The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck | The Secret of Life, Sex and Money

any single person who does that man or woman it's gonna make your dating life easier how could you offer thousands of dollars of value you could I would approach a woman and if she was not enthusiastically into me I would say nice to meet you have a nice night but what if she was extremely attractive so maybe this is where Tate actually comes in handy can I ask how much you made from the book um thank you so much for coming in the Ace coffee really let me say that again too early coming on the iced coffee hour we really appreciate it I'm a huge fan of your book The subtle art of not giving an F I am someone who gives an f about too many things I overthink everything this book was recommended to me or it came up someone sent it to me I can't remember exactly how I came across it I read it and it completely changed my mindset in terms of what to prioritize what to give an f about and just I guess life in general about kind of letting things go which I'm really bad at so for that I I thank you and I'm so grateful for you to come on I appreciate that yeah when did the desire to become an author start uh uh maybe like late 20s late 20s 27 28. so it was I I'm assuming after you spent plenty of time introspecting and kind of like fostering the current philosophy that you have kind of yeah I you know there's a funny there's a saying with writing which is um um writing imitates life so you need to like go out and live um I think I spent most of my 20s just like living and trying a bunch of [ __ ] and I never knew I was a good writer I got bad grades in my writing classes and at the time I thought I was like oh I'm just not a writing guy I'm like a science guy but looking back it was because I didn't follow the the assignment you know they would they would tell me like write a piece exploring the thoughts of George Washington or whatever and I would like write a fan fiction that imagine that George Washington was an alien and planted to like bring democracy to Earth and uh and I get like a [ __ ] F because they're like this is not what we assigned and I was like oh I guess I'm a bad writer then like you know it didn't even occur to me until I was like 30 then I'm like oh wait maybe that's actually what made me a good writer is that I didn't follow the assignment I didn't write like exactly what people expected of me so it wasn't actually until I had started my uh uh online businesses and started blogging and got a lot of traction blogging and started getting all these emails of people being like man you're an incredible writer like you should you should write a book sometime that I was like huh maybe I should write a book sometime what were you blogging about initially so a bunch of things so I started my first I read four hour work week in 2008 that's when I first read it too when it first came out yeah um I remember yeah I remember uh my the one real job I've ever had I worked at an investment Bank in Boston and uh hated every second of it and I remember I had four hour work week under my desk and any like little break I got I'd pull it out and read a few pages and I just remember by the time I got to the end of the book I was like I gotta get the [ __ ] out of here I gotta build a website or something like this is I can't do this so I started a handful back in 08 after reading a four hour work week I started a handful of very crappy kind of e-commerce affiliate marketing websites um and back then if you wanted to get traffic to those websites you blogged like blogging was the big thing it was what Google loved um back then you didn't have news feeds people didn't really post a ton of links on Twitter or whatever so if you wanted traffic Google needed to love you and Google at the time was loving blogs so everybody was like if you want to get customers you got a Blog so I started blogging for all these different um kind of e-commerce businesses or affiliate marketing businesses one of which was dating advice and promoting David D'Angelo's double your dating and that was the one that started to take off and I got within probably six months I got more traction with that one than all the others combined and so I was like ah I'll just like kind of keep hammering on this one that's how it started but it was still even it was like two years of that before it even occurred to me like maybe I should be an author how did you decide on dating that you're going to be writing about that did it start with dating or you started writing about other things and then dating just seemed more natural maybe I started writing about a bunch of different stuff the dating stuff and this is the funny thing about writing so the dating stuff came easiest to me because I was a single 23 year old dude and it was fun to write about my dates and what were you successful with the ladies Well define success why was that easy for you how it wasn't easy um so the pickup artist thing had been happening around this time and I'd read the game and a couple of other books and I had a bunch of friends who were like really into that world so we had been going out a lot and uh you know going to bars and stuff and approaching girls and so I had been doing that for a couple years and I had gotten like I by that point I was getting good results like I was hooking up a bunch and dating a bunch of girls but it's funny because it never occurred to me of like oh you could be one of these guys who's coaching you could write one of these books like it never dawned on me for some reason maybe this just has to do with like the level of their marketing back then but it it just seemed like they were in like another world I later realized once I met most of them that they were just normal dudes with really good marketing the dating writing the dating stuff came easy and I think one thing that I've learned throughout my career is that if there's a certain subject or topic that flows naturally out of you as you write it that tends to be your best content and so I don't think it was really a coincidence that it was the easiest for me to write it was the most fun for me to write and it's what got the most traction when I started putting it out into the world and so what was it a program that you were selling at the time to make a living writing about dating no well so when I when I first started out it was just affiliate like okay you know and that was for David D'Angelo yeah David D used to offer 200 commissions on his ebook how oh is that because of all the upsells yeah so it was funny we were talking about this before filming yeah I found David D'Angelo probably when I was 14 or 15 years old in high school I think it was on eBaum's World or something like that and I signed up for like an email newsletter or something like that and I get his newsletter every single day in my email I'd read all of them his titles were so good he was so captivating he would basically answer uh questions that people would send in say hey David here's my situation this girl's you know this how do I how do I get her to like me and he would write this whole thing and say you know I recommend you use my technique that you know you could have in my book yeah and then I think because I didn't have any money at the time and I had like a credit card or anything put in I think I just downloaded it illegally sure and I read the whole like double your dating at 15 years old yeah as we did back then um yeah he offered 200 commission just because he had so many audio courses seminars like hundreds of dollars which at the time and what was the most expensive one he offered uh oh it went up to thousands thousands how could you offer thousands of dollars of value in life you could couldn't but but it's funny because this is so this is one thing that like my team and I talk about quite a bit because at this point I'm like I'm a dinosaur in this world like I've been doing this for 15 years the prices of online content has consistently dropped over the past two decades back then back in like 2007 2008 whatever the concept of an online course was so novel and and just nobody had ever seen it before that you could charge this insane premium because people are like oh well it's online and you can access it anytime and you know it's got 20 videos so of course it's worth two thousand dollars whereas like these days online courses are dime a dozen so you really really really have to have massive amounts of value in a big I guess a lot of credibility to be able to like even charge a few hundred bucks these days so I haven't done very much research into the pickup culture but I know a lot of people that were very interested in it back in the day could you maybe say a few of like the pillars of pickup Artistry that like people like to teach or like the the grab the pull of it sure you know um so there are different schools of thought believe it or not um I'm not kidding I I could give a [ __ ] dissertation on this um there were different schools of thought so there were there were basically kind of two categories one was known as canned game which do you know what this is yes I haven't heard of this I like this has not crossed my mind in probably probably 15 years yeah that's crazy it's funny because you would memorize these lines man oh my God so so the the philosophy behind canned game was basically uh you know you as a guy you have there's probably two or three life stories that you have that are better than all the other stories you probably have two or three questions or ideas that are better than all your other ideas and so the the philosophy was you should just figure out what those best stories and those best lines are and then just use them on every single girl you meet because that's your best material right which is like there's a certain logic behind that the problem is is it kind of turns you into a robot and it turns your dating life into like this algorithmic like okay she said response why deploy story C2 but then also like man yeah yeah you're using these crutches and you come across a girl that's maybe a little I don't know more sporadic and she says something that throws you off and you're like uh uh uh and you can like yeah so that was the problem that was the problem with candy so far are until you come up with a situation where like I don't have a story for this right exactly crazy you know about this is 10 years old I had the canned game and it was a few times 15 years old how were you even because at 15 and high school using this at 15 or whatever I will try the best it didn't really work to try to try to score a date which failed miserably score a date yeah you're trying to you're just trying to get a date that's all it was and I'd have the canned material but it none of it worked I mean some of it would get you so far sure and then and that a lot of it was over like AOL Instant Messenger it'd be like you know you know aiming back and forth and you'd come up to a line it only got so far okay I can all right what we're going to do right now is an exercise okay you're gonna say a canned story and you're gonna say a canned story what was your go-to can store no no I hate it I hate it I hate it oh you didn't have you didn't have no no so this this is the first school of thought I was not part of this school of thought so this was like Neil Strauss is the game was kind of like the main can game thing you know mystery who was talked about in Neil's book a lot of the earlier pickup stuff so I guess like 2004 to 2007 was like very focused on this what what guys eventually realized is exactly what you just said which is like as soon as you run out of stories you revert you know it's like Cinderella turning back into a pumpkin I think as soon as you run out of storage you're like oh yeah I'm back to being that nerdy dweeb who has no confidence around girls but before we get into that you guys actually may not know this but Graham and I have had so 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your business and make better decisions faster and you can start by downloading netsuite's popular kpis checklist for absolutely free at netsuite.com iced again that's netsuite.com ice to get your own kpis checklist for free netsuite.com iced or the link Down Below in the description and now with that said let's get back to the back of the podcast there was a second school of thought that started to emerge which was known as natural game which is ridiculous because it's it's just being a human being but uh the idea behind natural game was like okay it's not about learning lines or uh stories or whatever it's about developing the skill set right developing social confidence developing social awareness developing a sense of humor these these things can be practiced right like you can you can go take an improv comedy class and become a funnier person you can join Toastmasters and develop more confidence speaking and better body language and all these things so the idea was like work on the the fundamental skills and principles within yourself and then that will just kind of naturally translate into greater success dating which is fundamentally true so I was a natural game guy like I I had probably a similar experience to Grant uh and a lot of people which is I read the game I was like oh my God I can't believe this works I went to a bar tried a bunch of lines and the girls just kind of looked at me like I had four heads and I was like you know I think I did better when I was just normal so I like went back to normal and then just started working from there I was like why don't we start at normal because I'm already good at some things and then just work at the things I'm not good at right uh which is just logical so I fell in the the natural game Camp which a lot of my focus and and as I so I I built the blog I developed an audience and then originally I promoted people like David D'Angelo but then people started wanting me like specifically to give them advice right so they're like hey Mark I've been reading you for a year I really like your take on things um here's my situation with this girl I'm seeing what do you think and the first dollars I made was charging money for that kind of thing like you know hey for 100 bucks I'll hop on the phone with you for an hour like talk me through it I'll give you I'll give you my two cents and eventually you know my focus generally became mostly like what I started to realize once I started working with a lot of different men what I started to realize is that you don't even have like yeah it's good to be funny that's great you don't have to be funny to get a girlfriend or get a date right like you it's good to have social confidence or be clever or be really charismatic but like you don't have to be charismatic to get a date ultimately what it comes down to is a certain amount of confidence in who you are an ability to deal with rejection or the possibility of rejection and simply being intelligent about which women you approach and which women you ask out and so that became most of my