The Dark Truth About Self-Help Books | Exclusive Interview with Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck)

27:22What, I'm going to sell it for, and everyone's getting pissed right in the chat. He's like, it's going to be$0, everyone. But also at the same time, that is the most selfish thing to do because you build so much goodwill and you know it's going to come back to you tenfold. The brilliance of Hormozy, and I think this is also what's so exciting about the creator space right now is that he realizes that the people on that webinar, that's not actually his customer.

27:52His whole content business is basically just one massive lead magnet for acquisition.com. He has something on the back end that is so potentially lucrative that he can easily give up a million dollar launch or a$10 million launch or whatever. It's no sweat off his back. I think you're starting to see that. You mentioned the Paul Brothers, Mr. Beast with Feastables. We're just now discovering that that brand relationship between a creator and their audience is so fucking massively powerful for non-content businesses. I imagine that we're probably going to end up at a point where, yeah, it's just a massive amount of free value is given up front.

28:45And then there's associated businesses on the back end. Like, oh, by the way, buy my chocolate bar next time you're at the grocery store. Or drink Prime next time you're thirsty. And that's actually where all the money's made. There's an argument that in the next 10, 20 years or so, you're only going to have the top tier creators and then you're going to have this long tail. Maybe you agree with this because you just said the keyword land grab, right? And when I think about land grab, typically I'm thinking about early days social apps. You've got to take as much attention as possible. But land grab also typically means that you're willing to burn a lot of money to get there.

29:17So how are you thinking about this? I'm burning a lot of money to get there. It's so funny, man. I'll talk to some entrepreneur friends. They'll be like, how's the YouTube thing going? I'll be like, oh, doing this and doing that and the other thing. And every once in a while they'll be like, oh, so... Making money? Yeah, are you making any money? I'm like, no, dude, I'm fucking, I'm like setting briefcases of money on fire left and right. It's the first time in my career I've done this. But to your point about the long tail versus like the handful of winners, the reality is that if you look at every creative industry, whether it's music, film, stage performers, like whatever art uh painting you know it's you always end up with winners take most like it's it's extremely i forget what the word is for it there's like a name for markets like this but it's yeah you you end up there's the top 50 musicians on spotify make like 80 of the revenue i don't see why the creator space would be different i do imagine that there will be a a very long tail of middle-class creators, especially super niche creators.

30:30People who are lawn care for elderly people. It's like, okay, yeah, that's probably an 80K a year business or something. But yeah, you're probably going to end up with maybe 1 ,000 mega creators. I'm not super high conviction in this, but I do think there's a real possibility that the 21st century major media companies are essentially born out of creator brands. It's not that hard to imagine how Mr. Beast could become the next Disney in like 30 years. And if you look back at the history of the TV and film industry, all of the major TV and film studios were started within the same 15-year period roughly 20 years after the technology was created.

31:20so it like it takes a decade or two to every for everybody to kind of figure out how to make something and then once people figure out how to make it there you get this like the rich get richer effect and pretty soon you're like you know two decades after that you've consolidated down to like you know 10 major studios that are making 90 of the content it's always like that you know you you talked about this on a on a pod about how your level of fame right now is like it's a good level because every now and then you'll get noticed. Oh my God, great book. But I think what you're swinging for here might be that top 1 ,000 fame level, if I'm not mistaken.

31:59It's funny, my wife and I had a conversation about this. I am at the perfect level of fame. I get recognized just enough that it's an ego boost. That nice dopamine hit. Yeah, it makes my afternoon. Good job, Mark. Fucking crushing it. And it doesn't interfere with my day-to-day life. I don't ever dread going to Whole Foods or whatever because people are going to want to talk to me, get a picture, whatever. That said, if that happens, I feel like I can manage it. One of the things I learned following Will Smith around for two years was that fame just becomes another system that needs to be managed.

32:43his exposure to the public is something that is carefully managed and the people on his team have protocols and processes if he gets approached at the airport by a fan everybody on his team knows exactly Will knows how he needs to respond his managers know how they need to respond his security know how they need to respond So it's something that you can structure another system around. Obviously, it limits your life in a lot of ways. It's not like Will can go buy a turkey at Whole Foods. But it does become manageable, and you can kind of reach a happy medium with it. I actually think the bigger cost of fame is just more probably in friendships and personal relationships.

33:39I imagine it becomes much more difficult to make them and keep them. Anyway, that's just a long-winded way of saying if that level of fame happens, whatever, I'll deal with it. I'm so passionate about the opportunity that exists right now and I've really just built my career on trying to disrupt my industry and push it to a new level, a new territory. And I just feel like this is the moment to do it. You know, this was at the All-In Summit. I don't think you were here for the last day, so maybe this was the last day. But I think something was said about how capital is easy to come by and you can basically, you know, almost like, in a sense, you can buy investment, but what you can't buy is real attention.

34:31And that's what you're going for, right? It's not like you're necessarily trying to, I don't think the angle is, maybe you'd even know what you'd be selling or pushing down the road, right? It's more so, hey, let's get the attention first. And it turns out that that's actually way more valuable. If you've got the attention, there's always going to be monetization opportunities. In 2023 and onward, if you have the audience, money will show up one way or another. You've got more than enough options. whereas if you kind of like i think the previous the old mindset persisted up until recently which was like well you've got to figure out how are you going to monetize monetize off the back of this what's your funnel going to look like you know all this stuff i think people are figuring out that that that that isn't as important as they thought i also just think and it's funny because we were talking about gary v a few minutes ago this is one of those things that gary v was saying like 10 years ago and it sounded kind of crazy and then and now it's like true like it actually it took a long time like it's one of those things that he was like oh yeah in like three years it's gonna be like this and obviously it wasn't like that but yeah now we're 12 years ahead and it's like oh shit no wait this whole thing about needing to create content and build a brand yeah that that brand and authenticity is like gonna be the most scarce asset and that like If you can build a relationship with your audience, you can take that anywhere.

