16 Lessons From 700 Episodes - Sam Harris, Mark Manson & Tim Urban

what's happening people welcome back to the show it is a 72nd episode it would have been 700 but huberman took that spot so I guess I can really kick him off to do this arbitrary runr of lessons if you are relatively new here over the last 100 episodes you might not know that around about every hundred I recap a bunch of lessons that I've got from the show or from life or from writing my newsletter and I get to run through them so today you're going to get to go through as many as I've got time for from the last 9 months or so and there are some absolute bangers in there before I get started if you haven't already neonic is live now my first ever product it is the only thing that you need to drink to get absolutely dialed in no matter what you need to do to be more focused attentive to improve your memory this thing is phenomenal so without further Ado by the way new tonic.com if you need that without further Ado your expectations Define your happiness more than your circumstances and this is something that I knew intuitively but needed a couple of quotes to kind of really synthesize it so Tim Urban says if you only wished to be happy this could be easily accomplished but we wish to be happier than other people and this is always difficult for We Believe others are happier than they are monu said this 300 years ago and we're still working on this one so Tim Urban resurfacing that famous quote really highlights the asymmetry between what we see of ourselves and what we see of everyone else right because humans are comp comparative relative beings we don't just judge what we are in isolation we judge it as a part of the entire hierarchy of society it's not just about being in a situation and it being good it's about being in a better situation than we were before and also a better one than the people that were around and also a better one than our parents were in when they were our age this is a intergenerational competition Theory it's referred to as Charlie Munga had a really great Insight where he said um The World Isn't driven by greed it's driven by Envy our lives are objectively the best Humanity has ever had yet complaining and dis dissatisfaction is as high as ever and also because everyone usually only shows the world the best of themselves this means that we see our own misery and our failings and foibles and vacillation from a front row seat while we watch the Highlight Reel of everyone else and this makes us think that other people are doing better than they really are and when we feel the Delta between Where We Are and where we imagine they are it hurts right there is no such thing as objective wealth everything is relative and most relative to those around you that's from Morgan housel and there's kind of a way to look at this that your circumstances are one uh indication of your happiness but your expectations are one too and you can either bring your circumstances up to meet your expectations or try as best you can to bring your expectations down but the problem is no one is going to feel fired up or romantic about the opportunity of leaving Lots on the table right this isn't very hosy pilled to say oh yeah I'm just going to expect less of myself I'm going to leave as much as I can on the table because I understand that the gap between my circumstances and my expectations are where happiness sits so by having lower expectations I can increase my happiness that doesn't it kind of feels like like folding almost to this uh ineffable Force that's out there trying to crush us but I don't know I think I think there's something to it in as much as you can take satisfaction in the things that you have done uh I was talking to Dan Bilzerian someone that you might not think of as a a font of like life bro wisdom but he's a really smart guy and we were talking about how um each time that you achieve a new level of success it essentially just creates a new bar for you to meet again in the future and that sounds I don't know it might sound kind of trite but the problem with a rapid increase in status or wealth or or Accolade or whatever is that all that you're thinking about is oh God that's now the new bar that I need to get to so for instance let's say that we release a a YouTube video and it breaks some record for a 24-hour plays let's say it does a million plays in an hour which I think in a day which is around about our current record there is Elation at the fact that we've done it but then there's also this uh despondency in the back of your mind where you think oh my God that's the new bar in order for us to get another best record we have to do a million 1.1 million plays in a day and that's terrifying it's also a reason I think why I'm not so bought in on universal basic income being a solution if AI automates all of our jobs and starts producing better podcasts than me because as soon as humans reach an acceptable level of existence they start wanting to push for more in order to stand out from the crowd and a flat hierarchy doesn't stick about for long so even if every single person earns the same amount of money people will just find something else to compete on right so in in 20100 when everyone's needs are met and nobody needs to go to work or something we're all going to be uh collecting leaves or wives or social credit score system points or something like it you are naturally going to stratify out into a hierarchy because it is not about your absolute happiness it is all about your relative happiness your relative attractiveness your relative wealth Gad sad said this on the episode a couple of weeks ago right he said um if you want to be happy and satisfied with your sex life you not only need to have the amount of sex that you want but you want to be having a little bit more sex than all of your friends around you so yeah um happiness and uh satisfaction in life does not exist in a vacuum as as much as you and me may think oh yeah fantastic I can do this from first principles that's not the way that it works so yeah uh be careful about your expectations another one about Mono thinking which got some uh backs up on the Internet a couple of weeks ago which was great uh was by Ginder Bogle he says you can gauge someone's Ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer those who blame many different issues like War poverty and pollution on just one cause like capitalism are recycling explanations because the demand for answers outstrips their supply so good man the demand for answers outstrips their supply so they keep on repurposing the only answer that they do know everything is because of toxic masculinity or everything is because of climate change or everything is because of progressive ideology or whatever it is right and it got me onto another idea which might explain why you get ostracized sometimes for not being a card carrying extremist or a cookie cutter idealog so if I know one of your views and from it I can accurately predict everything else that you believe then you're not a serious thinker right so if you tell me your view on abortion and from it I know your stance on immigration and Healthcare and gun control and vaccines and Taxation it seems likely that you haven't arrived at all of those beliefs on your own rather you just unquestioningly adopted an entire Suite of beliefs from some group right you've outsourced your worldview to the crowd and these people are very predictable right I can be very confident about what they'll say if a new social campaign movement comes along because it's exactly the same as what everybody else in their group will say and this is why anyone who thinks for themselves and doesn't adhere to a cookie cutter ideology whale is so unpopular right you are an unreliable Ally surely you you might agree with me on abortion but I know that you disagreed with me on your opinion of Donald Trump so I'm uh very skeptical of you in the future right these unreliable allies need to be treated with much more skepticism and