#961 - Mark Manson - 19 Raw Lessons To Not Mess Up Your Life
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What are you laughing at, man? Your business idea. It was just incredible. Thank you. I'm still thinking about it. I'm unable to speak about my million billion dollar idea. Is that because you don't want anybody to steal it or because you would never be allowed to speak again? It's a combination of both. But look. The world will wait. The world is going to have to wait. But when it happens, it's going to know about it. And Andrew Heumann is as well. Yes, for sure. All right.

Controversial opinion. Okay. People would need less therapy if they tolerated fewer assholes. Yeah, I think what, so I hear, I hear problems from a lot of people. I get a lot of emails and I have for a long, for almost 20 years now. And it's amazing to me how often people will, will email me or message me about some issue that's going on in their life. And really it just comes down to like somebody in your life is a dick.

And yet, instead of just being like, you know what, I'm not going to hang out with a dick anymore. I'm going to try to change their dickishness. I'm going to try to manipulate it or control it or convince them or have them see the light and understand their own dickitude. And it's just like such a losing battle. And of course, they always, you know, the email that comes in is like eight pages long and it has a full biography of every party involved. And I'm just like, well, what? Maybe just like don't call them back.

Like, is it that hard? Um, so I, I just, and, and, and when you, when this doesn't even get into the therapy culture thing, you know, like, especially when you get on Instagram and you start seeing all these posts about, you know, like, uh, um, you know, if they don't, if they don't appreciate you at your worst and they don't deserve you at your best, you know, it's like, life's hard. People don't get along. Like some people are, are disagreeable and some people are going through shit and they'll say mean things to you. And like,

At a certain point, you just there's a skill set of deciding what is acceptable and what's not acceptable in your life. And you can either develop that skill set or you can just continue to be subjected to the whims and the asshole nature of the people around you. What do you think of the contributing skills of that skill set?

So I think one reason people get stuck in this is like, one is just the scarcity mindset around relationships, right? So you often hear scarcity mindset around like business and money and all this stuff. And all that stuff is true. But like, a lot of people have a scarcity mindset around relationships. They think like, oh, if I stop hanging out with half my friends, then I'm just never gonna have friends again. Where it's like, no, there's an abundance of people in the world. And

the way life works is that when somebody exits your life, generally somebody new will show up in due time to, to kind of fill that role. Um, so I think that's one, I think two is just like the courage to speak up or the, the courage to stand up for yourself. Uh, a lot of people don't feel, um, I don't know what the word is like that they have permission to like express what they feel or express that they feel that they've been disrespected. Um,

And I also think that a lot of people develop some sort of like codependent emotional attachment to, to people around them. Right. They, they've, they have their self-esteem is lodged in the minds and mentalities of others. And so if you're not okay, I'm not okay. Exactly. And so the idea of like excising you from my life is, is literally like psychological suicide. Exactly. So it's just not even an option that occurs to them. Um,

So yeah, it's like, it's such a simple thing yet. So many people struggle so deeply with it, which I mean, I sometimes joke with my team that like my whole job is just, uh, uh, telling people obvious things, uh, in a way that like, doesn't feel so difficult because like most life problems are actually extremely simple and basic, you know, it's like, uh, how do you

how do you break up with somebody? It's like, well, you just say like, I don't want to be with you anymore. But like that is so emotionally hard and painful. And, you know, most of these life issues that I deal with or that I write about, it's just, it's extremely simple actions that are laden with so much emotional attachments and neuroticism around it. It clouds your ability to see just how simple the problem is. I think with the breaking up with someone thing,

How many times in history, what, what percentage of breakups have used the sentence? I just don't want to be with you anymore. That sounds so fucking unsophisticated. Yeah. It sounds so shallow. It sounds flippant. Uh, it's blase. Um, it's, it's not very empathetic. Um,

if you've got even a fucking hint of scarcity mindset or uncertainty about your future and you say to somebody, I just don't want to be with you anymore, there's this fear of karmic retribution. Oh, the universe is going to come again. It wasn't because I worked until my health fucking fell apart and then I needed to help my mother with her. You need this cosmic weight of justification as opposed to

Your offering of love is simply just

not what I want. Well, the irony here too, is that generally people who are in bad relationships or like unhealthy relationships, one of the reasons they're unhealthy is that there's a running scorecard that's going on. So there's this like running tally in each person's head of like, well, I did this thing for you and I did this other thing for you and you never did this thing for me. And when I was here, like you weren't, you weren't there to support me. And like, there's just like a scoreboard that's always being calculated. And, and,

What those people don't realize is that it's the scoreboard itself that is the problem. It's not that one person is like, quote unquote, winning or losing. And so I think when it comes time to like somebody's like wants to break up or wants to end a friendship or, you know, stop speaking to a family member or whatever.

They're thinking of it in terms of the scoreboard. They're like, well, I just need to show this person that my score, like I'm winning the scoreboard right now. And if they unjustified in my departure. Exactly. So if they understand that, then they'll understand why I'm like not going to be their friend anymore. And it's like, well, no, dude, like the scoreboard is actually the problem in the first. Like the fact that you feel a need to keep score in the first place means it's a shitty friendship. Yeah, I agree.

I am also concerned about the therapy language culture, the self-pathologization on Instagram that somebody wasn't mean to you, they were narcissistic, that this wasn't a bad experience, it's caused you trauma, that you're not sad, you've got depression. And in other ways,

You think, well, fuck me, it wasn't that long ago that men and maybe women too were just totally in fucking denial of any mental health issues. So it seems like we're incapable of sitting in some nice gray area of good balance in the middle that we can just go from, no, no, everything's fine. You know, work until I get PTSD. Or even the most sort of micro displeasure is a huge supernova event. Yeah.

I actually, I forget where I read it, but I read, uh, it was actually in a research paper, um, where a psychologist at the APA was talking about how he believed that simultaneously people were both, uh, underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed. And, and the way he explained it is he was like, there's a population of say people with depression and anxiety. And within that population of people with, uh, depression, anxiety, not enough of them are being diagnosed. Like the majority of them are not diagnosed. Hmm.

But then if you look at the circle of people who are being diagnosed, many of them do not have depression. Exactly. So there's just like, there's like this Venn diagram of like people who are diagnosed and people who actually have the thing. And there's only a little bit of overlap going on between them. Wow. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, dude, I think the courage to say to yourself,

my needs or my wants are legitimate is a oddly a skill set because we would think we're often told about how people aren't that pro-social they often put themselves ahead of others and in

some ways in certain situations, perhaps to strangers, uh, uh, perhaps to people that we can't see or don't see in certain ways. Um, you know, we can cut in line of somebody at a traffic junction or we can, uh, you know, be, get more creative with our taxes than we should do. Or, you know, obviously not something that I do. Um, cut that. Yeah. Well, the IR, I am, I am under the scrutiny of the IRS now, but yeah. Uh,

You know, we could talk, I've been there. We could talk about that. Oh, well, okay. I need to know about this. What happened? Oh, I've been audited three times. Yeah. You've been audited. So that means that some guy with a pencil and a pad of paper comes in and looks at every receipt, every, everything. Okay. So, uh, principally yes. Uh, in practicality, no. Um, see when I got audited,

Just a little backstory of my career. I had a hit for people listening. I had a hit book. It went absolutely supernova, you know, so my income basically like 100 X in like two or three years, which obviously tripped some red flags at the IRS. What do they think you were doing?

I don't know. I like, well, and then there's all that you get in all this weird stuff about like, uh, you know, territories, right? Like, so it's like royalties are taxed differently in different States. Oh, how many books did you sell in the United Arab Emirates and how much was in Hawaii versus Texas? Yeah, exactly. So it's, it's like, there's a lot of bullshit like that. But, um, so when the initial audits came in, I was absolutely terrified, right? Cause it's like, this is my worst nightmare. Um, this is going to be awful. And then,

After the first call with the IRS agent, I remembered something like very fortuitous, which was that government employees have no fucking clue what they're doing. And so...

So the audit, like... Just for anybody else that's still listening from the IRX or all of the people from the IRS, I don't think that at all. That was a sentence that Mark said. I think that you're perfectly competent and really should apply your resources. You're very well resourced resources outside of this room. Yeah. I must have just gotten the one bad one. I'm sure. I'm sure. But yeah, they didn't look at anything.

And actually, hilariously, they found an error that my old CPA made, and it worked in my favor. So I actually profited from my IRS audits. All three of them? All three of them. Wow. I made like...

Almost 200 K from my IRS. Let's fucking go. Thank you. IRS. Wow. Actually, maybe I should be audited. Yeah. Audit me more. Yeah. Um, okay. But we do things, uh, to people that we don't know. Um, we often put ourselves ahead of them. Yeah. However, it seems like with the people who should have our best interests at heart, the people with whom we have given the most of ourselves invested our time, our energy, um,

It's very difficult to put ourselves first. We often subjugate our needs in place of somebody else. I'm not going to upset them. If I upset them, that's something. The fucking sentence, the syntax stops there. It just falls off a cliff. If I upset them, then catastrophe, disaster, something bad will occur. Yeah. I mean, it's a little bit paradoxical.

And there's a cliche and it's a cliche for a reason because it's true, which is, you know, it's the old put on your own oxygen mask first before you try to help somebody else. And I mean, relationships fundamentally function that way where it's like you have to

have a healthy relationship with yourself and your own self-worth before you're able to really kind of contribute and give in a healthy way to anybody else. And the true is the same is true vice versa. So like if you grow up in an environment with two parents who are emotionally dysfunctional, right? They're,

they're going to be deriving their self-worth and validation from you or from somebody else. And so they're not going to give you like the nurturing and support and everything that you need to grow up and be healthy yourself and learn how to put your own mask on yourself. So it becomes kind of this, this chain reaction that goes down through generations. And, um, and it's weird because it's like, if you're talking to somebody who's like never had an oxygen mask on in their life and you try to explain to them, like,

what an oxygen, like why they need an oxygen mask. Like they don't understand what you're talking about. What do you mean? Look after myself. Yeah, exactly. What does that mean? Yeah. It's like, it, you're almost like speaking a different language, but, and it, and it is paradoxical when you tell people to like put yourself first, because that sounds completely antithetical to like what a healthy loving relationship looks like from the outside. But like from the outside, a healthy relationship is like two people who are voluntarily giving themselves to each other, like

consistently and perpetually. But on the inside, what a healthy relationship feels like is like you are satisfied with yourself. And because you're satisfied with yourself, your cup is overflowing. And so you're happy to like just hand off. I literally use this analogy with two girls, one Bible the other day, which was you don't serve people from your cup. You serve them from the source of the overflows around your cup. Nice. And it's true. Like, I mean, look, that's not necessarily true.

true all the time, you can have a half full cup and be like, yo, let's take it down to a quarter. Please have some. But it's not good. It's not a good strategy. No, and it's... It backfires. I mean, I'll give you a tangible example. So my wife and I, we have a friend and she's... Biological clock's ticking, right? She wants to find a husband. Great woman, super smart, you know, beautiful, everything. But she really wants to find a husband. And like, it's actually...

She's starting to panic. And so what she's doing is she's like adapting her entire life to like finding a husband. Like it's like she's gotten rid of her hobbies and now she's like she's going to the gym all the time. And she's like just improv classes and salsa dancing. It's like everything is optimized to like find Mr. Right. And as a result, she's kind of killed her own personality. Like she has no more interest for herself. She's no free time for herself. She has no she's not doing anything for herself anymore. Right.

