19 Raw Lessons You Might Need To Learn Again - Mark Manson (4K)

[Laughter] What are you laughing at, man? Your your business idea. It was just incredible. Thank you. I'm still thinking about it. It's I'm unable to speak about my million billion dollar idea. Yeah. Yes. Is that because you don't want anybody to steal it or because you you would never be allowed to speak again? Uh it's a combination of both. Okay. But look, uh the world will wait. The world is going to have to wait. But when it happens, it's going to know about it. And Andrew Hume is as Yes, for sure. All right. Controversial opinion. Okay. People would need less therapy if they tolerated fewer [ __ ] Yeah. I think what So, I hear I hear problems from a lot of people. I get a lot of emails um and I have for a long for almost 20 years now. And uh it's amazing to me how often people will will email me or message me about some issue that's going on in their life. And really it just comes down to like somebody in your life is a dick. And yet instead of just being like, you know what, I'm not going to hang out with a dick anymore. I'm going to try to change their dickishness. I'm going to try to to manipulate it or control it or convince them or have them see the light and understand their own dicitude. And it's it's just like such a losing battle. And of course, they always, you know, the the the email that comes in is like eight pages long and it has a full biography of every every party involved. And I'm just like, well, what? Maybe just like don't call them back. Like, is it that hard? Um, so I I I just and and and when you when this doesn't even get into the therapy culture thing, you know, like especially when you get on Instagram and you start seeing all these posts about, you know, like uh um you know, if they don't if they don't appreciate you at your worst, then they don't deserve you at your best. You know, it's like life's hard. People don't get along. Like some people are are disagreeable and some people are going through [ __ ] and they'll say mean things to you and like at a certain point you just there's a skill set of deciding what is acceptable and what's not acceptable in your life and you can either develop that skill set or you can just continue to be subjected to the whims and the assholeness of the people around you. What do you think of the contributing skills of that skill set? So I think I think one reason people get stuck in this is like one is just the scarcity mindset around relationships, right? So you often hear scarcity mindset around like business and money and all this stuff and all that stuff is true, but like a lot of people have a scarcity mindset around relationships. They think like, oh, if I stop hanging out with half my friends, then I'm just never going to have friends again. Where it's like, no, there's an abundance of people in the world. And the way life works is that when somebody exits your life, generally somebody new will show up in due time to to kind of fill that role. Um, so I think that's one. I think two is just like the courage to speak up or this the courage to stand up for yourself. Uh, a lot of people don't feel um I don't know what the word is like that they have permission to like express what they feel or express that they feel that they they've been disrespected. Um, and I I also think that a lot of people develop some sort of like uh codependent emotional attachment to to people around them, right? They they've they have their self-esteem is lodged in the minds and mentalities of others. And so if you're not okay, I'm not okay. Exactly. And so the idea of like excising you from my life is is literally like psychological suicide. Exactly. So, it's just not even an option that occurs to them. Um, so yeah, it's like it's such a simple thing yet so many people struggle so deeply with it, which I mean I sometimes joke with my team that like my whole job is just uh uh telling people obvious things uh in a way that like doesn't feel so difficult because like most life problems are actually extremely simple and basic, you know? It's like uh h how do you how do you break up with somebody? It's like well you just say like I don't want to be with you anymore. But like that is so emotionally hard and painful. And you know most most of these life issues uh that I deal with or that that I write about, it's just it's extremely simple actions that are laden with so much emotional attachments and and neuroticism around it. It clouds your ability to see just how simple the problem is. I think with the breaking up with someone thing, how many times in history, what what percentage of breakups have used the sentence, I just don't want to be with you anymore? That sounds so [ __ ] unsophisticated. Yeah, it sounds so shallow. It sounds flippant. Uh it's blasze. Um it's it's not very empathetic. Um, if you are, if you've got even a [ __ ] hint of scarcity mindset or uncertainty about your future and you say to somebody, I just don't want to be with you anymore. There's this fear of karmic retribution. Oh, the universe is going to come and get I didn't have it wasn't because the I worked until my health [ __ ] fell apart and then and then mom I needed to help my mother with her. I you know you need this cosmic weight of justification as opposed to your offering of love is simply just not what I want. Well, the irony here too is that generally people who are in bad relationships or like unhealthy relationships, one of the reasons they're unhealthy is that there's a running scorecard that's going on. So there's this like running tally in each person's head of like, well, I did this thing for you and I did this other thing for you and you never did this thing for me and when I was here like you weren't you weren't there to support me. And like there's just like a scoreboard that's always being calculated. And what those people don't realize is that it's the scoreboard itself that is the problem. It's not that one person is like quote unquote winning or losing. And so I think when it comes time to like somebody's like wants to break up or wants to end a friendship or, you know, stop speaking to a family member or whatever, they're thinking of it in terms of the scoreboard. They're like, "Well, I just need to show this person that my score, like I'm winning the scoreboard right now, and if they I'm justified in my departure." Exactly. So if they understand that, then they'll understand why I'm like not going to be their friend anymore. And it's like, well, no, dude. like the scoreboard's actually the problem in the first like the fact that you feel a need to keep score in the first place means it's a shitty friendship. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. I I am also concerned about the uh therapy language culture the self pathization on Instagram that somebody wasn't mean to you, they were narcissistic, that this wasn't a bad experience, it's caused you trauma, that you're not sad, you've got depression. Uh, and in other ways you think, well, [ __ ] me. It wasn't that long ago that men and maybe women too were just totally in [ __ ] denial of any mental health issues. So, it seems like we're incapable of sitting in some nice gray area of good balance in the middle that we can just go from, no, no, everything's fine, you know, work until I get PTSD or uh even the most sort of micro displeasure is a a huge supernova event. Yeah, I I actually I forget where I read it, but I read uh it was actually in a research paper um where a psychologist at the APA was talking about how he believed that simultaneously people were both uh underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed. And and the way he explained it is he was like there's a population of say people with depression and anxiety and within that population of people with uh depression anxiety not enough of them are being diagnosed like the majority of them are not diagnosed. But then if you look at the circle of people who are being diagnosed many of them do not have depression and anxiety. Exactly. So there's just like there's like this vin diagram of like people who are diagnosed and people who actually have the thing and there's only a little bit of overlap going on between them. Wow. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, dude. I uh I think the courage to say to yourself, "My needs or my wants are legitimate is a oddly a skill set because we would think we're often told about how people aren't that pro-social. They often put themselves ahead of others and in some ways in certain situations perhaps to strangers uh uh perhaps to people that we can't see or don't see in certain ways. Um you know we can cut in line of somebody at a traffic junction or we can uh you know be get more creative with our taxes than we should do or you know obviously not something that I do. Um cut that. Yeah. the well the IR the I am I am under the scrutiny of the IRS now but yeah uh you we could talk I've been there we could talk about that oh why okay I need to know about this what happened oh I've been audited three times yeah you've been audited so that means that some guy with a pencil and a a pad of paper comes in and looks at every receipt every everything okay so uh principally yes uh in practicality no um see when I got audited. Just a little backstory of my career. Uh I had a hit, for people listening, I had a hitbook. It went absolutely supernova, you know. So my income basically like 100xed in like two or three years, which obviously tripped some red flags at the IRS. Uh what' they think you were doing? I don't know. I like Well, and then there's all you get into all this weird stuff about like uh you know, territories, right? Like so it's like royalties are taxed differently in different states. Oh, how many books did you sell in the United Arab Emirates? and and how much was in Hawaii versus Idaho. Yeah, exactly. So, it's it's like there's a lot of [ __ ] like that. But, um so when the the initial audits came in, I was absolutely terrified, right? Cuz it's like this is my worst nightmare. Um this is going to be awful. And then after the first call with the IRS agent, I remembered something like very fortuitous, which was that uh government employees have no [ __ ] clue what they're doing. ended. So, so the the the audit like I just for anybody else that's still listening from the IRX or all of the people from the IRS, I don't think that at all. That was a sentence that Mark said. I think that you're perfectly competent and really should should apply your resources, your very well resourced resources uh outside of this room. Yeah. Uh I must have just gotten the one bad one. I'm sure. I'm sure. But um yeah, they didn't look at anything and it actually hilariously the error the uh they found an error that my old CPA made and it worked in my favor. So I actually profited from my IRS audits. All three of them. All three of them. Wow. I made like almost 200k from my IRS. Let's [ __ ] go. Thank you, IRS. Wow. Actually, maybe I should be audited. Um audit me more. Yeah. Um okay. But we do things uh to people that we don't know. um we often put ourselves ahead of them. Yeah. However, it seems like with the people who should have our best interests at heart, the people with whom we have given the most of ourselves, invested our time, our energy. Um it's very difficult to put ourselves first. Uh we often subjugate our needs in place of somebody else. I'm not going to upset them except if if I upset them that something the the the [ __ ] center the syntax stops there just falls off a cliff. If I upset them then catastrophe disaster something bad will occur. Yeah. I mean it's a little bit paradoxical and there there's a cliche and it's a cliche for a reason because it's true which is um you know it's the old put on your own oxygen mask first before you try to help somebody else. I mean, relationships fundamentally function that way where it's like you have to have a healthy relationship with yourself and your own self worth before you're able to really kind of contribute and give in a healthy way to anybody else. And the true is the same is true vice versa. So like if you grow up in an environment with two parents who are emotionally dysfunctional, right, they're they're going to be deriving their self-worth and validation from you or from somebody else. And so they're not going to give you like the nurturing and support and everything that you need to grow up and be healthy yourself and learn how to put your own mask on yourself. So it becomes kind of this this chain reaction that goes down through generations. And um and it's weird because it's like if you're talking to somebody who's like never had an oxygen mask on in their life and you try to explain to them like what an oxy like why they need an oxygen mask like they don't understand what you're talking about. What do you mean look after myself? Yeah. Exactly. What does that mean? Yeah. It's like it it you're almost like speaking a different language, but and it and it is paradoxical when you tell people to like put yourself first because that sounds completely antithetical to like what a healthy loving relationship looks like from the outside. But like from the outside a healthy relationship is like two people who are voluntarily giving themselves to each other like consistently and perpetually. But on the inside, what a healthy relationship feels like is like you are satisfied with yourself. And because you're satisfied with yourself, your cup is overflowing. And so you're happy to like just hand off. I literally used this analogy with uh two girls one Bible the other day, which was you don't serve people from your cup. You serve them from the source that overflows around your cup. Ah, nice. Um, and it's true. Like it I mean, look, that's not necessarily uh true all the time. You can have a half full cup and be like, "Yo, let's take it down to a quarter. Please have some." Yeah. But it's not good. Yeah. It's not a good strategy. No. And it's Yeah. It It backfires. I mean, I'll give you a tangible example. So, um uh my wife and I, we have a friend um and she's biological clock's ticking, right? She wants to find a husband. Great woman, super smart, you know, beautiful, everything. But she really wants to find a husband. And like it's actually she's starting to panic. And so what she's doing is she's like adapting her entire life to like finding her husband. Like it's like she's gotten rid of her hobbies and now she's like she's going to the gym all the time and she's like just improv classes and salsa dancing. It's like everything is optimized to like find Mr. Wright and as a result she's kind of killed her own personality. Like she has no more interest for herself. She has no free time for herself. She has no she's not doing anything for herself anymore. And ironically, it's like she's meeting tons of guys and obviously it's not going anywhere. Why? Because she has no [ __ ] personality. Her cup's not overflowing. She's trying to give everything away all the time. And you see this I mean it happens on both genders, but um it's it's like a self-defeating. It it's just a paradoxical thing. It's like the more you you cultivate yourself, the the more you'll kind of become magnetic towards others. I love the insight. In order for art to imitate life, you have to live a life. Yeah. You have to have a life in the first place. Or else It's the same reason that comedians who get successful start only talking about airports and dinners and backstage. Yeah. Because that's all you know. You don't you don't do Whitney Cummings told me this story. It's so [ __ ] good. So, she's in the writer room in chief boss [ __ ] mode maybe 5 years ago, 10 years ago or something. And she's just, you know, million plates spinning all at once. classic sort of I I'm I'm going to do it myself woman and uh they're in the writer room for some sitcom thing that she's working on and they say it's a Saturday morning where is she talking about whatever this next scene is and someone went she's a baby shower and when it was like no one goes to a baby shower on a Saturday [ __ ] stupid idea they're like uh okay well um where else is she's a wine tasting she's like no one goes to a wine tasting they're like no Whitney you don't go to wine tastings and you don't go to baby showers that's precise precisely what normal people do. Yeah. Yeah. And you can't see that. And I suppose it does show up in that way as well. You don't want to just be interested in the other person. You want to be interesting yourself. And most people get the balance wrong in one way or the other. They're way too selffocused. They're way too other focused. Right. And because it's difficult it's it's difficult to have that that tolerance between the two. I wonder if that's why like celebrities date each other because like they have no life or we can bond over our mutual non- lives. Exactly. Exactly. All right. Next one. Yeah. If your workouts feel flat, your recovery is slow, or you've just been feeling off, might not be your training plan or your diet. Might be something a bit more boring like your testosterone. So, if you're not performing in the gym or the bedroom the way that you would like, or you just want to improve your testosterone naturally, Tonat Ali is a fantastic researchbacked place to start. 