focus and my content was very psychologically driven it was like forget all like definitely forget the pickup lines let's even mostly forget the skills and the the principles and stuff like let's just focus on you your ability to deal with your own fear your own sense of rejection your own identity if you get those things straight then all this other like everything else will kind of fix itself uh and that's kind of what I became known for yo in simple pickup was making their first videos 2010 2011 YouTube I learned it really doesn't matter at all what you say it's just how you say it yeah that's it I love their videos when they go up and Mumble some random stuff can I get your number and they'd be like sure sure yeah that's fine I'm curious as a man in the dating pool right now the hardest part and I'm probably speaking for a lot of the audience as well is the fear of rejection right for sure how did you overcome that fear of rejection or were you still scared of it but you were just managing it you know what and I by the way when it comes to rejection I think it's more so embarrassment that that was what it was for me is just getting embarrassed yeah without the rejection itself it's like am I gonna look like an idiot yeah I think so there's kind of two two takes one is a certain percentage of it is just simply desensitization like the way you realize rejection doesn't matter is you get rejected enough times and you're like oh this doesn't matter so that's part of it that's that's the answer nobody likes hearing but it's the truth but another huge part of it and I talk about this so I I did end up writing a dating book called models to track women through honesty and this was a huge chunk of that book which is most men who particularly men who struggle with dating they approach dating as as though it's a performance right like okay you got this hot girl to go out with you now you got to say the right things you got to do the right things you got to make her laugh at the right jokes and if you do that then you get to win you get to kiss her or hook up with her or whatever and like it's it's like they approach it like they're approaching a level in a video game you know it's like ah clear all the obstacles and then you know you you win the princess at the end and that's a terrible if you actually look at how human interaction works that's a terrible way to approach any relationship in life like the idea that you need to perform to make somebody else like you it's it's going to even if you succeed you're going to be dissatisfied with that success because it's not your actual self that they're liking it's the performance that they're liking so a much healthier way of looking at dating is that here's who I am here are the things that I care about that are important to me here's the lifestyle that I want for myself understanding that a vast majority of the women in the world are not going to be compatible with those values in that lifestyle that you want for yourself but also understanding that a small percentage of women are going to be highly compatible with those values and that lifestyle that you want for yourself and so your goal therefore is not to make every woman like you it's to find that small percentage of women who are highly compatible with you as quickly and efficiently as possible and so once you like really integrate that into your head rejection no longer becomes a Bad Thing rejection is simply part of that process of finding the compatible women so it's it's women are actually doing you a favor if they reject you especially if they reject you quickly because they are saving you all of the time and energy that would have been wasted on a woman who is not compatible who's not going to make you happy again you can't just like read that and overnight feel it but over enough time you can reach that point where you do feel that way and so it it you really not only do you stop caring but you're actually like completely comfortable with it I got to the point where I would approach a woman at a party or a bar or whatever talk to her for five minutes and if she was not enthusiastically into me I would say nice to meet you have a nice night and I would like move on but what if she was extremely attractive 10 minutes well then I got this story that I practice Yeah yeah yeah but how do you differentiate between being okay with rejection but also working on yourself to the point where maybe you're just not presenting yourself in the right way like this person could be a great match sure but if you don't convey yourself in a confident way then you're just shooting yourself on the foot right from the very beginning it is true it is true and so that's the argument to work on yourself primarily you know to develop social skills and humor and all those things like those are very valuable things and by the way not just valuable and dating valuable and everything valuable in business valuable with your family your social relationships so those are just very very important skills to have regardless but the answer to that question and also the answer to yours is guys get so caught up especially like if you're in a room and there's a super hot girl in front of you and you get the chance to talk to her there's something that happens to men's Brains they start acting like every other woman on earth died and this is like the last chance they're ever gonna have to procreate and it's like dude there are [ __ ] four billion women on this planet hundreds of millions of highly attractive women just in you know this continent there's there's no scarcity in terms of opportunities chances whatever like you're gonna meet another woman at some point you're gonna meet another hot woman you're gonna meet another woman that you Vibe and gel with the other thing that that it's important having this perspective for too is that it's very real in dating that you meet the right person at the wrong time like you can meet somebody who's extreme you're extremely compatible with but but they're moving across the country in two weeks or they just got out of a relationship and you just got into a relationship like there's there's a lot of stuff that happens that's completely outside of your control that if you just met two weeks prior or uh a year prior you would probably have a great relationship and it would change both your lives but you didn't so you just kind of learn to let those go as well like as they say there's always more fish in the sea which but before we get into that if you guys are looking to create high quality content just like us at a very low cost unfortunately unlike us we strongly recommend you guys try out our sponsor stream yard for those unaware stream yard is a live streaming platform that allows you to create really high quality content with just the click of a button all you need is a 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supporter of the podcast so if you want to support us support them link is down below and now with that said let's get back to the episode do you feel like this is something that every guy should learn when I hear pick up for me it means more so working on yourself and it was the confidence that I gained from being able to go up and talk to somebody that helped me so much in sales is just being able to have that understanding that like no matter who it is I can go up and talk to them and it'll be okay yeah I would differentiate between say pickup and just developing very useful life skills because like the line between those two things is very blurry in a lot of cases for a lot of people like I had a lot of clients back in the day really their only issue was what you just said they just needed they had some social anxiety they did they were a little bit unconfident or insecure around strangers that's really all they had to get over and it just so happened that being single and hiring a dating coach was the way they got over it but you know you probably could have hired a business coach gone the networking events like there are a lot of ways to attack these issues I would say some of the fundamental skills that every man should learn social skills for sure like you should absolutely focus and work on your social skills you should absolutely focus and and work on um your your sense of confidence sense of identity and that goes for any single person like it's any any single person who does that man or woman it's going to make your dating life easier but I mean there are plenty of people who just marry their high school sweetheart and like never think about dating a day in their life and that's cool too so um you know every everybody's mileage varies a little bit do you think social media is making taking social competence better or worse I think it's a bit of a mixed bag I think what I have observed particularly among like say Jen's ears is social media it increases their exposure to say social expression like exponentially over say what we were exposed to when we were young and so they seem I find that young people today are extremely Adept of like noticing catching memes ideas common threads that are showing up in different places like they seem extremely Nimble and like managing that and like noticing that I think what where they so I I would say they're maybe ahead of the curve in a certain sense of maybe just social awareness I think where they might be behind the curve is a certain amount of uh I don't want to say emotional maturity but like there's a certain amount of emotional development that can only happen face to face it can only happen when you are out with a group of friends and somebody says something that hurts you or when you're in awkward social situations where you have to be the person who walks up and talks to a group of strangers and I think the more the more people rely on social media and online platforms for for their socialization the less they are forced to be put in those situations and develop those emotional skills and so what I notice is just people being a little bit behind the curve in terms of their social emotional development yeah I would say what I've noticed being a gen Zer is a lot of people they're able to understand where a lot of people are coming from and like you said like reading and navigating social situations they're pretty good at yeah there's not a lot of depth yeah to them you know what I mean so they can go mile wide but not really a mile deep on anything that Rings true it's funny I've I've just recently hired a couple of gen's ears and I've noticed that like they are so [ __ ] aware of everything and like really a two months in conversation is like really attune the stuff how so I'm so curious uh I don't know exposure yeah I really think it's just exposure like you get to see so many different people personalities and points of view points of view on social media and it's just constantly seeing it and so you're aware of it and you kind of know how to like act and react but you don't know the depths of like where they're coming from because it's not like you know in-person conversation I can see you and I I see you know your point of view but also we're gonna go in depth about it yeah but on social media it's kind of just like oh this guy you know he's like one of those funny like Fedora wearing trenchco guys that like you know you give us an example like I I have a problem understanding like the depth aspect of things well I so I have found you know when I've talked to Jen's ears I've asked questions which I think when I was in my 20s would have promoted like just very thoughtful conversation like I've point blank asked some gen's ears like what are your long-term goals for yourself and they kind of stutter around and really get kind of uncomfortable and kind of give like a non-answer and I'm like wow that's really interesting especially because ninety percent of the Gins ears I'm exposed to are super [ __ ] smart and like really Savvy when it comes to like culture and what's going on in the world but then it's like you ask a personal question and it's just like they're kind of like stumbling around but you think if you asked a millennial who was the same age back then the same question they would give a better answer I used to sit around with my friends in my 20s and we would like sit there and dream of like what we were gonna do in 10 years and what we were going to do in 20 years but that's only because you only knew of a certain like a selection of things that were possible whereas now with social media you're like aware of like okay I could be a plumber in Nebraska or I could be you know multi-billion dollar Media Company manager it's like you know it there's like this weird um relationship between like as awareness expands the the in the possibilities expand the harder it is to narrow your focus and I think that's where the depth comes in because depth to have depth you have to kind of pick up a lot of land to die on like you have to be like this is who I am and this is the thing I care about and this is the thing I'm gonna defend and The Wider the options the harder it is to choose that spot of like yeah this is my identity so do you think there are too many options right now across everything absolutely I think that is arguably the the largest unspoken psychological Hazard of today's day and age and I've I've mentioned that um in each of my books particularly the end of that book like it's there's this concept of paradox of choice which you know the more options you're given the more optionality you're given the the least the less satisfied you are with whatever you choose ultimately and you especially learn this once you start getting older like you have to [ __ ] choose something like you can't when you're young it's easy to kind of sit around and dream about being like a world-class expert at five different things but like once you actually start working on stuff and you realize how the insane amount of effort and energy it takes to get good at just [ __ ] one thing you realize like oh [ __ ] like I really only get like two or three things in my entire life that I get to dedicate myself to and so I need to be like very conscious about what those things are and so yeah to your point if you've grown up with literally a million options at all times how do you pick those two or three things see as a millennial I or sorry not as Milan as a gen Zer I hate the idea that I restrict my options yeah you know what I mean I can only choose between some subset of of choices I feel like it's more so the distractions like you pick an option and you are aware of all the other options but it's all these distractions like these ads and like you know you could be a drop shipper you could be this you could be that which distract you although it is another option that you're kind of aware of do you think that it's possible to separate options from distractions and you're aware of all the options I think distraction is is another I think I see them as two two issues around the same thing right so it's like even if you have chosen you know I'm gonna be a [ __ ] great world-class podcaster always 10 other things going on at all times in your life so it's like how do you say no to all those things how do you turn all those things off it's it's it's another complication added on top of the initial complication how do you know what to pick I would say it's a combination of finding what you're naturally good at finding what you enjoy quite a bit and finding what making sure it's compatible with a wider lifestyle that you want to have right so it's it's maybe you like I enjoy science a lot I enjoy reading research papers I would [ __ ] hate it in Academia like I would be so miserable and so for me it just I realized years ago that that should probably be off the table um so yeah I think it's a combo of what you're good at what you consistently enjoy and what is compatible with the rest of your lifestyle and I guess you part of that too is you know getting paid for something yeah I think you really said it best in a prior podcast I really liked when you said that you know what you're really good at when it comes easy to you yeah when other people ask you how were you able to do that and you just say well no it was easy I just I just did it and I think for me if personal finance is something that like I've been obsessed with and even before making YouTube videos I was on Reddit talking about personal finance writing these long like you know analysis is on random things and I posted on Reddit that people would like it yeah it's basically like what feels like play to you that feels like Worth to other people and I realized like I learned this in music school because music schools is so insanely competitive for obvious reasons and I remember I was slowly like everybody kind of gets weeded out like 90 of the people in music school get weeded out and I was I made it through the first two semesters I was coming to the end of the second semester and I could feel like my time was coming and so I was practicing and and studying super hard like six eight hours a day and I remember I went into one of my private lessons with my my guitar teacher and I played a piece that I've been practicing all week like my my fingers were sore I was starting to get tendonitis all this stuff and I started playing it and I got 15 seconds in and he like put his hand on my guitar and he was like stop you're not practicing enough and I was like all right dude if this isn't enough like [ __ ] all this I'm out of here this reminded me you know in high school I really wanted to be a drummer I was in a band and I remember the moment that I realized I couldn't do this as a career I played a show at the Roxy and there was a band that played after us and I thought we crushed it it just banned after us the drummer was insane I bet the drama was probably late 20s early 30s and this was like Danny Carey sort of style that to me was like I'll never get that good like this guy was amazing like naturally gifted and afterwards we're talking to the guy and we're talking to the band and you know congratulations hey great set you know just you know being fans and the guy lived in a van on Sunset Boulevard as the drummer yeah and purely because the band wasn't making any money yeah he was practicing full time uh the rent that he would have paid goes to a studio that he splits so he could play the drums and I'm like this if this guy can't make it like what does that leave me and this guy's so much better Dude music is one of the most ruthless markets maybe the most ruthless Market in the world I I it's I can't tell you how many like I still watch a lot of amazing musicians on YouTube just for fun I can't tell you how many 18 year old kids that I watch on YouTube who can play circles around what I could ever like I could play at my Peak and I just look at I'm like I'm so glad I quit music oh my God but to finish that story really quick I remember I I got desperate so there was one guy in my program who was just clearly better than everybody else like he was the one guy everybody was like that guy's gonna make it and so I went I cornered him in the cafeteria the next day and I was like dude I'm like I'm having a crisis here and he's like oh yeah what's going on I'm like kind of like laid it all out I'm like I'm doing this I'm practicing this and I'm trying this and my teacher said I'm just not practicing enough I started asking him questions I'm like how much do you practice man and he was like I don't know it's like what do you mean you know now and he's like I don't I haven't really thought about it uh I was like okay well like how how do you approach a new piece like what's your process you know how much time do you spend on each part what's the warm-up and he was like I don't know like I don't I I don't know I just kind of like sit down and figure it out and like he couldn't explain to me what he was doing and I was like okay if you would guess how many hours a day are you like physically playing your instrument and he was like I don't know like eight or twelve but I've never really sat down and counted that's really that's an interesting question I like it blew my [ __ ] mind that this guy was just naturally unconsciously doing all of the behaviors that were required to be a top level musician um he did end up making it and I remember that conversation I was like okay I'm out of here like yeah I had one friend who made it as a bass player and it was his entire life but he loved it like he would be watching TV practicing fretting yeah and he would listen to a click track just normally yeah that would be his background instead of listening to music I wanted to click track yeah and at different you know bpms and that was it and he would just internalize it and you give him you say play 90 BPM in this he'll just do it yeah it was so instinctual for him we all have a natural competitive Advantage somewhere our personalities are different our interests are different our proclivities are different like there's something in each of Our Lives that we naturally do well that most people don't or it takes a lot of effort for most people and the tricky thing about it is that the things that we naturally do well they're so natural to us that we don't realize that we do it well like I never it never occurred to me I was a good writer I just I would get on forums I would get on music forums and I would like start arguing with a guy about like which band is better and I would write like my idea of a fun Friday night was writing like a 10-page dissertation on why this Tool album is better than this Tool album or whatever that's like what I did for fun and it never occurred to me that that was writing and that I was good at it and I think people make that mistake a lot that it is because it is so unconsciously natural to them they don't realize they've gotten so good at it and that that's actually their huge competitive Advantage yeah at what point did you decide to exit the dating segment and how much can you share how much money you made throughout that process not not that much really I was imagining yeah I was listening to a diary of CEO and I was like yeah it's 100 it's a thousand dollars and I thought like oh yeah you just retire from that like that that industry was shrinking by the time I left and I could see that it was it was a sinking ship um I started coaching in 08 I was making up full-time income in 09 full-time being like 50k a year or something I left in 2012. coach my last client in 2012. I wrote my my dating book in 2011 that was kind of like my mic drop moment of like [ __ ] all you toxic [ __ ] like here's a healthy version of of men's dating advice and then I left in 2012. I think by the time I left in 2012 I was pushing up close to 100K a year and that was Mo but that was mostly through online courses um through the blog I thought it would be way more I was kind of imagining like three to five hundred right I don't know I mean these guys made it seem like they're making so maybe they are but like you know it's funny I was never when I was in that industry I was never a big player in the industry I was kind of like a B level or c-level guy um it was after I left that my stuff blew up in that industry so like my dating book became the top men's dating book on Amazon for like eight I think it it might still be the top men's dating book on Amazon how do people find it just go on Amazon it's right there yeah uh and I still like I still get royalties from that today um so yeah it was weird when I was there I was kind of just this marginal guy who kept trying to like [ __ ] everybody else's thing up because I was like no no no that's that's toxic don't do that do this instead and um I was I was very contrarian but then once I left and I kind of pivoted just the self-help in general I think a lot of people became more aware of me and then things took off in that industry so when did the idea for the subtle art come to fruition so the book itself I started writing in 2014. so I pivoted I pivoted away from dating the self-help in 2012. and then in 20 2012 2013 my blog just blew up like traffic probably five or ten next the reason I did that is because in 2012 I realized that it's actually very surprising I really by by the end of 2012 I I had actually built up a a sizable audience of female readers and I kept getting emails from women saying like I love your blog I love your articles is this true for women too each time I would sit there and think about it I'm like yeah it actually is kind of true for women too and that happened enough times that I'm like why am I writing for men I should just write for everybody so I rebranded switched to to just kind of generic self-help audience blew up 20 2013 and uh that's when I was like okay I need the right like a real book and I I initially I thought I was going to self-publish it like my dating book um but then the odd by 2015 the audience had gotten so big that Publishers and agents and stuff had come knocking um as far the title itself that was an article in 2015 by then I had finished most of the first draft of the book but that article hit so hard like I'd had a bunch of stuff go viral but that one just was like so insanely viral that um my agent was like you should you should make that the title of the book and uh you know make that chapter one I was like that's not a bad idea and that no that that you wrote back then yeah what did you define as viral how did you know does it show views is it by comments is it by you know people responding it's it's funny back then um you used to be so Facebook and Twitter used to show you how many times uh things got shared like you people would post so like at the top of an article You Could See this has been shared on Facebook two thousand times and it's been shared on Twitter a thousand times they stopped doing that years ago but um you would see I mean I kind of knew like a standard article I would write would get I don't know three to five thousand shares just like from my core audience um and then if things kind of hit ten thousand twenty thousand whatever you knew something was kind of popping off and so I had a number that I had a number of articles that ended up with 50 000 shares or a hundred thousand shares on Facebook each of those shares is probably reaching anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand people and then subtle art hit over a million shares uh across social platforms and so that article alone did I mean it's funny and these days with YouTube numbers it seems scant but um that article alone I think that eight million page views in the first couple months which back then I think the New York Times got 30 million page views like the entire website yeah so um so yeah that's like massive how did you come up with the idea the big contextual piece of information here that matters a lot is that Facebook released their news feed in 2011. Facebook realized pretty quickly that they wanted to compete they wanted they wanted to be everybody's homepage like they didn't want you to go to the New York Times and like see what articles they had posted they wanted you to just get on Facebook and click on links through Facebook they started juicing any sort of like published content on other websites they started juicing their algorithm to like promote that because they just wanted everybody they wanted Facebook to be the home page of everybody like that's the first thing you look at in the morning so if you could create an article that went viral on Facebook you would just get this insane insane amounts of traffic so I figured this out pretty early like definitely earlier than most people very similar to what people do with YouTube these days I also because I had studied copywriting in previous years I understood that the two most important things when you post something on Facebook or any social media is going to be the title and then the image that pops up so if you have a great image and a great title A lot of people are going to pop up uh click on it and then if it's a great article they're gonna share it and and that share is going to get a bunch of clicks and then it's just gonna you know start the start the flywheel so I spent a lot of time focusing that's when I actually started again doing what YouTubers do now which is uh title first so come up with the title then create the article what most people did back then is they would think of the article they wanted to write write the article and then be like oh I should put a title on it um I realized that the title basically controls your distribution so pick the best title possible then write an article that delivers value based on that title so I started doing that had a few quick viral hits I'd say between 2013 and 2012 and 2015 I probably had like 10 different articles that just blew up so I went from my dating blog I think when I pivoted over my dating blog probably had 50k to 100K monthly readers um by 2015 I had like two and a half million monthly readers wow um so yeah it like I guess that's a 25x what were some of the biggest self-help points that you wanted to get across or that really did well that people resonated with so I grew up consuming a lot of self-help content and when I was a kid when I was young it was all the Oprah stuff so it was like the secret and Power of Now and manifesting and like power of positive thinking it was all very like touchy feely believe in yourself you know you're going to be great whatever and being a millennial like Millennials were were kind of known for just being disaffected and cynical of everything and I read all that stuff as a teenager and by like my mid-20s I was a little bit bitter about it I was like this kind of feels like [ __ ] like it makes you feel good for a little while but it doesn't actually change you doesn't actually like create any behavioral change around the same time there's a bunch of new like positive psychology it just started up in the 2000s and so we were starting to get the first research like first actual credible research on like things like happiness what improves well-being what may you know how