And ironically, it's like she's meeting tons of guys and obviously it's not going anywhere. Why? Because she has no fucking personality. Her cup's not overflowing. She's trying to give everything away all the time. And you see this. I mean, it happens on both genders, but it's it's like a self-defeating. It's just a paradoxical thing. It's like the more you you cultivate yourself.

the more you'll kind of become magnetic towards others. I love the insight in order for art to imitate life, you have to live a life. Yeah, you have to have a life in the first place. Or else it's the same reason that comedians who get successful start only talking about airports and dinners and backstage. Yeah. Because that's all you know. Yeah. You don't do, Whitney Cummings told me this story. It's so fucking good. So she's in the writer's room

in chief boss bitch mode maybe five years ago, ten years ago or something. And she's just, you know, million plates spinning all at once, classic sort of

I'm going to do it myself, woman. And they're in the writer's room for some sitcom thing that she's working on. And they say, it's a Saturday morning. Where is she? Talking about whatever this next scene is. And someone went, she's at a baby shower. And Whitney was like, no one goes to a baby shower on a Saturday. Fucking stupid idea. And they're like, oh, okay. Well, where else is she? She's at a wine tasting. She's like, no one goes to a wine tasting. And they're like, no, Whitney, no.

You don't go to wine tastings and you don't go to baby showers. That's precisely what normal people do. And you can't see that. And I suppose it does show up in that way as well. You don't want to just be interested in the other person. You want to be interesting yourself. And most people get the balance wrong in one way or the other. They're way too self-focused. They're way too other-focused. Because it's difficult. It's difficult to have that tolerance between the two.

I wonder if that's why like celebrities date each other because like they have no life. Or we can bond over our mutual non-lives. Exactly. Exactly. All right. Next one. Yeah. If your workouts feel flat, your recovery slow, or you've just been feeling off, might not be a training plan or your diet might be something a bit more boring, like a testosterone. So if you're not performing in the gym or the bedroom, the way that you would like, or you just want to improve your testosterone naturally, Tongkat Ali is a fantastic,

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They'll give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Personal growth is the process of learning to lie to ourselves less. Yeah, I think, you know, these simple truths that

Because they are so simple, but painful, we find ways to avoid them and deny them and pretend that they're not there. And like if you just take the self-worth piece, right? Like it's hard to accept that you're just not standing up for yourself, that you don't feel like you deserve respect or trust or time or attention. That's a very painful thing to sit with.

So you make up all sorts of stories and narratives and bullshit. It's like, oh, well, women are all like this and it's the fucking phones and, well, the political thing and schools these days. Whatever your little pet thing is, you just start stacking these narratives on top of each other just to hide that simple fact of like, yeah, you don't feel like you deserve it. And so what I tend to find...

both with myself and with a lot of the people that I talk to is, is that, you know, especially, you know, coming from self-help, which is the world that I'm, I guess, technically a part of, um, everything's marketed as, you know, here's the secret. Oh, if you just come to the seminar, learn these three things and you're going to like fix all your bullshit. And I just find it, it's never about learning something. It's about like unlearning things. It's about like unwinding the bullshit you've told yourself. Yeah.

There's an idea I spoke about with Naval, which was cultivated selfishness or holistic self-prioritization. But there's also another one of cultivated stupidity, which is many of the problems are you going... It's the story of The Alchemist. You go around the houses to come back to the place that you were at the very start and to realize, huh,

The issue was that I had assholes in my life and I just needed to stop talking to them. The issue was that I just didn't love my partner that much anymore and I needed to break up with them. The issue was that I wasn't that fired up at my job. And so many of these are to do with quitting, right? They're to do with letting go. Very few of them

That's a bit to do with change in taking on something new. Typically, you're letting go of something else. I don't like the town or country that I live in, and I need to just have the bravery to make the change and go somewhere else. And you have lied to yourself and tried to justify and obfuscate as a way to escape from the difficult decision. And you've started to layer all of these different

compensatory mechanisms on top and stories that you've told yourself. And now you have to dig down through them all and go, okay, was it this thing? Was it, was it, was it the self? I was therapy. I must go to therapy. I must find out why I have this attachment style. And it's like, no, you just don't fucking love your partner that much anymore. And you used to, and you feel guilty. Also, you start to see kind of these compulsive patterns show up in people because it's like, so like a narrative I had for a long time, right. Was just, uh,

I lived as a nomad for about seven and a half years. And I kind of, I started to get in my head when I started living in all these different countries, I started getting in my head that there's like an optimal place to live. And the only thing that that created for me was a desire to constantly be somewhere else. Dissatisfaction. Yeah, no matter where I was, it was like, something's not optimal, I should be somewhere else. And it really started to wear on me after a certain amount of time. And really like all that was underneath all of that

was just simply a fear of committing to a place in a community. Like that was there the entire time is just like this fear of like, I was in my twenties. It was time to be a grownup, time to be an adult, you know, time to set roots and like pick a path in life. And looking back now as an older man, like I can understand that I didn't have the courage to do that yet. And so I created all this narrative around like, well, I got to go find like the optimal place before I sat down and

But to find the place, I really got to mesh in the culture. And so I should probably study some languages. And, you know, I should probably split my time between these three different continents, maybe a year each, and maybe pick the five best countries per continent. And like, let me start researching all that, you know, and it's like, there goes like four years of my life. And don't get me wrong, I had a great time, I learned a ton of stuff. But like, a lot of it was driven by this avoidance of a very simple truth of like,

I wasn't ready to grow up. And as long as I'm on the road and like always booking a plane to somewhere else, I don't really have to grow up. The thing you said, you said something earlier, strategic selfishness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cultivated. Cultivated selfishness. So it reminded me of this. Have you heard of this concept, strategic incompetence? No. I love this. So it's like all the married guys listening will relate to this. So I'm a terrible cook.

and uh you look like someone that would be a good cook no i'm awful you have the hair of a good cook oh thank you yeah i don't know yes chef i don't know what that means but i'll take it no i could just see one of those white you know like high neck things like another 50 pounds on you you'd be great you're too thin now fat mark manson would have been fine thin mark manson's a fucking shit cook i know yeah you're right you're right that that ship sailed um

The, okay. So one of the reasons I am a bad cook is, uh, uh, my wife's an amazing cook. And so if I ever start to become competent at cooking, it means that I will have to start doing some of the cooking. And so it is better for me to just continue being bad at cooking so that I don't ever have to take responsibility for that in my house.

People in relationships do this all the time. Like you just, your partner's good at one thing. Iron the clothes incorrectly on purpose, put a lot of creases in it. Exactly. Especially men. Around the house. We're particularly bad about it. But it's like everybody does it. People do it at work too. It's like, oh, can you go fax these 20 papers or whatever? And people are like, oh, I've never used a fax machine before. When it's like, it's easy. You could figure it out. But like...

you want to be dumb because it alleviates responsibility. I love this concept because I think people do it in all sorts of different areas of their lives, right? Like people can be strategically incompetent at certain things because they don't want to deal with some of these harsh truths. Like they don't want to deal with their self-worth issues. So they're like, they remain dumb in their relationships. Like it actually incentivizes them to continue to like

be ignorant and clueless in the people that they associate with. Right? They... I'll give you another example. Like, I... Well, you referred to Fat Mark. I was fat for a long time. Dude, you've got to own it. I do. You have to own it. Dude, you want to hear the funny... You'll appreciate this. So, when I went on Tim Ferriss' show, I, like, mentioned... I was like, oh, yeah, I'm, like... I've been on a health journey. I used to have, like, a lot of health issues. And he, like...

of course he got into this. He's like, well, have you tried this new therapy? And he like starts explaining like all these, like you've got electrodes trapped to your head. Exactly. He's like, if you, if you vibrate the muscle with electrodes and like, and put your foot behind your head and all this stuff. And he like goes on this whole three minutes feel. And he's like, he's like, I don't know. Does any of that resonate with you? And I was like, dude, I was just fat. Yeah.

I was just like, I was fat as fuck. I just need to stop drinking. Yeah. Um, but to, to the health journey point, um, I was really unhealthy for a long time and I was really overweight and really out of shape. And it was even when it was clear that it was a problem. Um, I kind of had, I developed like a weird sort of like pride or identity around it because it's like,

you know, everybody in this space is, is all about optimization. And, you know, you gotta like get up at 6 AM and like stare at the fucking sun and, and, you know, do 18 sit-ups and like do whatever your like morning routine is. And I just had this pride of like, yeah, I'm not that guy. Yeah. You know, like I, I'm, I actually relish in the fact that I have no idea what your morning routine should be. And, um,

Uh, and the truth is, is that, that, that was just like, that was a strategic incompetence because I didn't want to deal with my shit. Yeah. I didn't want to deal with the fact that I- Very interesting. I ate too much and I drank too much. That's cool. I, uh-

There was a great insight from a guy called Alexander Date Psych, who is ostensibly an evolutionary psychology and dating researcher, I suppose. But he has some fucking fantastic takes. And he was talking about how people that are black sheeps are still sheeps.

Being a black sheep is still being a sheep. It's funny how many people think they are non-conformist when they are really just strict ideological adherents to a niche dogma. It's kind of like a cult member thinking they are non-conformist because their cult is small.

They're actually highly conformist, real NPCs, if you will. They're just conforming to a fringe. So being a black sheep is still being a sheep, basically. And it's crazy how many people think, I'm not one of those followers of whatever the mainstream thinks. That's for the fucking NPCs, sheeple. And you go, yeah, dude, you're even worse. You're being puppeted by the inverse of what those people are doing. So similar to the... It's like hipsters. Correct. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, I, I need to drive. I don't need to care about fashion. It's like purposefully not caring about fashion is a fashion. Yeah. Precisely. Just the reverse. You're not even doing it right. You're doing it the opposite. Um, another one that's similar to that is deliberate deoptimization. So, uh,

picking the small areas of your life in which you're going to try and optimize. Yes. And letting the rest of them go. And this is sort of the curse of the perennial insecure overachiever that, well, I need to get my health perfect, but I need to have the right number of credit cards to maximize my flight points because I can get a little bit more. If I sign up for three Amexes at once, it means that Delta gives you the thing. But I mean, it's going to take me five days to set everything up and then there'll be a lot of forms and the forms were wrong. But once I've done that, so-

picking okay what are the areas that really matter to me i'm going to optimize in those and the rest of them just letting them fall away because the stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than the imperfections will totally and will take up so much fucking time that i mean you could literally do you could spend your entire day biohacking yeah in order to extend your life and in the process of trying to extend your life completely fucking waste your life yeah exactly i mean it's

If you live an extra 50 years, but you spend 70 years optimizing spreadsheets to live those 50 years, like you're actually net negative. Right. You fucked it. All right. Confidence and fear both require believing in something that hasn't happened yet. At a certain point, you have to consider that you're choosing to be afraid. This ties into the layers of stories, right? Like, I mean, a lot, this kind of comes from, I take a lot of, a lot of my influence comes from Buddhism and Buddhism.

just the core precept of Buddhism other than life is suffering is just like not knowing, like you don't know anything and, uh, being like developing a certain level of comfort in that and being still being able to function despite it. Um,

And again, I think this comes back to the narrative thing. Like our brain is a prediction machine. And as its predictions come in forms of stories about what's going to happen, is it going to be a good thing? Is it going to be a bad thing? Is it going to go well?

And it's going to do it whether you, like, you can't stop it. That's just what the brain does. But you don't necessarily have to believe it. You can watch those stories come and go. You can train your brain to watch those stories come and go, right? And without necessarily identifying or attaching to them. And I just think, A, most people aren't aware of that. And then B, even if they are aware of it, they like, it's easy to lose track of what stories or narratives you're buying into. Or the fact that you can even, like, kind of choose to

find more helpful stories to buy into if you want. Um, so yeah, it's, it's, it's just another one of those, like George Orwell's got this great quote of like seeing what what's in front of one's nose takes a constant effort. Like it's often much easier to see what's here than what's here. And, uh, I love that metaphor just because it's all of this stuff.

that I write that it's like, that's what it is. It's right here, but because it's here, like I don't see it. I'm focusing on you. Right. And, um, it's, uh, it's constant. I wonder whether the, at some point you have to admit that you're choosing to be afraid. I wonder whether part of that is that we're so identified with our thoughts that it's, it's the, it's more real to us than reality because we,

reality's final touch point before we actually understand it is our thoughts. We filter it through our brains before we then start to tell ourselves the story of whatever that is. And then the story's molested by the filter as well. So yeah, confidence and fear both require believing in something that hasn't happened yet. Okay, so we have an upward aiming trajectory and a downward aiming trajectory. You could say sort of abundance mindset, scarcity mindset, optimist, pessimist, whatever. Okay.

