna ask me to cut the budget." "Great. What should you... What can you do now to prepare for the 4:00 interview?" So putting in perspective is, uh, a second of about 15 different exercises that change pessimism into optimism, that change helplessness into agency.
- CWChris Williamson
I don't know. I don't know. That to me, the, the predisposition that we have, the, uh, set point of everything being so negative, it seems so natural. That email that you get at 4:00, and you think, "That's it. My job's done. I, I, I'm gonna be kicked out. I'm gonna be homeless on the street, and I'm gonna live under a bridge, and I'm gonna have a gluten intolerance and a, and a club foot, and it's all gonna go horrendously." And, uh, that's-- that feels so natural to us, right? It, it, it, it... It's literally as natural as breathing for a lot of people.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
But what, what we have on our sides is realism, a realistic argument. So it's very important when you put something in perspective or you argue against a thought like, "How could I ever have a good interview with Chris Williamson?" that it be realistic, and you marshal evidence that's realistic. So I have a club foot. I'm homeless. I'm gonna wind, wind, wind up, uh, uh, uh, living under a bridge, is indeed like the most catastrophic thoughts we have. But when you learn to become a good disputer as opposed to just treating your most catastrophic thoughts as if they were true, empirically, it turns out people learn this. They learn it well. They become better at it. It r- alleviates, uh, depression and anxiety and increases, uh, flourishing. So in, in advance, I didn't know if it would work, but it turns out, uh, uh, th- there's something called meta-analysis in which you go over the entire literature instead of just doing one study. Well, it turns out there are, last count, uh, 335 studies of these tech-- positive techniques on depression, well-being, and anxiety. What you do is you put the whole literature together, and the literature basically shows, uh, that, uh, contrary to what you and I might have thought at the beginning, that there are a set of, uh, more than a dozen techniques that increase optimism and increase human agency.
- 27:50 – 29:16
Optimism vs Agency: What’s the Difference?
- CWChris Williamson
What's the relationship between optimism and agency? Agency, your new obsession. This is the new book. How is it different from optimism? Uh, how have you come to conceptualize that?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Yeah. So for me, agency has three components, and optimism is the second one. Uh, the first component is efficacy. So efficacy is the belief that you can accomplish your goals in the here and now. Secondly, optimism is the belief that you can accomplish your goals into the far future. Third, imagination is the range of goals that you can accomplish into the far future. So to be agentic, you have to be efficacious, believing you can accomplish the goals now. Optimistic, I can do them into the future. And imaginative, there's a large range of goals that I can accomplish. And the reason that expanded view of agency beyond just optimism matters is at the heart of the new book, and that's human history and when does human innovation occur. And that's in the presence of full-blown
- 29:16 – 32:04
Is Agency the Biggest Predictor of Success?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
agency.
- CWChris Williamson
How predictive is agency in someone's life outcomes, do you think?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Our best evidence, uh, is, uh, comes across cultures and across time and place. So, uh, what, uh, the book Agency is about, it takes the human condition from hunter-gatherers through agriculture, through Homer, uh, uh, through the Greeks, through the Middle Ages, uh, through the Reformation and the Renaissance, and through modern times, and asks the question: when do human beings flourish, and when do they stagnate? So in the laboratory, uh, I devoted my life to showing that these three components, when they're present, uh, produce more happiness and less depression. But the challenge of the book was to go back through history and ask the question, there are long periods in which people stagnate. So the Middle Ages is a very interesting example. And there are other periods in which, uh, humans flourish. And innovation flourishes. So the hypothesis that I was dealing with was, is this, uh, caused in the same way it is in the laboratory? So we know from the laboratory when we make people more optimistic, more efficacious, and more imaginative, they do better, less depressed, uh, flourish. So the challenge was to go back through history and ask the question, what is the role of agency in human progress and human innovation?