distance and in a tribal Warfare game the most reliable members are the most popular and I think that this is something reassuring to remember if you ever feel like you don't fit in or like people sometimes don't treat you with the same degree of uh like tribal acceptance that you notice other people do even people who are perhaps compromising what they believe compromising their um you're aware that they don't actually believe the things that they're saying yet they say them and somehow members of the group would rather have a lying compatriot than an honest adversary or even just like an honest associate right and um yeah I think I felt that a good bit myself I felt that um whether it's being accused of on the same video being a blue pilled cck and a uh a right-wing bigot right by by opposite people point in the same in this opposite direction it's just um it's an interesting one and it's reassuring uh in some ways and this leads into probably my favorite new idea that I'm kind of obsessed by at the moment which is the abalene Paradox the abalene Paradox is a situation in which a group makes a decision that is contrary to the desires of that group's members because each member assumes the others approve of it it explains how a number of accurate individuals can become idiots when they get together so think Emperor's New Clothes right an acquaintance invites you to his wedding despite not wanting you there because he thinks you want to attend you attend despite not wanting to because you think he wants you there or at a a business meeting someone suggests an idea that he thinks the others will like uh for instance recruiting a trans influencer is the face of a brand each member has misgivings about what it is but assumes that the others will consider them transphobic if they speak out so everyone approves the idea despite no one actually liking it or uh every member of a family in North Korea hates communism but they never mention this to each other because each assumes that the others approve of it and I think I wondered for a good while about how rational people that I knew in private held uh quite balanced beliefs or quite normal beliefs or just a uh a relatively normal worldview seem to change an awful lot when they got into a group and not just in a a performative way but that their actual you know like ground ethics seemed to adjust like there were a different person not only in presentation but in content too in substance as well so it's just again it's reassuring I think if you're somebody that sits anywhere outside of the absolute cookie cutter extremist on both sides ideology you are going to be observed as an unreliable Ally by the people that are further out to the right or the left than you because they are by definition more predictable the the further toward the middle that you get the less predictable you are and this whether it's to do with sports right if you're the sort of person that will both praise and criticize your sports team right or or or praise and criticize your child sports team all of these things the lack of predictability the lack of a cook cutter ideology about anything means that people will treat you with more skepticism because in the future they can't accurately project whether or not you're going to be on their side or on the side of someone else that they absolutely hate or somewhere else that they haven't even thought of much much easier ah yeah we don't need to worry about JN John's John's always John's Sweet John's Sweet John's John's always on our side so yeah I think useful lesson to know uh another one that I actually had Illustrated recently which was pretty cool by um V Andre was about the reason that you should stop taking advice from super successful people and i' noticed that there's a trend of people who've made it explaining how work life balance is actually what's most important and how you can't be powered by resentment or a sense of insufficiency or a chip on your shoulder or whatever and it's a failure I think on the part of the guru to understand that the tools you need to get from nor to 50 and not the same that you need to get from 90 to 95 and it's also a basic failure of memory right when you look at what got that person to where they are it's precisely the traits that they're now castigating almost almost everybody has more pain and resentment and fear in the beginning which is why they all use it and once you've achieved enough success and validation from the world to not be fueled by that anymore that's great but that doesn't mean that people who are just starting out can achieve the success that you now have by using strategies which you only accessed after becoming successful right like it's almost like uh the luxury belief of success kind of like Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs idea um defund the police for instance was pushed heavily by people that live in communities that didn't need a massive police presence and you need holistic balance Drive is pushed by people who already benefited from their resentment fueled Obsession for a decade right like we have to be very careful modeling off what successful statusfull behave to achieve success instead it would be what did my favorite Guru actually do when they were at my stage because that is a much more realistic idea of how you can emulate what they're doing Ali abdal has this great idea where he says about how um you want to be teaching people that are three steps behind you because when you're 10 steps ahead you can't remember the problems that you were having 10 steps ago and everybody falls into this trap right you the theory of mind again stepen pink is idea about uh the curse of knowledge like once you know a thing you can't imagine what it's not like to not know that thing and the the ability for people to jump back by you know three years five years a decade 20 years is basically impossible they can't remember where they were at and we don't have some you know photographic memory of the texture of our mind and of the way that we spent our time so yeah a much better way to do it if you're looking at someone is not to listen to what they're saying but to look at what they did when they were at the same stage as you um talking about realistic paths to difficult things I came up with this idea about a realistic path to Enlightenment so as much as moving to a cave right in the woods and spending a decade in silent Retreat might be great for your spirit it's not going to be doable by pretty much anyone and if you've meditated enough you know that you accumulate momentum in mindfulness kind of like a swell moving underwater and after enough time there's kind of a force and a power to your ability to drop into the present moment and sometimes even little waves of genuine calm Insight break above the surface it's lovely but if you're anything like me it doesn't result in an extended self-perpetuating Enlightenment it doesn't even really work on its own where your mindfulness sneaks up on you and you're in the present moment without realizing and I've done you know 1500 sessions of meditation over the last 5 years more so consistent meditation and a focus on mindfulness strengthens the thinking muscle that you use to Wrangle your mind to actually exist right now you you learn to punctuate your day with instances where your mind finally settles into the moment and then it's gone but then you can get back later in the day and as as far as I can tell this is the realistic path to Enlightenment you're never going to become fully Bliss Out In Perpetual non-dual astral realm synchronicity right but you can string together a few moments of Peace So that at least for a few times each day your mind rests where your feet are and I always used to think that this was a failure if I can achieve mindfulness but then I lose it that's still not persistent Enlightenment so I failed and instead I think it's smart to reframe the goal if you can just have your mind and your feet in the same location five or 10 times a day then