How To Trick Your Brain To Make Discipline Easy - Dr Orion Taraban

before we started we were talking about the importance of setting yourself end dates for things that you're trying to do new habits or goals that you're trying to achieve or challenges and routines that you introduce and how setting yourself an end time ensures that you spend sufficient effort uh and duration to work out whether or not this is a good idea for you at all and it's something that I've used an awful lot in my life and you've done it with your YouTube channel that's right you want to give things enough time to succeed and in general things will take a lot longer than most people expect it's almost like two to three times longer than most people think uh that's why when I started out this project with the YouTube channel I made a commitment to myself that I would publish regularly for three years before I even entertained the question as to whether this was something I would continue to do according to my research it might have taken that long for me to get some sort of positive outcome with respect to my efforts and I knew that if I was committed to that process if I made that commitment to myself I could maintain discipline to that process independent of any kind of or the absence of any kind of positive reward that was coming back at me which was definitely necessary because without that commitment I I might have given up well before anything of Interest occurred yeah certainly in my life some of the examples that I think fit this whenever I'm trying some sort of new strategy y out or a new supplement or a new type of training routine or diet or whatever uh setting myself a minimum amount of time that I'm going to stick to it for before then looking at something else allows you to actually accumulate some of the benefits that you get and some of the benefits can be in realizing that this isn't for you it's not always that it was something good uh you I'm going to Pivot and I'm going to try training CrossFit for a while so I'll do 90 days of CrossFit and I'm not going no matter how difficult it gets sh me being injured I'm just going to continue to do it and then at the end of the 90 days because that takes the job of guessing out right you don't have to make decisions you're just able to follow another one um I have found great success going sober even though I don't drink that much really that much at all but I love focused periods of sobriety because it means that you're never dealing with a hangover once every couple of weeks which I had in my 20s cuz I was partying a good bit and uh it meant that I could be more consistent one of the things that people ask is what should like I'm thinking about going sober like how should I design it I want to just go sober I'm going to stop drinking I was like stop drinking but give yourself a deadline of when your sort of period of sobriety is completed because it just allows you to feel like you're making progress now YouTube has the timeline bar on the bottom to show you how far through a video you are if the timeline bar bore no resemblance to how long the video if it was just this unlimited timeline bar that just went off the edge of your screen you'd have no idea how much closer you were getting toward the goal whereas if you say I'm going to go sober for six months or I'm going to go sober for three months or I'm going to go sober for a year it's that there you go now you know I'm one month toward whatever goal it is that I'm doing and I hope that that it helps to mediate motivation a lot for me absolutely I worked in addiction medicine for about two years I did my first two years of internship at an outpatient chemical dependency clinic and the idea that I would never have a drink for the rest of my life was one of the biggest obst towards anybody even entertaining the possibility of some period of sobriety that's why in AA in a lot of 12ep programs they say one day at a time they truncate we're just going to get through this one day and then we'll see what happens afterwards I've used that myself when I was trying to disabuse myself of certain substances I said okay I'm just not going to use today if I still want to use tomorrow you know we'll see of course I could continue to Kick the Can down the road and if I still had the craving tomorrow I could just say I'm just not going to use today and that got me through the hardest periods of of that recovery there's a uh Cory of this uh when it comes to writing that Paul graah talks about about how he sits down and writes when he needs to do his essays and it's that he promises himself that he's just going to read what he wrote yesterday and as he start it's just a promise like I'll just read what I wrote yesterday and as he does he notices ah I actually there's a gap in between the comma and and that word that I put it as a slight type of then he gets in and he's starting to edit stuff and then before he knows it he's I I I could add a sentence in and so he he says it's one of the only times that it's acceptable to lie to yourself says it's acceptable to lie to yourself to convince yourself that you're going to do less than you're actually going to do so that you reduce down that bar that you jump over I think that's good if you're thinking about motivating yourself to stick with a new habit also Escape protocols work really really well like writers have all kinds of idiosyncratic rituals that they've developed over time to keep themselves writing because it really is a habit you have to do it whether you feel like doing it or not especially if that's your job one of my favorite stories of this is Victor Hugo the French author apparently he every night would fall asleep in a very bare room with just like a bed and a writing desk in it and in the middle of the night he would pay his servant to come in and like steal all of his bed clothes and lock him inside that door and in order to escaped this room in which he was he woke up naked with just a writing desk and some sheets of paper he had to slip like 3,000 words under the door to his servant who would then provide him with the key to get him out of his bedroom and that's how Victor Hugo wrote several of his novels so the idea here is to create a negative outcome that you have to escape by doing the constructive good thing that you want to build as a Hab what is a less cataclysmic version of that easy so I I made a video about this a while ago it's the trick for motivation that always works people hate this but it's never not worked the idea is to nominate some amount of money that will sting like you you it's not going to break your bank but you'll miss it if it's gone and you'll have to write a check to either an individual an organization that you agree with if you don't perform the the behavior that you've nominated for yourself so like if you don't go to the gym today you're writing a 100 Buck check to the RNC or the DNC or you know pro-choice pro-life whatever floats your boat and let me tell you people hate the idea of giving their hard-earned money to an organization that they disapprove of lo and behold they find a way to make it happen that is so funny yeah I mean I it kind of makes me think it's so strange needs to be a name for this kind of relationship where the person who is subordinate does something in in some ways or the person who is being paid does something that the person paying them to do that very thing wouldn't want them to do so with that uh servant that's working for Victor Hugo he doesn't want to be locked inside of the room I mean in some ways he does because he realizes that it is uh a stepping stone toward his greater goal but when he wakes up and he's freezing cold he's got no bed cheats and he thinks [ __ ] hell like the damn it the servant did his job again this morning and I remember I was friends with this girl uh who was at University the same time that I was she was a different uni and she was a financial dominatrix like a what they called a finom they're called have you heard of this no what's that oh let me tell you about foms so a financial Domin at least the setup that she had with the particular G gentleman he was turned on I don't know if it was a sex thing or um just like an arousal or an excitement thing it could it could have been either of those or both and um she would get his entire pay packet sent to him sent to her from him uh