- CWChris Williamson
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- 32:04 – 38:55
How Our Understanding of Agency Has Evolved
- CWChris Williamson
How have you come to learn about the relationship between humans and their belief in agency? How has that changed over time?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
So let me do this at least by example. Uh, uh, if you look at, uh, just Homer, uh, the Greeks, uh, if you look at the older Homer, which is the Iliad, in which, uh, Achilles doesn't do it, but the gods get Achilles to do it. Achilles is not agentic. Uh, 100 years later, you've got Odysseus, the clever, wily, agentic person. And if you track across Greece, uh, by looking at the texts from Homer, uh, through the 6th century, through the Tragedians, uh, through the Golden Age, what you see is a mapping of in- increased belief in agency with increased progress in five different realms of life. Uh, the first is thought. Uh, the second is, uh, the arts, literature, sculpture. Uh, the third is, uh, technology, medicine, and science. The fourth is the quality of life, uh, death rate. And the fifth is political freedom, that if, if we take just the Greek period, you get basically a perfect mapping between increases in the belief in agency coded for by the philosophical writings and increase in progress, uh, in all five of those domains. Let me turn it on its, uh, side. Uh, this progress continues through about, uh, 350 AD. Uh, and something very important happens in 383 AD, and that's Saint Augustine. So Christian philosophers are becoming more and more agentic. More and more you can be holy, and what you choose to do in life when you die, God is gonna judge you for. And, uh, if you do good things and avoid the bad things, you're gonna go to heaven. That's the trajectory of Christian thought, continuing Greek thought. Uh, Augustine comes along in 383 and renounces human agency, declares that if you ever resist temptation, if you ever do good things, if you ever avoid bad things, it's because God arbitrarily injected you with grace.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
This becomes church doctrine for the next almost thousand years. And what you get by all five criteria is stagnation and regression in thought, in political freedom, in quality of life, in technology and science, and in the arts. Uh, and so if you map human progress against what the philosophical and r- religious beliefs are of the time, uh, when they're highly agentic, that's when humans flourish, just as they do individually, uh, now from laboratory evidence. Conversely, i- if the religious and philosophical doctrines are pessimistic, non-agentic, God does it, it's all chance, it's all determined, that's when you get stagnation.
- CWChris Williamson
Does that suggest that modern religious believers might be less agentic than if they were the same person was an atheist?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Um, it depends on the flavor of the religion. So very interestingly enough, let's take modern Protestantism. Uh, uh, the origins of modern Protestantism are Luther and Calvin. And contrary to, uh, what you might have learned in school about the Reformation Uh, Luther and Calvin out-Augustinian Augustine. That is, they believe in utter depravity, predetermination, and the absence of freedom of the will. And indeed, in, uh, uh, fifteen twenty-four, the leading Catholic theologian, Erasmus, writes a major article called On the Freedom of the Will, and it basically says we're like toddlers. We fall down, God lifts us up, but we have to have motive power of our own to be lifted up. Luther responds a year later saying, "That's sheer nonsense. We are predetermined. Uh, anytime we do s-- anytime we're lifted up, it's only because God lifts us up." So that's the origin of modern Protestantism. Catholicism is becoming highly agentic. Uh, Luther and Calvin kill that. Uh, but starting in the, uh, seventeenth and eighteenth century, Protestantism changes. Uh, it adopts the notion that we can participate in our own grace, that we can actually choose to do things that get us into heaven. And this is now, uh, what, uh, i-if... It's very hard to find a Lutheran or a Calvinist who believes anything like utter depravity, lack of freedom of the will, and predetermination. So Protestantism of the original Calvin-Luther form, uh, kills progress in all five realms, and indeed, that's the evidence from what goes on. Uh, uh, Protestantism evolves from this fundamentalist view and in many ways feeds, uh, the highly agentic, uh, uh, American society and European society that we have today and feeds greatly, uh, the last two hundred years of unprecedented progress.
