Battle Royale: Optimists vs Pessimists

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

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, everybody in Canada, we have a pretty big announcement.
We are finally going to do our first big, big
tour of Canada. We're going to announce the dates in.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
The theaters in cities here first, and then we're going
to give you all the ticket info. Okay, how does
that sound?

Speaker 3 (00:13):
It sounds great, Chuck. Where are we going to go?

Speaker 4 (00:15):
First?

Speaker 1 (00:16):
On June twenty fifth, we're going to be in Montreal
at the Olympia Des Montreal. The next night, on the
twenty six we're going to be going to Ottawa the
Hard Rock Live Ottawa and then on the twenty seventh,
finish up in Toronto at Massey Hall.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
And then we're going to walk to the next shows.
So it's going to take us a few weeks.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
On July twenty third, we're going to be in Vancouver
at Queen Elizabeth Theater. Friday, the twenty fourth of July,
we're going to be in Calgary at Jacksinger Concert Hall
at Art Commons, and we're going to wind it up
in Winnipeg on the twenty fifth at Burton Cummings Theater.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
That's awesome, So tickets go on sale two day. Everybody
December sixteenth, starting at ten am Eastern time and going
all the way to Friday, December nineteenth at ten am
Local time. We're going to have an artist pre sale.
You can buy your tickets early. Just go to stuff
youshould Know dot com and click on the tour button
and then click on your city and when you go

(01:08):
to check out, use the promo code s YSK live.
And if you miss all that, don't worry. Tickets go
on general sale on Friday, December nineteenth at ten am
Eastern time. And again you can get all of the
tickets and info you need at stuff youshould Know dot
com and we will see you this summer Canada.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and
there's Charles w Chuck Brian. We're just gonna do a
great job here today and Stuff you Should Know.

Speaker 4 (01:47):
Hi.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Everybody feeling good, Chuck dealing great, lewis.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
Looking great?

Speaker 4 (01:54):
Lewis Uh?

Speaker 2 (01:57):
You want to hear something funny?

Speaker 3 (01:59):
I do? Oh you hear?

Speaker 1 (02:03):
That?

Speaker 3 (02:03):
Is that your new windows?

Speaker 4 (02:05):
No?

Speaker 2 (02:06):
That is new windows? What does that mean?

Speaker 1 (02:09):
That is we were not able to stay in our
home this week because, as you know, because I've told
you this, because we're getting our electric panel redone. So
I was not able to print out my stuff as usual.
And where we were staying, you know, at a friends.
They allowed me to print, but all they had was

(02:29):
card stock. So that is the sound of heavy duty research.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
Man, that's like half a tree right there.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
I know, I feel pretty bad, but god, it feels
so good in my hand.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
Oh well, is this.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
Your new thing't? I could not justify that, but boy,
it feels good. Maybe for the live shows, because you know,
over the course of a tour, which is happening next year, everybody.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
Oh that's a good one. Yeah, we're going out on
tour everyone soon, starting January, then April and then the
summer for Canada.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
But yeah that you know how those that document gets
a little tattered over time, so I might card stock it.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
I like that. I call that tour kisses.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
I thought that was something else, like after the end
of the tour when we make out a little bit.

Speaker 3 (03:13):
We don't talk about that, all right, we don't have
a name for that, No, Chuck, We're talking today, not
about tour kisses of any variety, but about optimism and pessimism,
and this one, yeah, I do too. This is Olivia
helped us with this, And this is one of those
ones where when you know it was I knew very

(03:34):
little about what it actually is compared to what I
thought I knew, and I love like that.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah, same.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
Optimism and pessimism as pretty much everyone knows. Is this
the idea that you have like a sunny disposition or
maybe you're gloomy and eoorish.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:52):
I was going back and reading some or quotes. Man,
that was great. If you want to entertain yourself, just
read AA Milne E or quotes and you'll be delighted.
But the upshot of this is that that's not really
the best description of optimism and pessimism.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
That may be your earliest upshot by the way.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
Oh is it? I need to break that.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
Record next time?

Speaker 3 (04:12):
Then yeah, I'll say hey, and welcome to the Upshot.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
If you ever go solo, that'd be great to Josh
Clark only podcast The Upshot with Josh Clark, And.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
If I need to break that, I can say upshot
and upshot to the Upshot at any rate. The long
and short of what I'm talking about is that our
views of optimism and pessimism aren't exactly right, at least
as far as psychology is concerned. And in that sense,
it kind of confounds things because I found some of

(04:39):
this stuff a little hard to wrap my brain around,
because my brain's been so ProMED by pop psychology to
think of these things as this when actually we're talking
about them like that.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Is that what it was?

Speaker 1 (04:51):
Because I had the same thing where like, I spent
more time on this than things that were seemingly more
difficult to understand.

Speaker 3 (04:59):
That's the only the explanation I can think of was
preconceived notions.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Yeah, I think you're right.

Speaker 1 (05:05):
Shall we go back and just talk about the word
because I thought that was sort of interesting in itself.

Speaker 4 (05:09):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (05:09):
Was that the original word comes from French.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
Optimism optimismy that was coined in the early seventeen hundreds
by a philosopher named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz or I Guess Leibnitz.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
And that's interesting enough, that's fine.

Speaker 1 (05:27):
The idea was that God optimized the universe for good
and minimized evil. But what I thought was super interesting
was the word pessimism was literally made up just to
counter that, like as a straw man term for people
to write and say, well, now I don't really think so,
So they made up the word pessimism.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
Yeah. I thought that was interesting too, Although if you
look at it from you know, this whole thing finds
its roots in philosophy. It's not surprising because philosophers love
to make up stuff to tear one another's arguments apart.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
Right, Yeah, good point.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
I read that Voltaire wrote Candide to mock Leibnitz and
his idea of the opti universe because you thought it
was so preposterous. Interesting, but you hit on something here, like,
are the entire concept of optimism and pessimism is rooted
in philosophy not psychology. Yeah, and there's pessimism kind of
went on to have its own career Aside from optimism,

(06:18):
Schopenhauer came up with philosophical pessimism, which is the basis
of all life is suffering. Everybody's heard that one and
or experienced it. And then there are a couple other
versions of philosophical pessimism that I thought were pretty interesting.
The most the one that grabbed me the most is
this idea that there's more evil in the world than good.