every single month as soon as it lands he didn't get to touch it and then she would drip feed 50p increments back to him and there would be things where he would say uh I I need to go to work this morning there's no gas in the car and my wife's asking why there's no gas in the car and she'd say there's 50 P get the bus and he would love the fact in some ways would love the fact that he was being sort of tortured in this way you know quite he kept on doing it but then it's so strange because she had like dirt on him compromising photos and messages and all of this stuff and he's married with kids and I was so conflicted because I thought well this man is evidently paying for a service but he's like paying for the simulacrum of basically being blackmailed but he is being blackmailed which is exact and the closer that it gets to legitimate blackmail the more excited he like this is you know axiomatically this is what he requested and it's kind of the a much more protracted extreme 21st century like uh post apocalyptic version of Victor Hugo being locked in his uh in in his room by his servant yeah that's fascinating that's really interesting I knew a woman who worked as a actual dominatrix in a New York City dungeon for a while and she would say that the most requested service was uh catheterization of of the men and all kinds of what's that what's C catheterization it's a it's a medical term for sticking a tube up your urethra so that you don't have to urinate so this is an untrained 25-year-old woman without anyal I see okay so the idea is I need to pay exorbitant sums of money to be put in a very compromised situation uh maybe I need to feel pain maybe I need to be embarrassed maybe I need to feel helpless because it's the only time I get to feel outside of my power and control because I'm a big swinging dick down at the stock market kind of a thing what do you think's going on there it's the the polarization of a life where you are the person that gets to call the shots and somehow in their minds it sort of creates this excitement about being whatever the opposite of that thing is sure I mean what's like the cycle of wealthy Lifestyles is you start off poor and you work really hard you make some money and then you become the private jets in the yachts and if you actually become a royal what do they do in their spare time what do they do for fun they put on disguises they pretend to be poor and they go about the hooy you know what I'm saying so it's like people want what they don't yet have Alan Watts kind of talked about this in a spiritual way which is what if you were this kind of entity that could have any kind of experience that you wanted like what if you were actually in control of the life that you were experiencing well at some point it wouldn't you'd go through these lives where okay I I was a king and I was all powerful and I got everything that I wanted and that would kind of lose its luster it would lose interest to you and so you'd kind of like up the stakes in order to feel something which would mean giving up control and giving up awareness that you ever had that you chose this to begin with and so you'd put yourself like further and further out there so that you could have an emotional experience which is really what life is all about people want to feel things people will pay all kinds of money to feel things yeah that's true and I suppose a a boundless existence due to the fact that it's so boundless doesn't it doesn't give you if there are no limits placed on anything then there's no value placed on anything there's this quote uh Peterson uses a good bit where he says if we created a sufficiently idilic world the only desired lack would be for the want of lack itself sure and um what it's so funny that you brought this up one of my friends George posted do you know who uh kylian mbappe is he's a professional footballer one of the best in the world and um kylian mbappe says he'd pay so much money to be a normal human being speaking to Envoy special he said going to buy bread at the bakery I'd pay so much money now to be able to do this kind of thing which is normal for most people he added I've lost spontaneity the spontaneity of being a human being asked what he would do if he could become invisible for 48 hours and bppi replied I'd spend my two days outside that's for sure I can say that without thinking go eat quietly in a brazzerie go out go with friends pie it quiet partly party quietly without anyone to come see me the next morning a nice brunch in the sun on a Terrace there you have it simple things in life and I think that's wonderful to keep in mind because the life that the ordinary person person lives is what the hyper successful most wealthy and powerful people in the world Envy yeah it's strange the things that you get rid of I came up with this idea prompted by that in the Uber this morning on the way to the gym came with this idea of a Titanic problem which is an issue that everyone says you're in such a privileged position to deal with and this is a quote from my friend Adam marreon he says this is an extra special type of tragedy a tragedy that unfolds while while everyone cheers like being on the Titanic after the iceberg water up to your chin with everyone telling you that you're so lucky to be on the greatest steam ship of all time and the Titanic is indeed so huge and wonderful that you can't help but agree but you're also feeling a bit cold and wet at the moment and you're not sure why there's an old there's an old story about a Chinese philosopher um chongu and he was widely regarded as one of the wisest men in the realm and so one day the emperor sent his retainers out to fetch him to come to the court and they found him at a fishing pond and they say hey good news for you sir you know the emperor has taken note of your ability and would like to offer you a place of dignity here at the court uh at his right hand and he basically said look at that Turtle swimming around in the mud do you think it would be happier here in the pond or inbombed in a mahogany case at the foot stol of the emperor and everyone knew that he' rather be swimming here eating the bugs he's like yeah me too I'd rather be wallowing in the mud so get out of here that's very cool it's very strange to think uh the kind of the champagne problems that come along with stuff I've used this story before but Ben Francis who's the CEO of gym shark uh founder and CEO of of gym Shar clothing and I went for lunch with him in Manchester maybe a year ago something like that last and we sat down in Nando which is like a very kind of cheap chicken restaurant in the UK and we he had two assistants Over The Far Side on a different table that were doing emails or sorting his schedule or whatever no security no one noticed no one cared I think he was playing sodoku or something when I arrived or maybe he was on slack I'm not sure we sat down and we had uh chicken and then and then we left I realized that his net worth is three times what Drake's is and then I thought how much more difficulty would it have been if I tried to get Nando with Drake we wouldn't have been able to get within two miles right it would have been the roads would have been shut down and the Press would have been everywhere and we needed 75 security and there would have been cues and there would have been news articles and all this stuff so there's different roots to the kind of life that people think that they want I think it's a Bill O'Reilly quote where he says try getting rich and work out if you still want to be famous mhm they're two different things in general visibility is interesting because it kind of has a curve a linear relation to power like the least powerful and the most powerful people in any given Society are the invisible ones like the the homeless people in San Francisco in the middle of the day could be standing in the center of the street waving their arms and no one will look at them right so that's a type of invisibility that's just completely connected to powerlessness but it's always the ones who are behind the scenes pulling the strings whose names you don't even realize are in the decision-making room who have not only all the power but they have Security in their power because how do you Dethrone somebody if you don't even know that they exist everyone always does this they always say about um the you know the