- 38:55 – 42:22
How to Inject Agency into Your Life
- CWChris Williamson
Bringing it into the modern world, how do you advise people to construct more agency in their life?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Well, let's take the things one at a time. So, um, uh, the first aspect of agency is efficacy, and that is, how do you get better at undoing your beliefs that you can't succeed? Uh, and indeed, uh, half an hour ago, Chris, you and I went over, uh, a variety of techniques for, uh, coming to believe that you have more efficacy. Uh, the best techniques for efficacy, and this all comes from a modern psychological laboratory, is, uh, actually doing things and having them succeed. And sometimes we have to break if, uh, if you're feeling helpless and hopeless and you, uh, you're looking at your apartment and it's filthy, and you get out of bed, "What am I gonna do?" Say, go to your sink and wash one cup. Okay? Turns out if you wash one cup, that leads to a cascade of mastery experiences. So if you-
- CWChris Williamson
One coffee cup
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
... you go on to two cups, and then you go on to cleaning up. And it turns out when you do graded task assignment with people, uh, you, uh, systematically increase efficacy. Uh, for increasing optimism, we talked about arguing against your most catastrophic thoughts and, uh, putting in things in perspective. And the third and the thing I think we know the... So teaching efficacy and optimism, there are literally, uh, a thousand studies that have demonstrated you can do it, and you can be more efficacious and more optimistic and happier tomorrow than you are today. Uh, I'm very interested in the question, can you, the third one, can you be more imaginative and more creative? And indeed, a lot of my work today with AI is exactly that question, and I'll, I'll tell you about that in a bit. But, uh, in spite of the fact if you go to Barnes & Noble, you're gonna find, uh, several bookshelves called Creativity and Imagination. No one's really succeeded at teaching, uh, more imagination and more creativity. So we've got brainstorming, we've got taking a shower, taking a break, uh, but none of these things are enormously effective. And it really wasn't till I came across, uh, Claude and, uh, uh, ChatGPT that I've seen a breakthrough about human creativity and the notion that we can become more imaginative. And, uh, a lot of my work and thinking now is about, uh, the joint use of AI and human imagination to produce an unprecedented level of creativity.
- 42:22 – 54:41
Is AI the Key to Unlocking Human Creativity?
- CWChris Williamson
It's interesting. I think a lot of people would assume that AI would be sapping agency, you know, outsourcing thinking, outsourcing the, the, uh, feeling of being needed, of being useful in the world.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Yes, and i-indeed, uh, the doomsayers have the floor at the moment, and they're telling us all the terrible things. Uh- That AI might do to remove human agency, make us less human and the like. If AI had come along, uh, before Nikki 30 years ago, I would have joined them in as a doomsayer. I'd have been great at seeing all the hypotheticals that could go wrong. Uh, but AI has done exactly the opposite in my life. And, uh, let me take you through, um, my story about AI and why I've come to believe A-AI is the best companion and supplementer of human agency of my lifetime. So first, first story. Uh, I have two four-year-old grandsons, uh, Denny and Max. I am crazy about them. Uh, but the problem is I'm 80 years older than they are. Uh, they walk faster than I can run. I can't throw a football around with them.
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Uh, and the sad thing, starting at age two, I noticed that I was becoming invisible to them. So what could I do? So I went to Claude and I said, "Claude," Anthropic's, uh, AI, uh, "help me write stories in which Max and Denny are the heroes." So I said, uh, "Chapter one, Max and Denny see the haunted lighthouse in Stone Harbor." Well, basically, we're now on, uh, book six, chapter 24. This is where Max and Denny tour the solar system together. And basically, with a combination of Claude helping me write stories and, uh, ChatGPT giving wonderful oil paintings of Max and Denny from their photographs flying on Pegasus and the like, uh, the kids can't wait to see me anymore. I'm visible. They want to see me. They want the story. So part one, the warm-up is, uh, uh, even though I'm very cognizant of the doomsayers saying we're going to be dehumanized, uh, I've got more love in my life by a lot by the two, the two people I most care about in the world because of AI.