that's a good start and then maybe you can do 15 or 20 or 100 and that seems importantly both attainable and really useful and um just finding these moments where you can catch yourself this you know Sam haris said it on the episode that I did with him this is who inspired this and he said he was late coming to the podcast and he was rushing around in the house rushing rushing rushing and him and his wife was leaving at the same time and they were passing each other as he was sorting his shoes or whatever and then he just caught himself stopped picked her up gave her a kiss put her down and left and you know that's a 10c punctuation of whatever obsessive machinations you've got going on in your mind that you're currently captured by until you stop and you look and you realize where you are and your mind and your feet are in the same location and you do something with so much more intentionality and presence and then you move on with your day and stringing together sequences of those kinds of moments to me seems like it's so so much more attainable it's so much more realistic uh that that's kind of what I'm aiming for at the moment and maybe you know the Jed McKenna out there my fledgling Jed McKenna who's like this super enlightened spiritual teacher uh would maybe that's me being cooked and leaving it on the table but again you know that expectations and happiness thing if your expectation is the only time that I can be satisfied or feel um grateful for the work that I've put in on a mindfulness uh level is when I finally reach complete non-dual [ __ ] Enlightenment it's not going to happen uh for pretty much anybody so you're perpetually going to be dissatisfied with your own mindfulness practice whereas I think this this seems to work and I know that I can do it I've done every single person listening to this this ever treding mindfulness which is almost all of you knows that you can do you're washing the dishes and you just catch yourself and you actually feel the water hitting your hands right or I love to do this when I'm driving which is one of the saddest things about not driving out here in Austin yet because it takes forever to get a driver's license in America the leather on the steering wheel of my car had little perforations in it and I remember if I was sat at traffic lights like really trying to feel every single perforation on the steering wheel and it just puts you into the genuinely puts you into the present moment and you know that you can do it and you know that if you strung 50 of those together every single day that's pretty [ __ ] enlightened to me so anyway that's my realistic path to Enlightenment uh you might have seen that I was hanging about with Jimmy Carr uh obviously he came on the show but we've been talking for quite a while turns out that he's a a big fan of modern wisdom and we've been chatting a lot on WhatsApp and exchanging ideas and then he did my show my show and our episode and Rogan's dropped I think within two days of each other even though mine had been recorded like three or four weeks before and uh he brought up to Joe this idea that me and him had both been working on for a little while which is the 24-hour you and this is one of the best questions I think to ask yourself when faced with a decision which is what would you tomorrow want you today to do and it's something that I've relied on for a long time to help me get perspective and make better choices the reason that it's so effective I think is it rips you out of the moment and it stops you from relying so heavily on the confused chemical signals coming from your body and instead it it gives you a bit more distance it depersonalizes the decision it helps you treat yourself like a friend that you're responsible for helping in Peterson language uh it forces you to optimize for long-term thinking rather than immediate gratification uh it reminds you that ultimately decisions aren't being made for you now they're being made for you in 24 hours and 24 days and 24 months you can see our decisions as Investments that we make into our future and the more ruminative and deep of a thinker that you are the more you need to make decisions for your future self and not yourself now does that make sense so optimizing to gratify your desires in the moment at the expense of the way that you will feel and the story that you will tell yourself about yourself in the future is rarely a good deal because you live with the story of your decisions for far longer than the impact of them so you have to Choose Wisely and we don't have crystal balls right to see the future but this is about as close to Clairvoyance as I can think like in fact I can't think of a single decision which would be worse if I actually did what I wished that I'd done 24 hours later and I can't imagine if all you did was things that you wanted to do now but you in the future would regret like that's a just direct path toward misery right like I I it's a guaranteed way to make decisions which you're going to have to not only live with the consequences of but for even longer than that you're going to have to live with the story that you tell yourself about being the kind of person who made that sort of decision and again especially if you're you know introspective reflective ruminative sort of person who's going to think about the things that you do and tell yourself a story about what that means about you you need to be very very careful about what you invest into that future story of you uh because you know the negativity bias is a hell of a drug and if it wants if you have a predisposition to think of yourself as a bit of a piece of [ __ ] you will permanently be Scouting For any excuse to fit your prior oh yeah I knew I I knew that I was always going to do that thing I I I I've not changed at all this proves to me that I'm not the person that I thought it was so yeah decisions are as much about the sort of person that you will tell yourself that you are for having made the decision as the actual impact of the decision itself and uh what would you tomorrow want you today to do pretty bulletproof uh but difficult right very difficult to do because it gives you pretty much nowhere to hide there's essentially nowhere to hide at all and uh when you do make bad decisions it's on you anyway uh there was another one from Jed McKenna who again spiritual enlightenment now uh it just this guy's writing is so interesting he writes with this degree of clarity he's either an unbelievable writer and charlatan all definitely completely enlightened and and and crazy dude um I love his books anyway Jim OES he got me onto them and he's got this quote that I've been thinking about for a while which is it relates to how hard we try to control our lives he says fear and ego are keeping your hand on the tiller release the tiller for whatever reason and the steering takes care of itself so if you think about what life would be like if you didn't grip the tiller so hard the tiller is the handle attached to the rudder on a boat it's the thing that steers it and just thinking about you know you life is chaotic and there is a swell or a storm coming and you you grip on hard you try to Wrangle control of your life more by applying more effort and pressure and cognitive horsepower and it relates to something probably my favorite ever video from or Marcus so he's stood on stage at the announcement of his New York Times best bestselling book party and he says I spent so much of my life terrified of what I was going to become and whether I was going to be right here right now God how much time did I waste afraid I wasn't going to be right here right now if I could change the only thing I'd change about my whole life would be fearing less that I wouldn't get right here the place I was going anyway I wouldn't change all the mistakes and mishaps I needed those but all the constant worry that I wasn't going to make it that took me out of the moment it took me out of enjoying these experiences or smiling or eating my lunch or