35:55That will be the ultimate currency and everything else will flow out of it. I remember him saying that in 2012. I was like, dude, what the fuck are you talking about? I'm writing so many blog articles that I'm broke. What the fuck are you talking about? I think we are arriving at that point where he's correct. That's what the model is. I think it's, you build the attention and then you can figure out the monetization engine. I think too, most of the time people are like, let's figure out the monetization engine first because people are greedy and they want their nut. But the longer you can defer, the better.

36:27First world problems. I saw an interesting presentation at VidCon this year. So it was interesting. Actually, he was, I forget which VC fund, but he was like a VC investor in the creator space for many years. And then he actually left the VC world and is now basically running all Mr. B's business operations. He gave a presentation that was super interesting and he was kind of talking about why he made that jump. He said that back in the late 2010s, up through even 2020, 2021, he said all the investment in the creator space was going towards the services and software platforms that creators would operate on.

37:06So it's like the t-shirt platform or the newsletter software or whatever. Everybody was like, okay, what are creators going to need? we'll invest in that platform and then we'll capture a piece of the millions of creators who sign up for this thing. Most of them got torched. Yeah, and it's like they got absolutely taken behind the woodshed. He was saying the reason for that he said the lesson that they had to learn the hard way was that actually 90 this comes back to power law. It's a power law market. Coming back to the point about power laws what it turned out was that 1 % of the creators were actually deriving 90 % of the revenue.

37:53It actually wasn't very profitable to own the support platforms and systems and stuff that creators use because most creators don't make any money. There's a couple thousand that make all the money. What VCs are figuring out now is just screw the platforms, go straight to creator. Go invest directly in Logan Paul or Mr. Beast or Jake Paul or whoever. And that comes back to the Gary Vee thing of if you build the audience, the money's going to show up on your doorstep. Right, 100%. Let me ask you this. I'm sure you've gotten this asked a thousand times, but on the Will Smith piece, how did that book deal happen?

38:33They reached out to me. He had wanted to write a book for a while and he had met and talked to a few different authors. and for him it was it's funny because that year it was probably like one of the top three or four book contracts that were signed in the entire industry and for him it's like a passion project it's like a rounding error on his tax return but yeah he had wanted to do it for a few years and he had kind of met with some authors on and off and they contacted me I think late 2018 and then I finally got to meet him early 2019 and basically just flew me out to a movie he was shooting.

39:14We just hung out for like four or five days and got to know each other, had a good chemistry. We, he and I have very complimentary skill sets and personalities. Like he's very, he's very good at like micro stories. So like, if you, if you tell him like, Hey, tell us about the time you auditioned for Fresh Prince, he'll tell like the most amazing, fun, charismatic story. But if you, if you tell him like, hey, talk about that transition in your life between hip-hop career and TV. He doesn't really know where to start. I kind of come from the other side. I think very structurally, I think very organizationally.

39:53What are the themes? How do you organize a person's life? What are the themes? I'm never going to sound like him. Even if I tried to write the way he talks, I probably wouldn't be able to. So we just found it complemented really well. He needed somebody to structure everything for him and give him the canvas to paint by numbers. That's what comes really naturally to me. I spent a few days with him, and then I pitched him on an outline. I think the last night I was out there, he was like, what do you think? If we did a book, what would it be? I told him, give me one night, and I'll show you something tomorrow.

40:38And he was like, okay. And so then the next, I stayed up to like 2 a.m., like typing something up. Showed up at breakfast the next morning with my laptop and just kind of showed him an outline. Just like boom, boom, boom. Here's how we organize it. Here are the beats. Here are the main themes. Here's the title. We had a book club. It was hosted by the founder of Morning Brew, Alex. And the first book that we picked was the Will Smith book. Oh, cool. And then, yeah, that was actually the first book of yours that I read. Oh, yeah. Not the subtle art. That's cool. The other thing he wanted too is that he really wanted there to be takeaways.

41:15He wanted people to be able to read it and take lessons from it. But he's never been in this world. So he didn't know exactly where those lessons should be or how it should be written or whatever. So I helped out a lot with that side of it as well. I've got to ask you, the reason I even talked about the book in the first place is because I've done a book, I don't think I ever plan on doing another book. Why is it worth it to do the book? Because doing the book is such a pain in the ass. The counter argument would be everything's kind of a pain in the ass. But a lot of it depends on... But this is a really big pain in the ass.

41:46Yeah, books, dude, books are massive. The amount of time and energy that goes into them. The beauty of a book, if it hits a certain threshold and hits a certain longevity, a book can last longer than you. And I don't know if there are many mediums that that's true. this podcast episode it probably won't be listened to 10 years from now. Vast majority of YouTube videos are not watched 10 years later but there are so many books that are read 10 years later, 20 years later, 100 years later. There's some sort of longevity. There's a Lindy effect to it. There's some sort of longevity just to the format that's very valuable.

42:28if you can kind of get above that threshold of quality that this is going to be read for a long time. That said, getting there is extremely hard. Again, it's a power law thing. Like everything, the stat is, I think, the average book, it's really funny actually. So the average book, I think, sells like 140 copies and the average author buys 40 copies of their own book or something. It's really hilarious. Most publishing profit comes from maybe 10 or 12 books each year. How's your marketing team, how's the content team right now structured? And roughly, how much do you think you're spending a month on this?