people how people emotions react to certain experiences and so I started diving into that content and it turned out that like a lot of the actual academic research on happiness and emotions completely contradicts like the classic self-help stuff thinking positive all the time doesn't always necessarily help you feeling good about yourself isn't necessarily always a good thing so I basically started taking a lot of that academically rooted information and then zeroing in on that contradiction of like traditional self-help right so I would take you know a piece of research and then I'd create an article called uh this is why you shouldn't try to be happy or like stop trying to be happy which back then that was super controversial take in the self-help space and so people would click on it they're like what stop trying to be happy like they click on it and then they start reading it and it's actually like no it's like rooted in a lot of like very logical arguments of how this sabotages you and so that was that was basically kind of the initial Mark Manson piece of content like that was what I became known for these days you see that [ __ ] everywhere in my industry like these days that that basically is the industry to a great extent but back then it I I think I was probably the only person doing it or the first person doing it so it's like I captured a lot of that momentum do you think any of like the OG self-help books have any value because for me I read The Power of Now yeah and I thought that was like one of the best books I've ever read yeah and I've read a lot of like self-help books sure none have made the impact on me that that book has so here's the funny thing about like classic self-help books it's every single one of them has a nugget of truth right so Power of Now yeah developing the ability to be present is extremely important is that the only thing you need to know how to do no it's not and in fact you need to know how to think about the future and also worry about the past because those things are useful but you don't want to only think about the future or worry about the past because then you're just going to be this like neurotic person right so there's like most of my criticism for classic self-help isn't that it's wrong per se it's just that it's it's not the full picture like it's life's complicated and and in fact a lot of the things that are good for us are unpleasant and I think the function of most self-help throughout its history has been just make people feel good like here's the thing that's going to make you feel better and in a lot of cases that's helpful but in some cases it's not but the to give a few examples I'm a huge fan there's a classic book called The Road Less Traveled huge fan of that book uh him Scott Peck I like The Four Agreements a lot like it's got all this like shamanic Universe blah blah blah which I'm not really into but like in terms of just four simple Concepts that you can read that book in an hour and those four simple principles uh that it gives like will probably make everybody's life slightly better like that's just that's a good book so I I trash the industry a lot but it's you don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water like it's as with most things it's complicated I feel like with the Power of Now the part that I didn't necessarily like was like the whole reframing of your entire mind and your behavior and your personality and your character yes the way that you see life I don't think that that's very productive because nobody's actually going to do that but if you do use the tool of presence just like I said as a tool sure then it's great I think you make a really good distinction I think if you approach these things as tools like another great example is the secret right from a purely scientific point of view the secrets just complete and utter [ __ ] but the experience of manifesting like if you look at like perceptual biases and um confirmation bias and how you can leverage confirmation bias in your favor like that's a real thing like if you focus on a certain goal or idea that you have you will start noticing things that are opportunities to move towards that goal or opportunity so that is a real thing it's just all the kind of the fluff and the secret of the The Law of Attraction like it's a universal law like the law of graph no it's not it's just like human brains are weird we tend to pry we prioritize what we perceive based on certain heuristics here's one heuristic that you can take advantage of now do you have to explain that all in a book no but just like don't don't show it as gospel yeah that's the thing I don't like yes where it's like this is the only truth and everything else is wrong yes because I see that yeah but I feel like you have to be like that if you're writing a book about something you have to be pretty like you know divisive in terms of that you can't be like well it's sometimes true but sometimes it's also not but you know this case could be true for this person but sometimes it's more like stumbling on happiness and I know that you like it I love that book because it's not necessarily like it's like hey you know uh one size is not fit all yeah uh which I really appreciate it it's not like just like this is the gospel of how you live a good one what about you mentioned reframing your mind yes what do you mean by that like okay so like completely ignoring certain things that are 100 True like the fact that the past yes it kind of will Define innocence who you are happens to all and acting just as though that does not exist which is kind of what the power of now it's not saying it doesn't exist but it's saying like you should not necessarily ignore that but like almost almost act as though it doesn't exist I'm not using the right you know verbage but that's kind of what he's saying and I don't think that that's a very productive way because you're ignoring something that is 100 true and it's also okay Andrew Tate says he only has a set of beliefs that serve him yeah even if he's ignoring things that are biologically true so he says he does not believe in depression now I know that that may come off as silly but he does not believe in it because to not believe in it does not allow him to be depressed is his logic and if that's not true for everybody but if it just does so happen to be true for him right if it works for you I don't believe in taxes they just don't exist right well because it doesn't serve me but that belief wouldn't be serving you right because then you'd be back on your taxes but it doesn't believe something and if it works for him what do you think about ignoring certain things that are 100 True to carve out a belief system that only serves you even if you're living Blissful ignorance of certain things it [ __ ] you up you think so it absolutely it will maybe it wins for a month maybe it wins for a year eventually it will come and bite you in the ass because any part of reality that you ignore you are preventing yourself from from building the tool sets and in the ideas necessary to handle that aspect of reality so if God forbid Andrew Tate ever becomes depressed or somebody very close to him in his life becomes depressed he's going to be completely ill-equipped to deal with that situation and very much like not believing in taxes as soon as the IRS shows up Suddenly It's not in my interest anymore right so how do you first of all you get this fuzzy definition of like what is actually in your interest on what time scale like okay it makes you feel better today that's great but what about a year from now what about 20 years from now uh but then second it's just I and again this is like backed up by the research like it's I fundamentally believe that you should we should make every effort possible to see reality as it is and and not turn away from yeah but then but what's the difference between that and focusing on things that benefit you like let's say a situation happens uh you know and it's a bad thing but you could find a positive and focus on that or say maybe I don't know the real reason that this happened but how could I benefit from it happening and learn from that as long as you're not denying the bad thing that happened right so like a bad example of the or so an example of like doing this in an unhealthy way is like let's say my wife divorces me and all my friends come over and they're like oh my god dude I'm so sorry this is terrible and I'm like no you know what it's great because like now I can I can travel whenever I want and go out whenever I want and hey I get the date again this is going to be amazing obviously I'm just like [ __ ] deluding myself now maybe I do after the divorce start traveling again dating again trying a bunch of new things and a lot of these things do improve my life and I do become a better person and I can look back later and say you know the divorce sucked but all these good things happened as a result so I don't regret it it was a learning experience whatever like that that latter interpretation is the healthy interpretation like bad things can lead to good outcomes just pretending the bad thing never happened and everything's good all the time that's just delusion and so you're gonna again and what we find is that people who don't admit that a bad thing is a bad thing they you're basically you know your your brain is like your body you're like your muscles if you don't use it you lose it so if you're not using the muscles in your mind that deal with negative emotion you're just gonna remove your ability to handle negative emotion when it does happen so it's like at some point something absolutely horrible and tragic is going to happen and I'm going to be completely ill-equipped to deal with that reality when it does whereas if I'm consistently practicing noticing negative emotions and negative things that happen in my life and coming to terms with them and being realistic about them and understanding that you know life is complicated there can be good externalities and bad externalities to to good and bad events when the next bad event happens I'm going to become like very very stable and flexible in handling it and how do people get to that point how do they start it is as simple and difficult as simply not turning away from it and we trick ourselves and invent all sorts of methods to turn away from the bad ugly things in our life but it's it's really just developing a habit and a skill set of recognizing a pile of shit's a pile of [ __ ] you know depression is depression you can call it whatever you want but most people on this planet at some point in their life fall into a funk where they feel a lack of motivation they feel a lack of self-worth they feel a lack of Direction in their lives you pick whatever label you want it exists it happens right and it happens to everybody at some point if you don't admit that that's a thing then when it happens you're going to be completely ill prepared so it's it's this regular and constant practice of being like okay a bad thing happened it's okay you know there's good externalities there are bad externalities to that like how can we make the best of it and and this is why like I don't know I always tell people like so many people spend so much time and energy worrying about um whether something is deserved or not like oh this bad well he deserved that or no he didn't deserve that he he deserves better whatever it's like doesn't [ __ ] matter all all that matters is what actions you choose in reaction to that event like so the worst [ __ ] thing can happen in the world the first question you should be asking yourself is okay what's the best action I can take based on this situation if the best thing happens in the world your first question should be what's the best action I should take based on this this event it should never change what I loved in this book as well as the subtle art uh I think you brought it up in both was that people conflate responsibility and fault yeah all of the time which kind of reminded me of what you just said yeah when I 100 agree everything that happens to you in life and every choice that you make is a hundred percent your responsibility yes and of course there will be certain things that occur in your life that are not your fault absolutely but at the end of the day if you get hit by a car and you're lying in a hospital bed and you're like well it wasn't my fault it's still your responsibility to go through physical therapy to get better to I don't know reach out to people that can help you maybe if you're struggling mentally and what's crazy too is that I mean so if something bad happens to you and it involves another person a lot of people it's very easy to blame that other person but but if you end up in a situation like I don't know like let's say an earthquake hits California like the middle of this interview and kills one of my best friends that's obviously nobody's fault like that's just [ __ ] life right and and it's but still even people will spend so much time and energy laying awake in bed trying to figure out well did he deserve that you know was he a bad person was he at fault for that was it God was it was it the universe was it like all these like we just we keep we spend so much time spinning up all these stories and so little time asking ourselves what's the best thing we can do in this situation doesn't matter whose fault it is it doesn't matter why it happened 99 of those stories that you invent for yourself are gonna be false they're gonna be made up they're gonna be inaccurate so what can you do that's going to be beneficial and on top of just being productive it's also ethical because you can get caught in these Echo chambers of either entitlement yes if you think that you earn something uh or it could be victimhood if you think like you're just lamenting over something that happened to you or happen to somebody that you care about yeah yeah and it's what happens is a lot of these narratives then prevent us from taking certain actions right so it's it's if I convince myself that a certain certain people were to blame for this horrible problem in my life uh that's going to alter my ability to to take action in my life or take action in a situation that might involve them why do you think people overthink everything so we have this natural proclivity to spin up these stories around events in our lives and and there's a there's a practical you evolutionary purpose to this right like researchers have found that this kind of innate sense of Tit for Tat Justice is very much inherent in human psychology right so it's like you punch me on the arm it only feels correct that I punch you on the arm you know if if somebody steals a hundred dollars from you it only feels correct that you get the hundred dollars back like it's like this equal and opposite sense of of morality that happens I think for most of human history this was necessary to kind of regulate human tribes right make sure if you steal from him then he you he gets something back from you Etc so it makes sense