- SPSpeaker
Mm.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
That was part one, human emotion. Big supplement for me. But the big issue is creativity. Um, is AI creative? Uh, and the answer is, uh, for me, there are two views of what the number is in creativity. So the view that most of you probably hold is creativity comes out of the brow of Zeus. So it's one person, Michelangelo, a genius, sculpting out of this piece of marble, David. Well, I don't think AI is creative in the, uh, sense of Michelangelo. But it-- the second theory of creativity, which is the one that I think is most plausible, is that the number is two. It's the Wright brothers going back and forth. It's, uh, McCartney and Lennon, Kahneman and Tversky, Balanchine and Farrell. Uh, one of the-- Orville says this, Wilbur says, "No, that's wrong." They go back and forth, and out of that, uh, they not only figure out how birds fly, but much more importantly, they create the first, uh, airplane. This is the sense in which AI is massively creative. And I, uh, let me give you two examples of this. Um, I've been working on this book of agency for seven years. It has been a lot of work. Uh, chapter eight is about China. So, uh, I had looked at, uh, the West and found that the more agentic people were, uh, the more progress there was. But is this something peculiar about individualism and the West? And so, uh, I looked at ancient China with my, uh, Chinese colleagues from Beijing. And, uh, i-indeed, we found, we tracked, uh, Chinese, uh, agentic thought from the, the Shang dynasty, uh, to modern times. Uh, and we basically found that when there was good balance between individual and collective agency, that's when you get progress in China. That's chapter eight. Chapter nine is Israel, the Hebrews. And what I had done in chapter nine is I look at agency and the Torah. Well, the five books of Moses are not very agentic. Uh, uh, God basically does the heavy lifting here. Uh, the Hebrews complain and go along with him. Uh, but, uh, starting after the Torah in the writings of the prophets, that's when you get human agency as opposed to God's agency. That's chapter nine. I turned this into my editor. She says, "Marty, there, there's no transition between chapter eight and chapter nine." I've been staring at these, uh- chapters at that point for five and a half years, and I couldn't see a transition. So I go to Claude and say, "Hey, Claude, read chapter eight and read chapter nine and write me a transition." Whoosh. At the same time, across the globe, as the Chinese were struggling with the question of the relationship of individual agency to the state, the Israelites were wrestling with a more basic question, the relationship of human agency to God. Well, that turns out to be exactly right. I couldn't see it, but Claude could see it. Here's the big thing that Claude did creatively. So that's just one example of, of, of some-- maybe a very clever critic could have come up with that, but Claude did and I didn't. But here's something Claude and, uh, uh, ChatGPT did that with my going back and forth with them that no human being could possibly have done. And, uh, they've solved something I call the mystery of the Axial Age. Now, the Axial Age is if you look at a thousand BCE at Greece, China, uh, the Hebrews, Persia, and India, on terms of progress, all of these cultures are backwater villages, no coinage. You na- take any criteria of progress, nothing is happening in a thousand BCE. Five hundred BCE, five hundred years later, all five of these civilizations are booming. They're inventing things, coinage, art, tragedy, Buddha, Confucius. What happened in the five hundred years? What happened to-- what happened in five cultures across the Axial Age that enabled innovation? Okay, that's, uh, called the great mystery of the Axial Age. Something big happened to human beings between a thousand and five hundred BCE. Okay. I had the hypothesis that it was words, that in a thousand BCE, none of these five cultures had words for human agency. And then by five hundred BCE, uh, they've got words that describe I can do it, optimism, efficacy, and imagination. So that's the hypothesis.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh-huh.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
That's Orville saying it's words that did it. So I went to Wilbur, uh, uh, in this case Claude and again with ChatGPT, and I said, "Look, is this true? Could it be there were no words for human agency in a thousand? And then suddenly this huge panoply of agency words have developed?" And so both of them went through. No human being-- There's barely a field called ancient philology anymore, but there is no human being who is fluent in Aramaic, Hebrew, uh, uh, Sanskrit, ancient Chinese, uh, and, uh, uh, changes in Persian language, uh, and ancient Greek and, uh, Golden Age Greek. But they are. You know, they're ancient philologists. And, uh, after a day of going back and forth, they basically demonstrate that the words don't exist and that by five hundred BCE, all five of these cultures have discovered words about human agency. And when we have words, then we can do things. So if you take a term like, uh, sexual harassment, uh, people were always being harassed sexually in the office from time immemorial, but we didn't have the word until about nineteen seventy-five. Once we got the words, we got lawsuits and mandatory training-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
... uh, and the Me Too movement and the like because the words came into being. And so when you've got words for agency, that enhances human agency.
- CWChris Williamson
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- 54:41 – 57:08
Does Our Environment Shape Our Understanding of Agency?