43:08The content team right now is, I'm trying to separate video from everything else. So everything else, honestly, I could probably run everything that's not YouTube or video production related or podcast related, which we're going to launch next month. if you remove all that stuff, I could probably run everything else with two people. And I did run a team. It was just a team of three people for many, many years. Pretty much up until I decided to start distributing on all the social platforms. So just newsletter, blog, and social media, like non-video social media, I could do with two people. So a three-man team.

43:49As soon as you add podcasts, that probably gets the four people. and then once you add video, like really high quality video, now you're talking probably another four or five people just for the video side. Right now we're at eight and I'm scrambling to hire more people. So we'll probably end up at 10 to 12. Got it. Similar to Hormozy and Cody, I have to assume you're spending anywhere from$80 to$150 a month, something like that. I'll just throw a range out there. on people? People plus content in general. Are we counting hosting and shit like that? No. Okay. Should we? That's the funny thing.

44:36These days, a fucking newsletter platform is expensive as fuck. What are you hosting on? ConvertKit. If you've got a list of a million people, that's tens of thousands of dollars. So yeah, that's expensive. My hosting bill is super expensive these days. I would say if you add everything together, all the video production, video team, I don't think we're over 100K. I'd say I would ballpark it probably 75-ish. Probably between 60 and 80, somewhere in there. I keep asking this question just so people understand that to build this content team, it's not free. It's like, oh, well I don't spend on paid ads, so you're still spending on your content team.

45:23So what do you think your monthly reach is right now with all the channels combined? I'm tempted to grab my phone and start looking at my analytics for each platform. I haven't thought about it. It's definitely... Over 20 million? Maybe 20. That's solid. I think if you add my following across all platforms, it's close to four. I'm just looking at impressions. I think it's probably 15, 20. Probably. We'll see later. Yeah. But like, and the reason I asked you is because I think when you become like a top 1000 guy and we do this interview in 10 years or whatever, it's going to be like hundreds plus.

46:01For sure. So that's the difference. How many books have you sold so far? 20 million on Subtle Art. And how about the Will Smith book? 20 million is total. Total. Okay. Subtle Art's probably like 16, 15, 16, something like that. Got it. That's a lot. Yeah. So how many edits did you go through? How many drafts did you go through on Subtle Art? fucking dude

46:25that's how I'll answer this because by the way just to preface for everyone typically you might do six or seven that's like the average but they're not trying to write average books honestly I couldn't even tell you I wrote a whole version of that book that was just bad like straight up bad I think I showed it to my wife and maybe one or two friends was your wife like this sucks In so many words. She was very kind about it, but she's like, I'm not sure if this chapter is it, honey. No, it was bad. It wasn't there. The ideas were there, but it was just executed very poorly. I'd say maybe half of the content in that first round survived in the second one.

47:08And then with the second one, the second round is actually what ended up becoming Subtle Art. you know i myself i probably did three or four rounds i did probably a couple rounds with my wife and friends then it went to my editor my editor and i did two or three rounds and then it went to a copy editor it did one round with the copy editor um so yeah you added a it's at least 10 revisions and i want to illustrate so the the version the version i did just to show like what crap looks like versus like amazing. When I talk about drafts, it's like, oh, I'm still editing on. Like I'm not, I'm trying my best not to delete because you know, what did I say?

47:54I forgot what it was. But for you, you're actually tearing up half of it and then maybe the next draft, maybe you're tearing down another half of it. Yeah, the first draft of Subtle Art was like I think 110 ,000 words, which is roughly, I think like 440 pages. The second version was about 70 ,000 words, so immediately cut about 30 % from version one to version two. And then I think the version I turned into my editor was maybe 60 ,000, and then the version that got published was like 52 ,000. And the reason I'm even talking about this right now is I just want people to understand it takes a lot more work to do New York Times quality.

48:37Oh, for sure. And not only that, but a lot of that content in that book had been market tested on my blog and market tested on facebook you know so it was like for every idea that made it into the book there was probably one or two ideas that were tried on the website that nobody liked or nobody shared and i was like okay let's skip that one you know can we okay can we go back to the blog for a second because because i'm an seo dude right so yeah um back in the day i mean like you were it sounds because self-help is very there's the tam is everybody, right? So how were you? Were you just growing?

49:15You were just writing and then it just started to compound on its own? I'm assuming you're not doing any link building or anything. It's just, you know, good-ass content. Any kind of more formal SEO attempts that we made over the years of link building or whatever didn't really pan out. I had a lot of just natural virality. I had a period like 2012 to 2016. I had a bunch of articles go super viral. My backlink profile is pretty damn robust, naturally. But is it because you're pushing on Facebook and Twitter and it just started going viral and everyone just started linking to it? Is that okay? Yeah, primarily.

49:53My big competitive advantage early on, because I tried SEO stuff and I was just bad at it. My big competitive advantage early on that I attribute a lot of my success to is I think I just figured out before most people. Facebook rolled out their newsfeed in 2011 and I think I figured out before most people that the same way you optimize a thumbnail and a title on YouTube, you can optimize a title and a cover photo on Facebook to get a lot of shares and clicks. And so I started writing my articles very specifically to optimize Facebook virality and just took advantage of it. It's like Buzzfeed back in the day.