that our mind is always we're always trying any event that happens we're we're trying to create narratives around two things one is is this a good or bad thing how good is it how bad is it is it the worst thing is it the best thing and then the second thing the second narrative that we spin up around it is does the person deserve this are they a good or bad person did they do a good or bad thing to deserve the good or bad thing that happened to them it's just a very primitive natural state of response to any sort of event and I think first of all those stories tend to be extremely flawed they tend to be extremely biased they don't acknowledge our own imperfect information I think especially in the day and age of the internet we are all learning the hard way how little we know at any given time about any subject whatsoever and I've just found that so many people that I talk to or that I've worked with in the past have spent Decades of their lives hung up on these stories of like you know they grew up in a [ __ ] up household when they were a kid so they generated these stories about how they're a bad person and their parents punish them because of this and then you fast forward 20 years and they're in a relationship and they've had a kid of their own and it's completely [ __ ] up their family life because they've held on to that story for that long and so they're like we do this in macro ways and we do it in microwaves and I think if you look at a lot of the traditional wisdom whether it's the stoics Buddhists even Christianity like it's so much of it is trying to get people to let go of these stories right it's like Buddhism tells you everything is impermanent uncertainty is the only certainty let go of everything uh the stoics say you know like it's don't get attached just to emotions don't get attached to narratives uh withhold judgment Christianity says radical forgiveness love your love you know if a person smites you on One Cheek turn the other cheek it's it's like as humans as Society has scaled to such a level and complexity we need these constant reminders of don't buy into that story that first story that pops into your mind after any event it's probably wrong it's probably self-serving it's probably extremely judgmental and it's probably not going to serve you or anybody else see I tend to take the approach if anything happens whether it be good or bad I tend to think um how how will this serve me in the future what can I learn from this and how can I benefit from this so if a negative experience happens I just think first of all everything happens for a reason is one of the things that I tend to believe and that maybe there's a bigger purpose behind it long term that maybe you're not aware of now sure but I try to reframe everything is just how could I benefit from this where will this serve me in the future what can I learn from it and then for a lot of things too it's just like you you have a lot more control than I than you think absolutely and I think so that that classic that classic cliche that's a cliche for a reason uh everything happens for a reason again that's a good example of something that kind of gets imbued with this Cosmic significance of like oh the universe has a plan for your God as a plan for you I don't necessarily believe that but I do think everything happens for a reason but you have to go make that reason you have to decide okay my wife left me this is absolutely [ __ ] horrible but it happened for a reason and I need to go find that reason I need to go find a way to make this a good thing in my life you said something at the end of the subtle art it was one of my favorite chapters I've ever read in my entire life which was that it's important and productive to always be contemplating your own mortality and know that at any given moment you could die someone that you love can die and then all can just end yeah you told a story where you went to the edge of a cliff yeah and stood there yeah for a while and you also said on a podcast that you have like a fetish for standing at the edge of very steep Cliffs where a slight breeze or a little gust of wind could push you off to your death yeah is that is this true yeah yeah it's uh much the consternation of of my family um I've done it less okay lately uh as I've gotten older and I I try to I'm a little bit of an adrenaline junkie but um yeah there's just a rush that comes I've got this one of my favorite photos of myself is me sitting at the edge of the Grand Canyon on a cliff that's probably a thousand feet up and uh just looking out over it and I don't know it's just it's I feel so alive in those moments and I I had a number of people close close to me die at a young age and so it forced me to confront a lot of I guess it forced me to confront mortality probably earlier than most people are forced to confront it and I found that at a pretty young age that it's one of the few things that clarifies what's important to you because it's and again this kind of comes back to the point about gen Z and social media like when you're exposed to such a breadth of information and everything is relative to everything else right so it's it's this thing here seems important or less important because this thing seems more important there there doesn't seem to be any Solid Ground to judge everything by and I found that the only thing that seems absolute and unnegotiable is that you're going to be dead someday and once you realize that then you say okay Dead one day what are the three things that I care about and that that starts this process of clarification of like okay like separate what matters from all the noise so in Eckhart tolles and new earth he says obviously every experience everything that happens to everything that you go through is an opportunity for Spiritual realization and you're going to have so many opportunities throughout your life and you can realize more and more at different ages um but if you've missed out to be self-actualized or whatever throughout your entire life you have one final window of time right before you die you're lying on your deathbed and you think like oh what are the things that actually matter to me what are my values you can base it off of that which I found really interesting I I'm curious to know how do you contemplate mortality and your own existence and knowing that you're just a speck of dust without becoming a nihilist in a bad way I feel like like I mean you've talked about this a lot you call it the uncomfortable truth sure right the fact that you are meaningless and there's you're just nothing right yeah yeah um how do you not see that and become like you know it's all for nothing I'm just gonna sit back play video games because that gives me those quick dopamine hits yeah so maybe this is where Tate actually comes in handy um the answer is because that's not useful uh there are two ways to look at nihilism one is nothing matters we're all going to die so whatever might as well like do a bunch of coke and blow all your money or whatever the other approach is nothing matters we're all gonna die so there's no reason to not do the best things possible for yourself and others right like we all have a limited amount of time in existence our Consciousness has a limited amount of time in existence so we might as well try to optimize that time as much as possible for happiness love and well-being and there are obviously behaviors that are better for optimizing that than others it's kind of this double-edged sword there's no reason to do it but there's also no reason to not do it and this is this is recently it's funny when I was on tour for this book because that's largely what this book is uh uh an audience member came up to me and he was like he said this is called uh optimistic nihilism and I was like what and he's like he's like Google it it's like there's a small community of people and sure enough it's kind of this idea of optimistic nihilism that yeah if nothing means anything then you have no excuse to not get up and [ __ ] do good things and take care of people and tell people how you feel about them and give everything every moment you have so why aren't more people doing that then fear avoidance it's the uncomfortable truth uncomfortable uncomfortable I think people are just too comfortable I think people are getting too comfortable with having so many options I think the Baseline for what we need to live uh is is almost provided in a sense like you had mentioned before that you know a hundred years ago it was like getting food on the table finding a place to sleep at night finding a partner like if you could do a few basic things you're set it's meaning too it's fulfilling the purpose yes it was very clear that if you did these things you would be happy you'd be content you'd be satisfied with it but now there's so many different options so many different distractions that that you're comfortable so comfortable in fact that you never even try because you already got what you kind of need a lot of modern luxury is designed to help us avoid the uncomfortable but important things we need to think about right like our death or a loved one's death or um or some sort of tragedy that might happen in the future like we don't like thinking about those things so we we distract ourselves and and find ways to avoid them and I think there's a very strong argument that the conveniences of modern living make that avoidance or distraction simpler um and so it's it's harder for some people it's going to be more difficult to come to terms with these questions you said that when you're no longer like needing physical needs like shelter food water just basic things for survival a lot of the times your purpose and your meaning will go away so it turns from like physical struggles to like existential uh struggles and you also mention the year after you sold the subtle art and it like blew up did extremely well exceeded expectations but I don't even know how much you had your own existential crisis and it was one of the worst years of your life totally I was super depressed that year which is weird because I just experienced the greatest success in my career right [Laughter] I could say to that it's it's hard to talk that when you get to a certain point it's like absolutely how do I do even more than this right I get that but you also wrote the book which kind of should have been used as a tool to solve that existential crisis why do people yeah know what is good for them but they don't do it I am so tired of people coming to me for advice whether it's Financial not actual Financial advice but how do I set up a budget and I can tell them and I tell them exactly how to do it and they don't do it they know it's right why do people know they should break up with their toxic girlfriend but they don't do it yeah why do people not do the things they know they're supposed to do it's hard it's painful it's uncomfortable they have to confront and deal with a bunch of emotions they're not used to confronting or dealing with which comes back to the argument of get good at dealing with bad things like that is that's the muscle to lean into to practice um it's like knowing exactly how to lose 20 pounds but not going to the gym and I definitely I ate a big dose of Humble Pie after that book came out because it's like oh yeah you think you're a smart [ __ ] like here you are sitting on the couch playing video games all day like not knowing what to do with your life I mean Graham nailed it though like there's one thing that it it gave me an appreciation of is that there's something to be said about always knowing always having something better in mind for the future right it's like okay you know this project that we did was good but the next one's gonna be even better and that works throughout an entire career or even personal life until you get a win that's so massive and so inexplicably off the charts that you're like okay there's no way you know and then then you have to confront the fact of like oh now everything I do going forward is going to be less successful than this or compared to that yes totally so that that was very hard to deal with and hard to swallow and you know what's funny I uh the worst thing about it too is that you know you just made millions of dollars and you're depressed and like obviously everybody in your life thinks like you must be so happy like this is the best thing that's ever happened to you so you don't feel like you can complain to anybody like you you don't like I felt like an idiot talking to anybody about it um which made it even worse right because if you're depressed the number one thing you should do is go talk to somebody and uh it wasn't until I remember I was hanging out with a friend in New York who was a really successful startup founder and had sold his business for nine figures a couple years prior and he asked me he was like how you been doing like how's the book success going and I was like oh it's been amazing blah blah this happened this happened he's like no but really like how how's it been going I was like honestly man I'm pretty [ __ ] lost pretty depressed and he's like yeah I get that he's like selling my company it's like one of like the worst years of my life like I had no idea what to do he's like I still don't know what to do I was like God damn all right well I think people really like progress like it's a lot better to go from one to two to three to four then like one two ten back to two yeah it's a big change well also I bet you probably thought that that was going to be the most amazing thing ever right like you built it up and then you actually achieve it and you feel probably exactly the same as you did yesterday and you're like oh okay so that's the problem too is that you you hit all these dreams that you've had and you wake up and you your farts smell just as bad and you're just as hungover or tired and you're wife is complaining about dirty dishes like you're like wow nothing changed absolutely nothing changed is that where you came up with a concept oh no no you got it from Kant about the the pursuing the what was it the ends or making every decision in your life seeing it as the end yes rather than seeing it as the means to get to an end never treating a human being including yourself as a as a means but only as an end um that's kant's like kind of Bedrock principle behind his morality and it was funny because when I went into this depression I started reading a lot of philosophy uh because I was like well [ __ ] I just like maxed out every metric of success I've ever had for myself so and here I am like not happy so like time to do some reading figure out what the [ __ ] going on and uh and I came across that kant's principle and like that to me that kind of solved the nihilism for me like it kind of that was the puzzle piece that explained what I what I said a few minutes ago which is like you know if nothing means anything but conscious is limited Consciousness is limited then it is our moral duty to improve the quality of that consciousness as much as we