- CWChris Williamson
Does that have an implication that because humans learn through language as well as action, that the infectiousness of the culture that we put ourselves into, the sort of content that we expose ourselves to, the things we read, the friends that we're around, the stories that we hear, that has a unique contribution to our learned hopefulness or helplessness-
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Mm
- CWChris Williamson
... and our ability to understand agency. It feels like we're very permeable, uh, in that way for what narrative and story and, and, um, local influence can be on our, uh, belief in agency and therefore our ability to enact agency.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Yeah. Ab- absolutely. So, uh, here's a example from the Bible, from Hebrew. Uh, in, uh, uh, the Torah, um, I'll go beyond the Torah. After the Torah, the word teshuvah occurs for the first time. Teshuvah means repentance, that you can redo your life. It doesn't occur in the Torah. Once you have a notion like repentance, that tells you there are agentic things that you can do to repent, to make life better. And as far as we can see, that doesn't exist before. Uh, uh, in Greek, we get the word weakness of the will. Well, before that word, what you have is a civilization in which the gods are telling you what to do. When you get weakness of the will, that has a concept of the human being as having a will, and when they go astray, it's something they're responsible for. So our entire notions of moral responsibility did, did not exist, uh, in these five cultures a thousand years ago. But once you get words that are about will and freedom and-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
... choice and repentance, then you get a completely different view of what the human being is and that the human being can make life
- 57:08 – 1:02:04
Were Humans Conscious 3000 Years Ago?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
better.
- CWChris Williamson
How differently do you think a human mind would have experienced reality 1,200 years ago than me or you or anybody listening does now?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Well, it's very hard to know, and the evidence that we have is just through what's written. But, uh, uh, one major hypothesis, uh, this is of Julian Jaynes' wonderful book called "The Bicameral Mind," about 50 years ago. He was a teacher of mine. Uh, uh, Jaynes argued that consciousness itself, this, uh, ind- this thing inside of us that's looking at this landscape of reality and has agency, isn't there until the Bronze Age. And so for Jaynes, the transition in Homer from, uh, Achilles being a puppet of the gods to, uh, Odysseus being this masterful, cunning, wily person is a huge change in consciousness. So the extreme people here believe that consciousness as we know it is barely present 3,000 years ago, but by 2,500 years ago, it's be- it's, it's across the globe. And indeed, uh, the writings we have, uh, indicate that. So if you look across different cultures, uh, there aren't psychological words in 1000 BCE, in, uh-- and before, uh, writing occurs for the first time 3500 BCE. Uh, there are no psychology, no consciousness words.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Uh, there are lists and there are words about the gods and the idols. But by 500 BCE, uh, consciousness emerges. So the most radical hypothesis is that we weren't conscious, uh, 3,000 years ago and something new happened. Uh, consciousness as we know it now, uh, introspection develops for the first time.
- CWChris Williamson
And is it your-
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
That's the radical view.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. And is it w- w- the mechanism for that would be this kind of self-belief, this language, this cultural technology that allowed us to reflect inward? 'Cause the, uh, I think I'm right in saying "The Bicameral Mind," the whole point of that was that, uh, the inner words that we have inside of ourselves were not seen to be self-generated. They were, uh, spoken from above or below, I guess. They were, they were from God.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Well, in- indeed, Jaynes' hypothesis is, uh, uh, quasi-neurological. It's that 3,000 years ago, uh, the gods are talking to us, uh, from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Uh, and that as the corpus callosum develops-
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, this is a-
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... this is a structural argument. This isn't-
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... a, a phenomenological-
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
So Jaynes, Jaynes' argument is structural.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
My view is that that's, uh, uh, neuromythology. I think it's more like population pressures. So I think, uh, 3,000 years ago, you could get along in your little tribe by listening to the gods and obeying your parents. But in all five of these cultures, uh, there is Upheaval, the Doric invasion, uh, the, the raiders from across the sea. And when there's upheaval and you meet new people, in order to survive, uh, listening to the gods of your fathers and obeying them doesn't get along very well with these people. You have to be able to think about what they might be thinking. You have to leave listening to the gods and form, uh, other minds. And so from my point of view, what social upheaval does is it drives consciousness. Consciousness, in particular, what's called theory of mind, being able to intuit what the other person might be thinking is what drives the change in consciousness, uh, between 1000 and 500. And more specifically for me, it's a-- you get words that do
- 1:02:04 – 1:04:39
Why Agency is Double-Edged
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
this.