50:31It's exactly what Buzzfeed did. Upworthy was another one back then. Upworthy was actually the one. Because I remember seeing them pop up in so many spots and it was clear they were doing it on purpose and kind of manufacturing it. I was like, huh, I wonder if I did that for my blog, what would that look like? How much traffic were you getting to the blog each month? At its peak, I think it peaked in 2014 or 2015. At its peak, it was like two, two and a half million uniques each month and I think probably six or eight million page views a month. It's a lot. The reason I even ask right now is just because you started with that and you focused on that before deciding to move into another area.

51:15I actually think it took me longer to move into other areas because I was so like because the blog had been so successful like I was very hesitant to move away from it. Like I actually kind of like was fighting against the tide trying to keep it going instead of building a podcast or a YouTube channel or something. Going back to personal growth, I think you had a statement about how your ambition in your 20s versus your 30s, how has that changed? Well, I'm about to hit 40s, so that's part of it too. 20s, my ambition was literally just make enough money to live wherever I want and party as much as I want.

51:55That was pretty much it. And I successfully did that. I think I didn't hit a six-figure income until, I think it was like 29. Up until that point, it was just lifestyle business, taking as many coaching clients as I needed to run off to Thailand or Argentina. With the babes. Yeah, get laid a few times, fly home. That was pretty much it. It's funny because as I approached 30, I kind of had this mini midlife crisis of like, oh shit, I need to have a career. I can't just do this forever, right? I don't want to be 40 and still flying to Argentina to hook up with girls at 4 a.m. So that was when I actually really sat down and I started thinking about building a brand and taking it more seriously, systematizing stuff, hiring people.

52:44And that was around 28, 29. My 30s, it was all about... So this is really interesting because in the early 2010s, creator businesses, they were still kind of seen as not real businesses. Like, okay, that's cool. You've got millions of readers on a blog and you're popular on Facebook. But you don't really have a job, do you? I used to get these looks and questions from family members at Christmas and stuff. They're like, what do you actually do? Even though I was making six figures and had a small team and was doing all this stuff. Same trend as the YouTube trend right now. 100%. You don't really make money.

53:26Yeah, it's not really a job, is it? So there was kind of this chip on my shoulder in my 30s, I think, of proving I'm legit. Get the book deal, become a bestseller, get to the top of the New York Times list to prove I'm legit. They're like, this is a real career. I'm actually an expert. I actually know what I'm talking about. And then when the book took off, it just opened up all these other opportunities to do more books, to do the Will Smith thing, to do the movie. I did a big exclusive podcast with Audible. It's all this stuff like, oh man, real companies are giving me real money to make a real thing.

54:06And that was exciting for a while, but then I kind of realized after a few years what I said earlier, which is a little bit like Emperor Has Got No Clothes going on. Traditional media is shrinking drastically. Nobody's making money and nobody knows why. And so coming back to the creator space, I realized everything's really, this feels like the moment, like the bottom of the S-curve. So coming into my 40s, there's a very real, and then on top of that, when I was doing all the shit in my 30s, I burnt myself out. Kind of lost the fun, because it's like, I don't know, some TV studio is like, oh, here's a bunch of money to consult on this script or whatever.

54:45And I'm like, yes, because I'm just saying yes to everything and really I don't want to do any of it. coming into my 40s i really sat down last year and asked myself like what are like the one or two things i actually give a fuck about that i want to do for the rest of my life what's the legacy i'm going to build what's like the business i want to have stop doing shit that's not fun stop doing shit that's like not sustainable morgan housel has this great thing that he says like if it's not sustainable i don't do it which i think is very very wise like if you can't see yourself doing it five years, ten years from now, then why start?

55:19What are those two things? The creator business, going all in on creator economy, video content, and honestly just writing in general. What I've discovered is I'm so much happier when I'm in control. When I have creative control, I'm making branding decisions, business decisions. It's so much more satisfying and invigorating for me than dealing with a big publisher or studio or something who wants me to get on another Zoom call with nine people and I don't know what any of them do. Anyway, this is just so much more fun. For me, my 40s is very much like, okay, this is the moment to leave your dent in the universe, as Steve Jobs would say.

56:06Take it seriously. You're a grown-up now. You know how to manage. You've got money. fucking use it. Because up until now, I don't think I either had the maturity or the experience to really take advantage of it. And plus you also said there's different seasons. You might say, in this moment, yes, I'm an author, but that might change, right? So can you elaborate on that one a little more? I think that's a helpful framing. Yeah, so that was actually strangely huge for me. I became most well-known for being an author. I still am most well-known for being an author. Most people know me as an author.

56:40and without even realizing it, I just kind of adopted that as like, oh, I guess I'm an author. And coming back to the creator world and doing content, rebooting my content business, it showed me, it's like, dude, you were successful before you were an author. You're not necessarily just an author. You can be whatever the fuck you want to be. You don't have to ever write a book again if you don't want to. And it's so simple, but that thought is so liberating. absolutely liberating. And so like that, that has been a big shift in my, my thinking about myself. I think that's a pretty big unlock. Like I'm more trying to think about or figure out what your frameworks to are to get to these philosophical unlocks again.

57:27Well, in my, my experience has just been like, run yourself into the ground. And then like, when you literally can't do anything else, like stop and think, think about like why, why you did that. God, it's a burnout. Exactly. Will's book came out November 21, and then my movie came out. I took six months off right when I moved to LA. And I originally intended to take one or two months off because of the burnout. But I was so running to the ground that it turned into six. And it just turned into this, part of it too was I had hit that, I guess, the financial escape velocity of I literally never have to work again if I don't want to.