whatever I was doing know your mission have faith you're going to get there wherever you go it's going to be all right just find ways to get out of your head pretty good so if you imagine that the outcomes in your life are predetermined right imagine that where you're going to end up the achievement of your goals the attainment of your Pursuits are predestined and you're going there no matter how much you fear or worry now you still need to do the work you still need to do the things but you don't need to fear about completing the work or worry about whether you'll do the things the things you need to do will get done and the ones that you don't won't how differently would you experience life you'd be able to just be right in the world but not of the world doing the things but not afraid of the things according to Jed he says You observe events and you allow the flow of things to do the steering and you go where you go and I really think that there is something to this release the tiller is a mantra that I should tattoo on the inside of my eyelids and it's good to be reminded of when we find ourselves gripping too hard to fears or expectations because why fear about whether you're going to go to the place that you were going all along and it's a delicate balance between agency you know which is one of the words that I use the most on this podcast trying to internalize that locus of control you are able to make changes to your life you are able to lean in etc etc but there is also a degree of an anxiety and and concern and rumination and Obsession and neuroticism which is no longer helpful it's it's not a part of you taking control it's outside of you taking control and you faking or you confusing what you think for how you impact the world that to me is uh a really nice reframe release the tiller so another one of the topics that we've spoken about a lot over the last couple of months is been masculinity and you know a lot of guests a lot of female guests as well which I do appreciate I wish I wish that by the way how beautiful is this can look at that get in there look at that puppy um I wish in some regards that it was more accepted for men to be talking about masculinity again not to say that it's not but you know Politico did a seven-part series on men and there were zero male writers for it uh probably the most famous masculinity focused article over the last six months was Christine Ember female uh you know so many of the people that I've been speaking to about this are women and I get the impression at the moment that guys would happily take anyone speaking about their problems so you know like a beggar on the street you know like give me the end of your sausage roll or give me two pens or give me whatever like I'll take what you get but um I do wish that it was easier for men to have this conversation without having to prostrate themselves right on the well I I I must before we get started I must say that by focusing on the problems of men we're not ignoring the problems of women and I'm aware that for a long time you know men did have some privileges apart from the war and the disease and the only 40% of us reproducing all of that like these unnecessary caveats and the hurdles that guys need to jump over especially in some regards if you're a young dude that goes to the gym right you're just branded as some right-wing Firebrand Andrew Tate like [ __ ] from wish because that is how the mainstream media has captured all of the conversations around men and it's just it it that bit that bit sucks but anyway I was trying after the conversations that I'd had to work out why men struggling and and is largely a thankless task like why is it that it's so hard to give men any attention or to give them much attention in the mainstream media and I think it's because of a zero sum view of empathy so there's an assumption that any attention paid toward men takes it away from women or some other minority group who is more deserving like after all haven't men had it good for long enough maybe they should just suck it up for a while but empathy doesn't work in this way right like it's not a limited resource and recognizing the plights of men does not ignore the plights of women and ultimately women end up suffering in any case because it's this increasing cohort of apathetic checked out resentful men who contribute to the exact lack of eligible partners that women say that they're struggling with so the women who post like mocking tweets saying boohoo poor patriarchy sad whilst also complaining where are all of the Good Men at it's just mating logic seppuku right like they're just it it if one sex loses both sexes lose and I think the difference is the main difference is that at least when it comes to women's problems and they have any of them I think that you know five or 10 years time the actual big story is going to be uh male body image and female crisis of femininity uh I think that it's going to Pivot whereas at the moment it's mostly in terms of the way that people appear women's body standards and body types uh and men's mental health I think that's going to flip based on the trends male uh body dysmorph is is set to overtake women's within the space of the next two decades so everything's going to go up side down but anyway male blame right a common question I think is why don't men just do better right surely they can just try harder in school and employment and in health it's like Chop Chop men hurry up and stop being so useless but no other group is told that when they suffer with poor performance or accolades in the real world that they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps like we don't tell any other group that they should just talk about their problems instead we spend billions in taxpayer funded money and private charity to set up committees and departments and campaigns and funds to solve the problem so if a woman has a problem we ask what can we do to fix society and if a man has a problem we ask what can men do to fix themselves and it's a blatant double standard and anyone who is unwilling to admit the structural disadvantages faced by men are standing in the way of us solving the problems that are hurting men and the potential wives that they should be viable for right the problems are not in men's heads but they're out there in society and we shouldn't Gaslight men into thinking that they can solve these problems by just being less toxically masculine like if the patriarchy is so powerful why aren't men flourishing more right the the single biggest risk to a man under the age of 40 is his own hands Christine Ember had this really lovely quote where she said um many men feel that their difficulties are often dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they don't feel a part of just because you're in the majority doesn't mean you don't need support So in this regard Modern Men are being made to pay for the sins and the advantages that perhaps their fathers and their grandfathers enjoyed and you know it's it's just it's such a shame that Mena men are kind of told if only you were less masculine if only you were more like a woman like most of the the only in fact mainstream publicly acceptable versions of masculinity look an awful lot like traditional femininity men need to open up more about their emotions they need to not be so focused on status and Prestige and Mastery and conquering uh their aggression needs to be tuned down all you know well okay like I I get that but that's not fixing masculinity that's nuturing masculinity right it's it's not uh sanitizing the bad elements that men are struggling from it's sterilizing them altogether and yeah it's just it's not going to work it's ultimately not going to work because you're fighting against biology and then there was a study I wish I'd read it earlier on but Dr John Barry he was on the show maybe six months ago Center for male psychology the lead for the center of male psychology he said um having a negative view of masculinity damages boys and men's