And if you assume that you can choose to be confident, I can choose to believe that this is going to go well. So, okay, are you also choosing to believe that it's going to go badly in that case? Yeah. It's like a, it's, you know, the fundamental attribution error. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a confidence equivalent of the fundamental attribution error. I had this really great insight. You know, anybody that's been to therapy for a while immediately starts looking at their parents and you start to think, okay, well, fucking...

Why are you like this? And this thing happened because of that. And that's because of them and so on and so forth. Much of the time, people are happy to lay their shortcomings, their avoidant attachment and their rampant fucking over sexualization of themselves and others and their need for external validation. Happily, all of that at the feet of their upbringing. Yeah.

very rarely do they lay their strengths at the feet of their brain. It's like, but what about your confidence and your resilience? And what about the fact that you work really well in soldier? No, that was me. I self-authored my strengths, but my weaknesses were imposed on me. And it's kind of an internal equivalent of that here when it's, okay, why are you choosing fear and not confidence? I mean, there's many ways, right? It's not all fucking, you are insufficient and this is your problem and blah, blah. We've got negativity, fucking rampant negativity bias. But,

The choice is that. There's also an element of the strategic incompetence here too, right? Like it's, let's say I choose to fear coming on this podcast, right? I'm like, oh my God, I'm going on Modern Wisdom. He's going to bring the big lights. Don't say it like that. He's going to bring the big lights this time. I'm so nervous. And, you know, like that gets me sympathy from people. That gives me, it's a way to like...

uh, lower expectations, lower expectations for myself. Maybe it's a way to kind of brag to certain people. You know, maybe after I do the show, I'm like, Oh my God, I bomb. This is like going so horribly. And then like, I get to go home and like get more sympathy and validation from people. And then positive reinforcement went, dude, it went so well. You have such high standards for yourself. Do you know what it is, Mark? Your problem, your problem is like, you're amazing and you don't even see it. Tell

Like you just have such high standards for yourself. This is, this is getting good. Yeah. Now, now we're getting to it. I can't do it in a Latino accent. I'm afraid. Sorry. This is now we're getting to it. Uh, but yeah, you, you know what I'm, you see what I'm saying though? Like it's, it's fear. Like there's social value in fear just in that it like, it generates attention and awareness for yourself. And, um, and I think some people almost get like, uh,

sometimes I think like, like people who have anxiety, it's, it's almost like a fear addiction. It's like the, this like compulsive validation seeking that happens through always being worried about something. And, um, something's always going wrong. There's always a fire to put out. It's, it's a, it is a consistent way to draw attention to yourself, draw reassurance to yourself, bring validation to yourself, um,

And so I do think it's like people, there are very subtle incentives around people to like

choose the fear narrative that maybe they aren't aware of. This episode is brought to you by 8sleep. If you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold, this is going to help. It automatically cools down or warms up each side of your bed up to 20 degrees. It's got integrated sensors to track your sleep time, your sleep phases, your HIV, your snoring, and your heart rate with 99% accuracy. And it'll even start cooling or heating your bed for you an hour before bedtime, which is why it's

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and modern wisdom at checkout. I had a great conversation with this guy, Dr. Russell Kennedy's, the anxiety MD, Dr. Guy specialized in anxiety. He's equally bottom up as well as top down, which I really love. So he's okay. What's happening in the nervous system? Can we do some breath work? Can we get you to fucking meditate and chill out a little bit? And what's the story you're telling yourself? Do you need CBT? Do you need act therapy? Blah, blah, blah. So I wrote this little essay that I'm going to read to you about it after this week. Um,

I've been thinking about impediments to happiness, and I can see two obvious roadblocks. First is wanting things to be different. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something. If you want the world to be different, your happiness is held hostage until that change occurs. Sometimes this is an actual change you need to make to leave an unhappy relationship and

change from an unfulfilling career, complete a difficult conversation, and we will often remain in years of misery to avoid a few minutes of pain. The second roadblock, this is the one that's related, is uncertainty. Humans never genuinely pursue happiness. They only pursue relief from uncertainty. Happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct whenever uncertainty briefly disappears.

If you feel like you can't predict the future, you will default to fear and worry and rumination. Your mindscape will eclipse reality's landscape. Worrying about the thing you can't predict usually involves a nightmare fantasy, which is way worse than what could happen in reality. However...

This imagined reality briefly collapses the chaos of the world into certainty. And this is how much humans abhor not knowing how the future will unfold. We would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable.

Sometimes these situations overlap. A family member gets an uncertain medical diagnosis and we can't be with them. We argue with our partner while we're apart and we don't know how they're feeling overnight. We try to mend a broken friendship with a letter and haven't yet got a reply. So if you're feeling unhappy, look to where you're uncertain and where you want things to be different first. But it's that humans abhor not knowing how the future will unfold so much that we would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable because it

collapses the set of, huh, well, at least I know what it, I mean, it's terrible. Right. But it's not unknown. Right. And that's how much we don't like things that are unknown. Which if you zoom out from like an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense, right? Because it's, we're not evolutionary optimized to be happy. We're evolutionary optimized to be predictive and adaptable to our environment. Effective. Right. So it's happiness is actually just a lever in our brain that our biology is

pushing and pulling to get us to do the right things or worry about the right things. It's just our biology is not used to, you know, watching 2000 TikToks a day. Eventually you'll realize that it's better to be disliked for who you are than liked for who you are not, then everything will change. Yeah. I, the being liked for who you're not is not being liked, right? Even if you get people to like the performance that you're putting on,

You never get the satisfaction of being liked. Because it's not you, it's the performance. And it actually backfires because it just reinforces that you have to perform more. You're not good enough. Yeah. You're not acceptable. Yeah. I think this was the...

There was many, but I think that this is one of the fundamental issues with the pick-up artist movement, the way that it came about, that what it taught men who were struggling with women was that, hey, you can be really effective with women. You just need to not be yourself.

You just need to be. Dude, I saw this firsthand so many times. Like I saw. People don't know that you wrote models, dude. The best, still the best dating advice book for men. Everyone should go and get it on Audible and go back in 2014. That came out 13, 13, fuck 12 years, dude. That's it. That's if you're a guy who wants to improve, I would say, um, uh, mate, be the guy women want, uh, Jeffrey Miller and Tucker Max and models by you. The two, the,

They were the two fucking, the two car garage of. Thanks, man. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, I used to coach those guys and it was funny because it's, I saw it all the time, you know, guys, they'd learn the lines, they'd practice the techniques. Did you see the midget fight outside? Yeah, exactly. Who lies more? Um, but it, and a lot of them, they would start getting laid and then they, they would get laid. Like you would take these kind of awkward nerds who had never had a girlfriend, never hooked up.

They'd learn all these tactics and stuff. They'd start getting laid all the time and they'd actually feel worse about themselves. They'd actually get more depressed. And, and it was exactly this. It's like, they're not the fact that they had to learn a performance to get a woman to like them just reinforced how unlikable they were. You're not good enough. Yeah. Yeah.

I, the eventually you'll realize that it's better to be disliked for who you are than like for who you are not. It took me a 15 minute TEDx talk to say that. I'm not kidding. I did an entire 15 minute TEDx talk. It took fucking months. It took so long. Um, but yeah, I had this, I had this insight doing a club promo that,

toward the end of my 20s, I'd achieved success in a lot of the ways that society tells a young man that he should be successful. It's similar to, not massively dissimilar arc to yourself. You got notoriety, you have sort of social access, women and like a little bit of money and stuff and you're comfortable and people know who you are and all the rest of it. I was like, fuck, like why does none of this success really like feel real? And I realized that

a persona can't receive love, it can only receive praise. You know, it's saying, hey, well done, Gladiator, not well done, Russell Crowe. Well done, Thor, not well done, Chris Hemsworth. There's this sense that

you know if you're not being who you truly are all of your successes will feel hollow because people aren't in love with you they're just applauding the role that you play and you're always at best the closest that you get is being one degree removed from your successes and much of the time you're four five six seven degrees removed from it because it's okay i chris must work out what him mark wants me to say when he said hey what do you think about the new avengers movie it's a

reverse engineer, what do I know about what Mark likes about the Avengers movies and the franchise and what do I think that he's predicted? I think it's good. Yeah, it is good. Yes, it is good. I knew it was good. You know, and there's always this performance that you have on, which again, just reinforces you cannot be you, which is, it's also exhausting. It's like,

such a draining mental exercise this way i i hate i hate networking i'm like i'm a terrible networker and and i think part of it is i feel like i have to do that a little bit like i don't naturally see this why i don't have guests in my podcast anymore because i'm not like keeping on top of them i don't really care like i'm not i'm not super curious about like oh i wonder what that guy across the room is like like that's just not me i'm like very low-key introverted um

don't need to like be everybody's friend. And I, I still feel that sometimes in professional context where it's like, okay, I'm in a room. I'm like, this is totally one of those rooms where I should be walking around, like shaking everybody's hand, introducing myself. And I'm just like, and it's exhausting. It's like so fucking exhausting. Um, so yeah, I can't imagine living like that. Like it's okay when it's just like this one sliver of my life that I only occupy briefly, you know, um, each year, but

To never switch it off when you get home. If you're going through your whole life that way, and especially, yeah, if you're that way with your partner, if you're that way with your friends, it's just, it seems like such a miserable way to live. It's the reason for, how would you say, front-loading being yourself in the extreme as early in a relationship as you think that person can tolerate.

That's very carefully chosen words. I had, look, dude, I was single last year for the first time in a long time and certainly for the first time being this version of me. Yeah. And I had a strategy of an intellectual shit test. Okay. Which is kind of like... You told them your business idea?

Yes. I knew that you'd keep it in your mind. Everyone's going to be like, what's this billion dollar idea? You don't get to find out. It's if you imagine negging, but instead of insulting a girl, sending them psychology today articles and seeing if they say something interesting in response. Yeah. And it was like, this is something that's interesting to me. Human nature is one of the, like, if you're going to get into a relationship with me. Yeah.

I'm going to send you lots of articles from Substack, okay? And I'm going to expect at some point over the next week for us to have a chat about one of the things that I've sent you that's hopefully remotely interesting to you. And if that doesn't... It's a relatively innocuous but pretty good front-end filter for...

Maybe I'm not going to be reading articles at the same velocity that I am now in 10 years' time, but I imagine I'm still going to be intellectually curious. And this is a good rough-hewn rubric. And like a cute, oh, isn't this interesting? Do you see that article about how Taylor Swift changed whatever the fuck? Like, that's interesting. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to do that. And I think an older version of me, or a younger version of me, would have been, huh, well, that doesn't necessarily fit what a cool guy says.

Like, are you really going to send this article about like the mating habits of zebras and how it's different to horses and the fact that that's like really interesting because of the different environment they grew up in or some bullshit? It's like, yeah, actually, that's actually a really, really good thing to do. And the story that it reinforces in yourself is I am allowed to be me. Really?

I'm allowed to be more me sometimes than I even, especially if you can tune it up at the start and push yourself beyond your comfort zone. Cause you go, ah, I'm future-proof for like, I wouldn't have usually done this for two years. And you know, I've got myself to. It's funny. It's funny. You brought up models. Cause like I'm remembering now, you know, one of the central points in that book, which at the time was controversial, uh, was that.