(06:41):
So evil exists in greater quantities, but it's also of
greater quality too, So a small amount of evil can
spoil a very large amount of good.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
Oh, I agree with that. I think I do too.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
I thought of a good example is, let's say you
have an executive who works at a charity and they
get caught stealing money from that charity. Well, when word
gets out, a lot of people probably are going to
stop giving to that charity, and then the good that
charity was doing for other people is going to dry
up all because of the one act of that one person. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
Or let's say you throw a birthday party for your
kid and the whole day goes great, and at the end,
some some little jerk kid spoils it all by doing
just this one thing like smashes your kid's face in
the cake or something.

Speaker 3 (07:28):
Oh Man, talk about an upshot, right, But.

Speaker 1 (07:34):
I think the long and short of this sort of
the early philosophical stuff was it was way more sort
of broad as like, you know, the whole morality of
the universe, And since then we've really narrowed it down
more to like, like you're just very personal outlook on stuff.

Speaker 3 (07:53):
Yeah, And it's kind of even more kind of refined
than that, the idea that we should use or seek optimism,
we should optimize our optimistic outlook. Right, it's pretty old.
William James, who essentially founded modern psychology as a field
the late nineteenth early twentieth century, he was basically talking

(08:15):
about that very issue too. It got picked up about
fifty years later by Abraham Maslow, who came up with
the hierarchy of needs. He also said, hey, yeah, we're
really into this abnormal psychology because it's really interesting, but
we should focus on optimizing people's happiness. We'll call it
positive psychology. And I remember that. Do you remember when

(08:37):
we started writing at How Stuff Works, and like every
third article we wrote was about happiness. Yeah, there's like
a whole happiness craze that came out of Maslow's whole
positive psychology thing being picked up and dusted off in
the late nineties.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
Yeah, And I remember even in the eighties and nineties.
And I don't know if this came from. And we're
going to talk a lot about this guy, Martin Seligman.
He was in the nineties. He was the president of
the American Psychological Association. He talked a lot about positive psychology,
but I remember a lot about just PMA, your positive
mental attitude mm hm, and improving your PMA, and that

(09:13):
was just sort of the key to everything. Man, if
you can just if you can just get your head
right in that PMA, right, like, everything's going to fall
into place for you.

Speaker 4 (09:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:21):
And I mean I remember thinking Martin Seligman, I thought
he came up with positive psychology, didn't realize it was
an already existing thing, but that was so pushed and
pedaled what you just described around two thousand and eight,
two thousand and nine that I thought this guy was
a total fruit loop. But then looking into this stuff,
his research on optimism and pessimism, I'm like, Oh, it's
actually this dude's pretty pretty with it. And I guess

(09:44):
maybe being grown up, a little less cynical, certainly less
cigarette smoky, right.

Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:50):
In that kind of hindsight, I'm like, I think there's
actually nothing wrong with trying to figure out how to
how people can be as happy as possible. There's a
problem with foisting it on people and seeing you have
to be happy. There's something wrong with you that you're
not happy. That's not what these people are talking about.
They're just trying to figure out things that people can
do to make themselves happier if they feel like they

(10:11):
need to make themselves happier.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
And as we'll see, you know, we'll get to like
studies and stuff, but there's definitely plenty of benefits to
trying to be positive, positive and have an optimistic outlook
as far as I mean, we'll get to all the
different things, including like real health outcomes, right, but there
are also some positives to pessimism, as we'll learn, which

(10:34):
was not surprising, but once I read it, it kind of
you know, a lot of that makes a lot of
sense to me.

Speaker 3 (10:38):
Bravo, babe.

Speaker 2 (10:41):
One big thing if you look at the like the
how psychology.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
Really views it today, and this is sort of true
across a lot of psychology is sort of a nature
nurture thing, or in this case they refer to as
state versus trait state, meaning like are you feeling that
way right now?

Speaker 3 (11:00):
Mm hm?

Speaker 2 (11:00):
Or is it generally your trait.

Speaker 1 (11:03):
As a person of like, oh, nothing good ever happens
to me, and it's not just like I'm having a
bad day or something.

Speaker 3 (11:09):
Right, You can kind of think of states as moods
and traits as your personality. Yeah, exact one's way more
stable than the other. And psychology tends to focus more
on the trait side because they want to figure out
what it is that makes people actually adopt or or
grow up or be bestowed genetically. Who knows with an
outlook on life that's way more positive than somebody else

(11:31):
who may even have been like in the womb with them,
but raised in a different, different house, you know. Like,
twin studies have shown there's actually huge variations in pessimism
and optimism among twins who were separated at Perth.

Speaker 1 (11:46):
Yeah, those studies are always really telling to me because
that's probably not the hugest cohort, but I think it
just speaks a lot to a lot of different things.

Speaker 3 (11:56):
Yeah, and there's a lot of really unethical studies that
were carried out with twins too.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
Like I imagine splitting them up, right.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I think there was a researcher
at some point in the seventies maybe who specifically was
splitting up twins to study them.

Speaker 1 (12:13):
All Right, I'm gonna put on my optimist cap and
just think that everything worked out great for them because
they were eventually reunited.

Speaker 3 (12:20):
That's wonderful.

Speaker 1 (12:23):
So when you talk about the psychology side of things,
there's a couple of ways that they like to look
at it, which is which are dispositional and attributional. Dispositional
is how we predict future events, and attributional obviously is
like basically saying like this happened because of this, assigning
either credit or blame for the reason that something good

(12:45):
or bad happened to you.

Speaker 3 (12:46):
Right, And those two are trait based, Yeah, optimistic or
pessimistic views. It's not We're no longer talking about state
and trait. These are all traits from what we're talking about,
like this is how you view life, right.

Speaker 4 (12:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:00):
One of the first tests of this that has proven
to be really viable and valid. It's called the Life
Orientation Test, the LOT That was in nineteen eighty five,
and I think of the mid nineties they revised it,
so it's the LOT DASH R. Yeah, Lot DASH revised.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
Is that what it stands for? I kind of figured,
but that didn't bother looking.