mental health brand new research assessing the views of over 4,000 men found that thinking masculinity is bad for your behavior is linked to having worse mental well-being around 85% of respondents thought that the term toxic masculinity is insulting and probably be harmful to boys although the direction of causation isn't definite right do negative views about masculinity damage mental health or does low mental health cause men to view masculinity negatively it's clear that negative views of masculinity are linked to well-being to a significant degree and on the other hand having a positive view of masculinity is linked to better mental well-being and it fits with other evidence that's overlooked in the media and everywhere uh that masculinity can be beneficial to mental health the news shouldn't really be any surprise to any average person on the street who actually recognize the value of masculinity but much more people who are in Academia and the media and the government probably don't there's rare like exceptions but the majority of information about masculinity that we all get exposed to is unreasonably negative so you can be forgiven for thinking that men are the oppressors of women rather than the Protectors of women and interestingly the study found that better mental well-being was associated with believing masculinity makes men protective of women and worst mental well-being was associated with believing masculinity makes men feel violent toward women so one of the implications of the study is that if we want men to have good mental health a useful strategy might be to help them appreciate the ways in which their masculinity can have a positive impact on their behavior and the people around them uh so the message to schools uh and the media and the government from Dr John Barry is there is more to be gained by being positive so it's time to stop being so negative about men and masculinity and if you were to think that it's kind of it's almost like an information Hazard that the self-fulfilling prophecy of what you tell men what you tell people about what they are and what that means actually ends up changing the outcomes of their mental health if you allow the media and Academia to perpetuate a negative narrative about masculinity that is directly linked to worst mental health outcomes for men that's almost like I don't know like a a a custom pathogen or something that only impact half of the population and only impact their mental health but just allowing that to be perpetuated and the presumption is oh you know like men are just whining they need to get over it it's like hang on a second I thought that the whole point of this was that we were trying to bring men along for the ride and that we were supposed to care about their mental health so yeah that's uh like that whole masculinity conversation I'm really glad that I had so many great guests on you know George from the Tin Man just phenomenal super super interesting dude talking about it from a leftist perspective uh Christine Amber talking about it from a feminist perspective really great and I think Richard Reeves has got something new coming out next year too so he'll be back on I think he might no is going to be next year uh anyway uh something else that I realized I came up I came up with this rule called the parental clout gauge which is how I work out whether a news story has reached mainstream significance or not and it's not when it Trends on Twitter or hits daytime news or lands on the front page of a newspaper it's when my dad messages me about it on Facebook like that is holy [ __ ] like this is a big story uh he messaged me um maybe two years 18 months ago saying uh I see your friend Mr Rogan is in the news again and um he messaged something about Andrew Tate as well it's like it can be all well and good you know there can be like millions billions of tweets trending on Twitter that's that's fine but when your mom or your dad messages you about something from your world that's when you go oh my God like what what's this has got way out of hand and way too big so um the rule stands pretty well to that it's only the biggest stories that actually cross the threshold from from Millennial to the millennial Boomer uh wall that's been built um yeah it's funny I put out last week on my newsletter I put I put out a new theory about why women support body positivity so much or at least a contributing element to it uh so I'm going to try and dance through this mine field here I do think that there's some there there but upfront it's only a potential Theory so just hear me out it's also not a comment on anyone as a person so this is the Rivalry theory of body positivity female support for body positivity is at least in part fueled deep down by female intersexual competition which pushes women out of the dating pool by discouraging them from losing weight so Bill Burr on one of his Netflix specials where he did it uh Outdoors at Red Rocks I think said uh quote you guys are so into destroying each other I see all that sneaky [ __ ] you do ladies if you could just support the WNBA the way you support a fat chick who's proud of her body and no longer a threat to you that that league would be doing better numbers than the NBA oh my God you're a goddess you're gorgeous you look great in that bikini I'd kill myself if I look like that keep eating keep eating lose a toe you fat [ __ ] it's like if you saw an alcoholic oh my God you're face down passed out your kids are crying you're a hero you're a God keep doing what you're doing so that really got me thinking like that's ruthless but really really smart and then the was this new study that just came out a couple of weeks ago in the Journal of Personality and individual differences that kind of put a little bit more legitimacy to this idea than just like some comedians two-minute segment so they found that women who are high in intr seexual competitiveness are more likely to advise women who they perceive as potential mating threats to cut off more hair potentially in an attempt to sabotage their attractiveness the research res archers studied 450 women who were presented with hypothetical Salon clients participants were asked to cut off the amount of hair to recommend the amount of hair to be cut off for each client women who reported higher levels of intersexual competitiveness were more likely to recommend that clients have more hair cut off when the hair was in good condition and clients expressed a preference for minimal cutting and the reason behind this recommendation might be to subtly manipulate the appearance of their Rivals right because longer hair is a cue to Youth and health by advising more extensive haircuts these women could potentially diminish the physical attractiveness of other women and another Finding is that women advise clients of similar attractiveness as themselves to cut off the most hair so in this scenario participants effectively targeted women they perceived as being on the same attractiveness level as them which suggests a form of competitive Behavior called horizontal competition when uh individuals compete with others of similar attributes or qualities so the choice to focus on women of similar attractiveness may be strategic High attractive individuals may not pose a significant mating threat to others because they likely already have access to high quality mates on the other hand targeting less attractive individuals might not yield the desired results as their physical appearance might not be easily harmed through hairstyle changes right okay so why do I think that this relates to the body positivity movement because as far as I can tell the parallels seem pretty obvious plus you get social Renown for standing up for a mistreated group and importantly there's no body positivity movement for men right if a guy is unhappy with his body either publicly or privately most guys won't say something along the lines of you know you're absolutely gorgeous as you are you shouldn't feel any discomfort between