As a man, you shouldn't, you're not optimizing to get laid as many times as possible. You're optimizing to be happy with women. Like that's the whole point of this. Like whether you get laid, whether you use, you date and sleep with one woman or a hundred,

What matters is your happiness. It's not like... You can get to that. It's not the body count, right? And like what you just described is... I'm just having flashbacks of when I was in that industry. Like I would say things like that. I'm like, yeah, dude, send them zebra articles, you know, like... Because that's going to show you if she's the type of girl that you're going to enjoy being with. And...

You know, guys would be like, well, good luck getting laid with zebra articles, you know, and they'd look down on it. They'd call you fucking beta. Hang on. So you're prepared to sacrifice something that you know that you do want for something that you think that you do want. Yeah. With someone who doesn't actually want you because you can't be you in order to get the thing that you think that you want. I don't. I didn't follow all that. But yeah, sure. Sick. All right.

Okay, go ahead. No, you go ahead. No, I was going to tell a story. Tell a story. So the night I met my wife, I met her at three in the morning in a nightclub in Brazil. And within five minutes, I somehow ended up in a conversation about Russian grammar and how it was different from romance language grammar.

And she actually sat there and listened the whole time, dude. And she was like asking questions. She was like curious about it. And I remember that moment. I was like, holy shit, she's still here. And I was like, wow, we're going to get along really well. But yeah, it's funny. It's like one of the first conversations she and I had.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of guys want to date a Brazilian. I'm not convinced that they would have zeroed in on...

Russian grammar and romance language is the way into their heart. But look, I mean, you were the guy that wrote the book. Yeah. Whatever works, right? Before we continue, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I'm frankly dependent on it. For the last three years, I've started every morning with Element. Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no gluten or artificial ingredients or

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Often feels dull, peaceful, and repetitive, but it heals us in the long run. Yeah, I think fundamentally people mistake intensity of emotion for positivity of emotion. They ride the roller coaster of a dramatic and toxic relationship and the highs are so high and the lows are so low and they just think, well, this is part of it, right? Because they're experiencing both extremes. It's by far the most emotional experience they've ever had around anything in their life.

And so they assume, oh, okay, well, this must be what it is. But it's not that. It's actually, there shouldn't be this, like, insane oscillation between the highs and lows. There, of course, are highs and lows with every relationship. Like, that's natural, but... Not daily. It's what you want. What you want to optimize is, like, you know, the average baseline, right, that you return to. So, yeah, I just, I see that all the time. People, people...

People mistake the intensity of the emotion for, or the intensity of the relationship for being a positive relationship. And I think part of this happens because just like the way our psychology is, is, is that the more intense the emotion, the stronger the story and narrative and, and meaning that we like place on that experience. When, if you think about it, like there are all sorts of emotionally intense experiences you can have that actually don't mean anything at all. Right. Like I can jump out of a plane and,

That's going to be a very emotionally intense experience. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. I can date a woman who drives me absolutely fucking insane and then have the best makeup sex of my life. And just like the airplane, convince myself that it means something, but it actually doesn't really mean anything. Like what... It took me way too long to figure out that like what actually means something is the quality of time spent together in the dull moments. Like...

What's the, what's the, the Delta between your baseline and you're happy in it? Like what is your level of happiness during the dull moments when like nothing's happening, when you're just sitting around eating breakfast, you know, reading emails, are you happy in that moment? Like that's what you should be measuring because that's what life's made up of. That's the vast majority of life. Yeah. Life is made up of breakfast at the kitchen counter. Yeah. Yeah. Checking emails. Um,

It's interesting to think about, okay...

there's emotionally intense situations that don't mean anything. And I imagine that there's also emotionally mundane situations that mean a lot. That mean everything. Yeah. So the level of peace in your mind as your head hits the pillow at night, never going to probably appear in a gratitude, not even going to appear in a gratitude journal because it's just such, it's so obvious again, it's there. It's like, I slept okay. Yeah. You know, because I wasn't worrying about something. It's like, huh? Well, fucking, there's a lot of people on the planet that wish that they could have that.

Yeah. There we are. So peace optimizing for peace, you know, not sexy. What about, uh, obsessing over someone isn't love. It's fear disguised as affection. Yeah. Because obsession is, is, is driven by a fear of loss. You know, you're when you're obsessing over somebody or, uh, ruminating over somebody, you're not, you're not actually loving that person. You're trying to prevent loss of that person. And those are two very different things. Um,

Love is very... Loving is unconditional. It's done... I don't do things for my wife to prevent her from leaving me. That's not the intention. It's like I don't buy her flowers because I'm like, well, I better do this, otherwise she might leave me. That's not love. Love is you do something for her expecting nothing in return, just for the simple reason that you want them to be happy. And again, I think it's another...

It's another area that people like mistake because they feel such an intensity and because they feel such an intensity of the emotion and that emotion is directed towards a person and keeping that person as close to them as possible. They assume, well, this is this must be what love is, right? This is I'm clearly I'm in love with this person because all day and night, all I think about is like, how do I keep them as close to me as possible? And that's not love. That's fear.

There's a good insight from Visakhan Varasamy. He says, I think he calls it the divorce paradox, which is why do people who from the outside seemingly have a perfect relationship

Why do they end up breaking up? And it's because as a society, we haven't fully internalized the lesson that it is not the highs, but the lows and how you manage them that make or break relationships. And outwardly, it's rare that you see two people arguing. They'll put the face on. They're having a good time at the wedding or at the dinner or whatever it might be.

But then when they go home, they're fucking shouting and screaming and calling each other names and sleeping in separate rooms. Well, you don't see that. And how well do they deal with those bad times? So it's how you deal with bad times that are a better predictor than... Very few, I would guess, most marriages fail because of a surplus of poor rupture and repair as opposed to a scarcity of...

super intense high experiences you're insufficiently exciting to me is maybe there but less than you are too low to me you're too much of a drag absolutely and a one thing i told i tell friends all the time which is a really annoying thing to tell a friend in like a new relationship but like whenever i talk to people who are in a new relationship and they're like you know honeymoon period really falling for the person i always tell them like that all sounds great

But let me know when you've had your first fight. Like, you really don't know what it's made of until you've had your first real fight about something. Because all the good stuff, I don't want to say it's easy to find, but it is relatively, it's not scarce. Like, you can find somebody who...

You have a lot of fun with. You enjoy being happy. Hey, me too. Yeah. It's like, oh, you like the thing. I like the thing too. Let's do the thing together. Like that's, that's not that complicated. What's complicated is when all of her childhood issues come up and get triggered because of the thing that you said, because you've got this blind spot in your life that you haven't dealt with. And then you start really going at it. And it's really the, the,

the quality, like you said, the rupture and repair, the quality of the fighting, like how all community, like communication always breaks down to a certain extent during fights, but it's like, how deeply does it break down? Does it get nasty? Does it get personal? And then,

Similarly, how quickly do you recover from it? And do you recover from it? Or do you hold it against each other? Do you start the scoreboard? It's like, okay, it's 1-0, right? If the scoreboard's there, it's over. It's just a matter of time. I don't care how smart or beautiful they are, how many companies they started or degrees they have. They're insecure. They have no fucking clue what they're doing either. Feeling like you have no idea what you're doing is the price of entry to achieving your dream. Yeah.

I feel like this just like undermines your entire podcast. I have never claimed to have any idea about what it is that I'm doing. My guests may have done. Yes. Um, you included. No, no, but yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's, uh, so my, my, a good friend of mine had a really funny story around this. Uh, so really good friend of mine back in New York, startup guy, super smart. Um,

Startup founder had an exit, did really well, went to work for a VC, did really well at the VC, and then eventually got brought in by like one of the 20 or 30 biggest companies in the world to advise and help. Like they're doing like an internal incubator. And basically they wanted him to come in and kind of like advise their projects or whatever. Yeah.

So, you know, and this guy's like 30, right? So he's like climbed the mountain, climbed the next mountain. And now he's like being brought into like one of the biggest companies in the world, literally household name. And he's supposed to be in charge of like all these like special projects and new innovations and stuff. And I remember he came back. I like had dinner with him when he got back to town. And I was like, dude, how was it? He just looked at me and he's like, he's like, I just had this realization of like, it's fucking idiots all the way down. Like, no.

I always thought one day I'm going to walk in a room and there's, it's like, okay, these are the people that know what's going on. These are the people who like have the plan and have figured it out. And these are the Lords of the universe. And they're like secretly like pulling the puppet strings behind the scenes. And, uh, and the rest of us are just trying to keep up. And he was like, yeah, nobody knows what the fuck they're doing. Like it's, he's like,

It's a disaster. It's a complete and utter disaster. And he's like, I don't know what I'm going to do, but they're paying me a ton of money. So I always love that story. And I love that phrase. It's idiots all the way down. And I include us in that. Like, I think it's we're all just like chipping away at our own idiocy. Yeah. Slowly but surely. Publicly. But I do think that there is a...

There's a fair trade to be made, and certainly one that I've made even more, perhaps, than you as somebody who's actually written legitimate books. You can trade expertise for relatability. And I think if you say, hey, I don't know what's going on, and in my not knowing of what's going on, you can feel better in your not knowing of what's going on. You know, that is...

probably one of the most common threads across 950 episodes or whatever we've done at this show, which is I'm unsure about this thing, but I'm going to try and find out from someone who might know a tiny little bit more than me. Yeah. And we're going to work it out together of, well, six months later, I finally arrive at a realization that something approximating like accuracy. Huh? Well, that's cool. Well, we'll hold on to that one thing and we'll get another one and get another one.

George Mack, one of my favorite friends and favorite writers, has got this essay, Adults Don't Exist. Steve Jobs delayed nine months of medical treatment of pancreatic cancer to try a carrot juice diet and acupuncture.

Mozart overspent his income, lived miserably in mountains of debt, and regularly wrote letters to friends begging for money. Friedrich Nietzsche lost his virginity in a brothel and caught syphilis. He only saw his work sell 300 copies in his lifetime. Martin Luther King had extramarital affairs with over 40 different women, including spending his last night alive with two women and physically attacking another. Isaac Newton spent the

30 years of his life writing one million words on the pseudoscience of alchemy, hidden for years by his heirs because they were too embarrassed to publish it.

Don't put any adult on a pedestal. Kill your gurus or a more useful belief. The adults aren't going to save you. They don't even exist. I love that. That's awesome. He realized when his friends that he went to university with who were the most degen, Larry, couldn't hold, they couldn't get up on time. They weren't handing their assignments in. Went to go and be teachers. Holy fuck.

that means oh that means that my teachers were that idiot from oh okay like the adults literally do not exist it's idiots all the way down it i do want to hit on this though so one of the things that has been like concerning me lately so i agree with you by the way i think one of the things that is good about

what you do, what I do, what the kind of like all the alternative media or whatever you want to call it, is that there is a little bit more of an openness of uncertainty. I don't have it all figured out. Yeah. Lack of expertise or whatever. Yet the end result seems to be producing a public of greater uninformed certainty.

Right. So we've gone from a media and information environment that was very much built on certainty and expertise and credentials and authority and all that shit. And now we've gone to a much more decentralized information ecosystem in media system where people are very open about like, well, I don't have all the answers, but like, let's try to figure this out. And yet the public just seems like more certain about dumb shit than ever. Yeah.