Speaker 3 (13:21):
Sure, anytime you see the R with it something like that,
it almost certainly is revised. Yeah, yeah, Well it could
also be revved.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
Up, I guess, yeah, or really the right test.

Speaker 3 (13:31):
Right, The other letters are just kind of implied.

Speaker 2 (13:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
The lot was conceived by two dudes named Michael Schier
and Charles Carber. And what they were trying to do,
and I did a pretty good job of it, I think,
was measure you know, I talked about dispositional which is
how we predict future events. They're trying to measure dispositional
optimism and pessimism with this test.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
Yeah. So what they found is that, like I said, that,
the test is actually really reliable. That was the word
I was looking for before. Yeah, because if you take
this test, you know, at fifty you take it again
on a totally different day, in a totally different state
and a totally different state of mind. Yeah, at fifty
five you're probably going to get roughly the same score, right,

(14:17):
So it is a very reliable test. Interestingly, what they
found is that over the course of life, optimism tends
to rise and pessimism tends to fall from young adulthood
to middle age. Yeah, and then it starts to decline,
which I can tell you firsthand that is totally true.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
Uh. Oh, I don't want to self reflect too much
on this one.

Speaker 3 (14:40):
Well, something that I'm really hanging on too, is I've
been told that, like your forties are far and away
your worst decade.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
Yeah, I've heard that.

Speaker 3 (14:48):
Almost across the board. You've got way more responsibility, Like
you're not as young anymore. Your body's starting to change,
Like it's just a bad decade, fifties. It starts to
pick up. But I remember we talked about this before.
In your sixties, your happiness starts to go so back
up to levels that it was when you were younger.
So I'm really holding out for my sixties, man, I'll
tell you that.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
Well, I'm closer than you that for once. It's a benefit.

Speaker 3 (15:10):
I know I'm jelly.

Speaker 1 (15:12):
So the lot are, which I guess it could stand
for reliable. Yeah, so the lot are comes along.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
The revised test. It is ten questions, six of them
are scored, four of them are fillers, and the scored
wins are things like.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
I think Olivia found these exact questions and uncertain times.
I usually expect the best. If something can go wrong
for me, it will, And you're responding to how much
you agree with something, and they score it in a
pretty straightforward way, where from zero to twenty four, where
zero is very low optimism and high pessimism and twenty four, man,
you are maxed out optimist.

Speaker 3 (15:50):
I know, yeah, you got a permagrin, right, I guess.
So I took that test. I actually found the test
that like a clinician would give to like a patient.
It had like all the explanations and all that stuff
on it.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yeah, you're going to reveal your score.

Speaker 3 (16:05):
So out of twenty four, I scored eleven, and I
was like, that doesn't sound very good. And I looked
at the explanation and scoring and it says below thirteen
is lower than typical optimism and may warrant clinical attention.
So I got really upset about this because that's like
basically the test scoring academic version of going.

Speaker 1 (16:24):
Oh, yeah, I want to take that test, So.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
Send that to me, Leah.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
You should, I'll send it to you.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (16:31):
But I went on, I guess a bit of a tailspin.
So I tried to make myself feel better. I went
and listened to some Kenny G to brighten my mood,
and I was just sitting there. I realized I was
just sitting there waiting for him to screw up eventually,
so I stopped listening to trinny G. Then I went,
I'm going to have to alone again, naturally, and then
everything was all right again.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Okay, that's good.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
Attributional optimism or pessimism is what we mentioned earlier is
the other side of that coin. And that's when you're
either saying, like this thing that was good in my
life is happened because of this good thing only, or
this bad thing that happened happened because of this bad
thing only. It's basically assigning blame to what happens in

(17:13):
your life. And if you're you know, some of this
stuff is kind of no brainer. If you're optimistic, you
are much more prone to attribute negative events to a
specific thing, like, hey, things usually work out for me,
and this didn't just because of this, Whereas if you're
a pessimist, it's like, no, this happened to me just
because this kind of stuff always.

Speaker 2 (17:31):
Happens to me.

Speaker 3 (17:32):
Yeah, And in the same vein, if you're a pessimist
and something good happens to here, like that was just
one million chants, it makes me so sad, it is,
But that's that's usually how it works. On this test,
the attributional Style Questionnaire, I looked at that one too.
That's a Martin Seligman joint, huh, And it's twelve questions

(17:52):
twelve situations actually, where it says, so, for example, one
of them will say a friend compliment to you on
your appearance, and then I ask you to write in
what the cause was, right, like you got some new
duds or something like that, and then I've gotten even better. Example,
there's one that said you've been looking for a job
unsuccessfully for a long time. Then you'd write in the cause,

(18:13):
say you said it was a bad economy, or you
even said I'm not good at interviewing. Then it says
okay to ask you questions about the cause, like how
much of that is due to the actions of yourself
versus other causes? And so you might say like, well,
I'm going through a bad spell right now, so you

(18:34):
know it's probably me and my gloomy nature right now.
And then they'll say, well, how likely is it that
the issue is going to be present the next time,
say you interview. You can say, well, I expect to
be feeling a lot better next time, so maybe I'll
be doing a little better. And then how much does
it extend to other parts of your life. So there's
twelve of those, and from that, apparently you can glean

(18:55):
quite clearly whether somebody leans pessimists or optimist based on
their responses, because again it's do things happen because you
screwed up right or because you are capable of achieving
good things? Is it always that way? If things go
wrong for you? Is that just par for the course.
And then if something goes wrong for you, does your
whole life just get disrupted? Like those things he figured

(19:19):
out are actually really predictive and it makes a lot
of sense.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
Yeah, it's it's interesting. It's almost like someone who is
like a self actualized person as opposed to someone who
feels like they're just sort of a victim in life.

Speaker 3 (19:34):
Yeah, for sure, you know, for sure.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
So Martin Seligman, once again he put forth this idea
that though there was an antidote to this idea of
learned helplessness, which is this, I imagine it's awful, this really
draining thought that I just can't control anything that happens,
and all these negative things that happened to me, like
I can't do anything about that. He put forth the

(19:58):
idea of learned optimism. But that has to go on
the assumption that optimism and pessimism aren't just these fixed
things in your life, and it's more of a strategy
that you employ.

