Speaker 1: All right, everybody in Canada, we have a pretty big announcement.
Speaker 1: We are finally going to do our first big, big
Speaker 1: tour of Canada. We're going to announce the dates in.
Speaker 2: The theaters in cities here first, and then we're going
Speaker 2: to give you all the ticket info. Okay, how does
Speaker 2: that sound?
Speaker 3: It sounds great, Chuck. Where are we going to go?
Speaker 4: First?
Speaker 1: On June twenty fifth, we're going to be in Montreal
Speaker 1: at the Olympia Des Montreal. The next night, on the
Speaker 1: twenty six we're going to be going to Ottawa the
Speaker 1: Hard Rock Live Ottawa and then on the twenty seventh,
Speaker 1: finish up in Toronto at Massey Hall.
Speaker 3: And then we're going to walk to the next shows.
Speaker 3: So it's going to take us a few weeks.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: On July twenty third, we're going to be in Vancouver
Speaker 1: at Queen Elizabeth Theater. Friday, the twenty fourth of July,
Speaker 1: we're going to be in Calgary at Jacksinger Concert Hall
Speaker 1: at Art Commons, and we're going to wind it up
Speaker 1: in Winnipeg on the twenty fifth at Burton Cummings Theater.
Speaker 3: That's awesome, So tickets go on sale two day. Everybody
Speaker 3: December sixteenth, starting at ten am Eastern time and going
Speaker 3: all the way to Friday, December nineteenth at ten am
Speaker 3: Local time. We're going to have an artist pre sale.
Speaker 3: You can buy your tickets early. Just go to stuff
Speaker 3: youshould Know dot com and click on the tour button
Speaker 3: and then click on your city and when you go
Speaker 3: to check out, use the promo code s YSK live.
Speaker 3: And if you miss all that, don't worry. Tickets go
Speaker 3: on general sale on Friday, December nineteenth at ten am
Speaker 3: Eastern time. And again you can get all of the
Speaker 3: tickets and info you need at stuff youshould Know dot
Speaker 3: com and we will see you this summer Canada.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and
Speaker 3: there's Charles w Chuck Brian. We're just gonna do a
Speaker 3: great job here today and Stuff you Should Know.
Speaker 4: Hi.
Speaker 2: Everybody feeling good, Chuck dealing great, lewis.
Speaker 3: Looking great?
Speaker 4: Lewis Uh?
Speaker 2: You want to hear something funny?
Speaker 3: I do? Oh you hear?
Speaker 1: That?
Speaker 3: Is that your new windows?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 2: That is new windows? What does that mean?
Speaker 1: That is we were not able to stay in our
Speaker 1: home this week because, as you know, because I've told
Speaker 1: you this, because we're getting our electric panel redone. So
Speaker 1: I was not able to print out my stuff as usual.
Speaker 1: And where we were staying, you know, at a friends.
Speaker 1: They allowed me to print, but all they had was
Speaker 1: card stock. So that is the sound of heavy duty research.
Speaker 3: Man, that's like half a tree right there.
Speaker 2: I know, I feel pretty bad, but god, it feels
Speaker 2: so good in my hand.
Speaker 3: Oh well, is this.
Speaker 1: Your new thing't? I could not justify that, but boy,
Speaker 1: it feels good. Maybe for the live shows, because you know,
Speaker 1: over the course of a tour, which is happening next year, everybody.
Speaker 3: Oh that's a good one. Yeah, we're going out on
Speaker 3: tour everyone soon, starting January, then April and then the
Speaker 3: summer for Canada.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: But yeah that you know how those that document gets
Speaker 1: a little tattered over time, so I might card stock it.
Speaker 3: I like that. I call that tour kisses.
Speaker 2: I thought that was something else, like after the end
Speaker 2: of the tour when we make out a little bit.
Speaker 3: We don't talk about that, all right, we don't have
Speaker 3: a name for that, No, Chuck, We're talking today, not
Speaker 3: about tour kisses of any variety, but about optimism and pessimism,
Speaker 3: and this one, yeah, I do too. This is Olivia
Speaker 3: helped us with this, And this is one of those
Speaker 3: ones where when you know it was I knew very
Speaker 3: little about what it actually is compared to what I
Speaker 3: thought I knew, and I love like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, same.
Speaker 3: Optimism and pessimism as pretty much everyone knows. Is this
Speaker 3: the idea that you have like a sunny disposition or
Speaker 3: maybe you're gloomy and eoorish.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was going back and reading some or quotes. Man,
Speaker 3: that was great. If you want to entertain yourself, just
Speaker 3: read AA Milne E or quotes and you'll be delighted.
Speaker 3: But the upshot of this is that that's not really
Speaker 3: the best description of optimism and pessimism.
Speaker 2: That may be your earliest upshot by the way.
Speaker 3: Oh is it? I need to break that.
Speaker 2: Record next time?
Speaker 3: Then yeah, I'll say hey, and welcome to the Upshot.
Speaker 1: If you ever go solo, that'd be great to Josh
Speaker 1: Clark only podcast The Upshot with Josh Clark, And.
Speaker 3: If I need to break that, I can say upshot
Speaker 3: and upshot to the Upshot at any rate. The long
Speaker 3: and short of what I'm talking about is that our
Speaker 3: views of optimism and pessimism aren't exactly right, at least
Speaker 3: as far as psychology is concerned. And in that sense,
Speaker 3: it kind of confounds things because I found some of
Speaker 3: this stuff a little hard to wrap my brain around,
Speaker 3: because my brain's been so ProMED by pop psychology to
Speaker 3: think of these things as this when actually we're talking
Speaker 3: about them like that.
Speaker 2: Is that what it was?
Speaker 1: Because I had the same thing where like, I spent
Speaker 1: more time on this than things that were seemingly more
Speaker 1: difficult to understand.
Speaker 3: That's the only the explanation I can think of was
Speaker 3: preconceived notions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you're right.
Speaker 1: Shall we go back and just talk about the word
Speaker 1: because I thought that was sort of interesting in itself.
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Was that the original word comes from French.
Speaker 1: Optimism optimismy that was coined in the early seventeen hundreds
Speaker 1: by a philosopher named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz or I Guess Leibnitz.
Speaker 2: And that's interesting enough, that's fine.
Speaker 1: The idea was that God optimized the universe for good
Speaker 1: and minimized evil. But what I thought was super interesting
Speaker 1: was the word pessimism was literally made up just to
Speaker 1: counter that, like as a straw man term for people
Speaker 1: to write and say, well, now I don't really think so,
Speaker 1: So they made up the word pessimism.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I thought that was interesting too, Although if you
Speaker 3: look at it from you know, this whole thing finds
Speaker 3: its roots in philosophy. It's not surprising because philosophers love
Speaker 3: to make up stuff to tear one another's arguments apart.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, good point.
Speaker 3: I read that Voltaire wrote Candide to mock Leibnitz and
Speaker 3: his idea of the opti universe because you thought it
Speaker 3: was so preposterous. Interesting, but you hit on something here, like,
Speaker 3: are the entire concept of optimism and pessimism is rooted
Speaker 3: in philosophy not psychology. Yeah, and there's pessimism kind of
Speaker 3: went on to have its own career Aside from optimism,
Speaker 3: Schopenhauer came up with philosophical pessimism, which is the basis
Speaker 3: of all life is suffering. Everybody's heard that one and
Speaker 3: or experienced it. And then there are a couple other
Speaker 3: versions of philosophical pessimism that I thought were pretty interesting.