where you are and where you want to get to uh and women the justification for this from an eitech perspective is that women use indirect aggression way more than men do so men's intersexual competition is more like a large Sledgehammer whereas women's is like a poisoned arrow that you never see coming and I'm not saying that this is the entirety of the justification for female support for body positivity but I think it would be naive to say that it doesn't contribute at all right now I imagine that this is going to be an unpopular idea because it's uncomfortable to realize that what we thought were altruistic compulsions might have a selfish undercurrent but inter seexual competition is a hell of a motive Ator and it's just an idea but I do think that there is something here to do with this and uh if I make it through the next couple of weeks then I'll be fine uh another thing that I've been thinking about a good bit I've started I guess pivoting back into um a little bit of productivity stuff because the show has been uh quite aggressive plus obviously newtonic launch which has been like just so much work behind the scenes and then live tour which is irland in UK and Dubai and Canada and America supporting James Smith later this year and then just a ton of all of the cinema episodes everything there's been lots and lots of kind of pressure behind the scenes for me uh so I've got back into thinking about um productivity and there was this idea from uh Anna cadri that I totally forgot about and then I was reminded of it and it's just I've fallen in love with it so this is productivity dysmorphia productivity dysmorphia is the inability to see one's own success to acknowledge the volume of your own output it sits at the intersection of burnout imposter syndrome and anxiety it is Ambitions Alter Ego the pursuit of productivity Spurs us to do more while robbing us of the ability to savor any success that we might encounter along the way I've started thinking of this unhealthy relationship I have with my professional achievements as productivity dysmorphia Anna said I have realized that it is an inability to see my own success it's like I'm looking in the mirror of my professional life and I don't see the published author staring back at me all I see is a failure so good dude productivity dysmorphia is just this total jaded opinion of what we do of the achievements that we have made of the outcomes that we are uh get getting on a you know minutely or daily basis uh especially especially if you are a little bit more isolated when it comes to the work that you do you know if you're a work from home kind of person or work for yourself or you know Nomad entrepreneur type thing or you know anybody that just isn't part of a a team that has very objective metrics of success because who are you comparing yourself to right how are you comparing your PT sessions that you do for your clients with someone else's well you can come in and do more PT sessions you're in earlier or later than everyone else or you fit more into the same time or your clients get better outcomes but it's all kind of like fluffy stuff it's real hard to work out okay and how much how much of that is really how much of that has got there there and how much of the rest of it is just me sort of bsing myself and then you know for the people that work at home dude I went to I went to an office for the first time in probably two years the back end of 2021 I went to go and see Mike winnet uh from the contrepreneur series at his office in Warrington which is like not even Manchester in the northwest of the UK uh and I went to go and see him and I'd you know just been locked in the house for quite a while uh working for the best part of two years and then snap to kiles and all the rest of it so it was quite insulated and forgot what normal office like was life was like and you know Mike's team uh hardworking and they do their stuff and all the rest of it but I went in and just observed people you know the all of the [ __ ] distractions that you have of an open plan office oh someone's going to get up and does anybody want a coffee and then you know for 90 seconds or two minutes everyone talks about the different cof yeah I I once had a really great coffee from this place and are there any of those biscuits left with the ones that have got the the raisins in what what about the oh we're going to have to go to the we need to get more coffee for the whatever and I realized that my perception of my own work rate was measured against some totally arbitrary view of perfection that was unrealistic anywhere else and it's only when you get around other people and you realize especially in somewhere like an office just how much slippage there is so much just just things occurring that just chip away here and there and this isn't to say that it doesn't happen at home in fact you know for some people maybe even for most it also does happen even more so at home because there's no one looking over your shoulder to make sure that you don't scroll Instagram or or check YouTube or or reply to emails when you're supposed to be deep workking or or do something else when you're supposed to be replying to emails like I don't think that anyone situation is necessarily better than the other but although there are definitely personalities that lend themselves to one or the other being better but there is definitely a case to be made that you should see your level of productivity with a lot more equinity than you than you do and this kind of leads into an idea I had about monk mode so I'd I first learned about monk mode [ __ ] like 200 18 probably probably 2018 and one of my friends Jordan sent me this awesome article from illimitable man who was kind of red pill before there was red pill but it was much more uh to do with productivity and personal men's advice and exclusively about dating and doing things for dating um but you know the last few years we've seen monk mode really accelerate uh Iman gadzi is a big proponent of it I think he's got an app or something that tracks your monk mode uh so yeah it's grown hugely in popularity over the last few years and it's a especially amongst men you know a popular self-improvement strategy so for the people that don't know monk mode is at least uh originally a productivity strategy where you Retreat from the world to focus on three eyes there's introspection isolation and Improvement and despite the recent ascendants it's nothing new like I say um that 2014 blog post that I read from illimitable man uh described it as uh monk mode is a temporary form of men going their own way by cutting yourself off from the rest of the world for a while you can fine-tune your focus calibrate your direction and confront yourself you'll be acknowledging your weaknesses and then formulating a plan of action to deal with them so the focus is on minimizing your time contributed to social obligations and junk activities because these consume much of your time whilst yielding little to negligible increases toward your social market value so monk mode is a serious commitment not to be half asked you're either doing it or you're not it'll be a struggle in the beginning but once You' fully engaged it becomes beneficial and productive and dare I say it even an addictive lifestyle and that's the words of illimitable man so it's that last bit even an addictive dare I say even an addictive lifestyle so for me right the reason that I can comment on this is I've gone full monk mode a number of times in my life with really really great success I did 2017 did 2018 then I did M mid 2019 basically straight through Co until 2021 when I moved out here I cut out alcohol for over 2,000 days in the last eight years I did 500 days without caffeine 1500 sessions of meditation over five years of daily journals filled like over 300 sessions of Yin Yoga 500 sessions of Stuart Miguel's big three pretty much all of that done in a bedroom in Newcastle sat on my own usually first thing in the morning and almost all of