possibly can until we die can I ask how much you made from the book um so it is sold I think 16 million copies 16 to 17 probably a third of those are foreign I mean you probably get depending it varies a lot based on format country um agent fees stuff like that but generally per copy I'm making between a dollar between one and three dollars probably per book maybe like 150 per book um so yeah that pre-tax that would be I'd 25 30 million probably wow yeah what was the process like of writing that book How long did it take you and how do you get in the frame of mind to sit there and I guess it comes easy for you structuring it how long do that yeah it took me about two years to write it um you know my dating book was like 50 blog posts and I kind of just dumped like brain dumped into it in a couple months and then I revised it as I went like I it went through a few revisions over the next year with help from readers so I didn't really write that book like I kind of wrote it in public with with the help of my readers but I naively thought oh writing a book is easy it just took me a few months so when I started subtle art I kind of had the same naive perspective uh but it ended up taking about two years the first the first version of it was pretty terrible I showed it to some friends they were like there's some good stuff in here but there's a lot of weird [ __ ] like just dumb stuff uh so I ended up cutting half of it starting over writing a second version that second version is what got pitch to The Publisher um and then I went through a bunch of rounds with my editor how did you know what to cut out because I would have the sense that if you wrote it you might have the idea that no I wrote it it's good it's like it's there you don't know what you're talking about how do you humble yourself to take outside opinions and say no you're right I gotta cut half honestly I feel like that's the real skill of writing um it's knowing like everybody's got ideas and and most smart people are able to like write down a bunch of their ideas it's knowing which ideas are good and bad that separates like a good writer from a great writer in my opinion um I just I I will go back and re-read my work and I will reread it from a few different perspectives so the first and most important one is my uh like just my own like if I get bored reading it it's gone like if you can't if I can't entertain myself I'm not gonna entertain anybody else that's the first cut um then I'll kind of go back and I'll put myself in the shoes of say an average reader um so back in my dating advice days I'd imagine myself as kind of like this like lonely single college kid who like can't get a date and then I would read it imagining myself as that person and if I hit anything that kind of was confusing or upsetting I would cut that um and then one thing I don't do as much lately is I'll put myself in the shoes of like a hater or a Critic and I'll like reread it with that mindset and same thing I'll cut some things the other part too is you just show people like I've got probably five or six people in my life that I'll show a bunch of early writing to early drafts chapters stuff like that and if they come back like if one person doesn't like a section I'll kind of I'll take a look at it but I won't necessarily cut it if more than one person doesn't like a section or a point then it's gone how is having money changed your perspective on life [Laughter] that's a really good question that could be a whole podcast itself it's funny it it has changed some things that I didn't expect it to change and it's and then there I guess there are other things that I kind of expected to change but it did not my day-to-day life is basically exactly the same as it was before being rich which I'm happy about I think that's a good thing it has changed my perspective on it's given me a much greater appreciation of how much perceived status matters unconsciously to a lot of people like people not everybody treats you differently but a lot of people do um not only in professional situations but also social situations and you can tell that they're treating you differently that has been a little bit surprising and changed my perspective a little bit never thought I would say this it's definitely altered my politics a little bit particularly because you know when you don't have money it's very easy to hold a lot of views about say taxes and spending in government but once you have money whether you want to or not you are forced to start dealing with the government a lot more you have to interface with them a lot more you get audited you talk to the IRS more often you have more accountants you have lawyers you get sued for things like and that having that perspective is I guess it's it's honestly it's just being educated now on things like taxes the legal system regulations and seen up close and personally how how the government functions has absolutely changed my pers it's moved me right word I guess uh economically on the political Spectrum um because it's not impressive the interactions that you have of all places why would you be in California quality of life quality of life I mean government's not everything politics isn't everything and I don't think you should make it everything um I love the beach I love the weather and and I I do like the people out here um what else has changed I don't know I I do think there's a natural like when you get a bunch of money dumped on you at first you kind of don't know what to do with it and then there's just this not very natural inclination of like well I should find something to do with it like it shouldn't just sit there you know especially back in these days when it was like this is zero percent interest savings accounts so it's like I should do something you know I should go invest and I should buy property and buy crypto and take a bunch of trips and and that's fun for a while but one of two things starts happening or two things start happening really is one is you realize that those things are fun for like a year or two and then they get old and then the second thing you notice is that um a lot of things that are kind of cracked up to be like good financial decisions are not good financial decisions and so um yeah now most of my money just sits in uh lofi ETFs and does nothing yeah what are some of the bad financial decisions that you're talking about um buying a house that's too big you'll probably have a lot to say on this or this will not yeah yeah maybe maybe you've been down maybe smiling gearing up for this let's see it um yeah we bought a house that was way too big and it's funny because you don't think about the downsides right this is the house during now no no no okay now the house we're now is [ __ ] great um imagine you said it's too small yeah uh no you kind of especially living in New York we were my wife and I we were like so used to places that were too small that when we started looking at the places we could afford we were like oh my God like what if we got this one and then we'd go see an even bigger one we're like what about this one oh my God and you know we just got I guess seduced uh because when we actually moved in we realized hey we don't we don't have enough stuff we like literally don't have enough stuff to fill the house so then you feel obligated to fill the house which means buying a bunch of furniture you don't need and now you're dealing with a bunch of contractors and designers and stuff that you don't really want to be dealing with so that happened and then the second thing is is that there's actually kind of this you know we don't have kids so it's just me and her she got an office I got an office she had a bathroom I had a bathroom she had like this personal space I had a library you know we all had we had rooms for all of our own things so we never saw each other until like a year or two went by and we're like we never see we're like we're both in the house all the time and we never see each other and it we realized that we like didn't like that we like we started getting nostalgic about our little 900 square foot apartment that we lived in before the house because we were always basically in the same room together and and so yeah it was that house was just like one headache after another and then of course there's all the usual headaches that come with home ownership you know the maintenance and contractors and taxes and everything so I was fortunate to get out of that um to not lose any money on it but looking back it was just it was a dime how big was the house uh almost 6 000 square feet okay yeah see I'm in 4 000 square feet now but then again I work from home we have two offices there and I'm like I would love another thousand square feet really like I would love yeah because the drum set I have is in the closet like there's no room and then you need a guest bedroom for when guest come in and yeah yeah and that takes up a third of the house right there yeah yeah we're we're in about we're like 3 800 or something like that it feels perfect but then it's funny as soon as I started doing YouTube videos we were like oh [ __ ] I need to go get a studio somewhere well that's when you convert the garage I don't know if you have a garage or not but yeah yeah then you do a converted garage move the studio there yeah you're set yeah so we're we're happy now but it it it was too much for sure how did you start saying no to things because when you were talking about being in a space where you're like I don't know how long this is going to last so I may as well say yes to every opportunity um for me I really resonated with that because for me going into YouTube it's like I had studied this thing like before even making a first video I'm like okay if it goes well I got maybe five years doing this yeah so I'm like I would say yes to every podcast sure every event whatever people could throw I was posting as much as I could because I'm like you know if I only have two years I may as well post nine videos a week yeah and I would just pump out as you know everything just because I felt it was going to go away I think this is maybe the most important question for most people's careers it's also the hardest to answer because I I think every career you have periods where you should say yes to everything like if you're young and starting out you should say yes everything when you were starting on YouTube you should be posting everything you should be making every video you should be going on every podcast it's the same thing I did when I started eventually you hit an inflection point where you you get overloaded and the value you're receiving from each new thing is not proportional to your time and energy that you're putting into it so that's when you have to learn how to start saying no to stuff I got kicked back into saying yes to things when subtle art took off I started getting opportunities that realistically I was like this may never happen again like doing the Will Smith book right or doing a Feature Feature movie with Universal Pictures like you're probably never going to get get that phone call again so you might as well say yes to it because it might create further opportunities down the road so I had another period of saying yes to everything um 2017 through 2021 and I don't regret it but it was absolutely exhausting and completely burnt me out and so I had to go back into a process starting maybe a year ago of okay I need to say no to most things again for me the like it's gonna depend where you are personally in your career and part like part of it is just kind of a calculation of like does this add value like I could go speak at a conference in Europe and make 50k right but is that really adding a whole lot of value to my career probably not it doesn't scale and then two it's like I don't need the 50K and that's probably five days I'm I'm gone and I'm not working on something else so the opportunity cost is pretty significant so that these days that's a no like just an immediate no so part of it's the equation the second part which I think is the harder part is developing a trust in yourself to know that things are going to be good for a while that like you don't need these opportunities because there's going to be more down the road and that it took me a while to build that that confidence both very early in my career and then again after subtle art because it's you start telling yourself these things of like well maybe this is like my 15 minutes and maybe like this year is it and so I better say yes to everything at some point after a couple years of that in after the success has been sustained long enough you have to trust yourself that it's like okay I've made it this far I've done this many things successfully every year has gotten better in the previous year this is probably going to continue like I can say no to stuff I don't need to have that scarcity mentality right I guess the third thing which is the the maybe the hardest and most complicated and most personal is I definitely found it it helped to like I guess hit hit my number um especially leaving New York and coming here like cost of living I know cost living is high here but cost living here is like half of what it is in Manhattan um the house I bought here is less than half of the house I had in New York um so when I got out here and I like sat down and kind of ran all the numbers and everything I'm like I really don't need the work ever again if I don't want to and I think once you hit that moment then it just becomes like okay the only reason to do something is because I want to do it it's because I'm excited to do it it's because it's going to improve my life in some way um and so I've I took I took a long period of time off last year and and very intently focused on what am I gonna do like what what do I enjoy doing what am I excited to do uh and then you find those two or three things that like you get super pumped about and then you just say no to everything else did that happen naturally or were you forced to go and and think about those things I think it was pretty natural like I Knew by the end of 21 I knew I was like extremely burnt out and I was not enjoying my business anymore and I was not enjoying the speaking and the touring and everything so it coincided with moving here to La like in that that timing worked out nice I was originally I told myself I'm gonna take two months off took two months off I got to the end of two months I'm like nope still hate my business still don't want to talk to anybody so let's do two more months and then in the next two two months you know that's when a lot of the questions that the real first of all the realization of the financial Independence and then a lot of the questions of like all right dude you're about to hit 40. you've made it you can do anything you want for the rest of your career like the only question is what do you want what what is fun what is exciting what adds value and um and so I spent I spent most of those probably like month four and five kind of like figuring that out dipping