Speaker 3: The most the one that grabbed me the most is
Speaker 3: this idea that there's more evil in the world than good.
Speaker 3: So evil exists in greater quantities, but it's also of
Speaker 3: greater quality too, So a small amount of evil can
Speaker 3: spoil a very large amount of good.
Speaker 2: Oh, I agree with that. I think I do too.
Speaker 3: I thought of a good example is, let's say you
Speaker 3: have an executive who works at a charity and they
Speaker 3: get caught stealing money from that charity. Well, when word
Speaker 3: gets out, a lot of people probably are going to
Speaker 3: stop giving to that charity, and then the good that
Speaker 3: charity was doing for other people is going to dry
Speaker 3: up all because of the one act of that one person. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Or let's say you throw a birthday party for your
Speaker 1: kid and the whole day goes great, and at the end,
Speaker 1: some some little jerk kid spoils it all by doing
Speaker 1: just this one thing like smashes your kid's face in
Speaker 1: the cake or something.
Speaker 3: Oh Man, talk about an upshot, right, But.
Speaker 1: I think the long and short of this sort of
Speaker 1: the early philosophical stuff was it was way more sort
Speaker 1: of broad as like, you know, the whole morality of
Speaker 1: the universe, And since then we've really narrowed it down
Speaker 1: more to like, like you're just very personal outlook on stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's kind of even more kind of refined
Speaker 3: than that, the idea that we should use or seek optimism,
Speaker 3: we should optimize our optimistic outlook. Right, it's pretty old.
Speaker 3: William James, who essentially founded modern psychology as a field
Speaker 3: the late nineteenth early twentieth century, he was basically talking
Speaker 3: about that very issue too. It got picked up about
Speaker 3: fifty years later by Abraham Maslow, who came up with
Speaker 3: the hierarchy of needs. He also said, hey, yeah, we're
Speaker 3: really into this abnormal psychology because it's really interesting, but
Speaker 3: we should focus on optimizing people's happiness. We'll call it
Speaker 3: positive psychology. And I remember that. Do you remember when
Speaker 3: we started writing at How Stuff Works, and like every
Speaker 3: third article we wrote was about happiness. Yeah, there's like
Speaker 3: a whole happiness craze that came out of Maslow's whole
Speaker 3: positive psychology thing being picked up and dusted off in
Speaker 3: the late nineties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I remember even in the eighties and nineties.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if this came from. And we're
Speaker 1: going to talk a lot about this guy, Martin Seligman.
Speaker 1: He was in the nineties. He was the president of
Speaker 1: the American Psychological Association. He talked a lot about positive psychology,
Speaker 1: but I remember a lot about just PMA, your positive
Speaker 1: mental attitude mm hm, and improving your PMA, and that
Speaker 1: was just sort of the key to everything. Man, if
Speaker 1: you can just if you can just get your head
Speaker 1: right in that PMA, right, like, everything's going to fall
Speaker 1: into place for you.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I mean I remember thinking Martin Seligman, I thought
Speaker 3: he came up with positive psychology, didn't realize it was
Speaker 3: an already existing thing, but that was so pushed and
Speaker 3: pedaled what you just described around two thousand and eight,
Speaker 3: two thousand and nine that I thought this guy was
Speaker 3: a total fruit loop. But then looking into this stuff,
Speaker 3: his research on optimism and pessimism, I'm like, Oh, it's
Speaker 3: actually this dude's pretty pretty with it. And I guess
Speaker 3: maybe being grown up, a little less cynical, certainly less
Speaker 3: cigarette smoky, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: In that kind of hindsight, I'm like, I think there's
Speaker 3: actually nothing wrong with trying to figure out how to
Speaker 3: how people can be as happy as possible. There's a
Speaker 3: problem with foisting it on people and seeing you have
Speaker 3: to be happy. There's something wrong with you that you're
Speaker 3: not happy. That's not what these people are talking about.
Speaker 3: They're just trying to figure out things that people can
Speaker 3: do to make themselves happier if they feel like they
Speaker 3: need to make themselves happier.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: And as we'll see, you know, we'll get to like
Speaker 1: studies and stuff, but there's definitely plenty of benefits to
Speaker 1: trying to be positive, positive and have an optimistic outlook
Speaker 1: as far as I mean, we'll get to all the
Speaker 1: different things, including like real health outcomes, right, but there
Speaker 1: are also some positives to pessimism, as we'll learn, which
Speaker 1: was not surprising, but once I read it, it kind of
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of that makes a lot of
Speaker 1: sense to me.
Speaker 3: Bravo, babe.
Speaker 2: One big thing if you look at the like the
Speaker 2: how psychology.
Speaker 1: Really views it today, and this is sort of true
Speaker 1: across a lot of psychology is sort of a nature
Speaker 1: nurture thing, or in this case they refer to as
Speaker 1: state versus trait state, meaning like are you feeling that
Speaker 1: way right now?
Speaker 3: Mm hm?
Speaker 2: Or is it generally your trait.
Speaker 1: As a person of like, oh, nothing good ever happens
Speaker 1: to me, and it's not just like I'm having a
Speaker 1: bad day or something.
Speaker 3: Right, You can kind of think of states as moods
Speaker 3: and traits as your personality. Yeah, exact one's way more
Speaker 3: stable than the other. And psychology tends to focus more
Speaker 3: on the trait side because they want to figure out
Speaker 3: what it is that makes people actually adopt or or
Speaker 3: grow up or be bestowed genetically. Who knows with an
Speaker 3: outlook on life that's way more positive than somebody else
Speaker 3: who may even have been like in the womb with them,
Speaker 3: but raised in a different, different house, you know. Like,
Speaker 3: twin studies have shown there's actually huge variations in pessimism
Speaker 3: and optimism among twins who were separated at Perth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, those studies are always really telling to me because
Speaker 1: that's probably not the hugest cohort, but I think it
Speaker 1: just speaks a lot to a lot of different things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's a lot of really unethical studies that
Speaker 3: were carried out with twins too.
Speaker 2: Like I imagine splitting them up, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I think there was a researcher
Speaker 3: at some point in the seventies maybe who specifically was
Speaker 3: splitting up twins to study them.
Speaker 1: All Right, I'm gonna put on my optimist cap and
Speaker 1: just think that everything worked out great for them because
Speaker 1: they were eventually reunited.
Speaker 3: That's wonderful.
Speaker 1: So when you talk about the psychology side of things,
Speaker 1: there's a couple of ways that they like to look
Speaker 1: at it, which is which are dispositional and attributional. Dispositional
Speaker 1: is how we predict future events, and attributional obviously is
Speaker 1: like basically saying like this happened because of this, assigning
Speaker 1: either credit or blame for the reason that something good
Speaker 1: or bad happened to you.
Speaker 3: Right, And those two are trait based, Yeah, optimistic or
Speaker 3: pessimistic views. It's not We're no longer talking about state
Speaker 3: and trait. These are all traits from what we're talking about,
Speaker 3: like this is how you view life, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of the first tests of this that has proven
Speaker 3: to be really viable and valid. It's called the Life
Speaker 3: Orientation Test, the LOT That was in nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 3: and I think of the mid nineties they revised it,
Speaker 3: so it's the LOT DASH R. Yeah, Lot DASH revised.
Speaker 2: Is that what it stands for? I kind of figured,
Speaker 2: but that didn't bother looking.
Speaker 3: Sure, anytime you see the R with it something like that,
Speaker 3: it almost certainly is revised. Yeah, yeah, Well it could
Speaker 3: also be revved.