That's interesting. There's a great idea called knowingness. Lots of the issues of the modern world are laid at the feet of misinformation. And the claim is basically this person believes the wrong things because they've consumed the wrong stuff. And if only we could get them to consume the right stuff, we could update their beliefs. And you go, how? I mean, that's a pretty fair assessment if that's the problem. But if the problem is knowingness, knowingness being...

a lack of curiosity around what is true in place of a dogmatic belief about what you already know. So it's believing that you know the answer to the question before the question's already been asked. That is a prophylactic against any new information, regardless of whether it's miss or dis or mal or correct or whatever. And the...

challenge that you have is to try and get, I guess, the reason or the way that you know that this is true is precisely what you're pointing at, which is everybody acts as if the facts have already been settled while no one can agree on what the facts are. Like we say, people say, well, we know how much humans are contributing to climate change. We know this for a fact on both sides. Sure.

While both sides don't agree with each other. And it's the same as kind of a religion question, which is every religion acts as if theirs is correct whilst not agreeing with all of the others. Like, well, this can't all be correct. Like none of these, like it can't, everybody can't be right here. At best, one of you can be right. And the same thing goes with the sort of knowingness question. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's, and it's the more, the greater diversity of information that people are exposed to

the more contradictions arise and the more of the contradictions arise, the more people just kind of default to their whatever feels right. So yeah, confident or uninformed certainty, it's certainly part of it. But I also see the black sheep equivalent of that, which is sort of like nihilistic despondency. Like, well, you know, we can't trust anything anymore. Who even knows what facts are?

Uh, and that you can't trust the news and you can't trust, you can't even trust your neighbor next door and what they're saying. Um, and I wonder whether that is, there's maybe a bunch of different reactions to an overwhelm of information. Yeah. Uh, one of them being you kind of,

intellectually reverse engineer the biases you wanted to be true all along. But on another side, you just throw your hands up and say, I don't even, like, I can't even trust anything anymore. I don't know. Yeah, there's definitely an asymmetry around trust. Warren Buffett's got that great quote where he says it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. And I think the same is true with trust. It's like an institution can spend decades building up a certain amount of reliability and then just ruin it in a single day. And

I think the more we're exposed to everything, the more we're exposed to like the flaws and everything.

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slash modern wisdom related to that on the independent media system thing and also the trade between expertise uh and relatability i have a theory that we don't admire people who appear perfect we admire the people who are imperfect and are comfortable with it uh

Dr. Robert Glover, who wrote No More Mr. Nice Guy, he's got the three essences of a masculine man, which usually would be the sort of thing that makes my fucking toes curl, but this one's actually really good. And he says, a man who's comfortable in his own skin, who knows where he's going and is having fun while he's going there. And you go, okay, well, the comfortable in your own skin thing, okay, so...

someone who is imperfect and comfortable with it, right? It's very difficult to be comfortable in your own skin. No one believes that, very few people believe that they're perfect. So given that you probably are imperfect and know it, but are comfortable with it, you think, aha, this person's relatable and reliable. Right. It's another paradoxical kind of relationship dynamic in that we actually admire people who are comfortable with their own flaws. Like we don't, like think about the

If you think about a person who's, like, just trying to cover for their own flaws and act like they're not there or pretend like it's not their fault, generally, like, we don't like those people. Those people are very annoying. And if you think about the people you do find very endearing, it's the people who are quirky, weird, you know, kind of off sometimes. Why do you think that is? But they own it. Um...

I actually think it comes back to the trust thing. I think it's like, if I see somebody who's a little bit weird, but like owns it, I was like, yeah, I just got this. I'm just kind of an oddball. Like, I feel that I can trust them, um, that they're not going to bullshit me or try to be something they're not. Uh, whereas somebody who's just trying to look perfect all the time, uh, you actually don't trust them. It's like a yes man, right? Like, you know, it, it, it's,

The irony of a yes man is that somebody who always agrees with you on everything is like the last person you can actually go to for advice. I can't trust you. No, I can't trust you. Yes, exactly. So I, yeah, I do think the, the flaw, like the, the confidence that comes with one's own flaws and imperfections, like it, it ultimately does boil down to a trusting, which is ultimately like why authenticity is sexy is because you feel like you can trust the person. Yeah. I mean,

There's an idea again from George. He's so fucking good. He just did this high agency essay. Everyone should go and see highagency.com. His essay is available on there. It's fucking sick. But this one,

uh, non-fungible tokens, NFTs. There was a big boom, whatever, 2021 when everyone had COVID money and didn't know what to do with it. Uh, he's got this idea of non-fungible people. And that's basically the same as what you're talking about here. He uses his mom as an example and his mom fucking hates fighting, like can't bear physical altercations. And apparently she was on the phone with George's brother, I think 20 or something, some young

guy and the she's driving in the car on her own and she sees two young boys fighting by the side of the road so she stops the car in the middle of the street and gets out and sort of fucking uh arthur shelby's or tommy shelby's and she's like no fucking fighting no fucking fight like she's got these two apart but the son is still on the phone like mom mom what and she's like it's two people fighting i must get out and i must stop it it's like

Middle of the street, got out, like two people she doesn't know, totally didn't need to get, could have got punched, could have, like, anything. Gets back in the car, tells the son. And George made this point that...

at her funeral, nobody's going to talk about how she was always on time or, you know, the quality of the pasta al dente that she cooked or whatever, but she was the sort of woman that stopped a car in the middle of the street to stop people from fighting. And it's just a beautiful, that's a non-fungible person. It's interesting to think about, like, what are the stories that, you know, that...

It's interesting to think, what are the stories that are going to be told at your funeral? Because yeah, it's never, I mean, obviously there's stories of like you being very charitable or loving or whatever, but like people always find quirky shit like that.

Like they find the, the, the NFT version of whoever you were. In what areas were you non-fungible? Yeah. Like, yeah. Where were you in oddball? What's the inside joke that everybody at the funeral service is going to laugh and understand? Yeah, dude. You remember when he dot, dot, dot. Oh, he did that to you too? Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know. Didn't we love him? Like he was so great. Yeah. Uh,

If you aren't naturally tired at night and excited in the morning, then you probably haven't found something meaningful to work on. You are not stressed from doing too much. You are stressed from doing too little of what you care about. So this is a drum that I bang on endlessly to the productivity crowd, and I feel like it just gets ignored. But I think emotion is the most important productivity system.

There's a lot of... And I think the reason it gets discounted is because there is a lot of cheesy, cliched advice around like, oh, if you do what you love, you never work a day of your life. You know, like bullshit like that. It's... Passion is practical. Like when you deeply care about something you're doing, you're going to work on it longer. You're going to think harder about the problems. You're going to take feedback better. You're going to be more resilient. You're going to be willing to stay up at night, get up early on a Saturday or whatever. Like emotion is...

it is actually the highest leverage system within yourself towards whatever your productivity goals are. And I just feel like so much productivity advice is disembodied. It's like, you know, the, the hustle culture bullshit of just like, you know, how you feel just grind, grind, grind. And yeah, it's like, Oh, you know, stop being a bitch. Like, you know, sleep when you're dead, date when you're dead, like whatever, go make a billion dollars. It's, it's,

what is it for? Like if it's not for something, like if you're not doing all this work for some greater cause, then, then what the, what the fuck are you doing? Like you might as well just hang out at the beach and play video games. Like, cause, cause why not? You know, like there, there's a certain, there's a nihilism in the productivity space right now that like, it really bothers me. And, um, it,

Because A, I don't think it's healthy, but B, I also think it's like just bad advice. Like the best advice is find something you really fucking love and care about and give yourself to it. Bukowski's got this great line. He says, find what you love and let it kill you. And I just, there's like so much beauty in that because when you find a craft or a trade or a skill that like,

you deeply, deeply care about or a mission that you deeply, deeply care about, you are willing, you become willing to trade yourself for that mission. And, and you are like, when you trade your time, you are literally trading your life for something. So what are you going to trade it for? And what is the point of trade of making that trade? Some get a billion dollars, you know, get, get a hundred million followers. Like what,

what these, what these fucking do, like, what does that mean? You know? So I continue to bang that drum, uh, hopelessly, hopelessly. Yes. But I don't, I don't get it. I don't get invited to the, to, uh, you know, the same, uh, uh, biohacking conferences that, uh, uh, my contemporaries do. So, uh, Joe Hudson's got this wonderful line. He says, enjoyment is efficiency. Yes. Uh, that he looks at,

However much enjoyment I got out of doing a thing is just a direct correlate with how efficient I was at doing it. That the more that I enjoy something, the more efficient I'm going to be. Dude, people... And it's double-sided as well, right? Like, the better you get at something, the more you fall in love with it. And...

The more you love something, the more patience you're going to have to get good at it. And so it's just like, to me, it's like the most obvious entry point. But I think a lot of people develop kind of like fucked up relationships with productivity and work. Um,

And I say this as like a bona fide workaholic. Well, I was going to say, you know, you have found something that you love and you have done it so much that it almost killed your passion or at least acutely killed your passion. You wrote...

Three books in three years? Three books in a movie in four years, yeah. And then needed to kind of just play PlayStation for basically a full year after that to recover. Yeah, but it's interesting because in hindsight, I think the reason that happened is I actually lost sight of what I was doing and why I was doing it, right? So early in my career, I was blogging, doing the creator thing in the early 2010s. Fucking loved it. Book blows up.

All these opportunities show up, big book deals, movie deal, you know, world tour, all this shit. Start saying yes to everything because it's like, well, when's this going to come around again? And basically gave three to four years of my life to a bunch of stuff that was really, it wasn't optimizing for what I cared about. It wasn't optimizing for the mission that had driven me throughout most of my career. It was optimized for,

fuck, that's a lot of zeros on that contract. Like I should probably say, I should probably say yes to that, you know? And, and don't get me wrong. Like it's, I think it's okay to do that in, in bits and spurts. Um, but it's not long-term sustainable. And I think a lot of people develop, and it took me a number of years to kind of get back to what I love and appreciate about my work and like getting that, that mission focus again. Um,

But I do think people often use productivity as like they develop like a toxic relationship with productivity. It becomes a way to outsource their self-worth and avoid dealing with a lot of these like simple truths that they don't want to admit about themselves. And it's...

And you can definitely get, we live in a culture that will gladly encourage that. Correct. Yeah. I mean, I've always thought about Billy McFarland, the guy that started fire festival. Yeah. So the fucking prototypical example of this, I always thought about if Billy McFarland had managed to string together a semi-coherent festival, he would have been hailed as the Steve jobs of marketing. Yeah. The nothing could have changed or when nothing would have needed to have changed. Yeah.

in his motivation for doing it, his shameless requirement for self-promotion, the deception that he was going through with his investors, the fact that he didn't know that he was the adult that didn't exist, but saying that he did, all the way down. The only issue that people had was that the rug got pulled out from underneath his obfuscation and his lies and his incompetence. But if he'd even just about managed to creep an okay festival out,

People are so seduced by success. The modern world prays at the altar of success so much that they would have happily forgiven or overlooked the things. We all know this. There's so many people that hold on to popularity, not because people think that they're good or authentic or sort of genuinely being truthful, but because they're a rocket ship that's going up and to the right. And that sense of, huh, okay,

I don't think that that's where your productivity, uh, like a pioneer, uh, should be at. I don't think that that's necessarily the person that you should be following. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Um, it's funny too, cause I, I see so much of this, this stuff and like so much productivity advice. It's funny to me, so much productivity advice is actually catered to people who are

using their productivity as a way to escape their problems, right? It's all about morning protocols and when to set your alarm and hey, do this thing in the first five minutes or whatever. And like, I don't know, I look at that. I'm like, okay, first of all, I'm up by six without an alarm and I can't fucking wait to get to my computer. Like I'm like,

I don't have a routine. I'm, like, already awake. I'm awake because I'm excited. Like, as soon as my eyes open up, I'm, like, starting to think about what I'm going to do that day. And I'm so excited that I just, like, I get out of bed and I'm in front of my computer within three minutes and, like...