my toe in the water of a few different projects journaling a lot so this newer sense of like fulfillment happiness ease I would say like not so much stress was a product of what you would have called or you probably still call it external um factors yeah whatever because you compare like the external values versus the internal values so would you say that sometimes pursuing some form of external value or if you achieve an external value as a product of uh maybe like going for an internal value that it still can provide you with like a sense of calmness and and joy and happiness I'm glad you brought this up so the tricky thing with with chasing external metrics is that you can't really stop it's as human beings like we're always going to like seeing number go up we're always going to see like there's not a person on this planet that if you walked up to them and said hey how would you like to double your bank account nobody on the planet is going to say no like it's just we're humans we like to see things get bigger numbers go up we like the external validation so like that's never going to go away the important thing is that you're not basing your life around those external metrics that you have some internal metrics that you're then basing the external around right so if you're just and this is what happens with YouTubers a lot like they get on YouTube they start building an audience they get addicted to like number go up right and so they start making any content saying anything that just makes number go up and so they lose themselves they'd actually they don't really care about what they're making they don't actually believe a lot of the things that they're saying they're just chasing numbers over and over again and it makes them miserable like if you ever sacrifice the internal for the external you're going to make yourself miserable what you have to do is you have to figure out what are the internal metrics that are going to guide everything you know whether that's impact Financial Security taking care of your family whatever wouldn't that be external though Financial Security and impact I would say Financial Security is is absolutely internal because they're I know a lot of millionaires who feel like they're broke and I know a lot of people with 10K in their bank and they're completely secure and happy so it's the internal metric is very much it's what is the state of mind that I want to have in my life like what is the state of mind that I'm going for and everybody's the way that interacts with the external world is going to be a little bit different for everybody some people are going to feel broke at 10 million some people are going to feel completely fine at 10 000 right so but you have to start with that like okay what is my internal value like what do I what do I want my state of mind to be like for me it's it's I enjoy creating without Authority above me without limitation right it's like I I just enjoy thinking and sharing ideas and I enjoy scaling those ideas like that's just fun to me and so then you have to look at okay so what are what are the external metrics that align with those internal metrics that will are accurate measurements of achieving that internal measurement so you know say writing an article that people like like that's that's a success that's an external metric that lines up with my internal metric so the way that I understood that was that you have these internal values and they basically act as guides or Arbiters of certain decisions that you are going to be presented with at a future opportunity right so they're basically making the decision and taking that burden off of your future self's shoulders um and that you should feel fulfillment that you stay true to that not necessarily attached and feel fulfillment from the outcome of those decisions the internal guides like the values that you decide for yourself they become the heuristics of how you how you move through the world it's like basically like what are you what are you going to optimize for are you going to optimize for clicks are you going to optimize for impact are you going to optimize for Creative satisfaction like those are all those all all three of those things produce completely different careers and they can all be internal values there's an external representation to them right so if you opt if you're optimizing for just attention that's going to be represented through views and clicks if you're optimizing for impact then that's probably going to be represented externally through like emails fan fans reaching out followers like the thing the the qualitative things that are said to you like maybe you have a hundred fans but all 100 of those people are like you completely changed my life uh and then if you're optimizing simply for Creative satisfaction then you you probably don't give a [ __ ] you just put it out and as long as it's beautiful and you're you feel good looking at it then you're satisfied but those all create like and those are all completely valid ways to build a life and build a career in the world but they produce completely different outcomes and I think it's fine like the mistake that people make is they just pick an external metric because they think it's going to make them look cool in front of their friends or it's going to get them more dates or it's gonna ease the anxiety they feel all the time and the truth is is that purely external metrics without any sort of like internal tethering to a value uh they just make you feel worse in the long run how do you know when is enough dude I don't know [Laughter] I I guess I would say enough is when pursuing more is is creating more harm than it is good um which I that inflection point absolutely exists I think on most most Dimensions most metrics how did you know it was enough for you I guess based on your own I feel like someone would have had to tell you because I feel like when you are so you when your judgment is so clouded when you are in the thick of it yeah you're not going to be able to see it from like an outside perspective and be like you know what Mark maybe I shouldn't go fly out to the speaking engagement because I'm not having a conversation I should be having with you know a friend or my wife or something yeah it's definitely one of those things you realize you often realize after the fact um it's also so hard because in a lot of cases you have to do too much and like this has been a common theme in my life I tend to go too hardcore on things to know where that line is like I go past the line in order to find the line um so I look back at that period in my life and it's like yeah I definitely went too hard I should have like said no to some things and pulled it back a little bit but part of that partly I only know that because I went too far and I you know in my case it was during that period of my life I was you know aside from just pretty intense burnout and being dissatisfied um my health started to suffer a lot I gained a ton of weight um was like horribly out of shape felt stressed all the time had sleeping problems so it's like that's those are all telltale signs like those are all signs that your body's telling you yeah like bro that's interesting because that's actual like it's a visual one yeah whereas like a lot of the other times you know like relationships and stuff like that it's hard to to see yeah when they're suffering yeah but if you do look at your body and you're not satisfied with where you're at and you know that you could be sacrificing a little bit of that for a little bit more of this but if you don't need but it's funny because I would say even with where even were not objective even with our own bodies like it it and I'm sure anybody who's struggled with with their weight knows this like it's I I had to go again it was I gained probably 40 pounds over like four or five years 40 50 pounds and um it really wasn't until I was like 40 pounds in and then I was like oh wait I gained a lot of weight you know like it was I was years into an unhealthy lifestyle at that point before it even occurred to me like oh [ __ ] my jeans don't fit I'm curious also what role your wife played in your success she's great man honestly um she is the first person that hears any idea I have um and we have a very strong respect for honesty with each other so I mean she'll if it's a bad idea she'll be like um I don't think that's it um she's a great sense of she's great taste not only in men but in in in Creative work as well in books yeah so so like she'll look at she'll look at a bunch of book covers and be like no no these are bad this one's kind of good whatever she's great for stuff like that she's also just I don't know it's you know there's all this data that uh married people make more money and and you can actually it is and it's pretty causal like you can see it like you can see even high achievers as soon as they get married there's like an uptick in earnings and I I think there's so much intangible value of Simply Having a partner that can be a sounding board like any sort of major decision that I I'm wrestling with she can be a sounding board like she'll tell me if my reasoning makes sense if it doesn't make sense she'll tell me if I'm being irrational she'll tell me like if I'm having trouble with employees she's like an objective third party who can be like well no actually I think you're being kind of hard on him um there's just so much like intangible day-to-day value not to mention like the emotional comfort and the the stability that comes with with a long-term relationship um but yeah she's she's been incredible I Love Actually what you said and this is a metric I am now going to apply on my future dates or I guess maybe not dates but like you know life partner is you need to be able to hear something like I don't like that idea or hear criticism from your partner yes uh that is like one of the I would say the pillars of a healthy relationship what was the exact thing that you need to be able to hear from them just that sucks right or no I mean it's funny she um The Stereotype right is like anytime anytime your wife or girlfriend puts on an outfit and it's like how do I look you're supposed to be like wow you look gorgeous you know I was going to ask you if you say yes I don't you don't I don't you say you your hips look big or like I'll tell her if if she doesn't look good I'll tell her and she [ __ ] hates it and but does she ask you I think that's the difference of you being like she's funny I don't like that on you versus like crazy I didn't expect you to actually say that yeah no she'll she'll ask for my opinion okay and it's funny because okay so early in our relationship she'd get kind of mad and I'd be like well you asked so I'm gonna give you my opinion and then as time went on so first of all that does a couple things one it just it it's not comfortable in the moment again not turning away from hard things but it breeds so much trust because now she knows she knows from a very early stage if I say she looks great she must she [ __ ] looks great like I'm not kissing her ass I'm not you know just trying to be a sweet boyfriend or whatever like I actually mean it like wow you are stunning and she gets that much happier because she knows it's true and it's honest the funny thing has started happening I don't know around the time we got married so like these days now she'll ask me should be like what do you think about this outfit and I'm like not really feeling it she's and she'll be like well I love it so screw you and I'm like okay and so she'll go out in it anyway so it's like now we're even at this this like further level where she can hear the no and then she can decide for herself whether she's gonna take it seriously or not you know I I have strangely for a guy who traveled the world and just like was a chronic womanizer I've I've become a an unexpected champion of marriage um just because I it has been so profound in my life and unexpectedly profound like I if you had asked me when I met her if I even ever wanted to get married I probably would have said probably not like maybe if I have kids but other than that I don't see any reason how does marriage differ from a long-term relationship in my opinion it psychologically differs quite a bit so there is there's a reason the institution has lost it for like 5 000 years and that is like you can so when you're with somebody for a long period of time you make an explicit commitment you know it's like okay we're boyfriend girlfriend we're going to be monogamous we're these are the expectations of each other maybe we live together here's how we're going to share finances you have all those conversations and so it's like on the surface level everything is the same as a marriage the difference with a marriage is that you you invite every single person who matters to both of you in the entire world you stand in front of them and you say we are going to share a life together for the rest of our lives in a very like emotional ritual and then it becomes legally binding and so the social expectation like this whole layer of social expectation gets added to it a legal layer gets added to it and so there's like you basically ramp up the psychological constraints on the relationship massively which sounds bad but it has had such a calming effect on me because there are so many like minor anxieties that can happen in a long-term relationship you know it's like let's say you get in a fight and your girlfriend like storms out and just leaves gets her in a car and goes right all sorts of crazy [ __ ] starts running through your head you're like where is she going is she coming back so she gonna go find a guy is she gonna go to a bar like what the [ __ ] is she doing like when you're married you're like all right yeah like she has to she [ __ ] she like literally has to she has to come back even if it's to divorce you she has to come back so um there's something about that and this comes back to finding Liberation and constraints like narrowing down and finding that little sliver of life and being like this is me this is who I am and these are the things I'm going to live for there's a psychological safety and comfort that comes with that that is completely unexpected one way I describe it to a lot of my guy friends is I say like you know when you like leave photoshop on your computer in the background and it's like everything else just gets kind of slow because it's eating up all the RAM and then you close it and like suddenly that's why my computer I leave it open yeah because I have everything unsaved yeah that's everything and I don't want to lose my stuff it's always open it's been open for like a month so and then you close it and suddenly your computer is like try that blazing fast yeah uh so the way I describe it is there's like this this program that's open and in the back of every guy's head which is where's the hot girl is she into me what can I do to get her into me you know and like even even like when I've been in relationships that window's still open I'm not