Speaker 2: Up, I guess, yeah, or really the right test.
Speaker 3: Right, The other letters are just kind of implied.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The lot was conceived by two dudes named Michael Schier
Speaker 1: and Charles Carber. And what they were trying to do,
Speaker 1: and I did a pretty good job of it, I think,
Speaker 1: was measure you know, I talked about dispositional which is
Speaker 1: how we predict future events. They're trying to measure dispositional
Speaker 1: optimism and pessimism with this test.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So what they found is that, like I said, that,
Speaker 3: the test is actually really reliable. That was the word
Speaker 3: I was looking for before. Yeah, because if you take
Speaker 3: this test, you know, at fifty you take it again
Speaker 3: on a totally different day, in a totally different state
Speaker 3: and a totally different state of mind. Yeah, at fifty
Speaker 3: five you're probably going to get roughly the same score, right,
Speaker 3: So it is a very reliable test. Interestingly, what they
Speaker 3: found is that over the course of life, optimism tends
Speaker 3: to rise and pessimism tends to fall from young adulthood
Speaker 3: to middle age. Yeah, and then it starts to decline,
Speaker 3: which I can tell you firsthand that is totally true.
Speaker 2: Uh. Oh, I don't want to self reflect too much
Speaker 2: on this one.
Speaker 3: Well, something that I'm really hanging on too, is I've
Speaker 3: been told that, like your forties are far and away
Speaker 3: your worst decade.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've heard that.
Speaker 3: Almost across the board. You've got way more responsibility, Like
Speaker 3: you're not as young anymore. Your body's starting to change,
Speaker 3: Like it's just a bad decade, fifties. It starts to
Speaker 3: pick up. But I remember we talked about this before.
Speaker 3: In your sixties, your happiness starts to go so back
Speaker 3: up to levels that it was when you were younger.
Speaker 3: So I'm really holding out for my sixties, man, I'll
Speaker 3: tell you that.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm closer than you that for once. It's a benefit.
Speaker 3: I know I'm jelly.
Speaker 1: So the lot are, which I guess it could stand
Speaker 1: for reliable. Yeah, so the lot are comes along.
Speaker 2: The revised test. It is ten questions, six of them
Speaker 2: are scored, four of them are fillers, and the scored
Speaker 2: wins are things like.
Speaker 1: I think Olivia found these exact questions and uncertain times.
Speaker 1: I usually expect the best. If something can go wrong
Speaker 1: for me, it will, And you're responding to how much
Speaker 1: you agree with something, and they score it in a
Speaker 1: pretty straightforward way, where from zero to twenty four, where
Speaker 1: zero is very low optimism and high pessimism and twenty four, man,
Speaker 1: you are maxed out optimist.
Speaker 3: I know, yeah, you got a permagrin, right, I guess.
Speaker 3: So I took that test. I actually found the test
Speaker 3: that like a clinician would give to like a patient.
Speaker 3: It had like all the explanations and all that stuff
Speaker 3: on it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're going to reveal your score.
Speaker 3: So out of twenty four, I scored eleven, and I
Speaker 3: was like, that doesn't sound very good. And I looked
Speaker 3: at the explanation and scoring and it says below thirteen
Speaker 3: is lower than typical optimism and may warrant clinical attention.
Speaker 3: So I got really upset about this because that's like
Speaker 3: basically the test scoring academic version of going.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, I want to take that test, So.
Speaker 2: Send that to me, Leah.
Speaker 3: You should, I'll send it to you.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: But I went on, I guess a bit of a tailspin.
Speaker 3: So I tried to make myself feel better. I went
Speaker 3: and listened to some Kenny G to brighten my mood,
Speaker 3: and I was just sitting there. I realized I was
Speaker 3: just sitting there waiting for him to screw up eventually,
Speaker 3: so I stopped listening to trinny G. Then I went,
Speaker 3: I'm going to have to alone again, naturally, and then
Speaker 3: everything was all right again.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's good.
Speaker 1: Attributional optimism or pessimism is what we mentioned earlier is
Speaker 1: the other side of that coin. And that's when you're
Speaker 1: either saying, like this thing that was good in my
Speaker 1: life is happened because of this good thing only, or
Speaker 1: this bad thing that happened happened because of this bad
Speaker 1: thing only. It's basically assigning blame to what happens in
Speaker 1: your life. And if you're you know, some of this
Speaker 1: stuff is kind of no brainer. If you're optimistic, you
Speaker 1: are much more prone to attribute negative events to a
Speaker 1: specific thing, like, hey, things usually work out for me,
Speaker 1: and this didn't just because of this, Whereas if you're
Speaker 1: a pessimist, it's like, no, this happened to me just
Speaker 1: because this kind of stuff always.
Speaker 2: Happens to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And in the same vein, if you're a pessimist
Speaker 3: and something good happens to here, like that was just
Speaker 3: one million chants, it makes me so sad, it is,
Speaker 3: But that's that's usually how it works. On this test,
Speaker 3: the attributional Style Questionnaire, I looked at that one too.
Speaker 3: That's a Martin Seligman joint, huh, And it's twelve questions
Speaker 3: twelve situations actually, where it says, so, for example, one
Speaker 3: of them will say a friend compliment to you on
Speaker 3: your appearance, and then I ask you to write in
Speaker 3: what the cause was, right, like you got some new
Speaker 3: duds or something like that, and then I've gotten even better. Example,
Speaker 3: there's one that said you've been looking for a job
Speaker 3: unsuccessfully for a long time. Then you'd write in the cause,
Speaker 3: say you said it was a bad economy, or you
Speaker 3: even said I'm not good at interviewing. Then it says
Speaker 3: okay to ask you questions about the cause, like how
Speaker 3: much of that is due to the actions of yourself
Speaker 3: versus other causes? And so you might say like, well,
Speaker 3: I'm going through a bad spell right now, so you
Speaker 3: know it's probably me and my gloomy nature right now.
Speaker 3: And then they'll say, well, how likely is it that
Speaker 3: the issue is going to be present the next time,
Speaker 3: say you interview. You can say, well, I expect to
Speaker 3: be feeling a lot better next time, so maybe I'll
Speaker 3: be doing a little better. And then how much does
Speaker 3: it extend to other parts of your life. So there's
Speaker 3: twelve of those, and from that, apparently you can glean
Speaker 3: quite clearly whether somebody leans pessimists or optimist based on
Speaker 3: their responses, because again it's do things happen because you
Speaker 3: screwed up right or because you are capable of achieving
Speaker 3: good things? Is it always that way? If things go
Speaker 3: wrong for you? Is that just par for the course.
Speaker 3: And then if something goes wrong for you, does your
Speaker 3: whole life just get disrupted? Like those things he figured
Speaker 3: out are actually really predictive and it makes a lot
Speaker 3: of sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's interesting. It's almost like someone who is
Speaker 1: like a self actualized person as opposed to someone who
Speaker 1: feels like they're just sort of a victim in life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure, you know, for sure.