58:07The combination of those two things of like, okay, all the stuff I did the last five years clearly just ran me ragged. And looking ahead, I literally never have to do anything I don't want to do ever again if I don't want to, right? So there's a huge amount of liberation in that. And so there was just like this very honest, slow conversation with myself over the course of months of like, what do you want to do? What do you want to do? Like over and over and over again. By the way, you said this too. You said that you can stop the power struggle at any time. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think this applies here, right?

58:45Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, we sign up for status games, I think, without realizing we signed up for them. And this kind of ties into like chasing numbers. Like the chasing numbers is the status game in the content business. And it's very easy to get sucked into that and lose track of that there are other things that matter. And I think that chip on my shoulder that I mentioned earlier of proving I'm legit, proving this is a real business, proving being able to go home to Christmas and be like, yeah, I actually do have a job. I think I didn't realize that that put me, I signed up for a status game and I wasn't aware I was signing up for it.

59:23And status games as a rule burn you out. Because you can't win them, and it's never enough. So at some point, the only way to win them is to stop playing. That's a perfect segue. So how can people stop caring about what people think about them? Because I think you're always going to care what people think, right? But it's like, what can you do to mitigate it? We will always care what people think about us. It's just a fundamental part of our wiring. The question is, what metric are you using to judge how people care. I had a tweet a long time ago, and it said that you'll never stop seeking validation from others, so seek validation from better people and for better reasons.

1:00:04You can sign up for a stupid status game, like who has the coolest car. I think we all kind of know that that's a dumb status game, especially if you don't have any money. But plenty of people sign up for it. That's an example of choosing to seek validation from a bad source and for bad reasons. So find better reasons. And I signed up for Status Games, which probably at the time helped me. It was like, become a best-selling author, do a bunch of traditional media. And that was helpful for a short period of time, but it ended up getting me in trouble. How did it get you in trouble? It put me in a position that I felt like I couldn't say no to opportunity.

1:00:44That world, like the Hollywood and publishing and everything, you're only as good as your last deal. And so it always felt like, okay, if I don't take this book deal, they'll never talk to me again. Or if I don't agree to help with this script, they'll never talk to me again. So I keep thinking about, does this guy want to talk about the movie at all? Yeah, yeah. What is the movie at a high level? And it doesn't seem like you really enjoy that experience, but you can tell me. Well, to be honest, I enjoyed the production process. I really, like, so the production company, which was like a Kiwi company called GFC, shout out to them, really nice people.

1:01:24Really liked them. The shooting of the movie itself was very enjoyable. The director was a really nice guy. Like, no complaints. Where things got really dissatisfying was when it came to the studio and the business side, right? How are they going to roll out the movie? What's my involvement with it? What's the promotional obligations? That's where our incentives diverged because I've got this huge audience online. Obviously, it's in my interest, just put it on Netflix or Hulu and then I'll just promote the shit out of Netflix or Hulu. Everybody go to Netflix, watch my thing. But that's not where the studio makes the most money.

1:02:03The way the studio makes the most money is if I send all my audience to a bunch of tiny shitty theaters or some pay-to-download platform that nobody's heard of. So they wanted me to do that. And I was like, no, absolutely not. There's no way I'm going to do that. And so there was just this really... It was very clear after a while that they exist in a different world than I do and we clearly don't see each other's perspective at all. and they weren't very transparent about things. They would kind of try to bullshit me. That's the other thing about if you're the talent, everybody just kisses your ass.

1:02:47They just tell you how smart you are and how excited they are to work with you, even if you're a total dick. So I was like, this is stupid. This makes no sense for my audience. I would try to explain step by step, here's my online business, here are my incentives, here's what's best for my audience, here's why I'm not going to do that. And they're like, it's so great working with you. We're so excited. We're going to come back tomorrow with a new PowerPoint and we're going to get this figured out. And then they show up the next day and the PowerPoint's exactly the fucking same. And I'm just like, okay, yeah, this doesn't make sense.

1:03:22So that part sucked. But it was very, very illuminating for me because it gave me a glimpse into that industry, how it operates and how dysfunctional it is at the moment. How nothing makes sense. They have no idea how to make money off. Unless you're Marvel, they have no idea how to make money off you. Nothing's making money. I can sympathize with where they're coming from. They probably thought, oh, this guy's got 4 million followers. Let's give him a movie. I bet he'll promote it and we'll make a bunch of money. Well, it's like, no, I'm not going to do that. I sympathize with where they're coming from, but it also made me realize the budget for the movie was probably around a million bucks.

1:04:07First of all, a million dollars can buy you a lot of really good YouTube videos. Second of all, if they just gave me the rights... and I sold it myself through my website or whatever, I'd probably make a huge profit and crush. so like what am I doing like why am I even signing these deals or doing these projects this kind of goes back to focusing on a what you're good at and what you actually enjoy doing and I think most people don't learn that until maybe some I think most people don't even they never learn this sometimes you have to learn the hard way right like getting tempted into a thing a bunch of things a bunch of like kind of prestigious or sexy things that you don't actually like, but you kind of talk yourself into liking it because it's going to scratch some itch your ego's got.

1:04:55So you have a quote here, learning more is a smart person's favorite way to procrastinate. It kind of sounds like mental masturbation. Like, is that what it is? For sure. This is something I actually learned very early on when I was coaching. Because I would every once in a while, I'd have a client who was like, off the charts intelligent, like just massive big brain. and they were often the hardest people to coach because anything you told them that they didn't want to do, they would come up with the best, most convincing reasons not to do it. Then I would spend the entire coaching session arguing with them.