Speaker 3 (20:10):
Yeah, which is really significant because I think it's easy
for people who say are like have a generally gloomy
outlook to forget that there's plenty of times where they
are excited about the future, where they do expect something
good to comfort down the road for them. It's just
easy to get caught up in that sort of look
at them as like, No, this isn't like just your

(20:30):
genes like making you move and walk like Master Blaster
from Mad Max. Right, this is just you not even
being aware that you're adopting these things as strategies to
kind of negotiate life, because this is the strategy you
learn based on all these other different events in your
life that led up to this, which means chuck, and
this is the most hopeful thing of all. You can

(20:52):
learn and unlearn strategies that you're not aware you're using
by recognizing them as strategies.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:59):
And by the way, I just I cannot say that
movie character named from the Mad Max without saying it
like Tina Turner, I could only say Masta blasta.

Speaker 3 (21:10):
It sounds like it sounds like Tim Curry doing Tina Turner.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Wow, all right, yeah, I like it. Yeah, I like
that too.

Speaker 3 (21:19):
How's Tim Curry doing these days?

Speaker 4 (21:21):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (21:21):
You know, I actually saw something recently where he was
interviewed and he has recovered from his stroke such that
he can can speak, and you know, I mean, I
think he's doing as well as he can be for
you know, such a I think it's a pretty massive stroke.
But the interview I saw was like he had a
sense of humor and was engaged and people really really

(21:42):
loved hearing from him.

Speaker 3 (21:43):
Again, that's wonderful, I'm glad, I asked.

Speaker 4 (21:45):
Then.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
Yeah, I just saw that kind of recently too. That's funny.
You must be in my algorithm.

Speaker 3 (21:50):
I'm all up in there.

Speaker 2 (21:53):
Should we take a break or should we go through
this last bit?

Speaker 3 (21:57):
We should go through last bit?

Speaker 1 (21:59):
Okay, So here's something that's probably not surprising. Is it
dispositional and attributional optimism or really correlated to one another?
And really no surprise there. Also, I was about to say comorbid,
but that always sounds bad, but correlated to high self esteem,
positive affect, feeling like you're in control of your life

(22:20):
and your outcomes, and obviously negatively correlated with feeling depressed
or stressed or alienated or having anxiety or hopelessness.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
Yeah, And as far as Big five personality traits goes,
it's most closely related to emotional stability optimism is Yeah.
So essentially, if you put all that together, that's the
kid from your high school that you hated because everybody
loved him and he was in a great mood all
the time and he loved you.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
Yeah that was kind of me. Oh no, oh really yeah, sort.

Speaker 3 (22:50):
Of Mine was Scott Galvin or Tony.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
Appy Man, Tony Appy, that guy.

Speaker 3 (22:55):
So I say we take a break.

Speaker 1 (22:57):
Okay, well take a break. We're going to think about
her and where this podcast is headed. And I'm feeling
pretty good about it.

Speaker 2 (23:02):
Not theimistic. We'll be right back.

Speaker 4 (23:21):
Stop you know, stop stop stop here. Shouldn't know no,
stop you know, stop stop stop here, shouldn't know stop
you should know?

Speaker 2 (23:36):
All right.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
So the thing that was on my mind, and I'm
glad she included this bit Olivia did, is like, you know,
is this stuff nature or nurture? Like are we kind
of born this way? Or are we made this way,
and no surprise, it's a bit of both. I think
generally speaking, they've come to a consensus at about twenty
five And anytime you hear percentages like this, this sort
of take take it with a grain of salt, but

(23:58):
about twenty five percent genetic and the rest is a
mix of like your childhood and the environment that you
were raised in obviously, and then stuff that happened to
you since then.

Speaker 3 (24:10):
Yeah, and a lot of it's pretty intuitional, right yeah, intuitive, sure, Yes,
that's why I was like, that doesn't sound right. Yeah,
Like if you are a developmental psychologist, you would say, well,
your early life experiences and being raised in a family
that neglected you or abused you or criticized you constantly,
you're going to develop negative patterns of thinking and they're

(24:33):
going to frame the way that you look at the world.
Of course. Yeah, so I mean it makes sense of jobs.
It's not one of these things. It's like this one
subgroup in psychology is working on optimism and pessimism and
having to try to do all these mental gymnastics to
reverse shoehorn it into other stuff. Yeah, it just fits
with other concepts. So it's very clear that there are

(24:54):
there's something too. Optimism and pessimism. They do exist as
a thing psychologically speaking, and stuff like that just backs
it up.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
There was a study this year, actually pretty robust, where
they had two hundred thousand adults. And this one's good
because it was spread out over twenty two different countries.
And we'll talk about a little bit of the bias
of just studying sort of western countries with optimism and stuff.

Speaker 2 (25:17):
But they compare their levels of.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
Optimism with how they remember their childhood and across all
the geographies, and again, no surprise, people who had positive
relationships in their family with their parents and siblings, they
had better financial status, better health outcomes, and obviously were
more optimistic. Interestingly, if you had frequent religious attendance when

(25:40):
you were a kid, they associate that with optimism, but
most strongly in more secular countries, which I thought was
pretty fascinating.

Speaker 4 (25:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
I was trying to figure that out, and the best
I could come up with is that they just they
stood out more because they were fewer and farther between.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
I'm not sure, I don't know, or maybe in more
religious countries you're just sort of more expected to be
dragged to church and it wasn't like a conscious choice
you made to go.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
I don't know that's a better interpretation, okay.

Speaker 3 (26:07):
And also, like I was saying, divorce, abuse, feeling like
an outsider in your family all associated with lower optimism. Yeah,
and they did say, like, Okay, there is possibly something
we should mention here. It's possible that these people who
are recalling their childhood are the optimists are recalling their
childhood in more favorable terms, and the pessimist are recalling

(26:30):
them in less favorable terms. And there has to be
like a word for when the thing you're studying acts
as a confounding factor in the study of itself. Yeah,
could not find it to save the life of me.
So if you're a researcher other and you know what
that is, tell me because I've been dying. But that's
essentially what they were saying. They still said, now this
study still stands, but they at least did acknowledge that

(26:52):
it's possible it was the thing being studied optimism was
influencing the study itself.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, there's got to be a
certain it's like a blank bias, you.