Why would I use a protocol? Like, why would I need like a habit tracker or like, you know, all this stuff? Like if the emotions are aligned, like everything takes care of itself. Whereas if the emotions aren't aligned, then you have to spend all this extra energy. It's like the performative thing, right? With people in relationships. It's like if the emotions aren't aligned, then you're like basically retarded.

self-flagellating to get yourself to perform all these actions that are ultimately performative. It's like, okay, I put in 12 hours today. I got these six things done. I hit these KPIs this month. Uh, you know, my new nighttime routine demands, I do these six things. And it's like, you know, it, there's a, there's a certain healthy rhythm that like naturally emerges as with most things, most things when, you know, the systems are aligned. That was, uh,

An interesting transition that I had, you know, we, we had, when we have dinner, it was about a year ago when we did that dinner. No, it must've been a little over a year ago. Yeah. It was a little, it was like a year and a couple of months. Okay. Um, and that was me as in the trenches as I've ever been. You were going hard. Correct. Yeah. Um, and since then have learned to back off a little bit, but in that, as you, as you take your foot off the gas or as you speed up,

um you sort of notice changes in life and you could make an analogy to sort of acceleration or deceleration in things you know um your net worth staying the same it's kind of it's nothing but it going up it's like ah there's a change and going down fuck you'll notice that too yeah um one of the things that i noticed as i sort of purposefully tried to uh de-

decelerate and de-lever some of the things that I was doing from then until now, which I've done real successfully, was...

I had to face an awful lot more of the things that my obsession with productivity and being busy were hiding in the fog. So, you know, my busyness was certainly a hedge against uncertainty and fear and a lack of importance and meaning in this desperate requirement for validation and a lack of self-esteem. It's like...

How can I not be important? Look at how many calls I've got today. Like the world, the world needs me. Look at how busy my calendar is. Like my calendar is so fucking busy.

there's no way that I'm a worthless piece of shit. It's impossible. It's simply impossible. So yeah, sure. There may be some echoes of existential loneliness in the background, but sorry, bro, I can't hear you. I'm blasting sleep token at 150 decibels. Like that was a busy calendar was a hedge against existential loneliness for me. And it's a really good way to just continue to

not to not see the lies that you're telling yourself to, you know, not have to face the fears, the senses of insufficiency, the scarcity mindset, all of that stuff. It's like, I'm so busy, bro, that I don't have time for that. And as you, if you go, okay, I see that that's a pattern that almost everybody does. And I'm going to, I now have the opportunity maybe to choose to take my foot off the gas. You sort of feel that slowing as you kick forward and you go, okay,

Why do I take my self-worth from now? Because I used to take it from there. And now I have to realize maybe me believing that my importance, my self-importance was bolstered by my level of busyness was a lie. Yeah. And that's a fucking real battle to go through. It's a real thing. For sure. And I struggle.

Again, admitted workaholic here. This is something I struggle with too. The other thing I noticed, and I don't know, I'd be curious if this rings true for you. I've not been brought up to date on your dating life, but I see in friends that they're perpetually single or they want to settle down.

But then they complain that like they can't find the right person. And I'm like, well, dude, you're on the road like six months a year. Like when was the last time you saw the same person twice? And it's I think in some cases it that busyness is.

Again, it kind of comes back to that strategic incompetence. It's like, oh, well, I can't figure out my dating life because I'm too busy. But it's a get out of jail free card. You've always got one foot out of the door. So if this thing doesn't work, well, it's not that much of a comment on my sense of self-worth because I wasn't that committed anyway. Busy. Yeah. It's not because I'm hopelessly bad at making somebody feel comfortable around me and scared of letting somebody see me. It's because I'm on the road six months at the end.

Totally. I've seen that. I've seen that. I think I've done that not in my...

intimate relationships but i've done that in like with like social and family relationships right it's like uh yeah sorry i can't come home i'm like touring australia you know i'll see you next year we missed each other by like three days twice in australia yeah motherfuckers i know we need to organize it better that would have been cool i think you did i think you actually did the same we did the same cities yes but just in different orders

And I think a lot of people just like, cause I, there were people on both. Well, I ran into a lot of people who were like at your show, like the night before. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Well, dude, what? Imagine that for a weekend, a fucking Manson Williamson back to back spit roasted by us. I was just going to go there. Two podcasts, bros. One fucking venue. Yeah. Um, the happiest people are not the ones with the most options, but the ones who stop questioning their choices.

This comes back to your point about uncertainty, right? And this is, I think, where is at the foundation of the paradox of choice is the paradox of choices. On the surface, you have more optionality, you have more things to choose from, you have more paths that you could go down. But that optionality itself generates more uncertainty, because whichever path you pick, there's proportionally more uncertainty about whether that was the right path or not, whether you made the right choice or not, whether you could have made a better choice or not.

Um, and so I think at a certain point, like if you really just boil it down to it, happiness comes down to being satisfied with what you've chosen, not trying to optimize it. That's a kind of like a, whatever it's called, golden handcuffs or a velvet prison where if the thing that you claim that you want to have happen in life happens, I get

Better options. I achieved success. People respect me. People want me. People need me. Things are available to me. Okay. If that happens, if that happens, you are going to need to become increasingly good at saying no to an increasingly attractive number of an increasing quality of things that you could do with your life. And you're going to have to become

better at being able to be happy with the choice that you have made. Alex Hormozy talks about the woman in the red dress from The Matrix. And he says, remember that scene? Neo's walking down the street and Morpheus turns to him and he says, "Neo, were you looking at me or were you looking at the woman in the red dress? Look again." And it's Agent Smith with a gun pointed at his face.

And his analogy is, yeah, but now imagine that it was three years later and it's 1000 hypothetical 1000s, not one hypothetical 10. And you need to, I mean, what's your thing of, um, I shamelessly fucking nomenclatured it. Uh, I,

I called it identity dysmorphia. Identity lags reality by one to two years is one of yours. So if you've got this identity, which everybody does, right? You just, you see in the mirror the person that you used to see. The world sees some other version of you and it takes a little bit of time for that version to catch up. So,

You are lagging behind the options. Your ability to discern options is lagging behind the options that the world is going to give you. And your ability to say no is fucking two, three years old. All of this stuff. And yeah, the 1,000 hypothetical 1,000s in red dresses. And you need to go, I would have begged to have had the opportunity to have maybe said yes to this. And now I need to be pretty comfortable with saying no.

I, yeah. Crisis of success. That totally tracks. And I'm trying to remember Nassim Taleb had a quote around this. That was something like true wealth is measured by the money you turn down, which I just, oh, Morgan, Morgan Housel says, uh, uh, wealth is the Ferrari that you didn't buy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but yeah, it's funny cause I feel like good decision-making at any point in life is, is,

primarily learned by making bad decisions. So whatever level you get to, there's a new set of bad decisions that you have to make to realize not to make them to get to the next level. And so again, it's just one of these tricks that your brain plays on you of like, oh, well, you know, it's

And if you make it, then you don't have to deal with this bullshit anymore. And so it's going to be easier. And it's like, well, no, no, there's a new level of bullshit that you've never been exposed to. That is actually 10 times problems all the way up. Exactly. It's problems all the way up and it's idiots all the way down. Yeah. I think about that. That'd be a good book title.

Problems all the way up and idiots all the way down. Or maybe not. Yeah. So you come up maybe two or three times in my live show and one of the bits is it's idiots all the way up. So it's funny that you said it's idiots all the way down. Yeah, the...

the ability to sort of become increasingly discerning. And Jeffrey Katzenberg, who sat there earlier on, you know, the guy that fucking created Shrek and Aladdin and Lion King. He did like fucking Pretty Woman. This guy's a monster. 800 movies, 80 animated things. And I asked him about, you are someone who, if you have one skill set, you're tasteful. Like you have good taste. The ability to discern between something that is good and something that is not good. Right?

Right. It tastes very difficult to define, but that's the closest definition I can think of. He couldn't fucking define it. Like, where does good taste come from? What is it? Yeah. I don't fucking know. Yeah. And when it comes to choices, so much of the time we try and, again, that uncertainty, we abhor it so much that we would rather imagine a fantasy catastrophe than deal with something that's uncertain.

the reason that you have your, you know, a spreadsheet of 15 countries ranked first by continent, then by temperature, then by air quality, then by women hotness. You're hitting very close to home right now. I'm starting to shake with mid-20s anxiety. Oh, God. The reason that you have that is to try and be... to provide some sort of control, some source of control. You go, fuck, like, I just...

I'm so uncertain about my choices that if only I had more information. When really what it comes down to is just vibes. And, you know, I think we've both zeroed in

on the show, your show and mine respectively, that it actually is increasingly about vibes. It's like, okay, what's the vibe that I'm bringing here? What's the sort of energy that I really want to put across in this thing? And sure, there'll be maybe some information, maybe it's useful, maybe it's not. But largely what people are going to take away is like, okay, so what was the vibe like? And being a vibe architect is an unparalleled

an underrated which is basically you know somebody that's discerning in taste sort of a vibe architect you should add that to your linkedin yeah okay yeah i have a fucking vibe architect yeah yeah yeah no it's totally true though it's um i had another thing that i wrote uh that went viral it said that um i'm gonna probably fuck it up but it was uh uh

commitment is the result or no love is the result yeah love is the result of commitment not the cause right like you commit to something then you start loving it not the other way around right and it's similar to like action and motivation like you don't you take taking action is what generates motivation not motivation doesn't generate action um and similarly committing to something is what makes you fall in love with it not

you don't wait allows you to you don't go find the perfect country and fall in love with it and then be like oh i guess this is where i'm gonna live it's like no you pick a fucking place to live and then as you live there you start to fall in love with it that's just that's how life works the more you try to force what doesn't feel right the longer you delay finding what does yeah i think talking about the discernment i think it's it's really it's hard to develop the skill of knowing when you're bullshitting yourself like it's it's

again there's like layers to it right like it's as soon as you figure out your mind's first level of tricks that it plays there's like a whole nother level that yeah you beat it at white belt but then it's like fuck it graduated god it knows now it knows leg locks and kung fu exactly it's just it's just layers of an onion man like it's just it never you never stop finding novel ways to to kind of trick yourself and bullshit yourself and you can drive yourself crazy

You know, with the doubt and the questioning, which again, I think is, is, is the, a lot of the value that I took in Buddhism is that I think it's, it's like kind of a mentally and emotionally healthy way to doubt yourself. You don't know, and you're never going to know. And that's okay. And it's okay. And why don't you sit on the mat and stare at a wall until you feel okay about it? And because otherwise, if you, if you're kind of trying to go through life and asking, you're like constantly questioning everything all the time, like you're going to work yourself up into this like neurotic state.

of anxiety and stress. So it's almost like mental hygiene to set aside an area of your life, whether it's journaling or therapy or meditation or whatever, and like give yourself that space to kind of just unwrap the layers of the onion. Like, okay, well, why do I think that's true? What if that wasn't true? What if I'm like lying to myself right now? What would that mean? What would that say about my life? And kind of go the next layer down and the next layer down.

And then when you're done, you know, put all the layers back and go, you know, go about your life. Try to human as best you can. You said about being in self-conflict, and it makes me think about this sort of, especially for the sort of people that read your stuff, listen to my stuff, they are the prototypical avatar for a person who will be in conflict with themselves. They're introspective. They want to improve. They have...

high standards for a variety of things, many of which are in opposition with each other. You know, they want to be empathetic, but they want to be honest. They want to tell people the truth, but they want to care about them. They want to be supportive as a friend, but they need independence as an individual, blah, blah, blah. And I thought about, as you were talking there, you have self-conflict, but you have conflict with your self-conflict. Like, fuck, why am I always in conflict with myself? Why does that keep on happening? And I think...

in some ways, this sort of non-attachment, you don't have it figured out and that's okay and you'll be okay and this is the way it's going to be in perpetuity until you die. You go,

Okay, so maybe the self-conflict is going to be there because many of the things that we want are in tension with each other. And because of opportunity cost, you don't get to do two things. You want to support the mom and pop business that you were with from the very beginning, but you want to move to a new country. You're going to feel guilty if you leave the mom and pop business, but you're going to feel fucking regret if you don't go to the new country. Pick your fucking direction, Western man. And the same thing goes for your self-conflict. You think, fuck, I have these things. I'm going to be in tension with myself forever.