- CWChris Williamson
Eh, given that I think almost everybody loves the idea of more freedom, more independence, more agency, if they know that word, is more agency always a better thing for humans? Is there such a thing as having too much agency?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Uh, I think, uh, agency is double-edged. And, uh, so, uh, most of what I do in the book is to take the three components, efficacy, optimism, and imagination, and celebrate them and talk about the progress that it brings. But each of these has a shadow side. So efficacy is, uh, our, uh, ability to accomplish goals. But the fact that we can make an atom bomb doesn't mean we should. Uh, it doesn't tell us, uh, uh-- So we, we develop, uh, the steam engine, and, uh, this has a lot of costs in pollution and the like. So efficacy ha-had-- being able to do something doesn't tell us we should do it. Being optimistic about things, uh, doesn't mean they're gonna turn out well. Uh, it leads to, uh, uh, foolish decisions, but it also leads to blaming the victim. And that is if you think that, uh, good character and smarts, uh, produce, uh, wealth, technology, freedom, and you find people who are poor and oppressed, uh, you might blame them for not doing this. So that's the shadow side of optimism. And the shadow side of imagination is, uh, uh, we've now imagined, to my mind, uh, the greatest technological development in my lifetime, which is AI. Uh, but we don't know what it's gonna do. Uh, uh, so, uh, having efficacy, optimism, and imagination produces progress. Uh, but what we need is a wise and moral sense about efficacy, optimism, and imagination. And, uh, that's not something that we can guarantee.
- 1:04:39 – 1:13:48
Are Optimists More Successful?
- CWChris Williamson
What was that analysis you did about Trump and Harris, about that debate?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Um, uh, I've been quite interested in the relationship between optimism and winning elections. And, uh, so I had done quite a bit of work on coding, uh, optimism over the last, uh, since Grover Cleveland actually till now, and, uh, looking at, uh, optimism in the nomination acceptance speeches, rating optimism. And in more than half the elections, the more optimistic candidate wins. Uh, so Trump and Harris presented a very interesting contrast. Uh, everyone thought that Trump was a doomsayer and a pessimist. And indeed, in the following sense, he was, and that he talks about a lot more bad events than Harris does. But, uh, I haven't been interested in the number of bad events. The more bad events, the darker you sound. But, uh, uh, in the nomination acceptance speeches, Trump and Harris, uh, are about equally optimistic and pessimistic. So that would've said to me, "Well, it was a dead heat." But for the first time, I decided to track all the press conferences going right, right through, uh, October, uh, uh, 31st. Uh, I had never done that before. And starting around September 15th, Trump gets more and more optimistic, uh, darker, but the causes for Trump are things he can change. He's gonna change them. Uh, his attributions are optimistic. And by election day, uh, Trump is, uh, considerably more optimistic than Harris. Uh, we put our data in a sealed envelope. We sent it to reporters and the like. And I think we were the only pundits who predicted a substantial Trump victory
- CWChris Williamson
Wow. That is fascinating. I mean, it goes to show how alluring optimism is. You know, not, not just functionally useful inside of your own life, but it's a, it's a kind of an attractor, I suppose, to sort of bring people in. What, um-
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
No, uh, Chris, misery loves company, but company does not like misery. Uh, and it turns out if you do the following experiment, uh, I give you, uh... I'm gonna make you make cold calls, and you're gonna read a script either in a very depressive tone or in a real chirpy tone.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
And you just wait till people hang up on you. You hang up on depressed people much faster, uh, than chirpy people.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Uh, in general, optimism is a, uh, attractive characteristic.
- CWChris Williamson
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- MSDr. Martin Seligman
No. Tell me about that.
- CWChris Williamson
Resting, resting bitch face is... I, I have a little bit of resting bitch face. Um, it is a passive face when you're not doing anything. You're just sat across the far side of the room. Maybe you're thinking about something, and some people across the far side of the room might look like this. They're just sort of ambiently happy. Other people might look a little bit more like this. And for the people that are listening, I smiled, and then I did my normal face. My normal face is what's referred to as a resting bitch face. It's someone who's, like, just-
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Ooh. Is-
- CWChris Williamson
... minus 10% happy
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
... is there a literature on, is there a literature on whether or not people like the resting bitch face?