Speaker 1: So Martin Seligman, once again he put forth this idea
Speaker 1: that though there was an antidote to this idea of
Speaker 1: learned helplessness, which is this, I imagine it's awful, this really
Speaker 1: draining thought that I just can't control anything that happens,
Speaker 1: and all these negative things that happened to me, like
Speaker 1: I can't do anything about that. He put forth the
Speaker 1: idea of learned optimism. But that has to go on
Speaker 1: the assumption that optimism and pessimism aren't just these fixed
Speaker 1: things in your life, and it's more of a strategy
Speaker 1: that you employ.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is really significant because I think it's easy
Speaker 3: for people who say are like have a generally gloomy
Speaker 3: outlook to forget that there's plenty of times where they
Speaker 3: are excited about the future, where they do expect something
Speaker 3: good to comfort down the road for them. It's just
Speaker 3: easy to get caught up in that sort of look
Speaker 3: at them as like, No, this isn't like just your
Speaker 3: genes like making you move and walk like Master Blaster
Speaker 3: from Mad Max. Right, this is just you not even
Speaker 3: being aware that you're adopting these things as strategies to
Speaker 3: kind of negotiate life, because this is the strategy you
Speaker 3: learn based on all these other different events in your
Speaker 3: life that led up to this, which means chuck, and
Speaker 3: this is the most hopeful thing of all. You can
Speaker 3: learn and unlearn strategies that you're not aware you're using
Speaker 3: by recognizing them as strategies.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And by the way, I just I cannot say that
Speaker 1: movie character named from the Mad Max without saying it
Speaker 1: like Tina Turner, I could only say Masta blasta.
Speaker 3: It sounds like it sounds like Tim Curry doing Tina Turner.
Speaker 2: Wow, all right, yeah, I like it. Yeah, I like
Speaker 2: that too.
Speaker 3: How's Tim Curry doing these days?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 1: You know, I actually saw something recently where he was
Speaker 1: interviewed and he has recovered from his stroke such that
Speaker 1: he can can speak, and you know, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think he's doing as well as he can be for
Speaker 1: you know, such a I think it's a pretty massive stroke.
Speaker 1: But the interview I saw was like he had a
Speaker 1: sense of humor and was engaged and people really really
Speaker 1: loved hearing from him.
Speaker 3: Again, that's wonderful, I'm glad, I asked.
Speaker 4: Then.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just saw that kind of recently too. That's funny.
Speaker 2: You must be in my algorithm.
Speaker 3: I'm all up in there.
Speaker 2: Should we take a break or should we go through
Speaker 2: this last bit?
Speaker 3: We should go through last bit?
Speaker 1: Okay, So here's something that's probably not surprising. Is it
Speaker 1: dispositional and attributional optimism or really correlated to one another?
Speaker 1: And really no surprise there. Also, I was about to say comorbid,
Speaker 1: but that always sounds bad, but correlated to high self esteem,
Speaker 1: positive affect, feeling like you're in control of your life
Speaker 1: and your outcomes, and obviously negatively correlated with feeling depressed
Speaker 1: or stressed or alienated or having anxiety or hopelessness.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And as far as Big five personality traits goes,
Speaker 3: it's most closely related to emotional stability optimism is Yeah.
Speaker 3: So essentially, if you put all that together, that's the
Speaker 3: kid from your high school that you hated because everybody
Speaker 3: loved him and he was in a great mood all
Speaker 3: the time and he loved you.
Speaker 2: Yeah that was kind of me. Oh no, oh really yeah, sort.
Speaker 3: Of Mine was Scott Galvin or Tony.
Speaker 2: Appy Man, Tony Appy, that guy.
Speaker 3: So I say we take a break.
Speaker 1: Okay, well take a break. We're going to think about
Speaker 1: her and where this podcast is headed. And I'm feeling
Speaker 1: pretty good about it.
Speaker 2: Not theimistic. We'll be right back.
Speaker 4: Stop you know, stop stop stop here. Shouldn't know no,
Speaker 4: stop you know, stop stop stop here, shouldn't know stop
Speaker 4: you should know?
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 1: So the thing that was on my mind, and I'm
Speaker 1: glad she included this bit Olivia did, is like, you know,
Speaker 1: is this stuff nature or nurture? Like are we kind
Speaker 1: of born this way? Or are we made this way,
Speaker 1: and no surprise, it's a bit of both. I think
Speaker 1: generally speaking, they've come to a consensus at about twenty
Speaker 1: five And anytime you hear percentages like this, this sort
Speaker 1: of take take it with a grain of salt, but
Speaker 1: about twenty five percent genetic and the rest is a
Speaker 1: mix of like your childhood and the environment that you
Speaker 1: were raised in obviously, and then stuff that happened to
Speaker 1: you since then.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and a lot of it's pretty intuitional, right yeah, intuitive, sure, Yes,
Speaker 3: that's why I was like, that doesn't sound right. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Like if you are a developmental psychologist, you would say, well,
Speaker 3: your early life experiences and being raised in a family
Speaker 3: that neglected you or abused you or criticized you constantly,
Speaker 3: you're going to develop negative patterns of thinking and they're
Speaker 3: going to frame the way that you look at the world.
Speaker 3: Of course. Yeah, so I mean it makes sense of jobs.
Speaker 3: It's not one of these things. It's like this one
Speaker 3: subgroup in psychology is working on optimism and pessimism and
Speaker 3: having to try to do all these mental gymnastics to
Speaker 3: reverse shoehorn it into other stuff. Yeah, it just fits
Speaker 3: with other concepts. So it's very clear that there are
Speaker 3: there's something too. Optimism and pessimism. They do exist as
Speaker 3: a thing psychologically speaking, and stuff like that just backs
Speaker 3: it up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: There was a study this year, actually pretty robust, where
Speaker 1: they had two hundred thousand adults. And this one's good
Speaker 1: because it was spread out over twenty two different countries.
Speaker 1: And we'll talk about a little bit of the bias
Speaker 1: of just studying sort of western countries with optimism and stuff.
Speaker 2: But they compare their levels of.
Speaker 1: Optimism with how they remember their childhood and across all
Speaker 1: the geographies, and again, no surprise, people who had positive
Speaker 1: relationships in their family with their parents and siblings, they
Speaker 1: had better financial status, better health outcomes, and obviously were
Speaker 1: more optimistic. Interestingly, if you had frequent religious attendance when
Speaker 1: you were a kid, they associate that with optimism, but
Speaker 1: most strongly in more secular countries, which I thought was
Speaker 1: pretty fascinating.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was trying to figure that out, and the best
Speaker 3: I could come up with is that they just they
Speaker 3: stood out more because they were fewer and farther between.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, I don't know, or maybe in more
Speaker 1: religious countries you're just sort of more expected to be
Speaker 1: dragged to church and it wasn't like a conscious choice
Speaker 1: you made to go.
Speaker 2: I don't know that's a better interpretation, okay.
Speaker 3: And also, like I was saying, divorce, abuse, feeling like
Speaker 3: an outsider in your family all associated with lower optimism. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and they did say, like, Okay, there is possibly something
Speaker 3: we should mention here. It's possible that these people who
Speaker 3: are recalling their childhood are the optimists are recalling their
Speaker 3: childhood in more favorable terms, and the pessimist are recalling
Speaker 3: them in less favorable terms. And there has to be
Speaker 3: like a word for when the thing you're studying acts
Speaker 3: as a confounding factor in the study of itself. Yeah,
Speaker 3: could not find it to save the life of me.
Speaker 3: So if you're a researcher other and you know what
Speaker 3: that is, tell me because I've been dying. But that's
Speaker 3: essentially what they were saying. They still said, now this
Speaker 3: study still stands, but they at least did acknowledge that
Speaker 3: it's possible it was the thing being studied optimism was
Speaker 3: influencing the study itself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, there's got to be a
Speaker 2: certain it's like a blank bias, you.
Speaker 3: Know, blank bias.