the most important progress that I've ever made was facilitated by a concentrated period like this so you might think why have you got a problem with monk mode if you have benefited from it so much and it was such a powerful productivity tool for you but it's precisely monk Mode's reliable Effectiveness creates a problem because the dark side is that addictive lifestyle thing the issue is monk mode justifies a retreat from life and risk and self Adventure as it justifies it as self-development and it makes you feel Noble in isolation so much so that it can become hard to bring yourself back out and this means that if you already have a tendency to live a sheltered slightly unsocial life you're encouraging yourself to further abscond away from ever building a real life support network which is ultimately the thing you need the most in the long run and I saw this in a friend probably a decade ago so he went on a a fitness journey he was already pretty introverted and and shy then he had a an upcoming fitness competition which Justified 800 p.m bed times and militant routines and the rejection of all social invites the competition came and went but the routine didn't change and it took years for him to reventure out into some sense of normality and this is largely a personal reflection for me as well right the Allure of perpetually working on yourself is very very high because Improvement is rewarding but if you're not careful you can spend the rest of your life focused on those three eyes at the expense of the actual reason that you did monk mode in the first place to be able to show up in the world in a better way Bill Perkins the dude that wrote die with zero who's now become a really good good friend says delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification and with monk mode you practice in private so that you can perform in public Private Practice in the extreme results in no public performance so the fear is I guess the summary is don't obsess for too long in solitude for personal growth or you will struggle to reintegrate and the best solution that I found and kind of my strategic tactical takeaway is to periodize right so you set a deadline for your monk mode to end 3 to six months I think is a sweet spot in my experience you can do longer if you've not done it before and shorter if you've been doing it a good bit but if you do not set some sort of end goal you're just going to continue to blast through whatever time what's the reason for you to ever reintegrate and you hear this in YouTube comments and I get it like I dude I've been there I've been the person who has found the the comfort of not having to rely on other people uh of of always saying no to social invites to the point where you no longer need to say no especially if you're a bit of a people pleaser like I am saying no to things is tough so creating a routine of people not inviting you because they know that you're going to say no also alleviates the nose that you have to say in future uh it it is so seductive and enjoyable to go and do this thing but the reason that you went to go and do this isolation personal development thing in the first place was to then reintegrate into the world as a leveled up higher Social market value more equanimous more calm more peaceful more competent person with this whole new skill set and this degree of self-love and and and self-awareness and if you never actually bother to reintegrate or if you even make it so difficult to reintegrate because you can't remember what it's like to not do that it's dangerous like it's it it there are here there be demons or whatever it is here here there be monsters um something that can be really really good in the first place can end up being toxic at high doses and I think monk mode is one of those and I would have made life a little bit easier if I just taking small breaks every 6 months uh or so as opposed to doing these much bigger Longer stretches where Breaking the Habit becomes super rough so post content Clarity is another idea that I fell in love with and I was you know largely a lot of what I'm doing is trying to aggregate interesting [ __ ] from the internet and books and and other podcasts and and news and stuff and then use them to instigate new ideas on my own or or on the show or in my writing and um I was finding myself feeling I don't know just unsettled sometimes after I would consume certain bits of content so I wanted to create a rule for myself that would help me work out whether the content that I was consuming was making my life better or worse uh because the problem is while you will watch any anything you're distracted by the content itself uh which means that you can't judge how the content impacts you during the consumption of it the the creator of whatever you're consuming has designed a content to be compelling and to keep you hooked because if they didn't they'd be beaten by another Creator who just did that better but just because something is compelling doesn't mean that it's good for you you will happily hate watch adversarial argumentative videos not because there's a fascinating question being answered but because you want to make your team you want to see your team make the other team look silly and you pity follow accounts to check in on the slow motion car crash of whatever catastrophe is happening in some person's existence or you descend into scroll holes and browse Twitter arguments as your heart rate gets jacked up through the roof in some silent apoplectic rage but when you finish consuming it you forget that you consumed it and you move on with your life and you don't assess whether not that was actually good for you so in this way you're kind of like a shop owner in a shop with no walls you're allowing your most valuable resource which is your attention to be stolen by whichever individuals are the most bold and aggressive and then tomorrow you forget that they didn't pay you and you allow them to do it all over again so the solution I think is to ask yourself how does watching different creators make me feel right some YouTube channels are compelling and lyic hijacking and they keep me watching but I feel uptight and and tense and negative and cynical and zero sum after watching them like I don't want to message my friends and tell them that I miss them or pay people compliments or ring my mom or go outside and see nature and I feel like the world is against me and that's not the sort of content that I want to consume any of no matter how much it makes my dopamine fire right on the other hand you can watch content or read or whatever listen to stuff that makes you feel the most connected to the world that makes you feel hopeful and open and prepared and informed and light and aligned if you think that your body is made up of what you put into your mouth your mind is made up of things that you put into your eyes and ears and your content diet should be Spirulina for the soul not fast food for your amydala so thinking very carefully about how you feel after you consume some content is the only fix for this because during the consumption of it it is so compelling and it's been designed to be that compelling and if it wasn't sufficiently compelling you wouldn't be watching it you'd be watching something which is more compelling you can't really defeat the consumption of the content while you're consuming it what you can do is assess how you feel afterward you know if you go back through your YouTube history which is something that you can do and think okay how did I feel after I watched that it's best to do it probably you know five or 10 minutes after you finish up check that as well sexy little neonic cooler um think about how you feel after you finished watching something or or reading something spending time on any social media and just reflect okay would I want to do that again tomorrow and if not start to tune down your use of that you know there's a not interested or don't show this Channel or not interested I think uh to um options that you can