clicking on it and I'm not using it in a relationship but it's still open I'm like still thinking about it like I'm in a barn like God damn if I was single I wonder what I would say to her you know like those thoughts still happen and as soon as I got engaged it was like that program got got shut off and all of this mental Ram got freed up and I just felt like I had more more processing power just more energy more Focus there was like no debate it's like okay this is my person to [ __ ] ride or die like this whole subject is just closed case is closed it's done I never have to think about it again I can think about these things that I really really how much of that is just making a choice and sticking with it because you mentioned that before the Paradox of choice is that you know when you make that decision now you can focus on other things do you think it's just that decision I think that's a huge component of it um I also so the flip side of this too is that if you're with the right person and you have a good relationship with them this process of adding these constraints it feels really good because it brings you guys closer together right so it's like as you're going through this process of getting engaged planning the wedding doing the wedding you know figuring out how your life's gonna function together like it brings you closer together you feel closer than you've ever felt before and that you know if you if you're with the right person and you love them that feels really [ __ ] good so you've got this thing that feels really good that's happening and it's like shutting off all this noise and [ __ ] that you used to worry about that you don't have to worry about anymore how do you have a happy marriage I know it's a deep question but from your experience what have you noticed works I've talked about brutal honesty yeah I think the two most important factors and there's like not even a close third is trust and respect if trust goes um nothing else works right it's like if I don't trust my wife doesn't matter what she says what she does it's not gonna have any value to me because I'm like why is she doing that is she like [ __ ] with me is she like playing me whatever so without trust nothing nothing else functions and then without respect uh it becomes toxic you you start hurting each other instead of helping each other right because if you don't respect the other person you start trying to impose your own views and values onto them and and they try to convince you to take on their views and values so you end up in this like power struggle that's really unhealthy it can be very exciting and dramatic and the sex can be good but it's not healthy so trust and respect have to be there before anything else um the other thing about trust and respect too is when you have those two things you realize that it's not about not fighting like like every couple fights some couples fight more another some couples rarely fight some couples fight a lot but as long as like if you have trust and respect you are likely to fight productively like that's what matters in a relationship every relationship has fights every relationship has disagreements can you fight productively can you end up in a better place after the fight than you were before it if the answer is yes then that's probably a good relationship if it's no it's going to be rough doesn't mean you can't get there but it's it's gonna be hard it's like fighting to win the argument versus fighting to achieve or land upon some shared objective or goal that's a huge part of it right because when people are in uh see the relationship as a power struggle every fight becomes I need to be right you know you need to see it my way and that's just it's [ __ ] toxic it's it's just deteriorates everything so one of the most fundamental parts of that is saying okay whether I'm right or wrong matters less than the fact that we as a unit are better after this than before and and our and my marriage like we've both had multiple times where it's like [ __ ] I'm wrong like I mess that up I'm sorry um and so I think the the ability to admit that admit being wrong ask for forgiveness and then also the ability to forgive because like a lot of people are able to say like okay I [ __ ] up I'm sorry A lot of people are bad at letting it go like you need to be able to let it go as well it's like okay it's okay we're gonna be fine what is your biggest insecurity and what are certain things you think you need to work on I'm hitting middle age and I'm starting to have a lot of questions around like that realization like not even just thinking about my mortality but like really a realization of like okay you might be 50 of the way through here Peak years how are you are you using them well like how are you using them are you using them well and so I I have noticed like I've had a I've had an urgency in the last year of like make sure you're working in on things and doing things that are going to matter when you're 80 90 years old I think it's not enough to Simply know what you want which a lot of people struggle to know what they want you need to also ask yourself why you want it and be like uncomfortably honest with that with that question because a lot of the things that we do want are driven through insecurity trauma you know we got bullied when we were a kid and we think if we have a Lamborghini like people like us you know whatever it is um so be very very brutally honest with that question of like why do you want the thing um in terms of just like improving your life generally I I honestly think physical health is underrated I know that sounds weird to say I don't mean like [ __ ] dieting and fads and getting a six-pack I just mean sleeping well not drinking alcohol not eating garbage like those three things right there if you can do those three things like exercise regularly even if it's going for a walk like if you can just do those things consistently for a few months you will notice a massive Improvement in energy and and mood and I think that just gets underrated like it's not it's not a sexy answer it's not the ant like it's not a big life hack that everybody wants to hear right because it's something that everyone could be doing at the current moment it's not like oh get a Lamborghini oh that's exciting yeah you know what I mean because you know that you don't actually have to work a bunch at this given moment it's like I'm delaying the burden to My Future Self yeah but it's like oh you know like maybe I'll skip out on this cookie or you know maybe I'll go to the gym wake up at a certain hour like that stuff you could be doing right now yeah so it's not very sexy social relationships is another unsexy thing that is has completely outsized benefits on on happiness um it's again there are a bunch of studies around this it's like I think it was seeing a good friend once a week was the equivalent of like an extra 80k in income in terms of its effect on happiness levels really yeah I had no idea there's a bunch of [ __ ] like marriage is marriage by itself is worth like I think 200k a year in extra income in terms of Happiness like it's shocking how these simple things have outsized impacts and everybody continues to ignore them because they're so boring and put it in so you're saying you could get hypothetically like 300 Grand a year in happiness by seeing your friends getting married exercising on a regular basis like a very basic thing it's so [ __ ] boring but yeah it's probably good and it's absolutely gonna make you more more happy than the lambo so that's really interesting can you rattle off a few of the most impactful and powerful books that you've read we already talked about four-hour work week in the game uh although I don't know if I would recommend either of those these days I think they're both kind of of a different era um I'm a big fan of stumbling on happiness big fan of that book the roadless travel uh in my opinion that's kind of like the best classic self-help book um it's a little bit more intellectual but uh Stephen pinker's the blade the blank slate changed my views on a lot of things about like how how much of our personality and and disposition is actually alterable and what's not and that sounds like it's a bad news thing like we like to believe that we can change anything about ourselves but I think actually coming to terms with the with just kind of how you're naturally built as a human being is much healthier just like recognizing like okay I'm an introvert like let's deal with that instead of trying to be something you're not Jonathan Heights got a great book called uh the happiness hypothesis which is a really good review of uh positive psychology kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow super useful for understanding just like how bad our brains are at observing reality could go on and on it's good yeah a couple in there I've read a couple I need to read um so one thing that you talked about on Tom billiard's podcast that I loved was spiritual entertainment like a spiritual diet like having that oh it's like spiritual ice cream for dessert but not actually do anything for it doing anything about it yeah um versus actual self-realization and using like spiritual enlightenment and applying that in your life I'm wondering how could someone go from like a spiritual diet as though it's just entertaining like I feel like I'm kind of at the place where I'm just reading all of these personal development self-help type books sure and I'm like well how much of it am I actually applying in my real life versus how much do I like that little cookie at the end of the book where I'm like oh I feel like I can use these in my life but I don't actually use them yeah how do you go from somebody who just like has that in their diet versus actually like digesting it and becoming self-realized my advice so self-help there's a certain percentage of self-help content that really is just glorified entertainment and there's a certain percentage of it that can become a little bit addictive because that that people get hooked on that chasing that feeling of of oh I learned something I'm improving something I'm better than I was before I watch this video or look you know read this book even though they're not actually changing their day-to-day behaviors and when people get kind of caught in that Loop my recommendation is actually to just stop like take a month and this sounds weird but like take a month and like detox from Life advice detox like don't listen to podcasts or read the books or watch the videos like go 30 days and just live your life just do things like You're normally doing and then just pay attention to how happy are you because in a lot of cases you're kind of happy already so like what you don't need to fix what's not broken I I wrote a number of articles about this years ago and I talked about how like in my head there's there's kind of two versions of self-help and they don't get distinguished often enough one is taking people who are in a bad place and making them okay and then there's another version which is taking people who are okay and then trying to make them better or make them good or great if you're in a bad place then yeah you need to work really hard to get to a place that you're okay but if you're already in a place that's okay and you're just like kind of chronically optimize trying to optimize every aspect of your life you can actually drive yourself into a bad place right because it's like suddenly a life that is otherwise happy and successful you're constantly aware of all the the areas that you're showing up short and all the things that are unoptimized and that you're not doing well enough and so you can drive yourself into misery that way and so I always tell people if you feel like you're at any risk of falling into that trap just stop for 30 days just go live and don't worry about it like take a self-help vacation what pain do you want in your life and what are you willing to struggle for so what pain do you welcome and what are you willing to struggle for this is your question you know this it's exactly what I'm doing like I enjoy you know I spent about four four or five years kind of In traditional media doing a lot of books movies I did a couple TV deals coming back to the Creator space where again I get to have control um I create the content I build the team I scale everything I I figure out monetization everything it's so [ __ ] fun like it's stressful of [ __ ] it's an insane amount of work as you guys know but I'm so I'm having so much fun and it's it feels it feels good it feels like play and it feels impactful Graham yeah what pain do you welcome in your life and what are you willing to struggle for uh pain I enjoy being the underdog and changing what I believe could be done better I don't know if that's quite a pain uh jeez pain what discomfort are you comfortable with and you like I would say physical exhaustion something that like for me like I could lean into that I could probably do better I could probably improve on that they're touching myself there are benefits to that for sure because that's something I I can't stand Jack noses I love being comfortable he is so sensitive to any like we'll go in a pool that's like not heated I won't even go it so cold but I feel better after anything all right so I'm gonna close this off with a little quote okay okay there's a quote by you one day it must be good one day you and everyone you love will die and Beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time little of what you say or do will even matter this is the uncomfortable truth of life and everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it we are inconsequential Cosmic dust bumping and Milling about on a tiny blue Speck we imagine our own importance we invent our purpose we are nothing that is a quote thank you very much for coming on the podcast can I drop this you can't smash it also huge shout out to malcolmedia this is their Studio they're based in Santa Monica they have let us use this they are so generous so so so generous I wish I could go on for minutes about this but I can't if you're in Los Angeles and you want a studio to film at and this is not they didn't even tell us to say any of this did you guys even do that do you rent out the studio or is it okay I didn't even know that we're speaking at us right here just to get they do if you're in Los Angeles you want a studio to film that seriously we can't recommend this enough this has been like the best shoot this is even better than our said Jack oh it's way better and the cameras they have fx6s which are I mean we have fx3s so it's at least two times better if my math is right if this existed in Vegas we would just be using this instead of her on set honestly so they're linked Down Below guys they didn't pay us to say this we're just doing it as a favor thank you so much thank you Mark thank you very much yeah and uh your books will be linked down below cool until next time see ya cool thank you so much man this has been so good this is fun man