Speaker 1: Good enough if you're wondering about the brain itself, like
Speaker 1: just your physical brain, you're noodle. As they say, they
Speaker 1: have found differences obviously in optimists and pessimist brain and
Speaker 1: how they're built, like your gray matter volume, but also
Speaker 1: how they activate. There was a study again from this
Speaker 1: year in twenty twenty five where and I thought, this
Speaker 1: is pretty interesting where optimists share patterns like there the
Speaker 1: wonder machine lights up in kind of the same way
Speaker 1: when optimists imagine future events, whereas when pessimists imagine future events,
Speaker 1: they may all be imagining something negative, but it's all
Speaker 1: individual to that person.
Speaker 2: And how the MRI machine lights up.
Speaker 3: I think this is maybe the most interesting thing that
Speaker 3: has been turned up about this so far.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It's just like groupthink versus like, no, I have a
Speaker 1: personal negative outlook that's only mine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I saw somebody point out like, maybe
Speaker 3: this is why some people click with other people, like
Speaker 3: they share a literal brain pattern in the way that
Speaker 3: they think about the future outlook on life. Whereas you know,
Speaker 3: people who are like have lower optimism or higher pessimism
Speaker 3: tend to think be thought of as like moby alienated
Speaker 3: off by themselves. So they can't even connect with one
Speaker 3: another because they have varying brain patterns. It's not like
Speaker 3: optimists all have one brain pattern and pessimists all have
Speaker 3: one brain pattern. Optimists are the only ones that share
Speaker 3: the brain pattern. I find that super fascinating.
Speaker 1: No, totally, And it also sort of lends itself to like,
Speaker 1: if you're pessimistic, you may have a harder time finding
Speaker 1: a community because it's your own and not one that
Speaker 1: you share. Yeah, as you know, we're talking about health outcomes.
Speaker 1: If you read, you know, especially like when you were saying,
Speaker 1: like the earlier two thousands, when it was all this
Speaker 1: happiness stuff, like it makes it seem like optimism is
Speaker 1: basically just the key to life across every single factor
Speaker 1: from health to your finances, everything your focus and your
Speaker 1: decision making and your motivations.
Speaker 2: And a lot of that. It's true to a certain degree.
Speaker 1: It's not a magic pill, but there's no doubt that
Speaker 1: optimism is linked to better like literal health outcomes, better
Speaker 1: heart health, lower inflammation, better immune responses, sleeping, better overall
Speaker 1: mortality rates. One suggestion is like, yeah, because you know,
Speaker 1: you're not as stressed out and stress as the cause
Speaker 1: of a lot of that stuff, So that just sort
Speaker 1: of makes sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you have less inflammation, which is a big one.
Speaker 3: I mean, that could explain it right there as far
Speaker 3: as health out outcomes. But also they're like, well hold on,
Speaker 3: I mean, like optimists. One of the things that defines
Speaker 3: optimists is that they are undeterred in seeking their goals
Speaker 3: because they generally believe they're going to be successful. Right,
Speaker 3: whether all odds are against it or not, doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: They're just going to go and do their thing because
Speaker 3: they think it's going to be fine. So that would
Speaker 3: include things like quitting smoking, exercising, eating right. Having goals
Speaker 3: and then just working toward them is almost always aligned
Speaker 3: with better health and like having better health habits too,
Speaker 3: so that would definitely explain one reason why they are
Speaker 3: probably healthier.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are some big caveats that Lvia was keen
Speaker 1: to point out, and a lot of these studies that
Speaker 1: sort of, you know, tie between being optimistic and having
Speaker 1: good health. It gets ticked down quite a bit when
Speaker 1: they look into the details of like someone's I don't
Speaker 1: know bank account and they're like, oh, well, yeah, this
Speaker 1: person that's got loads of money. Yeah, Yeah, they're more
Speaker 1: optimistic and so yeah, they're healthier because a lot of
Speaker 1: that just financial stress and all that stuff goes out
Speaker 1: the door. And you know, when you're stressed out about
Speaker 1: money like that may lead to like drinking more or
Speaker 1: starting smoking, and so you really have to sort of
Speaker 1: caveat that to death, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And similarly, these studies are usually just taking a
Speaker 3: snapshot of what that person's like, right then, Right, so
Speaker 3: you score very high on an optimistic the life orientation test. Right,
Speaker 3: and you also say, like, I don't smoke, I eat
Speaker 3: five servings of vegetables every day. Yeah, it's not clear
Speaker 3: from that study they're correlated. But is it that people
Speaker 3: who eat better and don't smoke tend to have a
Speaker 3: more positive outlook? Do you not smoke and eat better
Speaker 3: because you have a positive outlook? There's a whole chicken
Speaker 3: in the egg thing. I just coined that phrase, but
Speaker 3: I think it's gonna stick around.
Speaker 1: Then there's something called optimism bias, which I thought was
Speaker 1: pretty interesting. As a human race, we have an optimism bias.
Speaker 1: They've studied it to death and they found that just
Speaker 1: for the general population, the default is about eighty percent
Speaker 1: of people are generally optimistic. Ten percent are generally pessimistic
Speaker 1: and about ten percent can go either way, or maybe
Speaker 1: you're neutral. And there was a psychologist named Neil Weinstein.
Speaker 1: I think this is in the very early nineteen eighties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty was his initial study where he was the
Speaker 1: first guy to say, yeah, I mean, we're pretty much
Speaker 1: biased toward being optimist. And you know, one reason may
Speaker 1: be because it's so shoved down your throat that that's
Speaker 1: the key to everything good in life.
Speaker 3: You know, Yeah, maybe what Weinstein. I'm going with Weinstein,
Speaker 3: but I get Weinstein too. Yeah, I think one thing
Speaker 3: that his study, it was a landmark study from what
Speaker 3: I could tell. In nineteen eighty, he tested two hundred
Speaker 3: students and said, Okay, of these positive things and of
Speaker 3: these negative things, was the likelihood it all happened to you?
Speaker 3: And was the likelihood it all happened to your classmates?
Speaker 3: And just across the board, students said that positive things
Speaker 3: were much more likely to happen to them than to
Speaker 3: their classmates. Negative things were much more likely to happen
Speaker 3: to their classmates than to them. And we're talking things
Speaker 3: like liking your post graduation job, or your house doubling
Speaker 3: in value in five years, or this one, I love
Speaker 3: this one, your achievements being written up in the newspaper,
Speaker 3: like all those things were much likelier to happen to
Speaker 3: the test taker than they were to their fellow students.
Speaker 3: And that kind of gets to the basis of this
Speaker 3: optimism bias that everyone thinks that they're above average in
Speaker 3: a lot of different ways, which is of course impossible
Speaker 3: because there have to be people who that isn't true for,
Speaker 3: or else there wouldn't be an average. We'd all be
Speaker 3: above average. It's not possible. And so here's where we
Speaker 3: get to stop talking about optimists as if they're the
Speaker 3: greatest thing that ever happened, because one of the big
Speaker 3: problems with optimism is this bias and making terrible predictions
Speaker 3: about the outcomes of events.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, there was another study that kind of tied into
Speaker 1: that is from Tali Sharrat, who's a cognitive neuroscientist at
Speaker 1: the University College of London and kind of took that
Speaker 1: experiment and ran with it and said, all right, I'm
Speaker 1: going to ask you about the likelihood of something good
Speaker 1: or bad happening in your life. Get that answer, and
Speaker 1: then they say, well, here's actually the average likelihood of
Speaker 1: that kind of thing happening, and now let me ask
Speaker 1: you again. And they found that people change their answers
Speaker 1: more in response in the positive way than in the
Speaker 1: negative way, which I thought was sort of counterintuitive.