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I think, you know, these these simple truths that because they are so simple, we but painful, we find ways to avoid them and deny them and pretend that they're not there. And like like if you just take the self-worth piece, right? like it's it's hard to accept that you're just not standing up for yourself, that you don't feel like you deserve respect or trust or time or attention. That's a very painful thing to sit with. So, you make up all sorts of stories and narratives and [ __ ] you know? It's like, "Oh, well, women are all like this and it's the [ __ ] phones and well, the political thing and you know, schools these days." Like, it's whatever whatever your your like little pet thing is. You just start stacking these narratives on top of each other just to hide that like simple fact of like like, yeah, you don't feel like you deserve it. And um and so I I what I tend to find both with myself and with a lot of the people that I talk to is is that you know especially you know coming from self-help which is the world that I'm I guess technically a part of. Um everything's marketed as you know here's the secret. Oh if you just come to this seminar learn these three things and you're going to like fix all your [ __ ] And I just find it's never about learning something. It's about like unlearning things. It's about like unwinding the [ __ ] you've told yourself. There's a idea I spoke about with Naval which was uh cultivated selfishness or uh like holistic and um self- prioritization. But there's also another one of cultivated stupidity which is many of the problems are you going it's the story of the alchemist, right? You you go around the houses to come back to the place that you were at the very start. Yeah. And to realize, huh, the issue was that I had [ __ ] in my life and I just needed to stop talking to them. The issue was that I just didn't love my partner that much anymore and I needed to break up with them. The issue was that I wasn't that fired up at my job. And so many of these are to do with quitting, right? They're to do with letting go. Very few of them has to do with change in in taking on something new. Typically, you're letting go of something else. I I don't like the town or country that I live in and I need to just have the bravery to make the change and go somewhere else. Um, and you have lied to yourself and tried to justify and obfiscate as a way to escape from the difficult decision and you've started to layer all of these different compensatory mechanisms on top and stories that you've told yourself and now you have to dig down through them all and go, okay, was it this thing? Was it was it was it the self? I was therapy. I must go to therapy. I must find out why I have this attachment style. And it's like, no, you just don't [ __ ] love your partner that much anymore and you used to and you feel guilty. Also, you start to see kind of these compulsive patterns show up in people because it's like so like a narrative I had for a long time, right, was just uh I I lived as a nomad for about seven and a half years and uh I kind of I started to get in my head when I started living in all these different countries, I started getting in my head that there's like an optimal place to live and the only thing that that created for me was a desire to constantly be somewhere else. Dissatisfaction. Yeah. No matter where I was, it was like something's not optimal. I should be somewhere else. And it really started to wear on me after a certain amount of time. And really like all that was underneath all of that was just simply a fear of committing to a a place in a community. Like that was there the entire time is just like this fear of like I was in my 20s. It was time to be a grown-up. time to be an adult, you know, time to set roots and like pick a path in life. And looking back now as an older man, like I can understand that I didn't have the courage to do that yet. And so I created all this narrative around like, well, I got to go find like the optimal place before I sat down. And but to find the place, I really got to imshed in the culture. And so I should probably study some languages. And you know, I should probably split my time between these three different continents maybe a year each and maybe pick the five best countries per continent and like let me start researching all you know and it's like there goes like four years of my life and uh don't get me wrong I had a great time. I learned a ton of stuff, but like a lot of it was driven by this avoidance of a very simple truth of like I wasn't ready to grow up and as long as I'm on the road and like always booking a plane to somewhere else, I don't really have to grow up. The thing you said uh you said something earlier uh uh strategic selfishness or Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cultivated cultivated selfish. So it reminded me of this. Have you heard of this concept strategic incompetence? No, I love this. Um, so it's like all the married guys listening will relate to this. Uh, so I'm a terrible cook and uh, you look like someone that would be a good cook. No, I'm awful. You have the hair of a good cook. Well, thank you. Yeah, I don't know. Yes, chef. I don't know what that means, but I'll take it. I know. I could just see one of those white, you know, like high neck things like another 50s on you. You'd be great. You're too thin now. Fat Mark Manson would have been fine. Thin Mark Manson's a [ __ ] [ __ ] cook. I know. Yeah, you're right. You're right. That that ship has sailed. Um the Okay, so one of the reasons I am a bad cook is uh uh my wife's an amazing cook and so if I ever start to become competent at cooking, it means that I will have to start doing some of the cooking. And so it is better for me to just continue being bad at cooking so that I don't ever have to take responsibility for that in my house. Pe people in relationships do this all the time. Like you just you you your partner's good at working the clothes incorrectly on purpose. Put a lot of creases on it. Exactly. Especially Especially men working around the house. We're particularly bad about it. Um but it's like everybody does it. People do it at work, too. It's like it's like, "Oh, can you go uh fax these 20 papers or whatever?" And people are like, "Oh, I've never used a fax machine before." When it's like, it's easy. You could figure it out, but like you want to be dumb because it it it alleviates responsibility. Um I love this concept because I think people do it in all sorts of different areas of their lives, right? Like people people can be strategically incompetent at certain things because they don't want to deal with some of these harsh truths. like they don't want to deal with their self-worth issues. So, they're like they remain dumb in their relationships. Like it actually incentivizes them to continue to like be ignorant and clueless in the people that they associate with, right? They um I'll give you another example. Like I uh Well, you referred to Fat Mark. I was fat for a long time. Dude, you got to own it. I do. You have to own it. Dude, you want to hear the funny You'll appreciate this. So, uh, when I went on Tim Ferrris's show, um, I like mentioned I was like, "Oh, yeah. I I I'm like I've been on a health journey. I used to have like a lot of health issues." And he like, of course, he got into this. He's like, "Well, have you tried this new therapy?" And he like starts explaining like all these like, "You've got electrodes trapped to your head." Exactly. He's like, "If you if you vibrate the muscle with electrodes and like and put the your foot behind your head and all this stuff." And he like goes on this whole 3 minutes feel and he's like he's like, "I don't know. Does any of that resonate with you?" And I was like, "Dude, I was just fat." I was just like, I was fat as [ __ ] I just need to stop drinking. Yeah. Um Yeah. Um but to to the health journey point um I was really unhealthy for a long time and I was really overweight and really out of shape and it was even when it was clear that it was a problem um I kind of had I developed like a weird sort of like pride or identity around it because it's like you know everybody in this space is is all about optimization and you know you got to like get up at 6 a.m. and like stare at the [ __ ] sun and and you know do 18 sit-ups and like do whatever your like morning routine is. And I just had this pride of like yeah, I'm not that guy. Yeah. You know, like I I'm I actually relish in the fact that I have no idea what your morning routine should be. And uh and the truth is is that that that was just like that was a strategic incompetence because I didn't want to deal with my [ __ ] Yeah. I didn't want to deal with the fact that I Very interesting. I ate too much and I drank too much. That's cool. I uh there was a great um insight from a guy called Alexander Datesych uh who is ostensibly an evolutionary psychology and uh dating researcher I suppose but he has some [ __ ] fantastic takes. Uh and he was talking about how people that are black sheeps are still sheeps. Being a black sheep is still being a sheep. It's funny how many people think they are non-conformist when they are really just strict ideological adherence to a niche dogma. It's kind of like a cult member thinking they are non-conformist because their cult is small. They are actually highly conformist real NPCs if you will. They are just conforming to a fringe. So being a black sheep is still being a sheep basically. And uh it's crazy how many people think I'm not one of those followers of whatever the mainstream thinks that's for the [ __ ] NPCs sheeple you go yeah dude you're even worse you're being puppeted by the inverse of what those people are doing. Um so similar to the it's like hipsters correct. Yeah. Oh I I need to d I don't need to care about fashion. It's like purposefully not caring about fashion is a [ __ ] fashion. Yes. Precisely. Just the reverse. You're not even doing it right. you're doing it the opposite. Um, another one that's similar to that is deliberate deoptimization. So, uh, picking the small areas of your life in which you're going to try and optimize. Yes. And letting the rest of them go. And this is sort of the curse of the perennial insecure overachiever. That, well, I need to get my health perfect, but I need to have the right number of credit cards to maximize my flight points because I can get a little bit more. If I if I sign up for three MXs at once, it means that Delta gives you the thing. and then but I mean it's going to take me 5 days to set everything up and then there'll be a load of forms and the forms were wrong but you know once I've done that so picking okay what are the areas that really matter to me I'm going to optimize in those and the rest of them just letting them fall away because the stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than the imperfections will totally and will take up so much [ __ ] time that I mean you could literally do you could spend your entire day biohacking in order to extend your life and in the process of trying to extend your life, completely [ __ ] waste your life. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it if you live an extra 50 years, but you spend 70 years optimizing spreadsheets to live those 50 years, like you're actually net negative, right? You [ __ ] it. Uh, all right. Confidence and fear both require believing in something that hasn't happened yet. At a certain point, you have to consider that you're choosing to be afraid. This ties into the layers of stories, right? Like I mean a lot this kind of comes from I take a lot of a lot of my influence comes from Buddhism and just the core precept of Buddhism other than life is suffering is just like not knowing like you don't know anything and uh being like developing a certain level of comfort in that and being still being able to function despite it. Um and again I think this this comes back to to the narrative thing like our our brain is is we're our brain is a prediction machine and as its predictions come in forms of stories about what's going to happen is it going to be a good thing is it going to be a bad thing is it going to go well and it's going to do it whether you like you can't stop it that's just what the brain does but you don't necessarily have to believe it you can watch those stories come and go. You can train your brain to watch those stories come and go, right? And without necessarily identifying or attaching to them. And I just think a most people aren't aware of that. And then b even if they are aware of it, they like it's easy to lose track of what stories or narratives you're buying into or the fact that you can even like kind of choose to find more helpful stories to buy into if you want. Um, so yeah, it's it's it's just another one of those like George Orwell's got this great quote of like seeing what what's in front of one's nose takes a constant effort. Like it's often much easier to see what's here than what's here. And uh I love that metaphor just because it's all of this stuff that I write that it's like that's what it is. It's right here, but because it's here like I don't see it. I'm focusing on you, right? And um it's uh it's constant. I wonder whether the at some point you have to admit that you're choosing to be afraid. I wonder whether part of that is that we're so identified with our thoughts that it's it's the it's more real to us than reality because reality's final touch point before we actually understand it is our thoughts, right? we we filter it through our brains before we then start to tell ourselves the story of whatever that is. And then the story is molested by the filter as well. Um so yeah, confidence and fear both require believing in something that hasn't happened yet. Okay. So we have um an upward aiming trajectory and a downward aiming trajectory. You could say sort of abundance mindset, scarcity mindset, optimist, pessimist, whatever. Um, and if you assume that you can choose to be confident, I can choose to believe that this is going to go well. Okay. Are you also choosing to believe that it's going to go badly in that case? Yeah. Uh, it's like a it's, you know, the fundamental attribution error. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a confidence equivalent of the fundamental attribution error. I I had this really great insight. You know, anybody that's been to therapy for a while immediately starts looking at their parents and you start to think, okay, well, [ __ ] why why am I like this and this thing happened because of that and that's because of them and so on and so forth. Much of the time, people are happy to lay their shortcomings, their avoidant attachment and their rampant [ __ ] over sexualization of themselves and others and their need for external validation. Happy to lay all of that at the feet of their upbringing. Very rarely do they lay their strengths at the feet of their brain. Yeah. You know, it's like, but what about your confidence and your resilience and what about the fact that you, you know, you work really well in solits, but my weaknesses were imposed on me. Yeah. And it's kind of an internal equivalent of that here when it's okay. Why are you choosing fear and not confident? I mean, there's many ways, right? It's not all [ __ ] you are insufficient and this is your problem and blah blah. negativity, [ __ ] rampant negativity bias. But the choice is there. There there's there there's also an element of the strategic incompetence here too, right? Like it's it's let's say I choose to fear coming on this podcast, right? I'm like, "Oh my god, I'm going on modern wisdom. He's going to bring the big lights." Say it like that. He's going to bring the big lights this time. I'm so nervous. And you know, like that gets me sympathy from people. that gives me it's a way to like uh lower expectations lower expectations for myself. Maybe it's a way to kind of brag to certain people, you know, maybe after I do the show I'm like, "Oh my god, I bomb. This is like going so horribly." And then like I get to go home and like get more sympathy and validation from people and then positive reinforcement went, "Dude, it went so well. You have you have such high standards for yourself. Do you know what it is, Mark? Your problem your problem is like you're amazing and you don't even see it. like you just have such high standards for yourself. This is this is getting good now. Now we're getting I can't do I can't do it in a Latino accent, I'm afraid. Sorry. This is now we're getting to it. Uh but yeah, you you know what I you see what I'm saying though? Like it's it's fear like there's social value in fear just in that it like it generates attention and awareness for yourself. And um and I think some people almost get like uh sometimes I think like like people who have anxiety, it's it's almost like a fear addiction. It's like the this like compulsive validation seeking that happens through always being worried about something and um something's always going wrong. There's always a fire to put out. It's it's a it is a consistent way to draw attention to yourself, draw reassurance to yourself, bring validation to yourself. Um, and so I I do think it's like people there are very subtle incentives around people to like choose the fear narrative. Yeah. That maybe they aren't aware of. This episode is brought to you by eight sleep. If you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold, this is going to help. 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Right now, you can get $350 off by going to the link in the description below or heading to eight.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom a checkout. That's ei.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom a checkout. I had a great conversation with this guy, Dr. Russell Kennedy's the anxiety MD doctor guy specialized in anxiety. He's uh equally uh bottom up as well as top down which I really love. So he's okay what's happening in the nervous system? Can we do some breath work? We get you to [ __ ] meditate and chill out a little bit. And what's the story you're telling yourself? Do you need CBT? Do you need act therapy? Blah blah blah. So I wrote this little essay that I'm going to read to you about it after this week. Um I've been thinking about impediments to happiness and I can see two obvious roadblocks. First is wanting things to be different. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something. If you want the world to be different, your happiness is held hostage until that change occurs. Sometimes this is an actual change you need to make to leave an unhappy relationship, change for an unfilling fulfilling career, complete a difficult conversation, and we will often remain in years of misery to avoid a few minutes of pain. The second roadblock, this is the one that's related, is uncertainty. Humans never genuinely pursue happiness. They only pursue relief from uncertainty. Happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct. Whenever uncertainty briefly disappears, if you feel like you can't predict the future, you will default to fear and worry and rumination. Your mindscape will eclipse reality's landscape. Worrying about the thing you can't predict usually involves a nightmare fantasy, which is way worse than what could happen in reality. However, this imagined reality briefly collapses the chaos of the world into certainty. And this is how much humans abhore not knowing how the future will unfold. We would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable. Sometimes these situations overlap. A family member gets in an uncertain medical diagnosis and we can't be with them. We argue with our partner while we're apart and we don't know how they're feeling overnight. We try to mend a broken friendship with a letter and haven't yet got a reply. So if you're feeling unhappy, look to where you're uncertain and where you want things to be different first. But it's that humans abhore not knowing how the unfuture will unfold so much that we would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable because it collapses the set of huh well at least I know what it I mean it's terrible, right? But it's not unknown, right? And that's how much we don't like things that are unknown, which if you zoom out from like an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense, right? Because it's we're not evolutionary optimized to be happy. We're evolutionary optimized to be predictive and adaptable to our environment. Right? So it's happiness is actually just a lever in our brain that our biology is pushing and pulling to get us to do the right things or worry about the right things. Um it's just our biology is not used to, you know, watching 2,000 Tik Toks a day. Eventually, you'll realize that it's better to be disliked for who you are than liked for who you are not. Then everything will change. Yeah. I the being liked for who you're not is not being liked, right? Even if you get people to like the performance that you're putting on, you never get the s you never get the satisfaction of being liked. You won't because it's not you, it's the performance. And it actually backfires because it just reinforces that you have to perform more. You're not good enough. You're not acceptable. Yeah. I think this was the fundamental, there was many, but I think that this is one of the fundamental issues with the pickup artist movement, the way that it came about, uh, that what it taught men who were struggling with women was that, hey, you can be really affected with women. Mhm. You just need to not be yourself. You just need to be I Dude, I saw this firsthand so many times. Like I I saw People don't know that you wrote Models, dude. The best still the best dating advice book for everyone should go and get it on Audible and go back in 2014 that came out. 13 13 [ __ ] 12 years, dude. That's insane. That's if you're a guy who wants to improve, I would say um uh Mate, be the guy women want. Uh Jeffrey Miller and Tucker Max and Models by you. The two they were the two [ __ ] the two car garage of Thanks, Ben. Yeah. Um yeah, I used to coach those guys and it was funny because it's I saw it all the time. You know, guys, they they learn the lines, they practice the techniques. Did you see the [ __ ] fight outside? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Who lies more? Um, but it and a lot of them they would start getting laid and then they they would get laid. Like you would take these kind of awkward nerds who had never had a girlfriend, never hooked up, they'd learn all these tactics and stuff, they'd start getting laid all the time and they'd actually feel worse about themselves. They'd actually get more depressed. And and it was exactly this. It's like they're not The fact that they had to learn a performance to get a woman to like them just reinforced how unlikable they were. You're not good enough. Yeah. Yeah. I the eventually you'll realize it's better to be disliked for who you are than liked for who you are not. It took me a 15-minute TEDex talk to say that. Uh I I'm not kidding. I did an entire 15-minute TEDex talk. It took [ __ ] months. It took so long. Um but yeah, I had this I had this insight doing uh club promo that toward the end of my 20s I'd achieved success in a lot of the ways that society tells a young man that he should be successful. Similar to massively dissimilar arc to yourself, right? You got uh notoriety. Um you have sort of social access, women and like a little bit of money and stuff and you're comfortable and people know who you are and all the rest of it. I was like [ __ ] like why does none of this success really like feel real? And I realized that a persona can't receive love. It can only receive praise. You know, it's it's saying, "Hey, well done um Gladiator, not well done Russell Crowe. Well done Thor, not well done Chris Hemsworth." There's this sense that, you know, if you're not being who you truly are, all of your successes will feel hollow cuz people aren't in love with you. They're just applauding the role that you play. And you're always at best the closest that you get is being one degree removed from your successes. And much of the time you're four, five, six, seven degrees removed from it because it's okay. I Chris must work out what him Mark wants me to say when he say, "Hey, what do you think about the new Avengers movie?" It's uh uh reverse engineer. What do I know about what Mark likes about the Avengers movies franchise? And what do I think that he's predicted? I think it's good. Yeah, it is good. Yes, it is good. I knew it was good. you know, and there's always this performance that you have on which again just reinforces you cannot be you it's also exhausting. It's it's like such a draining mental exercise this way. I I I hate I hate networking. I'm like I'm a terrible networker and and I think part of it is I feel like I have to do that a little bit. Like I don't naturally see this why I don't have guests on my podcast anymore because I'm not like keeping on top of them. I don't really care. Like I'm not I'm not super curious about like, oh, I wonder what that guy across the room is like. Like that's just not me. I'm I'm like very low-key introverted. Um don't need to like be everybody's friend. And I I still feel that sometimes in professional context where it's like, okay, I'm in a room. I'm like, this is totally one of those rooms where I should be walking around like shaking everybody's hand, introducing myself, and I'm just like, and it's exhausting. It's like so [ __ ] exhausting. Um, so yeah, I can't imagine living like that. Like it's okay when it's just like this one sliver of my life that I only occupy briefly, you know, um, each year. But to never switch it off when you get home, if you're going through your whole life that way and especially Yeah. if you're that way with your partner, if you're that way with your your friends, it's just it seems like such a miserable way to live. It's the reason for uh how do you say front-loading being yourself in the extreme as early in a relationship as you think that person can tolerate. Uh that's very carefully chosen words. Um I had look I dude I I I was uh single last year for the first time in a long time and certainly since for the first time being this version of me. Yeah. And um I had a I had a strategy of uh an intellectual [ __ ] test. Okay. Um which was kind of like you told me your business idea. Yes. Yes. I knew that you'd keep it in your mind. Everyone's going to be like, "What's this billion dollar idea?" Like you don't get to find out. Um it's if you imagine uh negging, but instead of insulting a girl, uh sending them Psychology Today articles and seeing if they say something interesting in response. Yeah. Uh, and it was, look, this is something that's interesting to me. Human nature's one of the like, if you're going to get into a relationship with me, I'm going to send you lots of articles from Substack, okay? And I'm going to expect at some point over the next week for us to have a chat about one of the things that I've sent you that's hopefully remotely interesting to you. And if that doesn't it's a relatively innocuous but pretty good front-end filter for I maybe I'm not going to be reading articles at the same velocity that I am now in 10 years time but I imagine I'm still going to be intellectually curious and this is a good ruffune rubric and like a cute oh isn't this interesting do you see that article about how Taylor Swift's changed whatever the [ __ ] like that's interesting so I'm okay I'm going to do that and uh it I think an older version of me or a younger version of me sure um would have been huh well that's not that doesn't necessarily fit what a cool guy would do like you really going to send this article about like the mating habits of zebras and how it's different to horses and the fact that that's like really interesting because of the different environment that they grew up as some [ __ ] like uh yeah actually that's actually a really really good thing to do and the story that it reinforces in yourself is I am allowed to be me I'm allowed to be more me sometimes than I even especially if you can tune it up at the start and push yourself beyond your comfort zone cuz you go ah I'm future proof for like I wouldn't have usually done this for two years and you know I've got myself to it's funny it's funny you brought up models cuz like I'm remembering now you know one of the central points in that book which at the time was controversial uh was that as a man you shouldn't you're not optimizing to get laid as many times as possible you're optim optimizing to be happy with women. Like that's the whole point of this. Like whether you get laid whether you you you date and sleep with one woman or 100, what matters is your happiness. It's not like you can get to that. It's not the body count, right? And like what you just described is I I'm just having flashbacks to when I was in that industry. Like I would say things like that. I'm like, "Yeah, dude. Send them zebra articles, you know, like because then that's going to show you if she's the type of girl that you're going to enjoy being with." And you know, guys would be like, "Well, good luck getting laid with zebra articles, you know, and they'd look down on it. They'd call you [ __ ] beta and pussy." So, you're you're prepared to sacrifice something that you know that you do want for something that you think that you do want. Yeah. With someone who doesn't actually want you because you can't be you in order to get the thing that you think that you want. I don't I didn't follow all that, but yeah. Sure. Sick. All right. Wait. Okay. Go ahead. No, you go ahead. No, I was I had I I was going to tell a story. Tell the story. So, the night I met my wife, um I met her at uh 3:00 in the morning in a nightclub in Brazil. And within five minutes, I somehow ended up in a conversation about Russian grammar and how it was different from romance language grammar. And she actually sat there and listened the whole time, dude. And she was like asking question. She was like curious about it. And I remember I remember that moment. I was like, "Holy [ __ ] she's still here." Like, and I was like, "Wow, we're going to get along really well." You know, and um but yeah, it's funny. It's like one of the first conversations she and I had. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of guys want to date a Brazilian. Uh, I'm not convinced that they would have zeroed in on Russian grammar and romance language as the way into their heart. But look, I mean, you were the guy that wrote the book. So, whatever works. Right. Before we continue, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I'm frankly dependent on it. For the last 3 years, I've started every morning with Element. Element contains a sciencebacked electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no gluten, or artificial ingredients, or any other BS. It plays a huge role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health, regulating appetite, and curbing cravings. That's why it's used by everyone from Dr. Andrew Hubman to Dr. Mike Israel, Olympic athletes and FBI sniper teams, and me. This orange flavor in a cold glass of water tastes like a beautiful salty sweet orangey nectar. And there's a no questions asked refund policy. And you don't even need to return the box if you don't like it. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. And you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklnt.com/modern wisdom. Sorry to break it to you, but it's impossible for someone who destroys your mental health to be the love of your life. Obsessing over someone isn't love. It's fear disguised as affection. Unhealthy love often feels exciting, dramatic, and profound, but hurts us in the long run. Healthy love often feels dull, peaceful, and repetitive, but it heals us in the long run. Yeah. I think fundamentally people mistake intensity of emotion for positivity of emotion. um they ride the roller coaster of a dramatic and toxic relationship and they the highs are so high and the lows are so low and they they just think, well, this is part of it, right? Cuz it's they're experiencing both extremes. It's like by far the most emotional experience they've ever had around anything in their life. And so they they assume, oh, okay, well, this must be what it is. But it's not that. It's actually you there shouldn't be this like insane oscillation between the highs and lows. Um there of course are highs and lows every relationship like that's natural but not daily. It's what you want what you want to optimize is like you know the average baseline right that you return to. Um so yeah I just I see that all the time. people people people mistake the intensity of the emotion for or the intensity of the relationship for being a positive relationship. And I think part of this happens because just like the way our psychology is is is that the more intense the emotion, the stronger the story and narrative and and meaning that we like place on that experience. When if you think about it, like there are all sorts of emotionally intense experiences you can have that actually don't mean anything at all, right? Like I can jump out of a plane that's gonna be a very emotionally intense experience. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. I can date a woman who drives me absolutely [ __ ] insane and then have the best makeup sex of my life and just like the airplane convince myself that it means something, but it actually doesn't really mean anything. Like what it took me way too long to figure out that like what actually means something is the quality of time spent together in the dull moments. Like what's the what's the the delta between your baseline and your happiness? Like what is your level of happiness during the dull moments when like nothing's happening? when you're just sitting around eating breakfast, you know, reading emails, are you happy in that moment? Like that's what you should be measuring because that's what life's made up of. That's the vast majority of life. Yeah. Life is made up of breakfast at the kitchen counter. Yeah. Yeah. Checking emails. Um it's interesting to think about. Okay. There's emotionally intense situations that don't mean anything. And I imagine that there's also emotionally mundane situations that mean a lot that mean everything. Yeah. So the level of peace in your mind as your head hits the pillow at night never going to probably appear in a gratitude not even going to appear in a gratitude journal because it's just such it's so obvious again it's there. It's like I slept okay. Yeah. You know because I I wasn't worrying about something. It's like huh well [ __ ] there's a lot of people on the planet that wish that they could have that. Yeah. There we are that. So peace, optimizing for peace, you know, not sexy. What about uh obsessing over someone isn't love, it's fear disguised as affection. Yeah. Because obsession is is is driven by a fear of loss. You know, you're when you're obsessing over somebody or uh ruminating over somebody, you're not you're not actually loving that person, you're trying to prevent loss of that person. And those are two very different things. Um, love is very loving is it's unconditional. It's done like I don't do things for my wife to like prevent her from leaving me. That's not the intention, you know? It's like I don't buy her flowers cuz I'm like, well, I better do this otherwise she might leave me. Like that's that's not love. Love is you do something for her expecting nothing in return just for the simple reason that you want them to be happy. And again, I think it's another it's another area that people like mistake because they feel such an intensity in because they feel such an intensity of the emotion and that emotion is directed towards a person and keeping that person as close to them as possible. They assume, well, this is this must be what love is, right? This is I'm clearly I'm in love with this person because all day and night all I think about is like how do I keep them as close to me as possible? M and that's not love that's fear. There's a good insight from uh Visakhan Verasmi. He says it's I think he calls it the divorce paradox which is um why do people who from the outside seemingly have a perfect relationship why do they end up breaking up? And it's because as a society we haven't fully internalized the lesson that it is not the highs but the lows and how you manage them that make or break relationships. And outwardly, it's rare that you see two people arguing. They'll put the face on, they're having a good time at the wedding or at the the the dinner or whatever it might be. Uh but then when they go home, they're [ __ ] shouting and screaming and calling each other names and sleeping in separate rooms. Uh well, you don't see that. And how well do they deal with those bad times? So it's how you deal with bad times that are a better predictor than very few I would guess most marriages fail because of a surplus of poor rupture and repair as opposed to a scarcity of super intense high experiences. You're insufficiently exciting to me is maybe there but less than you are too low to me. You are too much of a drag. Absolutely. And and one thing I told I tell friends all the time, which is a really annoying thing to tell a friend in like a new relationship, but like whenever I talk to people who are in a new relationship and they're like, you know, honeymoon period, really falling for the person, I always tell them like that all sounds great, but let me know when you've had your first fight. Like, you really don't know what it's made of until you've had your first real fight about something. Because all the good stuff, I don't want to say it's easy to find it, but it is relatively it's not scarce. Like you can find somebody who you have a lot of fun with. You enjoy being happy. Hey, me too. Yeah. It's like, oh, you like the the thing? I like the thing, too. Let's do the thing together. Like that's that's not that complicated. Uh what's complicated is when uh all of her childhood issues come up and get triggered because of the thing that you said because you've got this blind spot in your life that you've haven't dealt with and then you start really going at it. And it's really the the quality like you said the rupture and repair the quality of the fighting like how all commu like communication always breaks down to a certain extent during fights but it's like how deeply does it break down? Does it get nasty? Does it get personal? And then similarly, how quickly do you recover from it? And do you do you recover from it or do you hold it against each other? Do you start the scoreboard? You know, it's like, okay, it's one zero, right? If the scoreboard's there, you it's over. It's just a matter of time. I don't care how smart or beautiful they are, how many companies they started or degrees they have. They're insecure. They have no [ __ ] clue what they're doing either. Feeling like you have no idea what you're doing is the price of entry to achieving your dream. I feel I feel like this just like undermines your entire podcast. I have never claimed to have any idea about what it is that I'm doing. My guests may have done. Yes. Um you included. No. No. But yeah, I mean I I think it's it's a so my my a good friend of mine had a really funny story around this. Uh so really good friend of mine back in New York, startup guy, super smart. um startup founder, had an exit, did really well, went to work for a VC, did really well at the VC, and then eventually got brought in by uh like one say one of the 20 or 30 biggest companies in the world to advise and help man like they're doing like an internal incubator. Um and basically they wanted him to come in and kind of like advise their their projects or whatever. So, you know, and this guy's like 30, right? So, he's like climbed the mountain, climbed the next mountain, and now he's like being brought in to like one of the biggest companies in the world, literally household name, and he's supposed to be in charge of like all these like special projects and new innovations and stuff. And I remember he came back, I like had dinner with him when he got back to town, and I was like, "Dude, how was it?" And he just looked at me and he's like, he's like, "I just had this realization like it's [ __ ] idiots all the way down." Like I I always thought one day I'm going to walk in a room and there's it's like okay these are the people that know what's going on. These are the people who like have the plan and have figured it out and these are the lords of the universe and they're like secretly like pulling the puppet strings behind the scenes and uh and the rest of us are just trying to keep up. And he was like yeah nobody knows what the [ __ ] they're doing. Like it's he's like it's a disaster. it's a complete and utter disaster. And he's like, I don't know what I'm gonna do, but they're paying me a ton of a ton of money. So, um, I always love that story and I love that phrase. It's idiots all the way down. Um, and I I include us in that. Like I I I think it's it's we're all just like chipping away at our own idiocy. Yeah. Slowly but surely, publicly. But that I do think that there is a there's a fair trade to be made and certainly one that I've made even more perhaps than you as somebody who's actually written legitimate books. Um you can trade expertise for relatability. Uh and I think if you say hey I don't know what's going on and in my not knowing of what's going on you can feel better in your not knowing of what's going on. You know, that is probably one of the most common threads across 9 [ __ ] 50 episodes or whatever we've done at this show, which is I'm unsure about this thing, but I'm going to try and find out from someone who might know a tiny little bit more than me. Yeah. And we're going to work it out together of h six months later, I finally arrive at a realization that's something approximating like accuracy. Huh. Well, that's cool. Well, we'll hold on to that one thing and we'll get another one and get another one. George Mack, one of my f favorite friends and favorite writers, he's got this essay, adults don't exist. Steve Jobs, delayed nine months of medical treatment of pancreatic cancer to try a carrot juice diet and acupuncture. Mosart overspent his income, lived miserably in mountains of debt, and regularly wrote letters to friends begging for money. Friedrich Ner lost his virginity in a brothel and caught syphilis. He only saw his work sell 300 copies in his lifetime. Martin Luther King had extrammarital affairs with over 40 different women, including spending his n last night alive with two women and physically attacking another. Isaac Newton spent 30 years of his life writing 1 million words on the pseudocience of alchemist alchemy hidden for years by his heirs because they were too embarrassed to publish it. Don't put any adult on a pedestal. Kill your gurus. Or a more useful belief, the adults aren't going to save you. They don't even exist. I love that. That's awesome. He realized when uh his friends that he went to university with who were the most den Larry couldn't hold they couldn't get up on time. They weren't handing their assignments in. Went to go and be teachers. Holy [ __ ] That means Oh, that means that my teachers teachers were were that idiot from Oh, okay. like the adults literally do not exist. It's idiots all the way down. It I do want to hit on this though. So, one one of the things that has been like concerning me lately. So, I agree with you by the way. I think one of the things that is good about what you do, what I do, what the kind of like all the alternative media or whatever you want to call it is that there is a little bit more of an openness of uncertainty. I don't have it all figured out. Yeah. Lack of expertise or whatever. Yet the end result seems to be producing a public of greater uninformed certainty. Right? So we've gone from a media and information environment that was very much built on certainty and expertise and credentials and authority and all that [ __ ] and now we've gone to a much more decentralized information ecosystem and media system where people are very open about like well I don't have all the answers but like let's try to figure this out and yet the public just seems like more certain about dumb [ __ ] than ever. M that's interesting. There's a great idea called knowingness. Um lots of the issues of the modern world are laid at the feet of misinformation. And the claim is basically this person believes the wrong things because they've consumed the wrong stuff. And if only we could get them to consume the right stuff, we could update their beliefs. You go, how I mean that's be pretty fair assessment if that's the problem. But if the problem is knowingness, knowingness being a lack of curiosity around what is true in place of a dogmatic belief about what you already know. So it's believing that you know the answer to the question before the question's already been asked. That is a prophylactic against any new information regardless of whether it's miss or dis or mal or correct or whatever. And the challenge that you have is to try and get I guess the reason or the way that you know that this is true is precisely what you're pointing at which is everybody act as if the facts have already been settled while no one can agree on what the facts are. Like we say people say well we know how much humans are contributing to climate change. We know this for a fact on both sides. Sure. while both sides don't agree with each other, right? And it's the same as kind of a religion question, which is every religion acts as if theirs is correct whilst not agreeing with all of the others. Like, well, this can't all be correct. Like, none of these like it can't everybody can't be right here. At best, one of you can be right, right? And the same thing goes with the sort of knowingness question. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's and and it's the more the greater diversity of information that people are exposed to, the more contradictions arise. And the more the contradictions arise, the more people just kind of default to their whatever feels right. Well, so yeah, confident, yeah, uh uninformed certainty is certainly part of it, but I also see um the black sheep equivalent of that, which is sort of uh like nihilistic despondency, like well, you know, we can't trust anything anymore. Who even knows what facts are? uh and that you can't trust the news and you can't trust you can't even trust your neighbor next door on what they're saying. Um and I wonder whether that is there's maybe a bunch of different reactions to an overwhelm of information. Yeah. Uh one of them being you kind of intellectually reverse engineer the biases you wanted to be true all along. Yeah. Uh but on another side you just throw your hands up and say I don't even like I can't even trust anything anymore. I don't know. Yeah. There's definitely an asymmetry around trust. Warren Buffett's got that great quote where he says it it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to to ruin it. And and I think the same is true with trust. It's like an institution can spend decades building up a certain amount of reliability and then just ruin it in a single day. And I think the more we're exposed to everything um the more we're exposed to like the flaws and everything. This episode is brought to you by Nomatic. Summer is here and travel season is in full swing, but let's be honest, your backpack was probably built for a school field trip, not international adventures, which is where Nomatic comes in. I've been able to travel the world with this bag right here. Because it's designed by people who actually understand the chaos of being on the move. 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We admire the people who are imperfect and are comfortable with it. Mhm. And uh Dr. Robert Glover, who wrote No More Mr. Nice Guy, he's got the the three essences of a masculine man. Uh, which usually would be the sort of thing that makes my [ __ ] toes cold, but this one's actually really good. And he says, um, a man who's comfortable in his own skin. Yeah. Who knows where he's going and is having fun while he's going there. And you go, okay, well, the comfortable in your own skin thing. Okay. Someone who is imperfect and comfortable with it. Mhm. Right. It's very difficult to be comfortable in your own skin. No one believes that they're well, very few people believe that they're perfect, right? Right? So given that you probably are imperfect and know it but are comfortable with it, you think, "Huh, this person's relatable and reliable, right?" It's another paradoxical kind of relationship dynamic in that we actually admire people who are comfortable with their own flaws. Like we don't like think about the if you think about a person who's like just trying to cover for their own flaws and act like they're not there or pretend like it's not their fault. Uh generally like we don't like those people. Those people are very annoying. And if you think about the people you do find very endearing, it's the people who are quirky, weird, you know, kind of off sometimes. Why do you think that is? But they own it. Um, I actually think it comes back to the trust thing. I think it's like if I see somebody who's a little bit weird but like owns it and it's like, "Yeah, I just got this. I'm just kind of an oddball." Like I feel that I can trust them. um that they're not going to [ __ ] me or try to be something they're not. Uh whereas somebody who's just trying to look perfect all the time. Uh you actually don't trust it's like a yes man, right? Like you know it's the irony of a yes man is that somebody who always agrees with you on everything is like the last person you can actually go to for advice. If I can't trust your no, I can't trust your yes. Exactly. So I yeah I do think the the flaw like the the confidence that comes with one's own flaws and imperfections like it it ultimately does boil down to a trusting which is ultimately like why authenticity is sexy is because you feel like you can trust the person. Yeah. I mean there's an an idea again from George. He's so [ __ ] good. He just did this high agency essay. Everyone should go and see uh high agency.com. His essay is available on that. It's [ __ ] sick. But this one uh nonf fungeible tokens NFTs there was a big boom whatever 2021 when everyone had co money and didn't know what to do with it. Uh he's got this idea of nonf fungeible people and that's basically the same as what you're talking about here. He uses his mom as an example and his mom [ __ ] hates fighting like can't bear physical altercations. And apparently she was on the phone with George's brother think 20 or something young guy. and the she's driving in the car on her own and she sees two young boys fighting by the side of the road. So she stops the car in the middle of the street and gets out and sort of [ __ ] uh Arthur Shelby's or Tommy Shelby's and she's like no [ __ ] fighting no [ __ ] fight. Like she's got these two but the son is still on the phone like mom what? And she's like it's two people fighting I must get out and I must stop. It's like middle of the street got out. like two people she doesn't know like totally didn't need to get could have got punched could have like anything gets back in the car tells the son and George made this point that at her funeral nobody's going to talk about how she was always on time or you know the quality of the pasta aldante that she cooked or whatever but she was the sort of woman that stopped a car in the middle of the street to stop people from fighting and uh it's just a beautiful that's a nonf fungeible person it it's interesting to think about like what are the stories you know that it's interesting to think what are the stories that are going to be told at your funeral because yeah it's never I mean obviously there's stories of like you being very charitable or loving or whatever but like people always find quirky [ __ ] like that like they find the the the NFT version of whoever you were in what areas were you non funible yeah like yeah where were you in oddball what's the inside joke that everybody at the funeral service is going to laugh and understand yeah dude you remember when he dot dot dot oh he did that to you too yeah I know I know Didn't we love him? Like, he was so great. Uh, if you aren't naturally tired at night and excited in the morning, then you probably haven't found something meaningful to work on. You are not stressed from doing too much. You are stressed from doing too little of what you care about. So, this this is a drum that I bang on endlessly uh to the productivity crowd and and I I feel like it just gets ignored. But I think emotion is the most important productivity system. Um there's a lot of and I think the reason it gets discounted is because there is a lot of cheesy cliched advice around like oh if you do what you love you never work a day of your life. You know like [ __ ] like that. It's passion is practical. Like when you deeply care about something you're doing you're going to work on it longer. You're going to think harder about the problems. You're going to take feedback better. You're going to be more resilient. You're going to be willing to stay up at night, get up early on a Saturday or whatever. Like emotion is it is actually the highest leverage system within yourself towards whatever your productivity goals are. And I just feel like so much productivity advice is disembodied. It's like, you know, the the hustle culture [ __ ] of just like ignore how you feel. Just grind, grind, grind. And yeah, it's like, oh, you know, stop being a [ __ ] like, you know, sleep when you're dead, date when you're dead, like whatever. Go make a billion dollars. It It's What is it for? Like, if it's not for something, like, if you're not doing all this work for some greater cause, then then what the what the [ __ ] are you doing? like you might as well just hang out at the beach and play video games. Like cuz cuz why not, you know? Like there there's a certain there's a nihilism in a in the productivity space right now that like it really bothers me. And um it cuz a I don't think it's healthy, but b I also think it's like just bad advice. Like the best advice is find something you really [ __ ] love and care about and give yourself to it. Um, Bukowski's got this great line. He says, "Find what you love and let it kill you." And I just there's like so much beauty in that because when you find a craft or a trade or or a skill that like you deeply deeply care about or a mission that you deeply deeply care about, you are willing you become willing to trade yourself for that mission and and you are lit like when you trade your time you are literally trading your life for something. So, what are you going to trade it for? And what is the point of trade of making that trade? Get a billion dollars, you know, get get a hundred million followers. Like, what these what they [ __ ] do? Like, what does that mean, you know? So, I continue to bang that drum uh hopelessly. Hopelessly, yes. But I don't I don't get it. I don't get invited to the to uh you know the same uh uh biohacking conferences that uh uh my contemporaries do. So uh Joe Hudson's got this wonderful line. He says enjoyment is efficiency. Yes. Uh that he looks at however much enjoyment I get out of doing a thing is just a direct correlate with how efficient I was at doing it. That the more that I enjoy something, the more efficient I'm going to be. Dude, people and it's double-sided as well, right? Like the better you get at something, the more you fall in love with it. And the more you love something, the more patience you're going to have to get good at it. And so it's just like to me it's like the most obvious entry point, but I think a lot of people develop kind of like [ __ ] up relationships with productivity and work. Um, and I say this as like a bonafide workaholic. Well, I was going to say, you know, you have found something that you love. Mhm. And you have done it so much that it killed almost killed your passion or at least acutely killed your passion. You wrote three books in three years. Yeah. Three books. Three books in a movie in four years. Yeah. Yep. Um and then needed to kind of just play PlayStation for basically a full year after that to recover. Yeah. But it's it's interesting because in hindsight I think the reason that happened is I actually lost sight of what what I was doing and why I was doing it. Right. So early in my career, uh, was blogging, doing the creator thing in the early 2010s. [ __ ] loved it. Book blows up, all these opportunities show up, big book deals, movie deal, you know, world tour, all this [ __ ] Start saying yes to everything cuz it's like, well, when's this going to come around again? and and basically gave three to four years of my life to a bunch of stuff that was really wasn't it wasn't optimizing for for what I cared about. It wasn't optimizing for for the mission that had driven me throughout most of my career. It was optimized for [ __ ] that's a lot of zeros on that contract. Like I should probably say I should probably say yes to that, you know? And and don't get me wrong, like it's I think it's okay to do that in in bits and spurts. Um but it's not long-term sustainable. And I think a lot of people develop and it took me a number of years to kind of get back to what I love and appreciate about my work and like getting that that mission focus again. Um, but I I do think people often use productivity as like they develop like a toxic relationship with productivity. It becomes a a way to outsource their self-worth. Oh and and avoid dealing with a lot of these like simple truths that they don't want to admit about themselves. Um, and it's and you can definitely get we live in a culture that will gladly encourage that. Correct. Yeah. I mean, I've always thought about Billy McFarland, the guy that started Fire Festival. Yeah. The [ __ ] prototypical example of this. I always thought about if Billy McFarland had managed to string together a semicoherent festival, he would have been hailed as the Steve Jobs of marketing. Yeah. The nothing could have changed or nothing would have needed to have changed in his motivation for doing it. his like shameless requirement for self-promotion, the deception that he was going through with his investors, the fact that he didn't know that he was the adult that didn't exist but saying that he did all the way down. The only issue that people had was that the rug got pulled out from underneath his obfiscation and his lies and his incompetence. But if he'd even just about managed to creep like a okay festival out, people are so seduced by success. The modern world praise at the altar of success so much that they would have happily forgiven or uh overlooked the things they did. We all know this. There's so many people that hold on to popularity not because people think that they're good or authentic or sort of genuinely being truthful, but because they're a rocket ship that's going up and to the right. and that sense of, huh, I don't think that that's where your productivity uh like uh pioneer uh should be at. I don't think that that's necessarily the person that you should be following. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Um it's funny too cuz I I see so much of this this stuff and like so much productivity advice. It's funny to me so much productivity advice is actually catered to people who are using their productivity as a way to escape their problems, right? It's all about morning protocols and when to set your alarm and hey, do this thing in the first 5 minutes or whatever. And like I don't know, I look at that I'm like, okay, first of all, I'm up by six without an alarm and I can't [ __ ] wait to get to my computer. Like I'm like I don't have a routine. I'm like already awake. I'm awake because I'm excited. Like as soon as my eyes open up, I'm like starting to think about what I'm going to do that day. And I'm so excited that I just like I get out of bed and I'm in front of my computer within 3 minutes. And like why would I use a protocol? Like why would I need like a habit tracker or like you know all this stuff like if the emotions are aligned like everything takes care of itself. Whereas if the emotions aren't aligned then you have to spend all this extra energy. It's like the performative thing, right, with people in relationships. It's like if the emotions aren't aligned, then you're like basically self- flagagillating to get yourself to perform all these actions that are ultimately performative. It's like, okay, I put in 12 hours today. I got these six things done. I hit these KPIs this month. Uh, you know, my new nighttime routine demands I do these six things. And it's like, you know, it there's a there's a certain healthy rhythm that like naturally emerges as with most things most things when you know the systems are aligned. That was a an interesting transition that I had. You know, we we had when did we have dinner? It was about a year ago when we did that D. No, it must have been a little over a year ago, I think. Yeah, it was a little it was like a year and a couple months. Okay. Um and that was me as in the trenches as I've ever been. You were going hard, correct? Yeah. Um and since then have uh learned to back off a little bit, but in that as you as you take your foot off the gas or as you speed up um you sort of notice changes in life and you could make an analogy to sort of acceleration or deceleration in things, you know, um your net worth staying the same is kind of nothing. But it going up it's like ah there's a change and going down, [ __ ] you'll notice that too. Yeah. Um, one of the things that I noticed as I sort of purposefully tried to uh de uh decelerate uh delever uh some of the things that I was doing from then until now, which I've done real real successfully, uh was I had to face an awful lot more of the things that my obsession with productivity and being busy were hiding in the fog. Yeah. So, you know, my busyiness was certainly a hedge against uncertainty and fear and a lack of um importance and meaning and this desperate requirement for validation and uh a lack of self-esteem. It's like, how can I not be important? Look at how many calls I've got today. Like, the world the world need me. Look at how busy my calendar is. Like, my calendar is so [ __ ] busy. There's no way that I'm a worth worthless piece of [ __ ] It's impossible. It's simply impossible. So yeah, sure there may be some echoes of existential loneliness in the in the background, but sorry bro, I can't hear you. I'm blasting Sleep Token at 150 dibels. Like that was a busy calendar was a hedge against existential loneliness for me. And it's a really good way to just continue to not to uh not see the lies that you're telling yourself to, you know, not have to face the fears, the senses of insufficiency, the scarcity mindset, all of that stuff. It's like, I'm so busy, bro, that I don't have time for that. Totally. And as you if you go, okay, I see that that's a pattern that almost everybody does and I'm going to I now have the opportunity maybe to choose to take my foot off the gas. You sort of feel that slowing as you kick forward and you go, "Okay, where do I take my self worth from now?" Because I used to take it from there and now I have to realize maybe me believing that my importance, my self-importance was bolstered by my level of busyness was a lie. Yeah. Uh and that's a like that's a [ __ ] real to go through. Yeah, for sure. And I I str like again admitted workaholic here like this is this is something I struggle with too. The other thing I noticed and I don't know I'd be curious if this rings true for you. Um I've not been brought up to date on your your dating life. Um but it like I I see in friends that you know they're like perpetually single and or they like want to settle down but then they complain that like they they can't find the right person. And I'm like, "Well, dude, you're on the road like 6 months a year. Like, when was the last time you saw the same person twice?" And it's I think in some cases it that busyness again, it kind of comes back to that strategic incompetence. It's like, "Oh, well, I I can't figure out my dating life cuz I I'm too busy." It's a get out of jail free card, right? You've got you've always got one foot out of the door. So, if this thing doesn't work, well, it's not that much of a comment on my sense of selfworth because I wasn't that committed anyway. Yeah. Yeah. It's not because I'm hopelessly bad at making somebody feel comfortable around me and scared of letting somebody see me. It's because I'm on the road 6 months at the end. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. I've seen that. I've seen that. I think I've done that not in my intimate relationships, but I've done that in like with like social and family relationships, right? It's like, uh, yeah, sorry I can't come home. I'm like touring Australia, you know. I'll see you next year. We missed each other by like three days twice in Australia. Yeah, [ __ ] I know. We need to organize it better. That would have been cool. I think you did I think you actually did the same. We did the same cities. Yes. But just in different orders. And I think a lot of people just like cuz I there were people both. Well, I ran into a lot of people who who were like at your show like the night before. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Well, dude, what? Imagine that for a weekend. A [ __ ] Manson Williamson back to back spit roasted by us too. I was just going to go there. Two podcast bros. Yeah. One [ __ ] venue. Yeah. Um the happiest people are not the ones with the most options, but the ones who stop questioning their choices. This comes back to your point about uncertainty, right? And and this is this is I think where is at the foundation of the paradox of choice is is the paradox of choice is on the surface you have more optionality. you have more things to choose from. You have more paths that you could go down. But that optionality itself generates more uncertainty because whichever path you pick, there's proportionally more uncertainty about whether that was the right path or not, whether you made the right choice or not, whether you could have made a better choice or not. Um, and so I think at a certain point, like if you really just boil it down to it, happiness comes down to being satisfied with what you've chosen. not trying to optimize anything. That's um kind of like a whatever it's called, golden handcuffs or a velvet prison where if the thing that you claim that you want to have happen in life happens, I get better options. I achieve success. People respect me. People want me. People need me. Things are available to me. Okay. If that happens, if that happens, you are going to need to become increasingly good at saying no to an increasingly attractive number, yeah, of an increasing quality of things that you could do with your life. And you're going to have to become better at being able to be happy with the choice that you have made. Uh, Alex Homozi talks about um the woman in the red dress from the Matrix. Yeah. And he says, "Remember that scene? Neil's walking down the street and Morpheus turns to him. He says, "No, were you looking at me? Were you looking at the woman in a red dress? Look again." And it's Agent Smith with a gun pointed at his face and his analogy is, "Yeah, but now imagine that it was 3 years later and it's 1,000 hypothetical 10,000s, not one hypothetical 10." Yeah. And you need to I mean, what's your thing of um I shamelessly [ __ ] nomenclatured it. Uh I called it identity dysmorphia. Um uh identity lags reality by 1 to two years is one of yours. Um so if you've got this identity, which everybody does, right? You just you you see in the mirror the person that you used to see, the world sees some other version of you and it takes a little bit of time for that version to catch up. So you are lagging behind the options. Your ability to discern options is lagging behind the options that the world is going to give you. and your ability to say no is [ __ ] 2 3 years old. Your all of this stuff and yeah, the the 1,000 hypothetical 1000s in red dresses and you need to go I would have begged to have had the opportunity to have maybe said yes to this. Mhm. And now I need to be pretty comfortable with saying no. I Yeah. crisis of success that totally tracks and I'm trying to remember Nim Celeb had a quote around this that was something like true wealth is measured by the money you turn down which I just Morgan Morgan how says uh uh wealth is the Ferrari that you didn't buy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um but yeah, it's funny because I I feel like good decision- making at any point in life is primarily learned by making bad decisions. So whatever level you get to, there's a new set of bad decisions that you have to make to realize not to make them to get to the next level. And so again, it's just one of these tricks that your brain plays on you of like, oh well, you know, if you make it, then you don't have to deal with this [ __ ] anymore. And so it's going to be easier. And it's like, well, no, no, there's a new level of [ __ ] that you've never been exposed to that is actually 10 times problems all the way up. Exactly. It's problems all the way up and it's idiots all the way down. So yeah. Uh, I think about that. That'd be a good book title. Problems all the way up and idiots all the way down. Yeah. Or maybe not. Yeah. I And so you you come up maybe two or three times in my live show and one of the one of the bits is it's idiots all the way up. So it's funny that you said it's idiots all the way down. Um, yeah. The the ability to sort of become increasingly discerning and Jeffrey Kenberg who sat there earlier on, you know, the guy that [ __ ] created Shrek and Aladdin and Lion King. He did like [ __ ] Pretty Woman. This guy is a monster. Like 800 movies, 80 animated things. And I asked him about um you are someone who if you have one skill set, you're tasteful. Like you have good taste. The ability to discern between something that is good and something that is not good, right? I taste very difficult to define, but that's the closest definition I can think of. He couldn't [ __ ] define taste. Like where does good taste come from? What is it? I don't [ __ ] know. And when it comes to choices, so much of the time we try and again that uncertainty, we abore it so much that we would rather imagine a fantasy catastrophe than uh deal with something that's uncertain. The reason that you have your, you know, spreadsheet of 15 countries ranked first by continent, then by temperature, then by air quality, then by women hotness, uh you're hitting very close to home right now. starting to starting to shape with mid20s anxiety. Oh god. Um, the reason that you have that is to try and be to to provide some sort of control, some source of control. You go, [ __ ] Like, I just I'm I'm so uncertain about my choices that if only I had more information. Mhm. Uh, when really what it comes down to is just vibes. And, you know, I think we've both zeroed in on the show. your show and mine respectively that it actually is increasingly about vibes. Yeah. It's like, okay, what's the vibe that I'm bringing here? What's the sort of energy that I really want to put across in this thing? And sure, there'll be maybe some information, maybe it's useful, maybe it's not, but largely what people are going to take away is like, okay, so how what was the vibe like? Yeah. And being a vibe architect is an underrated, which is basically, you know, somebody that's discerning in taste. Sort of a vibe architect. You should add that to your LinkedIn. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I am a [ __ ] vibe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's totally true, though. It's um I had another thing that I wrote uh that went viral. It said that um I'm going to probably [ __ ] it up, but it was uh uh commitment is the or no, love is the result. Yeah. Love is the result of commitment, not the cause. Right. Like you commit to something, then you start loving it, not the other way around, right? And it's similar to like action and motivation like you don't you take taking action is what generates motivation not motivation doesn't generate action. Um and similarly committing to something is what makes you fall in love with it. Not allows you to get you don't go find the perfect country and fall in love with it and then be like oh I guess this is where I'm going to live. It's like no you pick a [ __ ] place to live and then as you live there you start to fall in love with it. That's just that's how life works. The more you try to force what doesn't feel right, the longer you delay finding what does. Yeah. I think talking about the discernment, I think it's it's really it's hard to develop the skill of knowing when you're bullshitting yourself. Like it's it's again there's like layers to it, right? Like it's as soon as you figure out your mind's first level of tricks that it plays, there's like a whole another level that Yeah. You beat it at white belt, but then it's it's like, [ __ ] it graduated. God, it knows now it knows leg locks and kung fu. Exactly. It's just it's just layers of an onion, man. Like it's just it never you never stop finding novel ways to to kind of trick yourself and [ __ ] yourself. And you can drive yourself crazy, you know, with the doubt and the questioning, which again, I think is is is the a lot of the value that I took in Buddhism is that I think it's it's like kind of a mentally and emotionally healthy way to doubt yourself. Um, you don't know and you're never going to know and that's okay. And it's okay. And why don't you sit on the mat and stare at a wall until you feel okay about it? And because otherwise if you if you're kind of trying to go through life and asking you're like constantly questioning everything all the time like you're you're going to work yourself up into this like neurotic ball of of anxiety and stress. So, it it's almost like mental hygiene to set aside an area of your life, whether it's journaling or therapy or meditation or whatever, and like give yourself that space to kind of just unwrap the layers of the onion, like, okay, well, why do I think that's true? What if that wasn't true? What if I'm like lying to myself right now? What what would that mean? What how would what would that say about my life? And and kind of go the next layer down and the next layer down. And then when you're done, you know, put all the layers back and go, you know, go about your life and try try to try to human as best you can. You said about um being in self-conlict and it makes me think about uh the sort of especially for the sort of people that read your stuff, listen to my stuff. They are the prototypical avatar for a person who will be in conflict with themselves. They're introspective. They want to improve. They have high standards for a variety of things, many of which are in opposition with each other. Um, you know, they want to be empathetic, but they want to be honest. They want to tell people the truth, but they want to care about them. They want to be supportive as a friend, but they need independence as an individual. Blah blah blah. And I thought about as you were talking there um you have self-conlict but you have conflict with your self-confing and I think in some ways the sort of non-attachment you don't have it figured out and that's okay and you'll be okay and this is the way it's going to be in per perpetuity until you die. Go okay. So maybe the self-conlict is going to be there because many of the things that we want are in tension with each other and because of opportunity cost, you don't get to do two things. Yep. Right. You want to support the mom and pop business that you were with from the very beginning, but you want to move to a new country. You're going to feel guilty if you leave the mom and pop business, but you're going to feel [ __ ] regret if you don't go to the new country. Pick your [ __ ] direction, Western man. And