Forbes top 100 richest people on the planet I don't know who does it whoever the top 100 richest people on the planet thing gets released and everyone has it in the back of their mind like yeah but there's some Russian SAR or there's some Colombian drug lord or there some Middle Eastern war mongerer or or energy tycoon or something and you know like Elon Musk he's just the front he's not the real one there's you know there's levels and levels and levels and if you believe that there's a new world order or a who conspiracy or even not that even if you just believe that there are uh mechanisms and dynamics that are outside of what we see um you can quite rightly presume okay so the richest company in the world I have no idea what the richest company in the world is but is it really that or is it the thing that pulls the strings behind the thing that pulls the strings MH yeah we might never know but in general it's a it's a more secure place to be to be the like the Vier is that how you say it like Jafar in Aladdin the the the The Man Behind the sultan The Man Behind The King who through his minations and manipulations can work through the emperor while remaining hidden in the shadows and and that person could even outlive several administrations so do we not see this with the American government as well that literally the way yeah but even without going so deep that you have the president the most powerful person in America right but you're just here on holiday you're Airbnb in this room in maybe four years or at the very most eight years you're out but there will be people and I mean I mean I don't know what the oldest person working in you know the White House or in Congress or whatever is at the moment but there's people I like Biden's been in there for like half a century or something think about if you've been um the right hand or the the visier of the president how many different administrations you've seen come and go and these to you a fouryear or even eight tenure would just seem like nothing you know it's in and out um you've got this idea that I think is pretty interesting about why getting what you want is often disappointing how's that work oh oh yeah well first of all it's disappointing because people don't really know themselves a lot of the things that people think that they want aren't really authentically grounded in their being this is something that I had to struggle with myself so I'm at the very most superficial level for a long time I thought that what I wanted in life was basically like a Corona beer commercial I wanted to be on a beach with a bunch of bikini women and some cool Bros and just like taking it easy and be really chill and in at some sort of Tropical Paradise and I now know enough about myself that if I did that more than two days I would probably want to shoot my face off it's like that would be like enforced Leisure it be enforced entropy for me I need to grow I need challenge I'm sometimes happiest climbing the mountain in a sley winter storm well I lost feeling in my toes and my fingers and but I feel so alive and I feel like I'm struggling towards some personally relevant goal that's my idea of happiness but it takes some time for individuals to disabuse themselves of the cultural inject of what their happiness is supposed to look like and to realize who they are sufficiently to identify something to replace that with so a lot of times people haven't done that yet and the tragedy is that they actually succeed in getting some approximation of that beer commercial and then they realize well what's wrong with me am I depressed you know I thought this was what I wanted it's certainly something that I've been striving for for my entire life what's the matter one of the things I often tell my clients is that as a therapist I facilitate their disappointment by helping them get what they want because once a person is sufficiently disappointed in some sort of external achievement there's one fewer place for them to look for their own happiness and satisfaction which is never found outside of themselves but unless they get that themselves they're going to think I'm full of [ __ ] it's like Rich Hollywood movie star saying hey money isn't everything it's like yeah well it certainly could help me I think I could handle that problem or being famous isn't all it's cracked up to be it's like you have to kind of you have to kind of learn that for yourself or else you're going to think people are hypocrites they're right but it takes a while to figure that out do you think that there is a way to shortcut that realization is there a way to realize that climbing the mountain isn't what you want to achieve without being stood a top it first it requires accurate self- knowledge like the more that you know who you truly are the more able you are to make decisions that represent let's say goodness of fit between reality and yourself and the more accurate self- knowledge you have it's almost like a a massive object and it pulls more accurate self- knowledge in through its gravitational field and you can make better choices with less information but that's a a lifetime process and in order to even begin to accumulate accurate self- knowledge people generally have to disabuse themselves of all the [ __ ] that's been put into their mind usually for the first 25 30 years of their lives which is considerable I've been thinking a lot about this term that's been stuck in my head for a philosophy that I'm working on a book that I'm working on at the moment intentionalism so trying to come up with a philosophy of being intentional with all of the different things that you do and trying to strip away and that seems to be the description of of what you're talking about here it's that the things that you do are the things you mean to do and the things that you want are the things that you want to want you don't do things that you're doing without realizing why you're doing them you don't want things that are society's wants or what your parents programmed you to want or the way that you dealt with your past traumas or the paths of least resistance or the thing that's convenient or comfortable on an evening time or the thing that's going to make you look cool to your friends it's life lived by Design not lived by default the problem is that most of our default desires are [ __ ] or or or not even necessarily [ __ ] they're like they're just misaligned usually for you and the more of a deep thinker the more idiosyncratic you are the less likely that whatever publicly acceptable version of success is supposed to be is the one that sits right in the middle of the bell curve of the best life that you could live that's interesting I do think that a lot of the stuff that's in people's minds is is [ __ ] not just misaligned um and I do think that it takes some time to see the default [ __ ] as [ __ ] because most people identify themselves with that [ __ ] like they think that that is actually them and so the fact that this is a default cultural inject or just the accident of their particular childhood upbringing is obscured to them it's mystified and that's actually the biggest obstacle that people face in divesting themselves of this [ __ ] they they can't recognize it as [ __ ] they see it as themselves and one pathway out of that is to understand like this doesn't feel good to me like if this is really what I want if this is really something that aligns with my values and my individual preferences why am I unhappy why am I unfulfilled why do I feel like something is missing like that's the little clue that's a little thread that people can begin to pull to kind of unplug the sink to flush out their minds that's very interesting I've been uh thinking since you said that earlier on helping people to become disappointed uh people succeeding at the wrong thing you know they they've achieved success but the thing that they achieved success in was not the thing that they actually wanted to want and here's an interesting sort of paradox that because hard work is usually uh done as a predecessor to something which is worthwhile there are some things that can come well without hard work but many things that are valuable require hard work in advance and hard work although kind of satisfying it's usually not it doesn't fill you with always happiness in the moment or sometimes even satisfaction in the moment can be