Speaker 3: It is, because you'd think if you've said, like, what's
Speaker 3: your chances of winning the lottery tomorrow and somebody said
Speaker 3: eighty percent, and then the people said, actually it's ninety percent,
Speaker 3: they go, great, what's say one hundred percent for me? Right,
Speaker 3: So that's what people would do. But if the researchers said,
Speaker 3: actually it's more like twenty percent, they'd be like, no,
Speaker 3: eighty percent for me. And that's what I was talking about.
Speaker 3: People tend to think that good things are likely to
Speaker 3: happen for them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even in.
Speaker 3: Knowing that statistically speaking, right overall, it's very unlikely to
Speaker 3: happen just anybody. But they're not just anybody. This is
Speaker 3: the optimism bias that's been turned up and reinforced the
Speaker 3: year after year every year. Yeah, it's an annual thing.
Speaker 1: Well, and uh, speaking of reinforce, it seems that optimism
Speaker 1: reinforces optimism if you. When they have they've studied this
Speaker 1: that positive life events just tend to make you even
Speaker 1: more optimistic, which makes a lot of sense. But if
Speaker 1: you have something negative that happens, it doesn't generally all
Speaker 1: of a sudden make you more pessimistic.
Speaker 2: It's just like, well, that happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Some other examples are when you expect things to
Speaker 3: be easy for you. A lot of people do that.
Speaker 3: I understand that one too, it could be bad, and
Speaker 3: that you'll be more successful then then you would, I
Speaker 3: mean again, just statistically speaking, And then also that we
Speaker 3: spend a lot more time thinking about good things that
Speaker 3: are coming down the pike than bad ones, so I
Speaker 3: also can associate with I mean it. It just seems
Speaker 3: unusual for the average person to sit around and be like, well,
Speaker 3: I'm probably going to get a flat tire in the
Speaker 3: next like year and a half. Statistically speaking, I should
Speaker 3: probably think about that for a little while.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: But there is some sort of like I guess, prophylactic
Speaker 3: influence of that, which is you might go make sure
Speaker 3: that your spare tire is doing okay, And that kind
Speaker 3: of belies this. I'm not sure if I'm using that
Speaker 3: word correctly, but that goes to show that the optimist
Speaker 3: bias can actually be harmful in some ways because it
Speaker 3: will prevent you from doing something like going to check
Speaker 3: your spare tire, because of course you're not going to
Speaker 3: get a spare tire because that wouldn't happen to you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's Emily and I talk a lot about it,
Speaker 1: like the Pollyanna thing. That doesn't seem to serve people
Speaker 1: well because then you're all of a sudden ignoring, or
Speaker 1: maybe not ignoring, but at least not putting as much
Speaker 1: weight into the things you do and the decisions you
Speaker 1: make day to day that might have a bad outcome,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden you're caught unaware when that
Speaker 1: bad outcome happens. Which is it's bad enough when you're
Speaker 1: just an individual, but if you're a corporation or a
Speaker 1: friggin government and you're caught unaware because you thought something
Speaker 1: was going to go too well, or you didn't put
Speaker 1: the budget or the time into something that you should
Speaker 1: have because you just thought it was a no brainer,
Speaker 1: or something like that, that can be really destructive to
Speaker 1: a business or to a nation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like just believing that artificial intelligence will
Speaker 3: be great with no downsides, you're worth considering. Is it
Speaker 3: good excellent example of what you're just talking about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: So you might say, okay, well, then if eighty percent
Speaker 3: of people are optimistic, that kind of suggests that this
Speaker 3: is like maybe humanity's default setting, and that tessimism is
Speaker 3: like maybe malfunction. Even the the thing about that is
Speaker 3: that it doesn't really make sense that it would be
Speaker 3: evolutionarily favorable for us to be optimistic because of this
Speaker 3: optimism bias that can get us into trouble. But you
Speaker 3: can look at it a certain way and say, like, actually,
Speaker 3: it does make a lot of sense, because if we
Speaker 3: didn't have an optimistic bias, we might not go try
Speaker 3: new things, we might not make it out of the
Speaker 3: cave and learn to make fire ourselves, or kind of
Speaker 3: put differently, if you have a problem that's life or death,
Speaker 3: and you throw a bunch of people at it, and
Speaker 3: all of them are kind of pre tuned to expect
Speaker 3: their attempt at being successful to work. The ones who
Speaker 3: die trying don't get to reproduce. The ones that succeed
Speaker 3: do get to live to reproduce. And not only do
Speaker 3: they get to live to reproduce and pass on that
Speaker 3: optimism bias, it's reinforced because they were successful, and they
Speaker 3: think all the more, now I can successfully predict my future,
Speaker 3: and I'll be successful in that future.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: And you know I mentioned the caveat about the Western
Speaker 1: societies being the most studied. A lot of these are
Speaker 1: definitely you know, slanted toward you know, the American way
Speaker 1: of life or the Western way of life, and thought
Speaker 1: they're really.
Speaker 2: Not super sure about sort of worldwide.
Speaker 1: There is some evidence that like in Japan, that like
Speaker 1: they might not anticipate positive outcomes as much for their
Speaker 1: own selves like we do here in the United States, Right,
Speaker 1: But they also make the point like, well we're also
Speaker 1: you know, all of these things are people self reporting.
Speaker 1: So in places like the United States or Australia, they
Speaker 1: may just be more likely to say out loud that
Speaker 1: they're optimistic, whereas in another country they may feel that
Speaker 1: way but just you know, no WAMIs kind of style,
Speaker 1: or maybe they just are not as outwardly optimistic, but
Speaker 1: they really feel it, they just don't want to say it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not cool to be optimistic in those countries. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you want to take a break and then come back
Speaker 3: and talk about some variations on this theme.
Speaker 2: Let's do it.
Speaker 4: Okay, stop, you know, stop stop stop. He shouldn't know no, stop,
Speaker 4: you know, stop stop stop. He shouldn't know stop you
Speaker 4: should know.
Speaker 3: Okay, Chuck. We said we're going to talk about some variations,
Speaker 3: and I think one thing we should point out is
Speaker 3: that optimism itself is almost a variation on a theme.
Speaker 3: When people say like like somebody's just happy all the time,
Speaker 3: there's going through life, they have like the best attitude,
Speaker 3: that's actually not optimism. Optimism is either, like we said,
Speaker 3: you are expecting good things to happen down the pike,
Speaker 3: or or you assume that you can overcome obstacles. You
Speaker 3: don't blame other people for your issues. Like that's optimism
Speaker 3: with the other thing that I just mentioned is positive affect,
Speaker 3: which is more enjoying the present, and optimism is thinking
Speaker 3: about the future essentially.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good thing to point out for sure.
Speaker 1: Some of these variations that you mentioned we were going
Speaker 1: to talk about. I thought all these were pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: One is called depressive realism, and I think they all
Speaker 1: have their place. Depressive realism is this idea that if
Speaker 1: you're you know, maybe a little depressed or moderately depressed,
Speaker 1: then you're actually a realist and you have a way
Speaker 1: more accurate view of the real world around you. In
Speaker 1: other words, you're not that Pollyanna, You're a realist. And
Speaker 1: this came from a study in the nineteen seventies by
Speaker 1: psychologist Lauren Eloy and lynn Yvonne Abramson where it's kind
Speaker 1: of a funky study, but they had participants push a
Speaker 1: button and then judged how a fel that might be
Speaker 1: for causing a light to go on, Like I'm going
Speaker 1: to press this button, but I don't think it's going
Speaker 1: to do anything, right.