the same thing goes for your self-conlict. You think, "Fuck, like, I have these things. I'm going to be intention with myself. But if I'm intention with the fact that I'm intention, that is I have control over that second one at least. Uh so you could call it second order emotions. You know, someone gets um uh frustrated. Yeah. And then they become agitated at their frustration. Yeah. And then they become resentful at their agitation about their frustration. Is this [ __ ] infinite regress of emotions about emotions and you go, "Yeah, I mean the first one makes sense. That happens. First one happens. you can't control it. But the the story that you've told yourself about this, I wrote a I wrote a piece years ago. I don't even remember the title, so I can't even plug it. But I I talked about this. I called them I've been doing this a long time. I I called them meta emotions, right? It's like feeling bad about feeling bad or feeling bad about feeling good, which happens a lot to people. And um and essentially my argument is just like try not to have me emotion. Like the emotions are always okay and the meta emotions are kind of always not okay. Like you um feeling good about feeling good that that turns into pride. Feeling bad about feeling good that turns into guilt. Like feeling bad about feeling bad that turns into self-loathing. Like it just don't judge the emotion. Just feel the thing. It's it's okay. It's going to whatever it is, it's going to be okay. That's sick. Yeah. I like that a lot. Uh trust people. Most of them are good. And while you might get hurt occasionally, the alternative of distrusting everyone is far worse. Yeah, man. I this ties into a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about. I I look around and I think a lot of the the struggles of people today, it is around just trusting people, being comfortable. I I I just I think our views of the median person in the world have gotten so skewed by being online too much, by being on social media too much, by being overexposed to news media too much. Like I just think if you actually get out in the world and and talk to people face to face, even people you disagree with, even people who like you think are like the bad ones or whatever, nine times out of 10 they're good people and you can pretty quickly find common ground and get along really well. And um you know, I used to be uh I used to be an esports gamer when I was a teenager. Mhm. Um I can imagine that. Yeah. And unlike Elon, I actually was um calling him out. Um he I got really pissed cuz he said that he was he competed in one of the first Quake tournaments and like I actually went back to my old clan buddies and and like we looked it up and yeah, he wasn't in it. Oh, anyway, um my my personal grievances aside, so there used to be a thing that happened back when I was like I used to compete in these esports tournaments, and of course, being a bunch of like 16-year-old nerds, we'd like sit and just talk [ __ ] to each other all the time online. Like, we'd play the game, practice against each other, and everybody just like talk mad [ __ ] to each other. And of course, it would devolve into like, "Oh, when I see you at the tournament, I'm going to beat the [ __ ] out of you." Or, "When I see you at the tournament, I'm going to bring my boys. We're going to beat the [ __ ] out of you. you know, you better be ready, all this stuff. And so, every single tournament we went to, there was all this drama about like, oh man, it's going to go down here. Like, Chris and Mark are going to fight, you know, it's going to be sick. And then, of course, what happens? Everybody shows up. Everybody meets each other. Everybody realizes that we're all like fat, nerdy, lonely dudes who spend way too much time on their computers. And of course, we all go to McDonald's and be friends. And that happened over and over and over and over again. And so I I feel like I learned at a very young age that there's just some sort of there's some sort of like intangible softening that comes when you're face to face with people that you're in the same room with them. The micro expressions, the body language, the tonality like there's a there's a certain amount of empathy and compassion that spontaneously emerges uh in the physical space that doesn't happen in the digital space. And um I I just feel as the world becomes more and more chronically online, I just I I feel like so many of our issues like really just boil down to that. Um I'm friends with uh one of the pre-minent happiness researchers out here. Uh her name is Sonia Lubamirki and her lab just did great woman, super smart. And her lab just did a new study. Um it still hasn't been published yet. It's in pre-publishing, but it it was interesting. They looked at a classic case, social media and happiness, smartphones, social media and happiness, and how they correlate, whatever. And interestingly, like a lot of research around social media and happiness, um, when you look at adults, it doesn't have that much of of an effect. M um the smartphones had a negative correlation with happiness. But what what was interesting is that and the way they measured it basically the way she summarized it was like the smartphone's causing greater unhappiness was not because of the smartphone. It was because what of what the smartphone was replacing, which was this just sitting in a room together talking and like actually empathizing, actually being like, "Okay, I don't want to agree with that, but you're a good guy, so you know, let's have another beer." You know, like it's it's that sort of casualness to everything that somehow gets distorted or lost. Um, so I don't remember like what you said that got me on this thread. You were talking about Quake. I don't know. Uh the more that you try to force what doesn't feel right, the longer you delay finding what does. Maybe it was that. Oh, trust people. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Trust them again. Trusting people. So, I I I think a lot of trust, it seems to spontaneously emerge from from the in-personness, right? And so again to the point about the asymmetry of trust, how damaging that is both for our institutions, our society, but also our personal relationships. Like if you can't trust somebody, you can't really have intimacy with them. Um I I think it I just think it's all related. And so that that post is just like a shout into the void of like please people like just trust each other. Yeah, just air on the side of trust. Sure, you're going to get hurt sometimes, but the alternative is worse. Yeah, there's a a lovely insight from Naval. Uh karma doesn't need spirits to deliver justice. Karma is just you repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. And that's kind of the same thing with with trust. that look, dude. Like, if someone is that much of an [ __ ] they're probably going to get found out sooner or later because there's only so many times that you can roll the dice and that thing happened. Mhm. And you not get you not get found out for it if it's bad or you not get found out for it if it's good. So, you didn't accumulate the uh negative reputation and you didn't accumulate the positive reputation for so long. And maybe some people can dance through the minefield of life and be an [ __ ] to everyone that they meet and arrive at their deathbed and no one really realize. But that's like some 7,000 IQ samurai [ __ ] to be able to make that work. And I just don't think I don't think that most people are going to do that. So yeah, I think Yeah. And as well there is certainly a trend in the modern world of uh I don't need anybody. I've been hurt before and that hurt was because of my trust. Therefore, the issue wasn't the person that I placed my trust in, but the act of trust itself. Right. I think that's an equation that gets that happens quite a bit. Run. Yeah. And it's that's completely self-defeating, right? It's like, I got hurt because I didn't get the intimacy or love that I crave, so I'm just going to stop pursuing intim intimacy and love. Like, that makes no sense. Um, and I don't know how or why that's become particularly fashionable. I I just it strikes me as incredibly self-defeating. In the game of life, he who has the smallest ego usually wins. Why? Well, it depends how you define wins. Um, but I think in terms of just well-being, um, I mean, you kind of just alluded to it yourself. You know, you can have that super samurai manipulative [ __ ] who's cheating everybody and stealing and lying to everybody all the time, but like that's they're probably miserable. They're probably incredibly dark, lonely, uh, miserable people. And and I just think all of this stuff that we're talking about, whether it's the authenticity or, you know, finding a way for your cup to overflow and finding a mission in your productivity, like all of this stuff, it it like demands a a certain humbling of yourself. And um I think in a way too it's just like choosing fear is a form of ego. Like it's how do you define ego? That's a good question. I in this context I would say it is um an overimportance of self like an arandized sense of self. Mhm. Um I do think having some ego or a healthy ego is is natural and important, but I just think it's it's uh all this stuff that we're talking about this like low-level delusions and misconceptions and distrust of people and choosing fear over confidence. Like all of it kind of boils back to like feeding this argandized sense of self of like I deserve so much. I'm so special. I I want all these things in the world and I'm going to be so upset if I don't get them. And like all of that really just boils down to like a a misrepresentation of your own importance, I guess. What's a better perspective? I think a better perspective is is understanding that everything comes with a trade-off. That life is is messy and painful. Um loss is inevitable, but that doesn't ma mean that the thing you lost wasn't worth it. Um, and that anything you pursue or desire, like you can't just pursue or desire the positive side of it. You also have to pursue and desire the negative side of it. Like you have to, if there's some goal in your life or some dream you have, you can't just dream about the benefits of that dream. You're also signing up for the costs of that dream. You're signing up for the struggles, the failures, the setbacks, the embarrassments. And the mind is just very bad at doing that. It's bad at holding two sides of a trade-off. And and at the same time, we tend to see when we when we create these narratives about the future or about what we want or what we don't want, we tend to only see what's bad about it or only see what's good about it. We don't see the full trade-off. We don't see like, oh, if I start a new company, I'm going to have to uh give up some of my social life and some of my time at home. Um, and so I need to be ready for that. It's like, no, we just think that, oh, that stupid [ __ ] company, it like messed up my life and, you know, what a mistake. I shouldn't have done that or my co-founder is an [ __ ] or like whatever, right? It's like it's it's their fault. It's, you know, blame everybody else. So, I think it's uh viewing optionality in terms of of the costs of like the emotional costs. Have you read much Oliver Burkeman? I love Oliver. He's [ __ ] king, dude. Yeah. His uh newsletter, The Imperfectionist, is uh it's the same as that uh Tim Urban thing. Uh new posts every sometimes. Um, it's like on no [ __ ] discernable cadence. It's like the he's Oliver Burkham's newsletter is like the threebody problem of publishing, you know? It's like when the [ __ ] is it coming? I don't think you know and neither can no one can predict. But um he has this idea from 4,000 weeks which is uh choose what you're going to suck at. Yep. Uh you know, choose in advance the thing that you're going to suck at because um opportunity cost demands trade-offs. There are no solutions only trade-offs. So, I want to find a partner. Okay. You're probably going to have to sacrifice some time in the gym. You're not going to be you're going to be going out on dates. You're going to events, maybe some late nights, maybe some early mornings, maybe some coffee breaks and stuff like that. Uh probably not going to maximize your finances. Maybe you're going to have to pay for Ubers and dinners, trips, and stuff like that. Okay. I I really want to make as much money as possible. It's like, okay, your social life is probably going to suck for a bit and uh you maybe not going to get to hang with your friends so much. Okay. So I think by in advance of that especially for the perennial type a [ __ ] optimizer people uh of which me um you have to say this is a price I'm willing to pay in order to achieve this other thing that I want and it's not forever and that's a what I don't know whether it's like personal growth hyperbolic discounting or something but our ability to understand that the decisions that we're making right now are just for right now you know not just for this second you know if you're going to make commit into a habit. Make it a couple of months. But, okay, I'm going to get in shape. All right. Well, that's going to take between three and three months and 12 months, something like that for most people. Okay. I get in shape. What am I what's the price I'm going to have to pay? What am I going to suck at during that time? Well, you know, I'm probably going to have to spend more money on going to the gym and and buying better food and probably not going to have much of a social life because I'm going to need to really lock in on diet and I'm going to have to like be socially awkward at dinners. the few that I do get to attend and I'm going to have to say, "Oh, sorry." Like, "I'm just having the steak this evening." Or whatever it might be. Okay. By doing that, when the price comes of the suck, it doesn't feel like um this comment on your self worth as a person that's being ripped away from you. Oh my god, how can I I'm not going to be able to deal with the thing that's happening. It's like, no, no, no. Okay, this is an indication that things are going well actually. Okay, this is something that you priced in and this is a cost that you're prepared to to go through in order to be able to achieve it. Uh but yeah, for a very very long time I would take my eye off the ball of a thing to focus on another thing and the second that this thing started to slip, I'd be like, "Okay, get back onto that." It's like one of those cats chasing a laser around. You know what I mean? It's like upup up. Yeah. I think pricing in is like a good term for it because it's it's because ultimately it is the value of something, right? Like if you are if you do have a goal or pursuit or something that you want in your life, obviously you perceive there to be a certain amount of value to it. And the same way you wouldn't just look at a stock and be like, well, how much money did they make last year? Cool. Let me buy it for this amount. Like you you need to look at both sides of the spreadsheet. you need to look at how much money they brought in and the expenses and the costs and also like what are the future risks and like do the full analysis 360 but we're just really bad at that with ourselves like we don't think in those terms and I I I think ultimately it's because generally our our our hopes and dreams are very emotionally driven they're very identity driven and that part of our brain is the more ancient mamalian part of our brain, right? And it doesn't it kind of shortcircuits the prefrontal cortex and like you know you you don't really want to act like think through second