frustrating it can be anxiety inducing it can feel like pressure and all the rest of it the problem is if the thread to pull on and I think that it's the right one I agree with you is does this feel good to me like am I having fun is this night does this life feel satisfying to me there is an amount of Puritan work ethic and sacrifice that you can continue to plug away at where you just go ah no that's not me bailing out of the wrong life Direction that's me paying the price that I need to in order to be able to achieve success and I will continue to do this because I'm leaning in this is the point that other people quit did you expect that this was going to be easy no of course you didn't this is what hard feels like and this is why you're going to win and so on and so forth but that ability to dampen down the voice in the back of your head that goes I I I don't think I'm having that much fun doing this I don't think that this is actually all that good for me or this doesn't seem to align bifa that from this isn't right this is this is in directionally the wrong thing for me to be doing that is a that's pretty tough to pull apart oh yeah it's very difficult oh where to begin with that so yeah you need hard work in order to accomplish anything so this problem is is actually a problem that most people aren't going to experience because they're not going to hang in there right so this is like a a second tier problem that people are to encountering and when I say it doesn't feel right I don't necessarily mean am I having fun or does this feel pleasurable in the moment sometimes this means like do I feel weak do I feel ashamed is there a nagging Sensation that there's something more important that I should be dealing with and for a lot of people they become successful at something that is like a a step towards something else in life like for example I for a long time worked as a test prep instructor and I got really really good at test prep I have a perfect score on the GRE I've worked with thousands and thousands of people on this test it's something that I got very very good at and that was necessary for me in my 20s because it paid my bills it helped to subsidize my education it was something that the market needed even though it wasn't like let's say the Fulfillment of my personal Destiny you know but I might have needed to go through that process in order to create the material conditions so that I might be able to launch that in the future the idea the problem is some people can get stuck there they get stuck with some measure of success they're thinking oh I'm actually making decent money I had to work really hard to get here maybe this is the best that life has to offer and that might not be true that might not be true I wonder I wonder how people work out that whether this is a a transitory period or whether they've outgrown the current modality that they're they're developing themselves within yeah I made an episode about this a long time ago which is that Winners almost always quit the idea that Winners never quit is probably Incorrect and it speaks to that kind of mental monologue that you were describing just a few minutes ago the fact of the matter is is that Mastery is very very difficult to achieve and so anybody who actually succeeds in arriving there must have quit pretty much everything else in their lives in order to devote themselves single focused on this one Endeavor right so you actually have to quit pretty much everything else in order to arrive at some degree of Mastery now I think that once you have some success you have some money you have built a business or you develop some sort of Fame it's almost like you have a kitty that you can gamble with and so it's possible now to take bigger risks without necessarily um compromising the fundamentals of your lifestyle or your survival and so that's why think it's necessary for people to just get some sort of like stability in their lives and then they can think about the next thing they can think about the thing that's connected to let's say more personal fulfillment or their passion whatever that means as opposed to going after that right out of the gate that that might be poor advice for a lot of folks especially Young Folks does a Jason poan quote where he says accept that all of your heroes are full of [ __ ] Your Heroes aren't Gods they're just regular people who probably got good at One Thing by sacrificing literally everything else and that's the quitting that you're talking about you got another idea which I loved about uh overpaying is the cost of winning and it feels like that's related here as well yeah it's connected to the idea that getting what you want is disappointing so basically I talk about how life is sort of an auction house and the way to auction houses work is it's full of things that people want but it's not a charity in order to achieve those goods people have to outbid every other person in the room it's not a perfect system but it's kind of what we have developed in order to maintain some form of fairness or Justice with respect to the allocation of zero some Goods because the universe is abundant in its generals but it's zero sum in its specifics right so with respect to the analogy with life it's not just about money though it could be it could mean that you have to work harder than anybody else you have to work longer than anybody else you may have to sacrifice your pleasure your well-being your social life your friends you might have to put that all into your offer to increase the value to surpass all other biders for that one zero some good and if you actually succeed in winning it's because no one else thought it was worth that much like by definition you must have overpaid like the likelihood that you hit the exact correct minimum amount of value if you went any lower you would have been outbid is functionally zero so you paid more for that than you needed to because no one else thought that that good was worth what you did and so that's part of the disappointment of actually getting what you want is you probably overpaid the idea is wow I finally won I got what I was doing for but look at all that I had to give up all of the years all of the the relationships all of the opportunities that I've had to surrender to get this was it worth it that's a tough question to answer and most people in order to resolve their own cognitive dissonance will say oh yeah it's definitely it's definitely worth it but the way I kind of reconcile that to myself is the goal is really just a pretext for the transformative process to achieve it it's like most people can't win as they currently are so the goal is the excuse to become better than what they currently are to put themselves in a competitive position to achieve it and that's the actual that's the actual gold that's the alchemical gold is the process by which the Lett is the base metal is transformed into something precious my friend Alex talks about how he spent I think five years building up his financial resources to the stage where he exited a business and was able to put it all into this new project and this is you know he'd worked for five years and he'd worked like a dog just so hard and then jumped it all into this new business and then the business partner sent it all to his girlfriend in Switzerland declared bankruptcy and he was back at zero and he thought those was five years of my life and I have nothing to show for it literally zero like every single penny sent zero left but within the next 12 months he made more money than in the last five years combined and then the year after that he made like 10 times or 100 times that much money and his point is not too dissimilar to yours which is the real thing that he got out of that experience was was the person who he became while he was doing it mhm and you discover who you are in the process of striving towards a goal everybody in the privacy of their own fantasies thinks that they're bigger stronger smarter more clever than they probably truly are and we often only get to see who we are in the comp the competition for those zero sums that exist in the world like the go are also an opportunity for us to get to know ourselves it's very difficult to actually know who you are by thinking about it the only way you can arrive at any kind of accurate self- knowledge is by taking action in the world and then examining