Speaker 2: Or man, this room's going to light up when I
Speaker 2: press this button.
Speaker 3: Right exactly, And they said that people with depression tended
Speaker 3: to more accurately predict whether that button was going to
Speaker 3: turn the light on or not, right, yeah, And so
Speaker 3: they extrapolated that to say, like, well, you know, that
Speaker 3: means that people with depression or depressive symptoms are they
Speaker 3: have just a greater handle on the reality of reality. Basically,
Speaker 3: they're less likely to make wild predictions about their success
Speaker 3: and so they understand reality better. And this was a
Speaker 3: landmark study that people just immediately put into the pop
Speaker 3: psychology grind because it's just so contrary and it's delicious. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's also one of those landmark studies that people
Speaker 3: have loved to kind of try to take shots at.
Speaker 3: And apparently it's not very well replicated. So yeah, I
Speaker 3: don't know its status right now, but it seems like
Speaker 3: it's it hasn't been debunked, and it's not unfounded as
Speaker 3: far as the feel psychology is concerned, but it doesn't
Speaker 3: seem like it's as golden as it once.
Speaker 2: Was to like a dented landmark. Yeah, I think.
Speaker 3: That's a great one, like that ball of foil. That's right.
Speaker 2: There's another variation called defensive pessimism. I like this one.
Speaker 1: I mean, this isn't really me, but I think there's
Speaker 1: a lot of validity here and that if you have
Speaker 1: lower expectations and you're sort of planning for the worst,
Speaker 1: that's almost the same as being optimistic in a way
Speaker 1: as far as it helping you in life, because it
Speaker 1: can really help manage your anxiety. It can make you
Speaker 1: feel like you have some sense of control and you're not.
Speaker 1: You know, like during COVID, they found that if you
Speaker 1: were a defensive pessimist, then that correlated with taking more
Speaker 1: precautions and being safer and I E.
Speaker 2: I guess being healthier.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you ever put two words to go to
Speaker 3: describe me, it's defensive pessimist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure I could see that, and I think.
Speaker 3: There's no greater description than this. But defensive pessimists don't
Speaker 3: focus as much on pursuing happiness. They focus more on
Speaker 3: avoiding regret, which is I mean, they can still have
Speaker 3: the same outcome, but it's it's what you're chasing is different.
Speaker 3: You're avoiding a negative outcome rather than pursuing a positive outcome,
Speaker 3: but the outcomes still the same.
Speaker 2: You succeeded because you're pursuing something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're Actually it's based on the idea that you
Speaker 3: can change your fate, right Like, you can take actions
Speaker 3: to affect this outcome and make it as close to
Speaker 3: the outcome you want as possible. That's the same thing
Speaker 3: as optimism, it's just coming at it a different way. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I really like that idea because I mean, it's not me,
Speaker 1: but I love it for you because it's not like, well,
Speaker 1: this is just going to happen to me no matter
Speaker 1: what it's like. Boy, I have a bad feeling that
Speaker 1: this is going to happen to me unless I take
Speaker 1: these steps, right.
Speaker 3: The only downside of it is like you won't let
Speaker 3: yourself think about the future being good because you'll chank
Speaker 3: it essentially.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Jinxing's a whole of their uh for sure,
Speaker 1: part of this thing.
Speaker 3: So what you just described, though, is what I think
Speaker 3: is the worst one, fatalistic pessimism, which is right, everything's
Speaker 3: wrong and I can't do anything to change it. That
Speaker 3: is a sad, sad disposition that I like to think
Speaker 3: that is not set in stone. It's just because of
Speaker 3: like circumstances, or it's a particular low point in your life.
Speaker 3: I don't know, but I don't like to think that
Speaker 3: anyone out there is at their base of fatalistic pessimists.
Speaker 3: That's just sad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 1: On the flip side of that coin, you have toxic positivity.
Speaker 1: I mean, we almost don't even need to say anything
Speaker 1: else because I think everyone knows what that is. It
Speaker 1: can lead to bad things because like that's sort of
Speaker 1: the Pollyanna thing I was talking about.
Speaker 2: You're ignoring anything.
Speaker 1: Negative to like basically you're delusional about that, and so
Speaker 1: you're not gonna attempt to improve things because you're just like, no,
Speaker 1: it's it all gonna work out.
Speaker 2: It's gonna be great.
Speaker 3: One of the ways that this pops up, I think
Speaker 3: for people, and they don't really recognize that that's what
Speaker 3: they're doing, is when somebody shares their feelings or confides
Speaker 3: in you that they're afraid of something or anxious about something,
Speaker 3: and you just say, oh, it's all gonna work out.
Speaker 3: You're being toxically positive right there. You're actually dismissing their fears.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You're probably doing it because you're uncomfortable, right then. You
Speaker 3: don't know what else to say, so you're just going on, well,
Speaker 3: I can't go wrong by being positive. You actually can,
Speaker 3: and that's toxic positivity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's I mean true in all relationships, supporting
Speaker 1: a spouse or a friend, but also a lot with parenting,
Speaker 1: Like that's not a great road to go down with
Speaker 1: a kid because you're teaching them the wrong things. I
Speaker 1: feel like you should be saying like, well, hey, let's
Speaker 1: think about this and maybe if you take these steps
Speaker 1: you can help affect the outcome, rather than like it's
Speaker 1: gonna be fine, you're gonna be great, yeah, because you're
Speaker 1: not always gonna be great.
Speaker 3: No, that is a good thing to teach a kid
Speaker 3: for sure. Yeah, there's also tragic optimism. Yeah. It was
Speaker 3: coined by a guy named Victor Frankel who is a
Speaker 3: psychologist or sorry, psychiatrist who actually did He was interned
Speaker 3: in a Nazi concentration camp and lost essentially everyone he knew,
Speaker 3: and he wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning
Speaker 3: from that and it's like a seminal book and search
Speaker 3: for the meaning of life. But he coined tragic optimism
Speaker 3: to basically say, this is the mindset where you are
Speaker 3: aware that in life you're going to suffer pain, guilt, loss,
Speaker 3: and that you can accept that that's true and still
Speaker 3: seek the most positive outcomes you can get. I like
Speaker 3: that one too, Try to be happy even knowing that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I like that.
Speaker 3: And then what's the last one.
Speaker 1: Chuck, Cultural pessimism. I'm not going to editorialize here. That's
Speaker 1: basically just like the belief that the society was better
Speaker 1: at a different time. You know, decades ago everything was
Speaker 1: great in this country and everything is just going straight
Speaker 1: down the toilet today.
Speaker 3: It's called getting old.
Speaker 1: It's interesting in that you have a tendency, in this
Speaker 1: case toward optimism bias about your own life while also
Speaker 1: at the same time being pessimistic about society as a whole,
Speaker 1: which I think is super fascinating.
Speaker 3: It is, for sure, especially when you talk about, like,
Speaker 3: my economic outlook is sunny, but not for the country.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I've also seen it called declinism too. Oh, so let's
Speaker 3: say you're like, all right, nuts to all this pessimistic
Speaker 3: outlook that I've got. I want to be an optimist.