and third order effects about uh you know the your your dream home or uh like that girl you're really into. And it's so it's hard. It's it's like incredibly hard to do it. Yeah. I wish I don't know it. It's sort of a ruthless irony that the times when you need your prefrontal cortex the most are the ones when it seems to be switched off, you know. Yeah. It's um I think I had another thing I I I posted a few years ago where I said it was like uh the the most consequential choice you'll make in your life is is who you choose as a partner. And uh and I I went through this whole list of things, you know, it's like they'll be your counselor, your roommate, your business partner, your financial adviser, your teacher, your lover, your travel buddy, like whole list. And then I finished it by saying like, and yet most people uh put as much thought into it as like, you know, the color of their iPhone case. Like it's just some people they're like, "Oh, I like this one. I happened upon it." Yeah. Yeah. It's like, "Oh, she's nice. She's kind of hot." the more that I learn about the way that the uh human attachment system works, passionate to companion at loved specifically, um a combination of Tai to Shiro, who's [ __ ] unbelievable, and Arthur Brooks, who's also [ __ ] unbelievable. Those two guys together, like a twocar garage of really really [ __ ] understanding uh human mating for like a psychological sense, I guess, and a neurobiological sense. And so many the way that human uh attraction and attachment works is it blinds you to this person's flaws. It causes you to feel unbelievably intense emotions about them whilst knowing very little about them. Uh real ruthless one that I learned from William Costello. Uh when you're in passionate love, the honeymoon phase, yeah, uh you your brain actively disengages from being able to see other available options. So it it sort of brings this sort of mating blinkers on, which is why friends that are still in the the honeymoon phase, but it's with somebody that's really not good for them. You say, "But dude, you're like, you could get like a million other amazing women." And they're like, "No, man. I'll never get anybody like her." And she's like, "She sucks." Yeah. And yes, you will. And look, your last girl was better than this girl. And how how are you so like functionally idiotic? I know that you're normally irrational. Oh, okay. You're kind of on drugs. Well, you mean you are on drugs. You're just on endogenous drugs as opposed to exogenous ones. And um yeah, I think so many people uh spend time with somebody where they love the smell of their hair and the shape of their nose and the way that they feel when they cuddle them at night and they fall backward into a relationship that they didn't with a person they don't actually have that much in common with. Yeah. And um it is a really ruthless trick that the human attachment system plays on you to get you to bond to this person in spite of their flaws. Yes. And then of course that that bond or that passionate love wears off after a certain amount of years. You wake up being married and living in the same house with the golden retriever together. Yeah. Completely financially in meshed with like two kids and you're like, "Oh [ __ ] I have nothing in common with this person." Like, you know, you bring your head above the water of this hormonal fugue state and you're like, "What the [ __ ] was that fever dream that I just came out of?" It's uh I mean, it's another example of just like how evolution did not optimize for happiness or harmony. It optimized for babies, making babies. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh it is very effective. I mean, it's it's hilarious in some ways, but I think a good lesson there is be careful who you let yourself fall in love with. Mh. Um, you know, you you almost need to treat you in love as kind of like a child. It's like, if I allowed this to happen, Mhm. I won't be able to use my rational brain. So, while I still have a tenuous hold on my sanity, allow me to try and make judgments carefully. How long am I going to spend with this person? And I need to make decisions probably pretty quickly while I'm still, you know, in rational mode and not speedr runninging through attachment. Um because once you're in it, it's like you're you're lost. Well, and this is another argument for what you were talking about earlier of like frontload your identity as much as possible. Try try and do everything you can to put them off. Right. Exactly. Like just be as much of yourself as possible. maximize you early on because it's it's that's when you're going to find out. Like if you if you hold yourself back and then you fall into this just love bucket of hormones and neurotransmitters, then you know you might be screwed. Um it's it's super cliche advice, but I remember at my wedding all the old people gave the exact same advice. Like all the old couples that have been together for like 40, 50, 60 years, they all give the exact same advice, which is like put the friendship first. What's that mean? Basically, they all said they're like, "Look, you're married now. There's going to be good years. There's going to be bad years. There's going to be romantic times. There's going to be non-romantic times. There's going to be difficult points in your life. There's going to be really great points in your life. like put the friendship first because that's going to carry you through everything. Everything else is going to come and go and you'll have you'll you'll have patience at different times. Um but if you're not friends, you're not going to have the patience to wait. I feel like most cultural and mental health issues these days can be summed up in just two words. Performative victimhood. That one did not perform well as I recall. I don't think uh people don't usually like liking a tweet that says that they're performative victims. Yeah, a little little bit called out. Um I don't I'm trying to remember what inspired that, but I do believe that. I do believe I mean this comes back to the therapy culture thing of people adopt as values what they get validated for, right? like they they if perceiving themselves as a victim is what brings them attention and sympathy and adoration, then it will encourage that behavior further. Like we're monkeys, you know? It's it's like Pavlov's bell. If you reward me for something, I'm going to keep doing it, right? I remember when I was running nightclubs, I always used to get pissed off. There's a couple of other companies in Newcastle and the northeast of the UK. Sort of classic workingass mindset like very wily shrewd like not intellectually sophisticated but uh relationally socially genius people. And you have one goal, busy nightclub, right? If you make your nightclub busy, you're the kings. If your nightclub is not busy, you're the [ __ ] idiot. And I always used to get pissed off at some of the other companies that would make claims um uh disparaging claims. There was no such thing as slander, right? You can say that this person's night, someone got glassed and it had three people in it and all of them were had one leg and they would, you know, they were upside down with a gluten intolerance [ __ ] everywhere. you know, whatever whatever you wanted to say in order to make somebody else's event. But this was a game that we refused to play. And me and my business partner had a principle where we're like, we don't talk [ __ ] about other people's nights. Um, and I always used to feel like it was unfair because we were constrained by what actually happened. But our competitors were simply constrained by what they could get away with saying and be believable. And I kind of get the sense that it's similar with this performative victimhood thing, which is if the way that you accumulate status, notoriety, recognition, validation from the world is through you doing a thing, your capacity to get the validation is constrained by your capacity to do the thing. Mhm. But if it's simply through the performance of grievance, imagined or real, there's the sky's the [ __ ] limit, dude. You know, like if you're the LeBron James of pretending to be a victim, that skill set is significantly easier to acquire than being LeBron James and doing it through being in basketball, you know, the the the the athlete who's perpetually injured, right? or is always, you know, brief flashes of being good, but then um gets the yips or I don't know what the equivalent is in in America, like gets in their own head and is unable to perform, can't perform in like clutch situations. Um like that is kind of romantic in some way. Imagine what he could have been. It's like, yeah, but he [ __ ] wasn't. Yeah, dude. Like ultimately he wasn't that thing. Even you know as brutal as it is as somebody that sometimes gets injured doing lifting heavy things like if you are the sort of athlete who gets injured that is also the same thing for you too that well imagine how great he could have been well yeah but his body wasn't built to be that great because every time that somebody hit him from the left his knee gave out or whatever it might be and I if you have an easy route to another example of this so this would have been me not necessarily performative victimhood but certainly me leaning into fear here as opposed to confidence. Um, when you play cricket, there is a something called a TFC and it's a thanks for coming. Thanks for coming means that you didn't bat, you didn't bowl. All that you did was field. Uh, because everybody feels and it's a like nod to what the captain would say at the end of the game when he chuck and he was like, "Thanks for coming, mate." Uh, because you didn't you didn't contribute. Um, and having a TFC is kind of a bit of a [ __ ] waste of a weekend. What did you do? uh you couldn't have contributed that much to the game. Presumably, you batted what's referred to as down the order. So, you're one of the later batsmen and if you were a bowler, you weren't needed or the conditions weren't right for you or the captain didn't have confidence in your ability to deliver at this stage of the game. And um there was a bit of me in the back of my mind that thought if I have the opportunity to have a TFC, at least I can't fail because I'm not faced I would rather assure my failure privately than risk failure publicly. Mhm. Um because I'm insulated from other people having to see how I could have fallen short potentially. And you know that would depending on how confident I was sometimes that would be more like I really want this and I would lean into it and other times it would be fear and I'd be like kind of you know got off scuff oh yeah I really fell up for it this weekend. God if you'd got me in there you could have seen the runs that I would have got on the board. Yeah. But uh yeah, the performative victimhood thing I think between that the um if you're not constrained by reality, you can uh become anything that you want to be as long as you can get away with claiming it. Uh and also this insulation privately. I I also like I think there's some there is a cultural norm that has shifted probably since you and I were kids and I don't totally understand why or where it shifted but it I think there's there's a certain amount of virtue has been started being ascribed to victimhood. Um, I think if I think back to like say my what my parents were growing up or my grandparents were growing up, uh, it was the opposite. It was like if you felt like a victim or complained about something, it was like, "Ah, suck it up, you know, rub some dirt on it, you know, get over yourself." That sort of thing. And then it feels like at some point there's kind of like an overcorrection, right? Like of course you want to acknowledge people who have had unfortunate things happen to them or maybe something's gone wrong or they've been treated unfairly or there's an injustice. But at some point along the way victimhood in and of itself has become seen as like a virtuous thing. And you can I think everybody's got their favorite pet groups that they can point to and like say you know as a as an example but like I see it all over the place. I see it's like I think I I wrote in one of my books I said I think this is the first time in history that literally every demographic feels agrieved and persecuted like rich people feel persecuted right now poor people feel persecuted white people feel persecuted black people feel persecuted straight straight people people feel persecuted gay people feel persecuted like how is this [ __ ] po who's persecuting like how is this possible it's the Spider-Man meme yeah exactly that's exact we live in a Spider-Man meme world right now and Um, and I don't totally understand how it's happened. And I think in in a sense, I think empathy has been weaponized. Um, both politically, but also socially. um that it's people kind of walk around with a badge of honor of like I've been mistreated or the group I'm a part of has been mistreated and that makes me that affords me all sorts of you know regard that I didn't necessarily earn or do anything for. Um, so yeah, I just I I I see that as kind of the root, you know, because you we could sit here and we won't, but we could sit here and talk about political issues all day and different social and cultural norms and issues that have been changing all day. But really at at the at the ground level of it, I just I see this performative victimhood as as a trend that is just like very fundamental and it's across the board across demographics and it is like very worrying. I wonder whether part of it is a a little bit of a sense of inequality and inequality can be due to empathy as well. Um, if you have people who feel like they're being mistreated in one way or another, that they're you are not recognizing the prices that I pay, whether I'm the rich person or the white person or the gay person or whatever or free. Um, that sense of uh I want to be seen. I want my suffering to be recognized and I feel like it's not. Mhm. starts to incentivize and it also resonates with other people who go, "Huh, I don't think that my suffering has been seen or has been recognized. They're just like me." And I wonder whether it taps into this um yeah uh righteous lack of recognition that that many people feel like they're a part of. Yeah. I think there's also a lot of uh believe it's the fallacy of composition that goes on which is like you will see you'll go online and you'll see say one terrible thing happened to one since we're both white guys we'll say terrible thing happens to one white guy and because we're white guys we're like oh my god look at what they're doing to all the white guys right and so there's like this this like logical fallacy that happens but you just it you your like your lympic system gets hijacked by the headline and the the horrible video that you see on TikTok or whatever and you're just like, "Oh my god, we're under attack." Yeah. [ __ ] Mark, you're awesome, dude. I I I think your work is phenomenal and I shamelessly repurpose it regularly. I appreciate your shameless repurposing. Good. I'm plagiar plagiarizing you with credit uh all the time. You got a new app, you got new stuff. Where should people go to check out all the things you do? Uh, I'm on every social platform. Check out my podcast, Solved. Uh, posted on YouTube all the time. So, come check it out. Everyone should. And your newsletter is also sick. So, people should go and check that out. Until next time, dude. I appreciate you. Thank you very much for tuning in. Swear interesting Mark Manson. How about swear interesting Naval Ravicant just here. Come on, press