in retrospect well what kind of person would have done this well I did that so maybe that's the kind of person that I am it's not something that you can decide in your own cognition it's very difficult to do uh this is one of my criticisms with monk mode as a personal development strategy that it's great you know you're going to do isolation uh introspection and really focus on you but until you brushes up against things that you haven't selected because you're going to go do I'm going to run a 5k quickly or whatever all right but you chose the distance it's not run run until an undisclosed amount of distance where your mom is trapped under a car right like that's really unchosen training or suffering right people in CrossFit they talk about uh how hard the workouts are you go they are they're difficult workouts but you chose this modality and the reason that you chose this modality is because you take a degree of pleasure from it now if I was to say you need to lie on the couch for three months and you're not allowed to train and you have to eat dog [ __ ] like that would be difficult that would be genuinely hard because it's outside of your existing sort of Paradigm of selecting things so you're within this bracket and uh Tim fer I heard this quote from Tim Ferris which is [ __ ] fantastic he said um running a business is a personal growth strategy masquerading as a vehicle for accumulating wealth that by doing things out there in the world you learn so much about yourself because you crash up against your inefficiencies and your self-doubt and your challenges with other people and your fears and your anxieties and it's like it's it's more like running on a treadmill than running on a road because the treadmill is continuing to move at a pace and you go I I can't slow down I need to keep this business going as opposed to being like ah you know maybe my meditation session was a bit hard today maybe it was easy no one knows like it's you don't have an external counter of that but when it comes to running a business or just testing yourself out there in the world up against other people you do that's why I think one of the best little psych hacks that a person can have is to choose whatever happens to to them this was something that the stoics talked about they delineated everything in terms of what was within my locus of control and what was outside of the locus of control and the vast majority of things are outside the locus of our control and the proper attitude to develop towards these things is indifference and to choose it like epicas talked about how if Zeus wants me to be sick then I want to be sick as well I want what Fate has in store for me and by choosing it you take some degree of psychological control over it and you can kind of wrestle with it you say that there's something in here that can better me there's something in here that I want in almost like a masochistic way like I can take this I can struggle with this and come out potentially reborn on the other side of it like that's a indomitable mental set yeah there's a a study that I heard Matthew hussy talk about which you'll probably be familiar with um two hamsters one who gets to run on the wheel when they choose attached to another wheel that has a hamster in that only runs when the other one chooses to you seen I don't know this study but I can picture it basically you've got one that's got internal locus of control and the other's got external locus of control one is running under their own valtion and the other is being made to run when the other one chooses to and pretty nasty experiment you know if you imagine that there was someone that did something compulsively and you had to do it at the same time it would be pretty painful but very interesting the stress levels of the two hamsters when you compare them together are just night and day they're completely different and uh yeah if you are this is the mental equivalent of that if you can try and take a little bit of power back from whatever it is that's occurred to you I chose this as opposed to like I'm happening to it it is not happening to me and of course even the hamster who could get on the wheel whenever it wanted was in a cage I mean it had very strict limitations on what it could do so we're really talking about just a relative difference most of us in terms of our Human Experience are the second hamster there's the universe is just so much larger than we are and it was set into motion a long time ago and we're coming up against forces that are Rippling from across the Stars uh all we can really do is choose how we want to respond to them some Victor Frankle talked about this it's like sometimes you're in a situation where there is no possibility of escape and so all you can really do is choose how you respond to that and he saw that there was an opportunity for dignity and self Transcendence in even the most you know abhorent circumstances you mentioned just before about how you doubled up or tripled up on work to get you through your studies and that you realized it was a uh stepping stone between you and something that you wanted in future I'm going to do these things because in future it will get me toward a position that I want what's your belief about whether people should grind out in their 20s or not I think it's a really important thing to do um but everybody's on their own path I initially wanted to be an actor I was a professional actor in New York City for about 11 years and I spent most of my 20s pursuing that and I would travel around the world and do shows and party and live the life of a Bohemian and looking back I couldn't have chosen to live my life differently because that's who I was I'm sure if well-meaning Orion got in a time machine and said hey look man you know your lifetime earning is going down and your real passion is psychology and helping people and self-discipline and he'd be like go [ __ ] yourself buddy so like I had to live the life that I lived because that's who I was right um and that put me on one level behind some of my peers who in their late 20s were already they've gone through Medical School they've gone through law school they have their secure Lifestyles they were partnering up they were having children they were buying houses and I was still living in subsidized housing in Brooklyn you know from month to month and that's a harder look uh the older that you get right so then I entered into a period of grinding where I burned all my boats there was no plan B and I worked 120 hour weeks for five straight years without taking a day off it was awful um but it positioned me to create the life that I live today I remember when I was back in that housing I was visualizing my life uh like down to the decoration of the office that I wanted to have and I realized eight years later I had arrived there like it took me eight years to Vis to actually manifest the dream that I had when I was in my late 20s and I think that's about right I think it can take seven to 10 years to make a dream a reality and I call that like a chapter of life and people have several chapters to their lives but they don't have an infinite number of chapters you know what is it like average age is 70 maybe 10 years at the so like maybe 50 good years divided by seven you get maybe seven or eight good chapters in your life you you got to and so like what's the theme of this chapter what do you want to have accomplished at the end of it where do you want to position yourself for what happens next I think it's really it takes so much more work than most people think in order to achieve a goal to make a dream come true but that's really what life is about life is like the dream making factory man this is where it happens this is where you get to make it real there's nothing more thrilling and exciting about this I don't know what your spiritual belief is but that could be why there's all of these Spirits floating around just not can't wait to get down here on Earth to make something happen because this is this might be the only show in town it's exciting to think about uncertainty of the future and I understand and I see it in myself like it's anxiety inducing I don't know what's going to happen I don't have certainty about the fact that things are going to work out or that my dreams are going to to occur correctly or what I I don't even know what's going to happen