But if I'm in tension with the fact that I'm in tension, that is, I have control over that second one at least. So you could call it second order emotions. You know, someone gets frustrated and then they become agitated at their frustration. And then they become resentful at their agitation about their frustration. It's this fucking infinite regress of emotions about emotions. And you go, yeah, I mean, the first one makes sense. That happens. First one happens. You can't control it.

But the story that you've told yourself about this. I wrote a piece years ago. I don't even remember the title, so I can't even plug it. But I talked about this. I called them... I've been doing this a long time. I called them meta emotions, right? It's like feeling bad about feeling bad or feeling bad about feeling good, which happens a lot to people. And essentially my argument is just like, try not to have meta emotions. Like the emotions are always okay. And the meta emotions are kind of always not okay. Like you...

Um, feeling good about feeling good that, that turns into pride, feeling bad about feeling good. That turns into guilt, like feeling bad about feeling bad. That turns into self-loathing. Like it just don't judge the emotion. Just feel the thing. It's, it's okay. It's going to be whatever it is. It's going to be okay. That's sick. Yeah. I like that a lot. Uh, trust people. Most of them are good. And while you might get hurt occasionally, the alternative of distrusting everyone is far worse. Yeah, man. I, I,

This ties into a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about. I look around and I think a lot of the struggles of people today, it is around just trusting people, being comfortable. I just, I think our views of the median person in the world have gotten so skewed by being online too much, by being on social media too much, by being overexposed to news media too much. Like, I just think...

if you actually get out in the world and talk to people face-to-face, even people you disagree with, even people who like you think are like the bad ones or whatever, nine times out of 10, they're good people. And you can pretty quickly find common ground and get along really well. And, you know, I used to be, I used to be an e-sports gamer when I was a teenager. I can imagine that. Yeah. And unlike Elon, I actually was.

Calling him out. Um, he, I got really pissed cause he said that he was, he competed in one of the first quake tournaments and like, I actually went back to my old clan buddies and, and like we looked it up and yeah, he wasn't in it. Oh, anyway. Um,

my personal grievances aside. So there used to be a thing that happened back when I was like, I used to compete in these esports tournaments. And of course, being a bunch of like 16 year old nerds, we'd like sit and just talk shit to each other all the time online. Like we'd play the game, practice against each other.

And everybody just like talk mad shit to each other. And of course it would devolve into like, oh, when I see you at the tournament, I'm going to beat the fuck out of you. When I see you at the tournament, I'm going to bring my boys. We're going to beat the shit out of you. You know, you better be ready, all this stuff. And so every single tournament we went to, there was all this drama about like, oh man, it's going to go down here. Like Chris and Mark are going to fight, you know, it's going to be sick. And then of course what happens, everybody shows up, everybody meets each other. Everybody realizes that we're all like fat and

nerdy, lonely dudes who spend way too much time on their computers. And of course, we all go to McDonald's and be friends. And that happened over and over and over and over again. And so I feel like I learned at a very young age that there's just some sort of intangible softening that comes when you're face-to-face with people, that you're in the same room with them. The micro-expressions, the body language, the tonality. There's a certain amount of empathy and compassion that

emerges uh in the physical space that doesn't happen in the digital space and um i i just feel as the world becomes more and more chronically online i just i i feel like so many of our issues like really just boil down to that um i'm friends with uh one of the preeminent happiness researchers out here uh her name's sonja lubomirsky and her lab just did a

Great woman, super smart. And her lab just did a new study. Um, it still hasn't been published yet. It's in pre-publishing, but it was interesting. They looked at a classic case, social media and happiness, smartphones, social media and happiness and how they correlate, whatever. And interestingly, like a lot of research around social media and happiness. Um, when you look at adults, it doesn't have that much of an effect. Um, yeah.

The smartphones had a negative correlation with happiness. But what was interesting is that in the way they measured it, basically the way she summarized it was like the smartphones causing greater unhappiness was not because of the smartphone. It was because of what the smartphone was replacing, which was this just sitting in a room together talking and like actually empathizing, actually being like, OK, I don't agree with that, but you're a good guy. So, you know.

Let's have another beer. You know, like it's, it's that sort of casualness to everything that somehow gets distorted or lost. Um, so I don't remember like what you said that got me on this. You were talking about quake. I don't know. Uh, the more that you try to force what doesn't feel right, the longer you delay finding what does. Maybe it was that. Oh, trust people. Oh yeah. Trust them again. Trusting people. So I, I think a lot of trust, it seems to spontaneously emerge from,

from from the in-personness right and so again to the point about the asymmetry of trust how damaging that is both for our institutions our society but also our personal relationships like if you can't trust somebody you can't really have intimacy with them um i i think it i just think it's all related and so that that post is just like a shout into the void of like

please people like just trust each other. Yeah. Just err on the side of trust. Sure. You're going to get hurt sometimes, but the alternative is worse. Yeah. There's a lovely insight from Naval. Karma doesn't need spirits to deliver justice. Karma is just you repeating your patterns, virtues and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. And that's kind of the same thing with, with trust that like, dude, like if someone is that much of an asshole, like,

They're probably going to get found out sooner or later because there's only so many times that you can roll the dice and that thing happen and you not get, you not get found out for it if it's bad or you not get found out for it if it's good. So you didn't accumulate the negative reputation and you didn't accumulate the positive reputation for so long. And maybe some people can dance through the minefield of life and be an asshole to everyone

everyone that they meet and arrive at their deathbed and no one really realized. But that's like some 7,000 IQ samurai bullshit to be able to make that work. And I just don't think, I don't think that most people are going to do that. So yeah, I think. Yeah. And as well,

There is certainly a trend in the modern world of, I don't need anybody. I've been hurt before. And that hurt was because of my trust. Therefore, the issue wasn't the person that I placed my trust in, but the act of trust itself. I think that's an equation that gets run. That happens quite a bit. Yeah. And that's completely self-defeating, right? It's like...

I got hurt because I didn't get the intimacy or love that I crave. So I'm just going to stop pursuing intimacy and love. Like that makes no sense. And I don't know how or why that's become particularly fashionable. I just, it strikes me as incredibly self-defeating in the game of life. He who has the smallest ego usually wins. Why? Well, it depends how you define wins. Um, but yeah,

I think in terms of just well-being, I mean, you kind of just alluded to it yourself. You know, you can have that super samurai manipulative asshole who's cheating everybody and stealing and lying to everybody all the time. But like that's they're probably miserable. They're probably incredibly dark, lonely, miserable people. And and.

I just think all of this stuff that we're talking about, whether it's the authenticity or, you know, finding a way for your cup to overflow and finding a mission in your productivity, like all of this stuff, it like demands a certain humbling of yourself. And I think in a way too, it's just like choosing fear is a form of ego. How do you define ego? That's a good question. I...

In this context, I would say it is an over-importance of self, like an aggrandized sense of self. I do think having some ego or healthy egos is natural and important, but I just think it's all this stuff that we're talking about, this like low-level delusions and misconceptions and distrust of people and choosing fear over confidence, like all that kind of boils back to like,

feeding this ingrained aggrandized sense of self of like i deserve so much i'm so special i i want all these things in the world and i'm gonna be so upset if i don't get them and like all of that really just boils down to like a misrepresentation of your own importance i guess what's a better perspective i think a better perspective is is understanding that everything comes with a trade-off that life is is messy and painful and

Loss is inevitable, but that doesn't mean that the thing you lost wasn't worth it. And that anything you pursue or desire, like you can't just pursue or desire the positive side of it. You also have to pursue and desire the negative side of it. Like you have to, if there's some goal in your life or some dream you have, you can't just dream about the benefits of that dream. You're also signing up for the costs of that dream. You're signing up for the struggles, the failures, the setbacks, the embarrassments, right?

And the mind is just very bad at doing that. It's bad at holding two sides of a trade-off at the same time. We tend to see when we create these narratives about the future or about what we want or what we don't want, we tend to only see what's bad about it or only see what's good about it. We don't see the full trade-off. We don't see like, oh, if I start a new company, I'm going to have to

uh, give up some of my social life and some of my time at home. Um, and so I need to be ready for that. It's like, no, we just think that, oh, that stupid fucking company, it like messed up my life and you know, what a mistake. I shouldn't have done that. Or my co-founder is an asshole or like whatever. Right. It's like, it's, it's their fault. It's, you know, blame everybody else. So I think it's, uh, viewing optionality in terms of

Of the costs, of like the emotional costs. Have you read much Oliver Berkman? I love Oliver's stuff, yeah. He's fucking king, dude. Yeah. His newsletter, The Imperfectionist, it's the same as that Tim Urban thing, new posts every sometimes. It's like on no fucking discernible cadence. Oliver Berkman's newsletter is like the three-body problem of publishing. Yeah.

You know, it's like, when the fuck is it coming? I don't think you know, and neither can no one can predict. But he has this idea from 4,000 Weeks, which is choose what you're going to suck at. Yep. You know, choose in advance the thing that you're going to suck at because opportunity cost demands trade-offs. There are no solutions, only trade-offs. So I want to find a partner. Okay. Okay.

you're probably going to have to sacrifice some time in the gym. You're not going to be, you're going to be going out on dates. You're going to events, maybe some late nights, maybe some early mornings, maybe some coffee breaks and stuff like that. Probably not going to maximize your finances. Maybe you're going to have to pay for Ubers and dinners, trips and stuff like that. Okay. I really want to make as much money as possible. It's like, okay, your social life's probably going to suck for a bit. And you maybe not going to get to hang with your friends so much. Okay. So I think by

in advance of that, especially for the perennial type A fucking optimizer people, which me, you have to say,

this is a price I'm willing to pay in order to achieve this other thing that I want. And it's not forever. And that's a, I don't know whether it's like personal growth, hyperbolic discounting or something, but our ability to understand that the decisions that we're making right now are just for right now, you know, not just for this second, you know, if you're going to commit to a habit, make it a couple of months, but okay, I'm going to get in shape. All right. Well, that's going to take between three and three months and 12 months, something like that for most people. Okay. I get in shape.

what's the price I'm going to have to pay? What am I going to suck at during that time? Oh, you know, I'm probably going to have to spend more money on going to the gym and buying better food. And I'm probably not going to have much of a social life because I'm going to need to really lock in on diet. And I'm going to have to like be socially awkward at dinners. The few that I do get to attend, I'm going to have to say, oh, sorry, like I'm just having a steak this evening or whatever it might be. Okay. By doing that, when the price comes of the suck, it doesn't feel like

this comment on your self-worth as a person that's being ripped away from you. Oh my God, how can I, I'm not going to be able to deal with the thing that's happening. It's like, no, no, no. Okay. This is an indication that things are going well actually. Okay. This is something that you priced in and this is a cost that you're prepared to go through in order to be able to achieve it. But yeah, for a very, very long time, I would take my eye off the

the ball of a thing to focus on another thing. And the second that this thing started to slip, I'd be like, okay, I get back onto that. And you know, it's like one of those cats chasing a laser around. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah. I think pricing in is like a good term for it because it's, it's cause ultimately it is the value of something, right? Like if you are, if you do have a goal or a pursuit or something that you want in your life,

obviously you perceive there to be a certain amount of value to it. And the same way you wouldn't just look at a stock and be like, well, how much money did they make last year? Cool. Let me buy it for this amount. Like you, you need to look at both sides of the spreadsheet. You need to look at how much money they brought in and the expenses and the costs. And also like, what are the future risks and like do the full analysis 360, but we're just really bad at that with ourselves. Like we don't,

think in those terms. And I think ultimately it's because generally our hopes and dreams are very emotionally driven. They're very identity driven. And that part of our brain is the more ancient mammalian part of our brain, right? And it doesn't

Yeah, I wish.

