Chuck Bryan

Talk about an upshot.

But 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 right since then, we've really narrowed it down more to like like you're just very personal outlook on stuff.

Yeah.

And it's gotten even more kind of refined than that.

The idea that 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 19th, early 20th century.

He was basically talking about that very issue, too.

It got picked up about 50 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 we started writing at How Stuff Works?

And like every third article we wrote was about happiness.

There was like a whole happiness craze.

That came out of Maslow's whole positive psychology thing being picked up and dusted off in the late 90s.

Yeah.

And I remember even in the 80s and 90s, and I don't know if this came from and we're going to talk a lot about this guy, Martin Seligman.