1:05:32I don't want to call anybody stupid, but if I coached a guy who was just kind of your average dude, not super smart, I'd be like, hey, go do that, say this. and they'd be like, okay. And then they'd go fucking do it and it'd work. And it's like, wow, this is so much easier. So one of the things that I've long been aware of is that when it comes to emotional issues, intelligence can actually work against you. Because when you're smart, you're better at rationalizing and you're better at excuse making and you're better at learning. So like intellectualizing. And those are all forms of emotional avoidance.

1:06:11If you're super smart and you have an emotional problem, you're going to be much better at finding ways to not deal with it than somebody who's not smart. Similar to this, the average email that you get is, how do I stop feeling bad? What's your typical response to that? My most typical response to readers when they send in their life problems is to simply let them know that they're normal, that this is normal, it's okay. I think one thing that happens a lot is that When we deal with something very painful in our lives, first of all, we feel alone. And so it's very easy to convince ourselves that nobody understands what we're going through.

1:06:50And I have a very interesting and privileged position in that I am exposed to thousands and thousands of people's life issues throughout the year. And I see people from all over the world, every country, every gender, every background. You start to notice that it's just the same half a dozen things that just pop up in different forms and different cultures. And so if somebody sends me an email, I don't know them. I don't know their life, their values, their history, their relationships. So it's very hard for me to say anything that's super tangible and useful. But what I can do, pretty reliably, is be like, oh, it's another one of these emails.

1:07:34Got 900 of these this month. There's nothing weird about you. So these situations hurt. It's fine to let it hurt. I hope it gets better, whatever. You talked about how happiness comes from solving problems. Can you elaborate on that? Because everyone just wants to be happier. So I figured you might have this mastered already. Sure, yeah, I'm always happy, like 24-7. No, I think I like to frame happiness as the process of moving from one problem to a slightly better problem or from moving from problems you don't want to have to problems you like having. Because it's an inevitability that we're always going to experience problems in life.

1:08:18We don't have full control over the world. We don't always get what we want. Life is finite. We all age and die. Problems happen. So the question is, are you currently confronting and dealing with the problems that you want to be confronting and dealing with? Or are you confronting and dealing with problems that are kind of just thrust upon you? And I think a lot of what is considered self-improvement is learning how to direct yourself away from the problems you don't want and towards the problems you do want. I think that's what Tony Robbins said. Maybe it was Tony Robbins or maybe he quoted somebody else.

1:08:56But success is waking up and being able to work on whatever it is that you want to work on. Yeah. And then this extra I pulled from your book, Sort of Art of Not Giving a Fuck. So trying to avoid rejection is a sense of entitlement. Yeah, because if you try to organize the world in such a way that you never feel rejection or failure, the assumption there is that you are above feeling disappointment, right? Like that your feeling of contentment or satisfaction is more important than whatever is happening in the world around you. or is more important than what the person you're interacting with wants for themselves, right?

1:09:37So I think there's a very strong correlation between a sense of entitlement and just an inability to deal with reality. And the more we're able to deal with reality, the more we're able to destroy that sense of entitlement within ourselves. My friend was dating this Russian woman and he said she was being really difficult. And he said, why are you being so difficult? And she said, there's no strength without resistance. As you're saying that, remind me of that. So yeah. It's funny because within the context of relationships, I mean, this is the thing, right? I think some people kind of naively believe that the perfect relationship, there's no fighting.

1:10:20There's no disagreement. You're always on the same page all the time. And I actually think that would be a boring relationship with zero intimacy. I think part of what creates the sense of intimacy and closeness and trust is the fact that you have different values and you clash about those values, but you still respect each other and choose to be with each other despite those differences in values. Like that's what makes it meaningful. I think you're saying on a podcast that therapy has the biggest hit rate. It's not like going to any conference. It's not reading a book or anything like that when it comes to not just personal growth, but happiness in general.

1:10:53Can you elaborate on that and maybe give some examples of how you've done this? Sure. So this investigation maybe started with my own insecurity. When I started to blow up in my career and people started to take what I said seriously, I wouldn't call it a crisis, but I take very seriously the ethics of the situation that I'm in. If millions of people read my material, then if I give bad advice, that has real effects on my audience and on the world. So I became deeply interested maybe seven, eight years ago of like, okay, what actually works, right? Like what modalities and therapies have they studied and what are the results?

1:11:38Like what's the hit rate? Which form of therapy is the most effective? Are weekend interventions effective? Are books effective? Like they've actually done empirical research on self-help seminars, on self-help books. And it's actually super interesting. So therapy is the most effective intervention. It's the classic for a reason, right? But what's fascinating is that even therapy, well, first of all, two things are really interesting about it. The first one is there are dozens and dozens of different modalities of therapy. Like there's like an alphabet soup, you know, it was like CBT, DBT, RE, BT, like I could list a dozen of them.

1:12:18every single one they measure and they measure outcomes of patients they all top out around 40%. All these different schools of thought all these different academics and brilliant minds like Freud and Adler have come up with all these different modalities of intervening in people's lives. What does that mean by the way when you say 40 %? 40 % report feeling better a year or two later. and 60 % report no difference. That's just across the board. So when people come to me and they're like, what type of therapist should I get? I'm like, it doesn't matter. Just find somebody you like. The most important thing is just that you go and talk.

1:13:00That seems to be the common denominator. So therapy kind of tops out around 40%, which, by the way, is pretty shitty. Like anything, a 40 % win rate. And that's the best. And that's as good as it gets, right? Self-help content is generally, it's a weaker effect. It's around the same. It's like 30 to 40 % report feeling better, but it's a weaker effect rate. So it's like, if therapy takes you from, let's say from a scale from one to 10, your happiness is a five. Therapy might take you, like a successful therapy intervention might take you from five to seven or five to eight. Self-help will take you like five to six.