Speaker 3: I'm even willing to try to navigate optimistic bias. That's
Speaker 3: how bad I want to be optimistic. There's actually some
Speaker 3: stuff that they figured out that you can do to
Speaker 3: essentially shift your outlook some I don't think anyone saying
Speaker 3: like this is going to rewire your genetic code or
Speaker 3: anything like that, but there are some proven interventions you
Speaker 3: can take to help that along. I think probably it's
Speaker 3: based on your willingness to want to change too.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think intervention is a good word because it's like, hey,
Speaker 1: this is happening, let me use this specific technique to
Speaker 1: stop it in its tracks. In the first case is
Speaker 1: the ABC technique. Our ol buddy Martin Seligman came up
Speaker 1: with this one to use a lot in CBT, cognitive
Speaker 1: behavioral therapy and the A is the antecedent or adversity,
Speaker 1: so you encounter something difficult. Olivia used a great example
Speaker 1: of like you, you know, like you flunk a test.
Speaker 1: Maybe then you have your belief and behavior, which in
Speaker 1: this case might be like I just I can't pass
Speaker 1: this test, I can't understand this stuff.
Speaker 2: I'm too dumb.
Speaker 1: And then the consequence is the C, which is because
Speaker 1: you have that fatalistic attitude I'm just too dumb to
Speaker 1: pass this test, you don't study and you fall further behind.
Speaker 1: And the key here, you know, according to Seligman, is
Speaker 1: you got to get in there between the difficult situation,
Speaker 1: the thing that happens, and the B thing between the
Speaker 1: A and B and change the attribute. So in other words,
Speaker 1: don't go to like, oh, I'm too dumb to do this,
Speaker 1: go to like, now that happened because I've been really
Speaker 1: stressed out. I didn't put the time in that I
Speaker 1: needed to to study. I was really had my priorities
Speaker 1: it priorities out of whack. I didn't sleep well that week.
Speaker 1: And that's an immediate intervention where you're putting the attribution
Speaker 1: on something that was temporary that happened.
Speaker 2: And this is how I.
Speaker 3: Am right, and that you can also change too exactly.
Speaker 3: And then conversely too, you can also say, like I
Speaker 3: got a good grade, it wasn't just because you know
Speaker 3: I was lucky. You tell yourself, I got a good
Speaker 3: grade because I worked really hard, I got good sleep
Speaker 3: this week, and I paid attention. I found this interesting.
Speaker 3: You can do the same thing too, the opposite too,
Speaker 3: to achieve the same goal. I think you probably have
Speaker 3: to do both to tell you the truth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And then this is also a good thing to
Speaker 1: remember when you're parenting, because when your kids are in
Speaker 1: school and they maybe get a bad grade, the first
Speaker 1: question I think you should say is, well, why do
Speaker 1: you think you got a bad grade? And see what
Speaker 1: they say, and then just kind of go from there, right.
Speaker 3: And then if they get a really good grade, you say, well,
Speaker 3: why didn't you get.
Speaker 2: A hundred exactly.
Speaker 3: So there's another one that's even better than the ABC technique.
Speaker 3: That's called the best Possible self for BPS intervention, And
Speaker 3: apparently everybody loves this one. There's a way of dealing
Speaker 3: with trauma that they used to have. It's called trauma writing,
Speaker 3: where you would write out essentially like the worst stuff
Speaker 3: that happened to you and it would make you feel
Speaker 3: better having gotten it out on paper. It would also
Speaker 3: be pretty traumatic to do, right, Yes, the whole basis
Speaker 3: of that trauma well, Laura King back in two thousand
Speaker 3: and one said, let's try something different. Let's write out
Speaker 3: this sketch of yourself down the road in the future
Speaker 3: where you've achieved everything you wanted to achieve it was
Speaker 3: through hard work. Write that version out and it's less traumatizing,
Speaker 3: but it also has the same effect, like it improved
Speaker 3: your sense of well being and apparently increases your optimistic
Speaker 3: outlook on things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it's the idea, that sort of hippie
Speaker 1: dippy thing where you know, close your eyes and envision
Speaker 1: your future where you're strong and you're not doing the
Speaker 1: things that you're doing now that are holding you back.
Speaker 1: And it sounds kind of corny, but I think when
Speaker 1: you write it down, there's something to that, just the
Speaker 1: same as trauma writing. It's different than just sort of
Speaker 1: mentally visualizing good things happening.
Speaker 3: Way different. There's something about writing that's definitely yeah, a
Speaker 3: step plus, you know. Yeah, And then so just real quick,
Speaker 3: there are some benefits to pessimism too. It's not just
Speaker 3: you know, being optimistic, Like, if you are pessimistic, there's
Speaker 3: some upsides to it. But also even if you're optimistic,
Speaker 3: there's maybe a little pessimism you should adopt too, Like,
Speaker 3: if you want to enact social change, that usually doesn't
Speaker 3: happen through optimistic leaders. It happens through people who are
Speaker 3: skeptical and are not following for the false advertising or
Speaker 3: false promises essentially, right, Like, you can't really be optimistic
Speaker 3: and good social change, I think yeah. And then also,
Speaker 3: if you are a group that wants to spur social change,
Speaker 3: it's probably because you're unhappy with your current situation. And
Speaker 3: then lastly, this one's always stood out to me. If
Speaker 3: everyone's looking on the positive side of things, then the
Speaker 3: people who are doing negative stuff are much likelier to
Speaker 3: get away with it. Oh interesting, So I feel like
Speaker 3: if you have the ability to shift between pessimism and
Speaker 3: optimism as the situation calls for it, that's probably ideal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: Or you know, if you're a defensive pessimist, it's not
Speaker 1: about aiming low, it's about not expecting too high. And
Speaker 1: then if you have and it sounds bad to have,
Speaker 1: like you should have low expectations it's more like realistic
Speaker 1: expectations and then you outperform those like That's got to
Speaker 1: feel great to a Pessimi, for sure.
Speaker 3: It's like planning for the worst but hoping for the best.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that old T shirt. Isn't there a cat hanging
Speaker 2: from a tree or something?
Speaker 3: I think that's hanging in baby. Okay, you got anything else?
Speaker 2: I got nothing else that. That was a good one.
Speaker 2: I enjoyed it.
Speaker 3: Agreed, well, Chuck enjoyed this one, which means he automatically
Speaker 3: unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 1: You know what, I don't have a great listener mail
Speaker 1: preps for today, So let's just mention once again that
Speaker 1: we are going on tour again next year. We are
Speaker 1: super excited. We got shows lined up in January out
Speaker 1: West Ish, in the Midwest in April, and then we're
Speaker 1: finally going all across Canada. You guys, we're reaching out
Speaker 1: with an Olive branch such weird times between our countries
Speaker 1: and saying, hey, don't boycott us, we want to come
Speaker 1: visit you. We're going to Montreal, We're going to places
Speaker 1: we've never been before, and.
Speaker 2: Tickets are on sale now and we'd love to see everybody.
Speaker 3: Yeah, starting out we're going to be in Denver and
Speaker 3: then Seattle and then San Francisco on January twenty seventh,
Speaker 3: twenty eighth, and twenty ninth. Yeah, and for those tickets
Speaker 3: and all tickets as they come on sale, you can
Speaker 3: just go to Stuff you Should Know dot click on
Speaker 3: the tour button and it will take you where you
Speaker 3: need to go.
Speaker 2: That's right. Can't wait to see everybody.
Speaker 3: Hey, yeah, Hey, And if you want to get in
Speaker 3: touch with this in the meantime and send us an email,
Speaker 3: we would love that. You can send it off to
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