- CWChris Williamson
I don't know. This is, this, this could be the next book, actually, um, for you.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
I'm gonna do it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Uh, like, so-
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
It's called Resting Bitch Face
- CWChris Williamson
... Resting Bitch Face. Uh, who knew that I was gonna teach maybe the greatest positive psychologist of all time about resting bitch face today? Um, I-- the reason, the reason I bring it up is resting, uh, resting smiling face or resting bitch face is kind of the same as what you're talking about with the script. It's the same person, but just this sense of a demeanor. It's the packaging that everything's being wrapped in. Like, somebody can say the same script, but if it's a little bit more bouncy... Like, we do, um, ad reads for the podcast, right? And sometimes when I have to do a, a big chunk of them in a single day, I'm not super f- I've been tired, maybe w- I had a hard day or something. And the difference in how when I watch them back, how happy I am to watch my own reads because in one of them I felt really positive about it, and the other I s- I'm saying the same words, but I'm not saying them with the same level of bubbliness and bounciness. Anyway, my point here is resting bitch face is someone wrapping the same face, the same person, the same demeanor in just a slightly different expression, and I think that, uh, that can change how people interpret who you are.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Well, I've written it down, and I'm gonna work on it. Uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Who knew?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
... I, there, there is literature on fertility and optimism, that optimistic people, uh, have more children. Uh, that's something about attractiveness. Uh-
- CWChris Williamson
That's interesting. I mean, certainly we like to be around people that are positive some, for the most part. I also wonder whether part of the optimism is sh- those people just assume that they can deal with more children. They think, "I've had one. Ah, two will be fine. Three will be fine. Four will be fine." As opposed to maybe some people that are a little bit more uncertain about the future. They might not be, they might not be so, so conscious about whether they could deal with it. I guess I, I'm kind of interested-
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
I, I, I'm just reminded, Chris, of something that happened recently in my life about-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
... uh, uh, well-being and positivity. Uh, and this actually is an example of, uh, how even at, uh, my age you can change. So, you know, uh, uh, I'm a complainer, particularly at restaurants. And, uh, I had noticed when... You know, I, I'm serious about wine and food, and I had been noticing that when I took all my kids and grandkids and wife to good restaurants, that they would cringe whenever the wine was brought to me [chuckles] to taste because I would turn it down and criticize it. And I realized, uh, really for the first time in my life watching them cringe, uh, that if Mandy, my wife, who is a sunny, positive, uh, good resting face, in fact, uh, if she was complained as much as I did, I wouldn't wanna be married to her. And so about two years ago, I resolved after the most recent restaurant experience, uh, not to complain anymore at restaurants.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
And we, we tested it out, and, uh, about a week later, we all went to a restaurant and, uh, I ordered steak tartare, and the maître d' came over to me and said, "Oh, I'm sorry, professor, uh, the machine is broken A machine. You don't make steak tartare with a machine
- CWChris Williamson
With a machine, yeah
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
You shave, you shave the beef with a knife. I'll have the smoked salmon. Uh, so i- indeed, I've stopped, uh, uh... It's not the resting bitch face, although my resting face is frowny. But I've learned the cost of complaining, and I can break myself of complaining
- 1:13:48 – 1:15:04
What Actually Makes a Good Life?
- CWChris Williamson
I guess, uh, you know, after all of this time, you know, over half a century of studying human flourishing, what have you come to believe about what makes life worth living? What is a good life?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Well, uh, uh, two things, Chris, I'd say. The first is that, uh, having agency, uh, waking up in the morning and having things that you can master that you're optimistic about, uh, is crucial for, uh, well-being, happiness, and how long you live. Uh, and the second is the importance of living in the future as opposed to the past or the present. So I, I think, uh, the human species example is that we are creatures of the future, that more than half of our thinking is planning for the future.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Uh, and so I think it's very important to understand that we metabolize the past and the present in order to have a better future. So being agentic and being prospective are for me the two keys to human flourishing.