1:13:42So it does something. it's a little something and it doesn't always work but it's like it's something right there are two reasons i find this significant one is is that basically even the top experts in the field of psychology who have spent their entire lives studying this and practicing it in a clinical setting still are not very successful at it like we still don't really know what works we have not found anything that is a consistently highly efficacious intervention to help people feel better about their lives. That's the first thing that's super interesting. The second thing that's super interesting is that everything is kind of roughly the same.

1:14:23So what seems to work seems to have nothing to do with the actual theory itself. I could come up with all these cool little models. You see this in the self-help world a lot, right? You go to a Tony Robbins seminar, and he's got all these models and he's got charts and graphs and he's like, well, we start here and then we go here. And it turns out none of that shit matters. Probably what matters is the fact that you're sitting in a seminar room surrounded by a bunch of people who are in similar life situations as you. You're interacting regularly with them and your feelings and intentions are being validated by somebody you respect.

1:15:00That seems to be the common thread through all of this. And to me, that was very relieving because as just quote unquote, our random dude on the internet, I think I had like a lot of imposter syndrome around like, who am I to be giving advice? Like, why should anybody take me seriously? And when I dove really deep into it, I realized like, oh, well, nobody really knows what they're doing. So, you know, like, and actually what I'm doing, which I guess this kind of ties in the marketing, which is reaching a very broad set of people and exposing them to ask these questions of themselves. Fundamentally, that is the value.

1:15:42Do you think therapy and coaching can go hand in hand sometimes? Because sometimes the way I look at my coach is he's got range, right? He's been a VC, he's been a coach before, and he's also a good father too, right? And so it's like, I feel like good therapy just comes from good, asking good questions. Like, what's your take on that? I kind of put life problems, life issues in the two buckets. One bucket is people who are in a bad place and want to get to an okay place. You know, you're depressed and you want to not be depressed or you're somebody in your life. You had a horrible breakup and you want to get over the breakup, right?

1:16:18I think therapy is probably better for that. The second bucket is you're okay, but you want to be great. and I think that's where coaching comes into play more. Therapists don't really, like if you come into a therapist's office and you're like, everything's pretty good, like I'm pretty happy, but I want to be fucking crushing it. Like a therapist can be like, well. So therapy's level one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like therapy is kind of like bandaging the wound. Whereas like coaching's kind of like building the muscle. Oh, interesting. Never thought of it that way. Clearly you've thought about this.

1:16:50Let me ask you, I mean, because when I listen to a handful of your podcasts, It seems like you've really thought through all the different frameworks. I've been doing it 15 years. First of all, even before I did this professionally, I was a self-help junkie. I read all the books and watched a bunch of tapes and stuff. Then when I started doing it professionally, I took it very seriously. Studied everything, researched everything, read a bunch of old philosophy and psychology. so yeah it's you accumulate each one of these things that I'm saying is probably two to three years for me to arrive at that conclusion but it's just I've been doing it long enough now that I can kind of just spit these things out the last leg of this podcast will be on the relationships piece with dating and all that but you did mention that you're bullish on communities long term and I think that's super interesting because to me, let's say we're recording this in a software company, office, and I think if you want to retain your customers for longer, you need to build community because it's a retention mechanism.

1:17:56How are you thinking about community and how are you building it? I just feel like life is so atomized that in communities, it's a fundamental human need. We all need to feel like we're part of some sort of group. There's less supply each year and the demand is staying the same. It just makes sense to me that it's going to become more valuable and more important. I don't think anybody's necessarily solved it, really. A lot of companies and organizations have tried, but I just feel like it's something people are going to want more of. In-person events, in-person interactions, even just meetups, excuses to get together with like-minded people.

1:18:39We were talking about this before, that you have been used to working remote forever, but now that you have the video team, the video squad that you're putting together, it's a game changer. Working in person, so much. And it's funny too because with written content, I don't think being in person really matters at all. If I type up an article on a Google Doc, I can send it to you and get feedback and notes. It's not really any more efficient for us to be in a room together. The nature of video, being in a room, watching the same thing at the exact same time, commenting on like, oh, notice how the light here looks weird or whatever.

1:19:19It is so much more efficient. It's 100 times more efficient. And it's more fun. It makes the process more fun. You don't have to upload fucking gigabytes and deal a frame and all this shit. You get to sit in a room and it feels like play. So I'm like a recent convert to in-person working environments. And you also said this, I mean, outside of the working environment, people are longing for community because one, dating is getting harder, right? And people aren't getting married. A lot of people aren't having kids, right? You mentioned this, people are going to play pickleball, right? It could be anything.

1:20:01Work's going remote. Family formation is happening less often. People are becoming less religious. Those are the three most binding social commitments that pretty much all human civilization people had. You went to work, saw the same people every day. You went to church, saw the same people every week. went home, saw your family every day. So if we're losing all those things, what do we replace it with? Because we do have to replace it with something. We're not built to be happy without some sort of consistent socializing with like-minded people. Do you have any plans to build a community around, I don't know what you want to call them, the subtle arters or whatever?

1:20:47My experience in trying to build communities has been pretty dismal. I don't know if it's just like I'm not good at it or if I'm just not built for it but I don't have any hard plans to do that myself I'm open to doing it at some point in my business but it's definitely something I would hire somebody who's good at it And you're in a handful of entrepreneurial communities right now Frontier Club, whatever else Have those been helpful for you? Oh, huge and honestly 80 % of the value is just that sense of community. You probably feel the same way. If you hang out with somebody who's from the corporate world, even if they're a really cool person, it's really hard to relate.

