Chuck Bryan

Oh, nice.

The Upshot with Josh Clark.

And if I need to break that, I can say Upshot and Upshot to the Upshot.

Oh.

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

Is that what it was?

Because...

I had the same thing where, like, I spent more time on this than things that were seemingly more difficult to understand.

That's the only explanation I can think of.

It was preconceived notions.

Yeah, I think you're right.

Shall we go back and just talk about the word?

Because I thought that was sort of interesting in itself.

Yeah.

Was that the original word comes from French, optimisme, that was coined in the early 1700s by a philosopher named Gottfried Wilhelm

uh liebniz or i guess leibniz and that's interesting enough that's fine the idea was that god optimized the universe for good and minimized evil but what i thought was super interesting the word pessimism was literally made up just to counter that like as a straw man term for people to write and say well no i don't really think so so they made up the word pessimism

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, right?

Yeah, good point.