Speaker 3 (27:01):
Know, blank bias.

Speaker 1 (27:02):
Good enough if you're wondering about the brain itself, like
just your physical brain, you're noodle. As they say, they
have found differences obviously in optimists and pessimist brain and
how they're built, like your gray matter volume, but also
how they activate. There was a study again from this
year in twenty twenty five where and I thought, this

(27:24):
is pretty interesting where optimists share patterns like there the
wonder machine lights up in kind of the same way
when optimists imagine future events, whereas when pessimists imagine future events,
they may all be imagining something negative, but it's all
individual to that person.

Speaker 2 (27:43):
And how the MRI machine lights up.

Speaker 3 (27:45):
I think this is maybe the most interesting thing that
has been turned up about this so far.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
Yeah, it is.

Speaker 1 (27:52):
It's just like groupthink versus like, no, I have a
personal negative outlook that's only mine.

Speaker 3 (27:58):
Yeah, I mean I saw somebody point out like, maybe
this is why some people click with other people, like
they share a literal brain pattern in the way that
they think about the future outlook on life. Whereas you know,
people who are like have lower optimism or higher pessimism
tend to think be thought of as like moby alienated
off by themselves. So they can't even connect with one

(28:21):
another because they have varying brain patterns. It's not like
optimists all have one brain pattern and pessimists all have
one brain pattern. Optimists are the only ones that share
the brain pattern. I find that super fascinating.

Speaker 1 (28:33):
No, totally, And it also sort of lends itself to like,
if you're pessimistic, you may have a harder time finding
a community because it's your own and not one that
you share. Yeah, as you know, we're talking about health outcomes.
If you read, you know, especially like when you were saying,
like the earlier two thousands, when it was all this
happiness stuff, like it makes it seem like optimism is

(28:56):
basically just the key to life across every single factor
from health to your finances, everything your focus and your
decision making and your motivations.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
And a lot of that. It's true to a certain degree.

Speaker 1 (29:09):
It's not a magic pill, but there's no doubt that
optimism is linked to better like literal health outcomes, better
heart health, lower inflammation, better immune responses, sleeping, better overall
mortality rates. One suggestion is like, yeah, because you know,
you're not as stressed out and stress as the cause

(29:30):
of a lot of that stuff, So that just sort
of makes sense.

Speaker 3 (29:33):
Yeah, you have less inflammation, which is a big one.
I mean, that could explain it right there as far
as health out outcomes. But also they're like, well hold on,
I mean, like optimists. One of the things that defines
optimists is that they are undeterred in seeking their goals
because they generally believe they're going to be successful. Right,
whether all odds are against it or not, doesn't matter.

(29:55):
They're just going to go and do their thing because
they think it's going to be fine. So that would
include things like quitting smoking, exercising, eating right. Having goals
and then just working toward them is almost always aligned
with better health and like having better health habits too,
so that would definitely explain one reason why they are

(30:17):
probably healthier.

Speaker 1 (30:19):
Yeah, there are some big caveats that Lvia was keen
to point out, and a lot of these studies that
sort of, you know, tie between being optimistic and having
good health. It gets ticked down quite a bit when
they look into the details of like someone's I don't
know bank account and they're like, oh, well, yeah, this

(30:40):
person that's got loads of money. Yeah, Yeah, they're more
optimistic and so yeah, they're healthier because a lot of
that just financial stress and all that stuff goes out
the door. And you know, when you're stressed out about
money like that may lead to like drinking more or
starting smoking, and so you really have to sort of
caveat that to death, you know.

Speaker 3 (31:02):
Yeah. And similarly, these studies are usually just taking a
snapshot of what that person's like, right then, Right, so
you score very high on an optimistic the life orientation test. Right,
and you also say, like, I don't smoke, I eat
five servings of vegetables every day. Yeah, it's not clear

(31:23):
from that study they're correlated. But is it that people
who eat better and don't smoke tend to have a
more positive outlook? Do you not smoke and eat better
because you have a positive outlook? There's a whole chicken
in the egg thing. I just coined that phrase, but
I think it's gonna stick around.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
Then there's something called optimism bias, which I thought was
pretty interesting. As a human race, we have an optimism bias.
They've studied it to death and they found that just
for the general population, the default is about eighty percent
of people are generally optimistic. Ten percent are generally pessimistic

(32:03):
and about ten percent can go either way, or maybe
you're neutral. And there was a psychologist named Neil Weinstein.
I think this is in the very early nineteen eighties. Yeah,
nineteen eighty was his initial study where he was the
first guy to say, yeah, I mean, we're pretty much
biased toward being optimist. And you know, one reason may
be because it's so shoved down your throat that that's

(32:26):
the key to everything good in life.

Speaker 3 (32:27):
You know, Yeah, maybe what Weinstein. I'm going with Weinstein,
but I get Weinstein too. Yeah, I think one thing
that his study, it was a landmark study from what
I could tell. In nineteen eighty, he tested two hundred
students and said, Okay, of these positive things and of
these negative things, was the likelihood it all happened to you?

(32:48):
And was the likelihood it all happened to your classmates?
And just across the board, students said that positive things
were much more likely to happen to them than to
their classmates. Negative things were much more likely to happen
to their classmates than to them. And we're talking things
like liking your post graduation job, or your house doubling

(33:09):
in value in five years, or this one, I love
this one, your achievements being written up in the newspaper,
like all those things were much likelier to happen to
the test taker than they were to their fellow students.
And that kind of gets to the basis of this
optimism bias that everyone thinks that they're above average in

(33:31):
a lot of different ways, which is of course impossible
because there have to be people who that isn't true for,
or else there wouldn't be an average. We'd all be
above average. It's not possible. And so here's where we
get to stop talking about optimists as if they're the
greatest thing that ever happened, because one of the big
problems with optimism is this bias and making terrible predictions

(33:52):
about the outcomes of events.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:56):
Well, there was another study that kind of tied into
that is from Tali Sharrat, who's a cognitive neuroscientist at
the University College of London and kind of took that
experiment and ran with it and said, all right, I'm
going to ask you about the likelihood of something good
or bad happening in your life. Get that answer, and
then they say, well, here's actually the average likelihood of

(34:18):
that kind of thing happening, and now let me ask
you again. And they found that people change their answers
more in response in the positive way than in the
negative way, which I thought was sort of counterintuitive.