- 1:15:04 – 1:18:48
Martin’s Most Underrated Work
- CWChris Williamson
Across all of the papers that you've written, is a-- is there a best paper you wrote that you think didn't get anywhere near as much attention as it should have done?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
It's the very best paper I've ever written almost no one has read. Uh, I'm very interested in, in dreaming. Uh, and indeed, uh, about forty years ago, I wrote up my theory of dreaming, which I think really is right. It says dreams have three and only three components. One, visual hallucinations. Secondly, an emotional tone underneath it. And third, plot making by relating the successive visual hallucinations to the underlying emotion. Well, I think that explains dreaming. I think I nailed it. In fact, it's the only thing I've ever written which I didn't have doubts about.
- CWChris Williamson
Um-
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
So I sent it, I sent it to The Psychological Review, which is our major journal. And for two years the following thing went on. Uh, sixteen reviewers over the course of two years, uh, half of whom say, "This is the best article on dreaming I've ever seen," and half of them saying, "If you publish this, I'm canceling my subscription to The Psychological Review." So in fact, I think the only-- the best paper I've ever written, uh, uh, maybe a hundred people have read in a very-
- CWChris Williamson
Wow
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
... obscure journal.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, my favorite book of yours is What You Can Change and What You Can't, and maybe not quite as obscure. But that-- I, I, I took the, uh, behavioral genetics red pill. Robert Plomin came on the show, and I-I I really sort of tumbled down the rabbit hole of understanding predisposition and heritability and twin studies and, you know, Joyce Penneison came on the show, and I had lots of conversations about this stuff. And I think anyone that learns about the fact-- the building blocks of what makes you a predetermined or at least predisposed before you arrive, immediately you start to ask the question, "Well, how much should I try? And what areas am I going to be falling behind in, and what areas should I focus on?" And, uh, The Agency book's great, but What You Can Change and What You Can't, for me, was just so... Even if it is one of your more, uh, niche books, it, it was, uh, wonderful. Like really, really fantastic.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Um, I, I reread it recently. It must be twenty-five years old or so. I, I had written five editions of Abnormal Psychology, so every five years I had to revise the textbook with new discoveries. Well, there were almost none, and in fact what I said in, uh, the book What You Can Change and What You Can't, that's pretty much remained the same. So psychotherapy and drugs work decently well on some things and don't work at all on others. And it's very important for people to realize what is malleable and what is not, so you don't waste your money and effort on the stuff that's not changeable. In fact, there are lots of things in human life that are incorrigible and unchangeable, and there are a lot of other things which are malleable and correctable, and it's very important to know the difference.
- 1:18:48 – 1:19:34
Why Being Boring Is a Choice
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. One of your ambitions in life is to not be boring. Why is that?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
[chuckles] Uh, at, at age twenty-one when I decided to, uh, become a psychologist, I went to, uh, one of my professors, Peter Madison, and I told him I was gonna become s-- I was gonna go to graduate school in psychology rather than philosophy or become a professional bridge player. Those were my other two options. And Peter said, "Marty, uh, 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." And indeed, that's what I've chosen.
- 1:19:34 – 1:21:05
Where to Find Martin
- CWChris Williamson
So good. Martin Seligman, ladies and gentlemen. Martin, you rule. I think you're great. I love your work. Uh, uh, just a unbelievable contribution to pivoting the world of psychology. I'm so happy. Where should people go to keep up to date with everything that you've got going on?
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
I've never woken up in the morning more excited than about my work than now, and that's because there's something hugely new on the horizon, and that's AI. So in my field and in my life, AI changes everything. It's the most important technological development in my life, uh, and it's really the first time in my life I wished I was twenty-one again and not eighty-four.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow. Wow. Well, it's nice, you know, as a-- it's very popular and very trendy for people to push back against AI at the moment and, um, your learned optimism appears to be, uh, managing to countervail even the most, uh, negative of forces about how people feel about the, the forthcoming robot apocalypse. Martin, I appreciate you very much. Thank you so much for today.
- MSDr. Martin Seligman
Thank you, Chris. Good to meet you.
- CWChris Williamson
Good to meet you too. A quick note. Lots of people tell us that YouTube unsubscribes them from the channel even though they already pressed it. So just check down there and see if the subscribe button is pressed. You get access to episodes before anybody else if you do. Supports me and the show, helps me to bring you bigger and better guests, uh, and it makes me very happy. So just go and give it a tap for me. I thank you. [blows kiss]
Episode duration: 1:21:05
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