click when you see videos on your uh home feed so let's say that you watch some video and you don't like it uh don't show this channel you will never see that channel again on your suggested feed right or in up next there you go there's that that's fixed uh if it's more platform-wide you know you can delete the app uh if you can manage to stick to it uh George Mac has this solution of his two phones where he's got a cocaine phone and he's got a kale phone uh the cocaine phone is only on Wi-Fi and the kale phone is the one that goes around with them all the time the cocaine phone's got all of the [ __ ] on it and the kale phone has just got like uber and and Audible and and Kindle and stuff like that uh George actually has an awesome rule uh he calls Max content razor would you consume your own content if not don't post it awesome right you know I asked a bunch of different guys over the last year whether or not they would consume the stuff that they make and there's definitely a trend amongst the guys who amongst the guys who seem more dissatisfied with their content creation life that when I ask them that question there's like a like dude if it takes you more than five seconds to say yes that's a [ __ ] no right um that's one of the advantages I think like let's break the fourth wall about some content creation stuff right like when you neonic bottle when you start doing any content the accepted wisdom is you should Niche Down super super hard capture an audience get the Thousand true fans and then you can broaden out from there because it's way easier to penetrate into a very small cohort or a narrow cohort than it is to penetrate across multiple cohorts all at once the problem is as far as I can see very few people are just interested in one thing like there's some obsessive CrossFit people out there but even the most obsessive CrossFit person is also into 70s Jazz you know and and romcoms and uh loves to play pickle ball like you know this the cooking Bakery whatever everyone is this Frankenstein's monster of idiosyncratic limbs that's kind of being attached to a torso and by niching Down super super hard what it does is get you known very very well for one thing but in future that can often become your uh kind of like an Achilles heel but it's it's almost a restrictive label you know Zach my housemate started off in Fitness for a long time and crushed he's got some of the best fitness videos if you're talking Olympic weightlifting I think he's the best on all of YouTube and Olympic weightlifting is a super popular sport but he's now at a stage of his life where he may never go back and compete in Olympic weightlifting again and he does much he's got way more varied interests he's interested in philosophy and psychology and human nature and culture okay so he now has to Pivot from that super like tight defined uh Niche to try and broaden out and as he does that the people who came for one thing are going to leave to look it's not impossible to do and I think that Zach will do a good job of it so if you want to watch if you want to watch how someone does it I guess just watch his channel over the next couple of years but certainly from my side the um would you consume your own content if not don't post it if you are not engaged with the stuff that you are producing online the sort of things that you're talking about the kind of stories that you're sharing on your Instagram Etc just stop like don't do it just make stuff and share stuff that you like not that you think people will like because ultimately if you're only doing what people what you think people will like you become a puppet and you Outsource your sense of selfworth and all of the content creation to the crowd you know these episodes I don't know it's what an hour and 10 minutes or something me waffling on about bro philosophy horeshit that I've like pulled out of my pulled out of the last nine months of life in the hopes that something's interesting but it's what I would have wanted 10 years ago like this entire show is what I wished that I had when I was 25 and starting to realize there's probably more to the world than just getting drunk and partying all right where do I start so and it still largely is all of the lessons still largely are so yeah all right Let's do let's do two more I've got this this like double up from Mark Manson which is great so this is um about resilience the willingness to be disliked is a superpower if you develop the willingness to be disliked you will inevitably have the courage to do the hard things that most people are not willing to do this will then imbue your life with a sense of meaning and importance it will also lead to success that others will be too intimidated to go after but I would go even further than this I would argue that until you're comfortable with the disapproval of others you are not truly a free individual yourself you must develop the ability to be disliked in order to free yourself from the prison of other people's opinions learn to do what's right even if others think it might be wrong learn to tolerate criticism and negative feedback because that's what will make you better learn to be laughed at hated on and trolled because if you can become comfortable with the hate you'll be [ __ ] Unstoppable and he's got this other uh what's that BG the courage to be disliked by some Japanese author whose name I'm going to absolutely Butcher and I haven't read but I've heard is really great um he also taught me about choose your suck every single Pursuit no matter how wonderful and exciting and glamorous it may initially seem comes with its own brand of [ __ ] sandwich its own lousy side effects everything sucks some of the time you just have to decide what sort of suckage you're willing to deal with so the question is not so much what are you passionate about the question is what are you passionate enough about that you can endure the most disagreeable aspect of the work because if you love something and want something enough whatever it is then you don't really mind eating the [ __ ] sandwich that comes with it and Mark said this on the episode that we did a couple of months ago where he mentioned that when the Blogger sphere started kicking off a few years ago maybe a decade ago or so uh he would go to these conventions and I think his blog posts he would maybe do multiple thousand 2,000 3,000 word essays per week and he would be asked I think by other people how he was able to put out such a high volume of content and he said something along the lines of like it it it just comes it comes a combination of easily to me and the difficulty comes easily to me too I like a that's interesting the difficulty comes easily to me too like that's the [ __ ] sandwich that he's prepared to eat and I think it helps to make you much more aligned with what you want anything that you want to pursue is going to be it's going to have an amount of associated pain and the best predictor is not who loves the thing the most the best predictor is who else can deal with the suck that comes along with whatever you want to do the best so yeah orienting yourself toward the difficulties as opposed to toward the pleasures will no one or very few people stop doing a thing or don't achieve success because of a lack of pleasure it's more an increase of pain I think yeah sure you need positive reinforcement but you get that from the dopamine of just making progress in any case the pains that you come up against the burnout the self-doubt the oh god I've got to do that thing I got to get the paintbrush out and get the easel out or whatever uh that's really what's going to cause you to stop as far as I can see so yeah Orient yourself toward the pains uh and that would be the best way to do this uh anyway new tonic.com go and try this get yourself a case right now it's available on Amazon Prime next day delivery UK and us you going get that right now at nut tonic.com or search on Amazon for Neu t o N I see and that's pretty much it I will see you in 98 more episodes