Speaker 3 (34:30):
It is, because you'd think if you've said, like, what's
your chances of winning the lottery tomorrow and somebody said
eighty percent, and then the people said, actually it's ninety percent,
they go, great, what's say one hundred percent for me? Right,
So that's what people would do. But if the researchers said,
actually it's more like twenty percent, they'd be like, no,
eighty percent for me. And that's what I was talking about.

(34:50):
People tend to think that good things are likely to
happen for them.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah, even in.

Speaker 3 (34:57):
Knowing that statistically speaking, right overall, it's very unlikely to
happen just anybody. But they're not just anybody. This is
the optimism bias that's been turned up and reinforced the
year after year every year. Yeah, it's an annual thing.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
Well, and uh, speaking of reinforce, it seems that optimism
reinforces optimism if you. When they have they've studied this
that positive life events just tend to make you even
more optimistic, which makes a lot of sense. But if
you have something negative that happens, it doesn't generally all
of a sudden make you more pessimistic.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
It's just like, well, that happened.

Speaker 3 (35:32):
Yeah. Some other examples are when you expect things to
be easy for you. A lot of people do that.
I understand that one too, it could be bad, and
that you'll be more successful then then you would, I
mean again, just statistically speaking, And then also that we
spend a lot more time thinking about good things that
are coming down the pike than bad ones, so I

(35:54):
also can associate with I mean it. It just seems
unusual for the average person to sit around and be like, well,
I'm probably going to get a flat tire in the
next like year and a half. Statistically speaking, I should
probably think about that for a little while.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 (36:12):
But there is some sort of like I guess, prophylactic
influence of that, which is you might go make sure
that your spare tire is doing okay, And that kind
of belies this. I'm not sure if I'm using that
word correctly, but that goes to show that the optimist

(36:32):
bias can actually be harmful in some ways because it
will prevent you from doing something like going to check
your spare tire, because of course you're not going to
get a spare tire because that wouldn't happen to you.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
Yeah, it's Emily and I talk a lot about it,
like the Pollyanna thing. That doesn't seem to serve people
well because then you're all of a sudden ignoring, or
maybe not ignoring, but at least not putting as much
weight into the things you do and the decisions you
make day to day that might have a bad outcome,

(37:04):
and all of a sudden you're caught unaware when that
bad outcome happens. Which is it's bad enough when you're
just an individual, but if you're a corporation or a
friggin government and you're caught unaware because you thought something
was going to go too well, or you didn't put
the budget or the time into something that you should
have because you just thought it was a no brainer,

(37:25):
or something like that, that can be really destructive to
a business or to a nation.

Speaker 3 (37:30):
Yeah, I feel like just believing that artificial intelligence will
be great with no downsides, you're worth considering. Is it
good excellent example of what you're just talking about.

Speaker 2 (37:39):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 (37:41):
So you might say, okay, well, then if eighty percent
of people are optimistic, that kind of suggests that this
is like maybe humanity's default setting, and that tessimism is
like maybe malfunction. Even the the thing about that is
that it doesn't really make sense that it would be

(38:05):
evolutionarily favorable for us to be optimistic because of this
optimism bias that can get us into trouble. But you
can look at it a certain way and say, like, actually,
it does make a lot of sense, because if we
didn't have an optimistic bias, we might not go try
new things, we might not make it out of the
cave and learn to make fire ourselves, or kind of

(38:27):
put differently, if you have a problem that's life or death,
and you throw a bunch of people at it, and
all of them are kind of pre tuned to expect
their attempt at being successful to work. The ones who
die trying don't get to reproduce. The ones that succeed
do get to live to reproduce. And not only do

(38:48):
they get to live to reproduce and pass on that
optimism bias, it's reinforced because they were successful, and they
think all the more, now I can successfully predict my future,
and I'll be successful in that future.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
And you know I mentioned the caveat about the Western
societies being the most studied. A lot of these are
definitely you know, slanted toward you know, the American way
of life or the Western way of life, and thought
they're really.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
Not super sure about sort of worldwide.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
There is some evidence that like in Japan, that like
they might not anticipate positive outcomes as much for their
own selves like we do here in the United States, Right,
But they also make the point like, well we're also
you know, all of these things are people self reporting.
So in places like the United States or Australia, they

(39:40):
may just be more likely to say out loud that
they're optimistic, whereas in another country they may feel that
way but just you know, no WAMIs kind of style,
or maybe they just are not as outwardly optimistic, but
they really feel it, they just don't want to say it.

Speaker 3 (39:55):
Yeah, it's not cool to be optimistic in those countries. Yeah,
you want to take a break and then come back
and talk about some variations on this theme.

Speaker 2 (40:03):
Let's do it.

Speaker 4 (40:03):
Okay, stop, you know, stop stop stop. He shouldn't know no, stop,

(40:29):
you know, stop stop stop. He shouldn't know stop you
should know.

Speaker 3 (40:35):
Okay, Chuck. We said we're going to talk about some variations,
and I think one thing we should point out is
that optimism itself is almost a variation on a theme.
When people say like like somebody's just happy all the time,
there's going through life, they have like the best attitude,
that's actually not optimism. Optimism is either, like we said,

(40:56):
you are expecting good things to happen down the pike,
or or you assume that you can overcome obstacles. You
don't blame other people for your issues. Like that's optimism
with the other thing that I just mentioned is positive affect,
which is more enjoying the present, and optimism is thinking
about the future essentially.