I don't know. It's sort of a ruthless irony that the times when you need your prefrontal cortex the most are the ones when it seems to be switched off, you know? Yeah. It's, um, I think I had another thing I, I, I posted a few years ago where I said it was like, uh, the, the most consequential choice you'll make in your life is, is who you choose as a partner. And, uh,

And I went through this whole list of things, you know, it's like, there'll be your counselor, your roommate, your business partner, your financial advisor, your teacher, your lover, your travel buddy, like whole list of

And then I finished it by saying like, and yet most people put as much thought into it as like, you know, the color of their iPhone case. Like it's just some people they're like, oh, I like this one. I happened upon it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, she's nice. She's kind of hot. The more that I learned about the way that the human attachment system works, passionate to companionate love specifically, a combination of Tai Toshiro, who's fucking unbelievable, and Arthur Brooks, who's also fucking unbelievable.

Those two guys together, like a two car garage of really, really fucking understanding human mating for like a psychological sense, I guess, and a neurobiological sense. And so many that the way that human attraction and attachment works.

is it blinds you to this person's flaws. It causes you to feel unbelievably intense emotions about them whilst knowing very little about them. Uh, real ruthless one that I learned from William Costello, uh, when you're in passionate love, the honeymoon phase, uh, you, your brain actively disengages from being able to see other available options. So it's sort of

brings this sort of mating blinkers on, which is why friends that are still in the honeymoon phase, but it's with somebody that's really not good for them. You say, but dude, you could get like a million other amazing women. And they're like, no, man, I'll never get anybody like her. And she's like, she sucks. And yes, you will. And look, your last girl was better than this girl. And how are you so...

functionally idiotic. I know that you're normally irrational. Oh, okay. You're kind of on drugs. Well, you mean you are on drugs. You're just on endogenous drugs. Exactly. As opposed to exogenous ones. And yeah, I think so many people spend time with somebody where they...

love the smell of their hair and the shape of their nose and the way that they feel when they cuddle them at night and they fall backward into a relationship that they didn't with the person they don't actually have that much in common with. Yeah. And it is a really ruthless trick that the human attachment system plays on you to get you to bond to this person in spite of their flaws. Yes. And then of course that

that bond or that passionate love wears off after a certain amount of years you wake up being married and living in the same house with the golden retriever together yeah completely financially enmeshed with like two kids and you're like oh shit i have nothing in common with this person like you know you bring your head above the water of this hormonal fugue state and you're like what the fuck was that fever dream that i just came out of it's uh i mean it's another example of just like how

Evolution did not optimize for happiness or harmony. It optimized for babies. Making babies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is very effective. I mean, it's hilarious in some ways, but I think a good lesson there is be careful who you let yourself fall in love with. You know, you almost need to treat...

you in love as kind of like a child. It's like, if I allowed this to happen, I won't be able to use my rational brain. So while I still have a tenuous hold on my sanity, I'm

allow me to try and make judgments carefully how long are we going to spend with this person and i need to make decisions probably pretty quickly while i'm still you know in rational mode and not speed running through attachment um because once you're in it it's like you're you're lost well and this is another argument for what you were talking about earlier of like

front load your identity as much as possible. Try and do everything you can to put them off. Right. Exactly. Like just be as much of yourself as possible. Maximize you. Early on because it's, it's, that's when you're going to find out. Like if you, if you hold yourself back and then you fall into this just love bucket of hormones and

neurotransmitters, then, you know, you might be screwed. It's super cliche advice, but I remember at my wedding, all the old people gave the exact same advice. Like all the old couples that have been together for like 40, 50, 60 years, they all give the exact same advice, which is like, put the friendship first. What's that mean? Basically, they all said, they're like, look, you're married now. There's going to be good years. There's going to be bad years. There's going to be romantic times. There's going to be non-romantic times. There's going to be

difficult points in your life. There's going to be really great points in your life. Like put the friendship first because that's going to carry you through everything. Everything else is going to come and go and you'll have, you'll, you'll have patience at different times. Um, but if you're not friends, you're not going to have the patience to wait.

I feel like most cultural and mental health issues these days can be summed up in just two words, performative victimhood. That one did not perform well, as I recall. People don't usually like liking a tweet that says that they're performative victims. Yeah, a little bit called out. I'm trying to remember what inspired that, but I do believe that. I do believe, I mean, this comes back to the therapy culture thing of...

people adopt as values what they get validated for, right? Like they, if perceiving themselves as a victim is what brings them attention and sympathy and adoration, then it will encourage that behavior further. Like we're monkeys, you know, it's like Pavlov's bell. If you reward me for something, I'm going to keep doing it. Right. I remember when I was running nightclubs, I used to get pissed off. There's a couple of other companies in Newcastle and

the northeast of the UK, sort of classic working class mindset, like very wily, shrewd, like not intellectually sophisticated, but relationally, socially genius people. And

you have one goal, busy nightclub, right? If you make your nightclub busy, you're the Kings. If your nightclub is not busy, you're the fucking idiot. And I always used to get pissed off at some of the other companies that would make claims, um,

disparaging claim. There was no such thing as slander, right? You can say that this person's night, someone got glassed and it had three people in it and all of them had one leg and they were upside down with a gluten intolerance shitting everywhere. Whatever you wanted to say in order to make somebody else's event. But this was a game that we refused to play. And me and my business partner had a principle where we're like, we don't talk shit about other people's nights. And

And I always used to feel like it was unfair because we were constrained by what actually happened. But our competitors were simply constrained by what they could get away with saying and be believable. And I kind of get the sense that it's similar with this performative victimhood thing, which is if the way that you accumulate status, notoriety, recognition, validation from the world is

is through you doing a thing, your capacity to get the validation is constrained by your capacity to do the thing. But if it's simply through the performance of grievance, imagined or real, the sky's the fucking limit, dude. You know, like if you're the LeBron James of pretending to be a victim...

That skill set is significantly easier to acquire than being LeBron James and doing it through being in basketball. You know, the athlete who's perpetually injured, right? Or is always, you know, brief flashes of being good, but then gets the yips or I don't know what the equivalent is in America. Like gets in their own head and is unable to perform, can't perform in like clutch situations. That is...

kind of romantic in some way. Imagine what he could have been. It's like, yeah, but he fucking wasn't dude. Like ultimately he wasn't that thing. Even, you know, as brutal as it is, as somebody that sometimes gets injured doing lifting heavy things. Like if you are the sort of athlete who gets injured,

That is also the same thing for you too. That, well, imagine how great he could have been. Well, yeah, but his body wasn't built to be that great because every time that somebody hit him from the left, his knee gave out or whatever it might be. And I, if you have an easy route to another example of this, so this would have been me, not necessarily performative victimhood, but certainly me leaning into fear as opposed to confidence. Um,

When you play cricket, there is something called a TFC, and it's a thanks for coming. Thanks for coming means that you didn't bat and you didn't bowl. All that you did was field because everybody fields. And it's a nod to what the captain would say at the end of the game when he's chucking out and he's like, thanks for coming, mate, because you didn't contribute. And...

having a TFC is kind of a bit of a fucking waste of a weekend. What did you do? You couldn't have contributed that much to the game. Presumably you batted what's referred to as down the order. So you're one of the later batsmen. And if you were a bowler, you weren't needed or the conditions weren't right for you or the captain didn't have confidence in your ability to deliver at this stage of the game. And there was a bit of me in the back of my mind that thought, if I have the opportunity to have a TFC, at least I can't fail.

Because I'm not faced, I would rather assure my failure privately than risk failure publicly. Because I'm insulated from other people having to see how I could have fallen short potentially. And, you know, that would, depending on how confident I was, sometimes that would be more like, I really want this and I would lean into it. And other times it would be fear and I'd be like...

Kind of, you know, God, I've scoffed. Oh yeah. I really fell up for it this weekend. God, if you'd got me in there, you feel you could have seen the runs that I would have got on the board. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, the performative victimhood thing, I think between that, the, um, if you're not constrained by reality, you can, uh, become anything that you want to be as long as you can get away with claiming it. Yeah. Uh, and also this insulation privately. I, I also like, I think there's some, there is a cultural norm that has shifted, uh,

probably since you and I were kids. And I don't totally understand why or where it shifted, but I think there's a certain amount of virtue has been started being ascribed to victimhood. I think if I think back to like, say, when my parents were growing up or my grandparents were growing up, it was the opposite. It was like, if you felt like a victim or complained about something, it was like, ah, suck it up, rub some dirt on it, get over yourself, that sort of thing.

And then it feels like at some point there's kind of like an overcorrection, right? Like, of course, you want to acknowledge people who have had unfortunate things happen to them or maybe something's gone wrong or they've been treated unfairly or there's an injustice. But at some point along the way, victimhood in and of itself has become seen as like a virtuous thing. And you can...

I think everybody's got their favorite pet groups that they can point to and like say, you know, as an example. But like I see it all over the place. I see it's like I think I wrote in one of my books. I said, I think this is the first time in history that literally every demographic feels aggrieved and persecuted. Like rich people feel persecuted right now.

poor people feel persecuted white people feel persecuted black people feel persecuted straight straight people people feel persecuted gay people feel persecuted like how is this fucking who's persecuting like how is this possible it's the spider-man meme yeah exactly that's exactly where we live in a spider-man meme world right now and um and i don't totally understand how it's happened and i think in in a sense i think empathy has been weaponized um

both politically, but also socially, um, that it's people kind of walk around with a badge of honor of like, I've been mistreated or the group I'm a part of has been mistreated. And that makes me, that affords me all sorts of, you know, regard and respect that I didn't necessarily earn or do anything for. Um, so yeah, I just, I, I see that as kind of the root

Because we could sit here and we won't, but we could sit here and talk about political issues all day and different social and cultural norms and issues that have been changing all day. But really at the ground level of it, I see this performative victimhood as a trend that is just very fundamental and it's across the board, across demographics, and it is very worrying. Yeah.

I wonder whether part of it is a little bit of a sense of inequality and inequality can be due to empathy as well. Um, if you have people who feel like they're being mistreated in one way or another, that there, you are not recognizing the prices that I pay, whether I'm the rich person or the white person or the gay person or whatever, or three, um, that sense of, uh,

I want to be seen. I want my suffering to be recognized and I feel like it's not. It starts to incentivize and it also resonates with other people who go, huh, I don't think that my suffering has been seen or has been recognized. They're just like me. And I wonder whether it taps into this righteous lack of recognition that many people feel like they're a part of. Yeah. I think there's also a lot of...

I believe it's the fallacy of composition that goes on, which is like you will see, you'll go online and you'll see, say, one terrible thing happened to one, since we're both white guys, we'll say terrible thing happens to one white guy. And because we're white guys, we're like, oh my God, look at what they're doing to all the white guys, right? And so there's like this logical fallacy that happens, but you just get, you're like,

your limbic system gets hijacked by the headline and the the horrible video that you see on tiktok or whatever and you're just like oh my god we're under attack yeah fuck mark you're awesome dude i i think your work is phenomenal and i shamelessly repurpose it regularly i appreciate your shameless repurposing good i'm plagiarizing you with credit uh

all the time you got new app you got new stuff where should people go to check out all the things i'm on every social platform check out my podcast solved uh posting on youtube all the time so come check it out everyone should and your newsletter is also sick so people should go and check that out until next time dude i appreciate you

If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found. Fiction and nonfiction and real life stories. And there's a description about why I like it and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free.

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