in 10 minutes time I don't even know the next words that are going to come out of my mouth but there's something thrilling about that and it's one of the reasons why I've increasingly been spending less and less time on the internet I've been spending less time on social media even though it's like partly my job um but I've been trying to find a way to get the information that I need to not be completely siloed off and like totally herited so I don't know what's going on in the world whilst also not being trapped by a lot of the tenor of the internet because the tenor of the internet at least a lot of what I see at the moment is very fatalistic it's very cynical uh and it's not a Dream Factory it's but it's also not even nightmare factory it's which is a type of dream yeah I suppose so but I I was about to say I don't know if it is a nightmare factory like at least the nightmare factory would involve it would be exciting it's more vanilla and beige than that it's like this sort of slow trudging walk toward inevitable boring despondency I don't know like it's just I'm I'm not a massive fan of a lot of the trends that I see on the internet at the moment despite the fact that I curate a lot of things very carefully and um yeah I just it makes me when I think about it when I truly truly connect with this stuff it makes me sad it makes me sad to think how many people perceive the world in a way that is so like unintentional so non- agentic they're not a sovereign individual they don't have control over their outcome or their future um things happen to them things happen for other people but that's that's not going to be for them and um yeah it's it's it's unfortunate now that is a difficult situation for one person to get in the point at which it really starts to rile me up is when those people begin to try and convince other people that that's the case I'm like yo you can be as despondent as you want is that your choice Free Will debates way longer than we've got time for but you can be as despondent as you want but it's there is nothing more perverse and toxic than trying to convince other people that they're living inside of the night the nightmare that you believe that you're already inside of like that to me seems to be like I don't know I I I think the world would be a significantly better place if those people just weren't allowed to talk H well it's their way of reducing their own cognitive dissonance I assume because the the presence of other people who don't see that life is a nightmare who are living their lives in an atic way and moving in the Direction with hopefulness and confidence towards their goals is a palpable counter example counter evidence counterfactual to their entire worldview it denies the validity of that worldview and that's embarrassing because it in some recess of their minds calls up the possibility that things could be different and that they could be wrong and that's actually very difficult to to to approach like this is there actually some uh correlates here with depression like I've worked with some folks who have been depressed for years and years and years and at a certain point after a certain amount of treatment they do come to the understanding that may maybe they've prolonged this condition longer than was necessary maybe they have been willfully mired in this state and the possibility of recovery is isomorphic with admitting that they kind of did this to themselves and that they might have been wrong for years and that's really difficult that's the Sun can cost fallacy right and so if I actually get better it kind of admits that I could have done this earlier and I'm having real trouble making sense of that does that make sense Chris absolutely yeah uh you talk we both have talked and researched a lot about dating have you spent much time looking at the black pill incel movement and those communities have you spent much time in them well I'll answer your question but first of all to your point I actually don't consume a great deal of content on the internet just like you were discussing part of that has to do with I want to keep my content as original as possible and I don't want to be unconsciously or unduly influenced by other people's ideas I think that a lot of the value that I have to provide has to do with kind of being an independent critical thinker um and I'm very careful about consuming content with respect to dating and intersexual Dynamics because there's a lot of angry men there's a lot of angry women and there's just a lot of hopeless and despondent folks I knew about the existence of black pill like abstractly but I had never actually met somebody who identified as black pill that changed when I when my channel became more successful and I could see some of the comments that were left on some of the videos and I was taken aback by how hopeless and despairing some people out there are with respect to women in relationships so William Costello one of my good friends he's the number one researcher of incels on the planet and he oh is he the UK the guy from the UK Irish don't say Irish don't say that careful excuse me excuse me I think I've watched some of um I think him on twice and I think I've watched both of them so he he was he was wonderful he's really brilliant and um you know he's doing this huge a bunch of huge studies at the moment anyway he uh he told me about ascending have you heard this word before mhm yeah so ascending for the people that don't know uh is rising out of the incel spere potentially becoming a viable mate and maybe getting a girlfriend but what he told me which was really interesting and it kind of leads to what you were talking about I think the key word was hope right if you believe that things can be better hope is painful because it posits an ideal and as soon as you posit an ideal you then begin to compare yourself to that ideal but if you just assume fatalism that nothing can change this is the way that things always are there is no hope nothing can be can be altered at all the there is no such thing as an ideal the ideal and reality fit together because you are constrained you're constrained by that and he told me that um in some of the chat rooms they'll say um with regards to ascending or becoming a fake cell as it's called that um I said oh so if you got a girl's number or if you r on a night out and you ended up sort of kissing somebody in the nightclub and he was like no no no much much smaller than that so if you went to Starbucks and the barista's eyes lingered on you for half a second longer than you thought and you were to go back and post in one of the forums and say this thing happened to me today the problem with that is if everybody is completely locked into their position if all incels can't get laid if there is absolutely no hope to them then there is no hope for any of the others but if one of them ascends and becomes get a girlfriend well what does that mean about me maybe that means that the owness and the Locust of control is on me as opposed to out there in the world I'm not constrained by things that are immovable and infallible I am the architect of these things that occur because egg user 2997 they just did it and they just they they just managed to do it and that's it's an unfalsified in many ways and I have't an awful lot of sympathy as well for the incel movement and I'm writing an article at the moment about that but it is a completely impossible to disprove philosophy because anybody that doesn't adhere to the philosophy gets accused of not being one of the members at all like if the only people who Ascend a fake cells then there's no such thing as an incel because it's just anybody that isn't all of these things that's outside of them and the second that someone breaks those rules they weren't one of us in any case I have a few thoughts on this so for a couple of years I did my pre-doctoral internship at the Cancer support community in Walnut Creek California where I was doing therapy with stage four cancer patients and often their caregivers or their children and that was a very difficult placement there was the first time in my life I had experienced that much sickness and loss and death I remember leaving that placement and crying just the tears would just be coming out of my eyes as I was driving home every day I learned so much about life from working with those folks and hope was