Speaker 1 (41:17):
Yeah, that's a good thing to point out for sure.
Some of these variations that you mentioned we were going
to talk about. I thought all these were pretty interesting.
One is called depressive realism, and I think they all
have their place. Depressive realism is this idea that if
you're you know, maybe a little depressed or moderately depressed,
then you're actually a realist and you have a way

(41:39):
more accurate view of the real world around you. In
other words, you're not that Pollyanna, You're a realist. And
this came from a study in the nineteen seventies by
psychologist Lauren Eloy and lynn Yvonne Abramson where it's kind
of a funky study, but they had participants push a
button and then judged how a fel that might be

(42:01):
for causing a light to go on, Like I'm going
to press this button, but I don't think it's going
to do anything, right.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
Or man, this room's going to light up when I
press this button.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
Right exactly, And they said that people with depression tended
to more accurately predict whether that button was going to
turn the light on or not, right, yeah, And so
they extrapolated that to say, like, well, you know, that
means that people with depression or depressive symptoms are they
have just a greater handle on the reality of reality. Basically,

(42:32):
they're less likely to make wild predictions about their success
and so they understand reality better. And this was a
landmark study that people just immediately put into the pop
psychology grind because it's just so contrary and it's delicious. Yeah,
and it's also one of those landmark studies that people
have loved to kind of try to take shots at.

(42:54):
And apparently it's not very well replicated. So yeah, I
don't know its status right now, but it seems like
it's it hasn't been debunked, and it's not unfounded as
far as the feel psychology is concerned, but it doesn't
seem like it's as golden as it once.

Speaker 2 (43:11):
Was to like a dented landmark. Yeah, I think.

Speaker 3 (43:14):
That's a great one, like that ball of foil. That's right.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
There's another variation called defensive pessimism. I like this one.

Speaker 1 (43:24):
I mean, this isn't really me, but I think there's
a lot of validity here and that if you have
lower expectations and you're sort of planning for the worst,
that's almost the same as being optimistic in a way
as far as it helping you in life, because it
can really help manage your anxiety. It can make you
feel like you have some sense of control and you're not.

(43:44):
You know, like during COVID, they found that if you
were a defensive pessimist, then that correlated with taking more
precautions and being safer and I E.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
I guess being healthier.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
Yeah, if you ever put two words to go to
describe me, it's defensive pessimist.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
Yeah, for sure I could see that, and I think.

Speaker 3 (44:02):
There's no greater description than this. But defensive pessimists don't
focus as much on pursuing happiness. They focus more on
avoiding regret, which is I mean, they can still have
the same outcome, but it's it's what you're chasing is different.
You're avoiding a negative outcome rather than pursuing a positive outcome,
but the outcomes still the same.

Speaker 2 (44:21):
You succeeded because you're pursuing something.

Speaker 3 (44:24):
Yeah, you're Actually it's based on the idea that you
can change your fate, right Like, you can take actions
to affect this outcome and make it as close to
the outcome you want as possible. That's the same thing
as optimism, it's just coming at it a different way. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
I really like that idea because I mean, it's not me,
but I love it for you because it's not like, well,
this is just going to happen to me no matter
what it's like. Boy, I have a bad feeling that
this is going to happen to me unless I take
these steps, right.

Speaker 3 (44:55):
The only downside of it is like you won't let
yourself think about the future being good because you'll chank
it essentially.

Speaker 1 (45:03):
Yeah, yeah, Jinxing's a whole of their uh for sure,
part of this thing.

Speaker 3 (45:07):
So what you just described, though, is what I think
is the worst one, fatalistic pessimism, which is right, everything's
wrong and I can't do anything to change it. That
is a sad, sad disposition that I like to think
that is not set in stone. It's just because of
like circumstances, or it's a particular low point in your life.
I don't know, but I don't like to think that

(45:29):
anyone out there is at their base of fatalistic pessimists.
That's just sad.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
Yeah, agreed.

Speaker 1 (45:37):
On the flip side of that coin, you have toxic positivity.
I mean, we almost don't even need to say anything
else because I think everyone knows what that is. It
can lead to bad things because like that's sort of
the Pollyanna thing I was talking about.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
You're ignoring anything.

Speaker 1 (45:52):
Negative to like basically you're delusional about that, and so
you're not gonna attempt to improve things because you're just like, no,
it's it all gonna work out.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
It's gonna be great.

Speaker 3 (46:01):
One of the ways that this pops up, I think
for people, and they don't really recognize that that's what
they're doing, is when somebody shares their feelings or confides
in you that they're afraid of something or anxious about something,
and you just say, oh, it's all gonna work out.
You're being toxically positive right there. You're actually dismissing their fears.

Speaker 4 (46:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (46:19):
You're probably doing it because you're uncomfortable, right then. You
don't know what else to say, so you're just going on, well,
I can't go wrong by being positive. You actually can,
and that's toxic positivity.

Speaker 1 (46:29):
Yeah, and that's I mean true in all relationships, supporting
a spouse or a friend, but also a lot with parenting,
Like that's not a great road to go down with
a kid because you're teaching them the wrong things. I
feel like you should be saying like, well, hey, let's
think about this and maybe if you take these steps
you can help affect the outcome, rather than like it's

(46:50):
gonna be fine, you're gonna be great, yeah, because you're
not always gonna be great.

Speaker 3 (46:54):
No, that is a good thing to teach a kid
for sure. Yeah, there's also tragic optimism. Yeah. It was
coined by a guy named Victor Frankel who is a
psychologist or sorry, psychiatrist who actually did He was interned
in a Nazi concentration camp and lost essentially everyone he knew,
and he wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning

(47:14):
from that and it's like a seminal book and search
for the meaning of life. But he coined tragic optimism
to basically say, this is the mindset where you are
aware that in life you're going to suffer pain, guilt, loss,
and that you can accept that that's true and still
seek the most positive outcomes you can get. I like

(47:37):
that one too, Try to be happy even knowing that.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
Yeah, yeah, I like that.

Speaker 3 (47:41):
And then what's the last one.

Speaker 1 (47:42):
Chuck, Cultural pessimism. I'm not going to editorialize here. That's
basically just like the belief that the society was better
at a different time. You know, decades ago everything was
great in this country and everything is just going straight
down the toilet today.

Speaker 3 (48:00):
It's called getting old.

Speaker 1 (48:04):
It's interesting in that you have a tendency, in this
case toward optimism bias about your own life while also
at the same time being pessimistic about society as a whole,
which I think is super fascinating.