something that would always come up in our group and individual therapy sessions and hope is a very personal thing because there is a time when the person is not going to get better with a certain disease and holding on to Hope longer than is Justified can just create more and more pain like it is a roller coaster hope but it's not for me or for anybody else to say when it's time to kill the hope for some people as long as there's life there's hope for other people especially those who are dealing with the disease sometimes they're more comfortable giving up to Hope than their wives and their husbands who want them to keep fighting no matter what so hope is not a a unilateral positive like in the myth about Pandora's Box in which all the evils were released into the world well the only thing that remained inside the box was hope hope was in the box with all the other stuff like why would that be the case sometimes some folks have posited that hope is the evil that lives within it's inside the box with all the other bad things so it's not unilaterally good because it can create so much pain and suffering hope is a very tricky thing we need it more than we think like the ability to feel like things could actually improve without that life would be a slaughterhouse it would be an absolute miserable hell and people experience hope in ways that they're not even conscious of experiencing so that's one thing the second thing I want to say particularly about incels it's because it's also related to depression so there's many different forms of narcissism and I know that's a loaded word so so I'm I'm kind of going to approach this more clinically which is uh we all kind of start out narcissistic all children are inherently narcissistic because they can't do perspective taking which means that their empathic ability is completely offline like they can't help but think that're the center of the world and as they age then the world generally more or less softly or more or less harshly beats that misconception out of them right um when we talk about narcissists it's individuals who for whatever reason have avoided disabusing themselves of that fallacy of the necessity for perspective taking theory of Mind etc etc uh into adulthood but there's many different kinds you look at the DSM and you just see one flavor of narcissist which we might call the grandiose narcissist I think that I'm the God's gift to women I can't s I can't not succeed everybody loves me I'm far more important and powerful than I actually am but we might pait there's another form of narcissism that's called like inverted narcissism and inverted narcissism I think is very much related to depression it's the idea that like oh I'm I'm so broken and damaged that nothing could possibly fix me happiness is is for something else it's not for me it's like a negative form of specialness I'm so broken that I'm a unique exception to the rule this treatment would never work for me this protocol would never help I will because I'm this special negative exception to the general rule and that's a form of narcissism and it's very difficult to I have actually a lot of sympathy for narcissist I've worked with some of them clinically um I've worked with enough of them to know that they're actually very scared hurt children underneath and they've done the best they can develop this wall of Defense around them and when that narcissistic facade which could be I'm fantastic or I'm so uniquely the negative exception to everything when that collapses they're back down being the scared shivering four-year-old even if they might be 30 years old or 60 years old and they kind of have to begin building up emotionally from there which is a very daunting Prospect if they've already lived Decades of life but there's really no other way that they can begin to ground themselves authentically in their own being and it and it can work like after that narcissistic collapse people can begin to build themselves up based on their authentic foundations but it's very very difficult to do so I think that this phenomena that you describe in the incel movement is sort of related to this is that I am this unique negative exception in grad school I learned in my assessment class that people were would rather be told that they have below average intelligence than average intelligence like if you gave somebody an IQ test and you had to administer and interpret the results more people needed like counseling and consoling to be told that they were averagely intelligent than if they were below average because on some level it's like oh I was I was special in some way even if that specialness was negative that seems to be almost like a badge of honor to to a lot of folks there's there's nothing that more people fear than just being average which most people are by definition of course that is fascinating I absolutely love that story I learned about um herostratic Fame what's that from my friend Gwenda uh a couple of a couple of weeks ago herostratic Fame many people would rather be hated than unknown in ancient Greece herostratus burned down the Temple of timus purely so he'd be remembered now now we have nuisance influencers who stream themselves committing crimes and harassing people purely for clout and it's not too dissimilar to what you were just talking about which is that people would rather be special but suboptimal than average average at all well we see that all the time in adolescence when there's trouble in the household or emotional neglect they often act out and and most people no matter what their chronological age is our emotionally adolescent yeah that's interesting given that you've worked with and you now I think you work exclusively with men in my clinical practice I work exclusively with men but I do consultations with men and women got you what do you think about the effectiveness and challenges of therapy for men and women there's a lot of talk on the internet at the moment a lot of criticism about therapy for men it's gynocentric it's female f focused it's it's designed for women it's instantiated by women um what's your what have you come to to learn and understand about the role of therapy for for men and its Effectiveness and challenges I think it's something that really does change depending on the gender match between the client and the practitioner I know that there are certain topics in particular that men would likely feel far more comfortable talking with another man these include anger and aggression these include their own sexuality uh these include discussions of power and I think that there are other topics including these that women are going to feel way more comfortable discussing with other women and that's fine but the idea that the way that men communicate is the way that women should or vice versa that's not quite true and the vast majority of talk therapy for Better or For Worse is geared towards women I think 85% of my cohort in my professional School were women I interviewed at places that didn't have a single man on staff like the vast majority of all kinds of mental health provisioners are women the vast majority of Mental Health Service clients are women I mean they use therapy three to four times as often as men do so it's sort of like reflected in that Marketplace and I think that the way that men and women approach problems there's a lot of overlap but there's also some fundamental differences fundamental differences that are kind of revealed in some of the stereotypic arguments that happen between men and women in relationships a woman comes home she's out of sorts about something to happened at her job and she's talking about it the guy starts offering Solutions and the woman says I just want you to listen he's like of course I'm listening that's how I know that I think that this is going to work I just want you to just sit there and listen well what the [ __ ] is that going to do anything how is that going to help ah you just don't get it yeah I guess fine you just want this problem so it doesn't work women actually just want to talk a lot of the times and if they can get it out they feel better and a lot of guys are just are scratching their heads like how the does that help anything like most men are more problem solution oriented they're action oriented they want to solve the source of the problem as it exists in reality either out there or in here and then they can move on with their lives a lot of men including myself see Talking simply for the sake of talking to be more or less a pointless Endeavor it's very interesting I've I've started back uh therapy in in Austin I've been doing it maybe three four months now 3 months four months something like that it's very interesting but it it's made life in some ways more difficult because it stirs up things that are much more difficult to forget about you know like your story about Victor Hugo it's very interesting and I'll be thinking about that at some point so I'm like that's cool like I got this image of Victor Hugo but if I want to forget about it's not going to be keeping me awake tonight but if you have a particularly or at least in my experience if I have a particularly Illuminating uh therapy session there are things about myself that I literally didn't know existed 3 hours ago and 2 hours ago I stepped out of the therapist's office and now I'm sitting down at dinner and all I can think about is this new thing and um that's great well I mean it's it it is in some ways but in other ways like you still need to you need to go through the world as a functioning person you need to not permanently be thinking or talking or exposing and expanding on whatever the [ __ ] thing was that you just talked about right that wouldn't that that wouldn't be good uh you need you need to keep things it it stirs up in or at least the best approximation I can say is it stirs up things that are are sufficiently deep that it's very hard to not think about them and that's relatively rare that won't last forever I mean if this is something that kind of Blindsided you that you didn't even know existed inside of you it's going to take some time for you to integrate that into your pre-existing personality structure and so maybe there will be some time that you'll have to devote to making sense of what you've learned about yourself but that won't be forever I started bottomless pit of of as yet undiscovered things that are going to be there might be there might be but there might also be there might be diminishing returns of investment for you to seek them out and and integrate them into your existence like maybe you're doing a good enough job as it were given your pre-existing self- knowledge you know and for a lot of people that's the truth and they run into issues when their pre-existing self- knowledge and their behavioral routines and their worldview come up against something that creates pain that creates suffering there's friction there's resistance there's failure and loss and they don't know how to hand handle it using their pre-existing um knowledge base and so that's the time to potentially go in and and grow and expand but yeah there's a time to plant there's a time to reap there's a time to just get on with the business of living as opposed to introspect Simply for the good of introspection yeah that's that's a really interesting point thinking about um when you're supposed to stop doing all of these practice runs and actually just get out on the field of play and make things happen in the world uh again this is another criticism I have around monk mode which is the purpose of Monk mode is supposedly to prepare yourself and improve yourself to become a better version of you dot dot dot so that then you can step out into the world as a more fully formed better more social more likable more successful better balanced person but monk mode as an end in itself cuts off the why and just continues the how for forever right Bill Perkins says delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification and monk mode can be very gratifying which is great and and fun and I had huge success huge huge success sat on a couch in Newcastle upon time doing breath work or meditation or journaling or reading or [ __ ] yin yoga or whatever it was I was doing that month but I realized I The Addictive nature of it especially if you're it's a particular Pitfall if you're someone that's a little bit uh introverted inclined because it legit imates your own Retreat from social life and it gives you nobility in isolation and that is something where you need to go okay like that's cool like it's cool that I'm doing this on my own and it's great and you this is my Rocky cut scene but like the purpose of the rocky cut scene is to then prepare him to go and do the next thing which is really like good sticking around and just doing it on your own I think results net overall in a loss I would agree and I think that monk mode is probably the less common manifestation of this more common manifestations of this socially are like education just for the sake of Education there's a lot of young people because of the way the educational system works they haven't developed any kind of self-direction and they go to college more or less because it's expected they graduate and they think I'm unprepared for adult life maybe I'll go get a master's degree and they do that for a year or two and they graduate and they're a little bit older and they're still unprepared for maybe I'll get a doctorate that definitely happen happens or therapy it's just like therapy is not a means to its own end it's a means to get back on your feet to move on with the business of life and to use your point about the rocky cutch scene the reason why he's training at all is because he has an upcoming fight with Apollo W without that fight there would be no necessity for him to train people who are training without the fight may become trapped in that training as a means as an end to itself so I think the goal is really really important the goal is the pretext for Action it also lets you know when you get to stop because you should be good enough relative to what you actually need to accomplish in the world there's a time to move forward there's a time to move on I think that there's a reverse as well um which is the important never being gotten round to because the Urgent always gets in the way and that is oh you know therapy or the gym or Diet change or having that conversation with my partner or leaving that apartment that's in a dangerous area of town or exiting a relationship that I don't like whatever I'll do that when dot dot dot there's not so much stuff on the plate when we're not so busy when we're not whatever whatever whatever and this is the reverse of what we're talking there's never an ideal time or to see it another way now is the only time that action can occur the present moment is the only time in which we can do anything so if not now when it's like I've never seen tomorrow I'm 41 years old I've never seen it I'm I'm losing hope that I ever will see it you know what I mean so it's like if I want to do something now is the perfect time to do it because it's literally the only time anything can be done that's great and you can you can begin to expand your conception of temporal reality in that way to have the present moment ex like di dilate and expand both instance in the past and the future and you can see that now you're poised for action in the present moment this is the moment that you've been waiting for your whole life is actually conspired to bring you to this exact point now is the time to act I love it Oran taban ladies and gentlemen where should people go they want to keep up to date with your work they want to check out all the things that you do where do you want people to head on the internet certainly well I have a YouTube channel called psyx so you can find my content there my website is oraban side.com there are links on my YouTube channel my side business is that Grell study program it's called Stellar gr it's the only empirically validated test prep system on the planet I wrote all the content myself um it's also the most affordable option on the market so if you're going to grad school you might as well check it out Stell g.com oh yeah Ryan I really appreciate you I'm a massive fan of your work and I look forward to chatting to you again as well this was great Chris I was really happy to meet you thanks for on thank you very much for tuning in if you haven't already hit subscribe then press right here it's the only way you can ensure that you won't miss episodes when they go live and the next couple of months I've got some of the biggest guests in modern wisdom history joining us and it supports the show and it makes me happy come on