Speaker 3 (48:15):
It is, for sure, especially when you talk about, like,
my economic outlook is sunny, but not for the country.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:22):
I've also seen it called declinism too. Oh, so let's
say you're like, all right, nuts to all this pessimistic
outlook that I've got. I want to be an optimist.
I'm even willing to try to navigate optimistic bias. That's
how bad I want to be optimistic. There's actually some
stuff that they figured out that you can do to

(48:44):
essentially shift your outlook some I don't think anyone saying
like this is going to rewire your genetic code or
anything like that, but there are some proven interventions you
can take to help that along. I think probably it's
based on your willingness to want to change too.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:02):
I think intervention is a good word because it's like, hey,
this is happening, let me use this specific technique to
stop it in its tracks. In the first case is
the ABC technique. Our ol buddy Martin Seligman came up
with this one to use a lot in CBT, cognitive
behavioral therapy and the A is the antecedent or adversity,

(49:24):
so you encounter something difficult. Olivia used a great example
of like you, you know, like you flunk a test.
Maybe then you have your belief and behavior, which in
this case might be like I just I can't pass
this test, I can't understand this stuff.

Speaker 2 (49:36):
I'm too dumb.

Speaker 1 (49:37):
And then the consequence is the C, which is because
you have that fatalistic attitude I'm just too dumb to
pass this test, you don't study and you fall further behind.
And the key here, you know, according to Seligman, is
you got to get in there between the difficult situation,
the thing that happens, and the B thing between the
A and B and change the attribute. So in other words,

(50:02):
don't go to like, oh, I'm too dumb to do this,
go to like, now that happened because I've been really
stressed out. I didn't put the time in that I
needed to to study. I was really had my priorities
it priorities out of whack. I didn't sleep well that week.
And that's an immediate intervention where you're putting the attribution

(50:22):
on something that was temporary that happened.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
And this is how I.

Speaker 3 (50:26):
Am right, and that you can also change too exactly.
And then conversely too, you can also say, like I
got a good grade, it wasn't just because you know
I was lucky. You tell yourself, I got a good
grade because I worked really hard, I got good sleep
this week, and I paid attention. I found this interesting.
You can do the same thing too, the opposite too,

(50:47):
to achieve the same goal. I think you probably have
to do both to tell you the truth.

Speaker 1 (50:52):
Yeah, And then this is also a good thing to
remember when you're parenting, because when your kids are in
school and they maybe get a bad grade, the first
question I think you should say is, well, why do
you think you got a bad grade? And see what
they say, and then just kind of go from there, right.

Speaker 3 (51:07):
And then if they get a really good grade, you say, well,
why didn't you get.

Speaker 2 (51:09):
A hundred exactly.

Speaker 3 (51:12):
So there's another one that's even better than the ABC technique.
That's called the best Possible self for BPS intervention, And
apparently everybody loves this one. There's a way of dealing
with trauma that they used to have. It's called trauma writing,
where you would write out essentially like the worst stuff
that happened to you and it would make you feel

(51:32):
better having gotten it out on paper. It would also
be pretty traumatic to do, right, Yes, the whole basis
of that trauma well, Laura King back in two thousand
and one said, let's try something different. Let's write out
this sketch of yourself down the road in the future
where you've achieved everything you wanted to achieve it was
through hard work. Write that version out and it's less traumatizing,

(51:55):
but it also has the same effect, like it improved
your sense of well being and apparently increases your optimistic
outlook on things.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
Yeah, you know, it's the idea, that sort of hippie
dippy thing where you know, close your eyes and envision
your future where you're strong and you're not doing the
things that you're doing now that are holding you back.
And it sounds kind of corny, but I think when
you write it down, there's something to that, just the
same as trauma writing. It's different than just sort of
mentally visualizing good things happening.

Speaker 3 (52:24):
Way different. There's something about writing that's definitely yeah, a
step plus, you know. Yeah, And then so just real quick,
there are some benefits to pessimism too. It's not just
you know, being optimistic, Like, if you are pessimistic, there's
some upsides to it. But also even if you're optimistic,
there's maybe a little pessimism you should adopt too, Like,

(52:44):
if you want to enact social change, that usually doesn't
happen through optimistic leaders. It happens through people who are
skeptical and are not following for the false advertising or
false promises essentially, right, Like, you can't really be optimistic
and good social change, I think yeah. And then also,
if you are a group that wants to spur social change,

(53:06):
it's probably because you're unhappy with your current situation. And
then lastly, this one's always stood out to me. If
everyone's looking on the positive side of things, then the
people who are doing negative stuff are much likelier to
get away with it. Oh interesting, So I feel like
if you have the ability to shift between pessimism and

(53:27):
optimism as the situation calls for it, that's probably ideal.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
Or you know, if you're a defensive pessimist, it's not
about aiming low, it's about not expecting too high. And
then if you have and it sounds bad to have,
like you should have low expectations it's more like realistic
expectations and then you outperform those like That's got to
feel great to a Pessimi, for sure.

Speaker 3 (53:51):
It's like planning for the worst but hoping for the best.

Speaker 2 (53:55):
Yeah, that old T shirt. Isn't there a cat hanging
from a tree or something?

Speaker 3 (53:59):
I think that's hanging in baby. Okay, you got anything else?

Speaker 2 (54:03):
I got nothing else that. That was a good one.
I enjoyed it.

Speaker 3 (54:06):
Agreed, well, Chuck enjoyed this one, which means he automatically
unlocked listener mail.

Speaker 1 (54:13):
You know what, I don't have a great listener mail
preps for today, So let's just mention once again that
we are going on tour again next year. We are
super excited. We got shows lined up in January out
West Ish, in the Midwest in April, and then we're
finally going all across Canada. You guys, we're reaching out
with an Olive branch such weird times between our countries

(54:35):
and saying, hey, don't boycott us, we want to come
visit you. We're going to Montreal, We're going to places
we've never been before, and.

Speaker 2 (54:42):
Tickets are on sale now and we'd love to see everybody.

Speaker 3 (54:45):
Yeah, starting out we're going to be in Denver and
then Seattle and then San Francisco on January twenty seventh,
twenty eighth, and twenty ninth. Yeah, and for those tickets
and all tickets as they come on sale, you can
just go to Stuff you Should Know dot click on
the tour button and it will take you where you
need to go.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
That's right. Can't wait to see everybody.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
Hey, yeah, Hey, And if you want to get in
touch with this in the meantime and send us an email,
we would love that. You can send it off to
stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.