1:21:34They don't understand your life, you don't really understand their life. So just having a group of entrepreneurs who get it, who deal with the same problems, who deal with the same stress, for me it's been a lifeline over the years. Here's another Twitter quote from here. The person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. The dream job you take is the job you stress over. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice. Whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. This was one of your top ones. Yeah, that thing crushes. We repost that every year.

1:22:10And it just does better and better. Every year it's one of the best performing posts of the entire year. I think it's because there's just something very fundamentally true and important that we all need to be reminded of, which is the way our brain works is that we tend to, when we dream about some sort of future or goal, we tend to only think about the positive aspects of it. If you think about your dream house, you just think about how awesome it's going to be to be in that house. you don't think about fucking toilet clogging or the repairs or the taxes or any of the icky, annoying stuff that comes with home ownership.

1:22:52That's a fundamental part of it. Same thing with getting a dog. Totally. Same thing with a relationship. I married a fiery Brazilian because I'm like, man, she's so passionate. She's so emotional. And then when we have a fight, I'm like, god damn, you have to be so emotional. Trade-offs. I'm like, well, that's what I chose. You choose your suffering. Yeah, exactly. You choose your suffering. I have a saying that I love, which is the best thing about a person or a thing is also usually the worst thing. I think it's important to walk in the things with that understanding. that the uniqueness of a person or an experience that is attractive to you is also probably the same thing that's going to cause problems.

1:23:44And so just be ready for those problems and make sure they're problems you like. Yep, okay. More here. So this comes from your book. So a healthy relationship is when two people solve their own problems. What do you mean by that? So an unhealthy relationship is when people try to fix each other. and they develop a savior complex. It doesn't work for a variety of reasons. Even though it sounds very unromantic, what a healthy relationship looks like is that two people work on themselves with the support and encouragement of the other. If I'm going through a hard time, it's not my wife's job to make me feel better.

1:24:24She should want to make me feel better. She should support me in trying to figure out whatever I'm going through, offer advice, be a shoulder to cry on, whatever. But it's not her job to go fix whatever's wrong in my life. And as soon as she and I tacitly agree that it's her job to fix whatever's wrong in my life, it fucks everything up. Because now I'm giving up my autonomy and my responsibility for myself, which hurts my self-esteem. and she's now taking responsibility for something that she can't control, which is my happiness. Which then creates an imbalance and then it creates resentment.

1:25:05Totally. And then it's a cycle. Totally. This is a problem I've had. So you overcame, I think you were an attachment foe before. Yep. And somehow you managed to justify marriage. So tell us what happened there. I'd like to learn more. There's a really great, interview of Daniel Gilbert. So Daniel Gilbert is like one of the top happiness researchers from Harvard. He had been in a long-term relationship with a woman for like 10 years, never married her because he never saw a point. And he was doing an interview with a journalist and Gilbert's research found that constraints actually promote happiness.

1:25:46Like there's something about our psychology that if you limit the number of options, we just tend to naturally become very happy with whatever option is left to us. Explains a lot of things in life. And so the journalist replied, he said, oh, maybe that's why married people are on average happier, which is true. He said, because if you put constraints on them and limit them to one person, they actually become extremely happy with that one person. They aren't always second guessing of like, oh, is this better? or should I date them or whatever. And Gilbert said that he was so profoundly impacted by that observation that he immediately went home and proposed to his girlfriend.

1:26:24Man, why did she stick around for 10 years? My answer to you, though, is my wife and I, we were together for like four years before we got married. And I spent pretty much the first three of those kind of constantly being a commitment phobe, constantly worrying, should I be with her? Should I go? Should we break up? And what do you think caused that? Some childhood trauma? Oh, yeah. Family dysfunction, all sorts of stuff. My previous relationships, I had been a piece of shit boyfriend. And so my goal with my wife was just like, okay, you don't have to be with her forever, but just don't be a piece of shit.

1:27:04Let's start with that goal. And I was successfully not being a piece of shit with her. And things were going well. But I was still having all these thoughts of maybe I should just dump her and run off to wherever. And it just kept recurring. And so it was driving me crazy and I made a deal with myself. I was like, okay. Because I would always come back to him like, am I happy with her? Yes, I'm happy. Am I happy with her? Yes. Do I see any reason why I might not be happy with her in the foreseeable future? No. so eventually I went through that thought cycle a number of times and I made an agreement with myself which is anytime I feel like going ask myself these questions and if the answers continue to be I'm happy, I'm going to be happy for the foreseeable future and I can't see anything that's going to change that don't fucking leave just suffer through it, deal with it and sure enough the more I dealt with it, the less it kind of popped up How long did you run that exercise for?

1:28:12Was that program running? Years. It got more and more manageable as time went on. When it came time to propose, I was fucking terrified. Like, absolutely terrified. The thing that actually kind of, it was funny, the thing that pushed me over the edge, we kind of reached that point where it was like, we should get engaged if we're going to stay together because we've been together for a long time. We're in our 30s. But I couldn't pull the trigger. And I had talked to a number of friends and family about it. I remember I was at dinner with my stepmom. My stepmom's old school, Texas, conservative, no bullshit, just lets you hear it, whatever she's thinking.

1:28:50My stepmom was giving me shit about it. She was like, why haven't you proposed to her? She's so great, you're never going to do better than her. What the fuck are you thinking? I was just like, I don't know. I told her the same thing I was telling everybody, which is like, how am I supposed to know if I'm going to be with her forever? How do I know if I'm going to be happy with her forever? There's no way to know that. My stepmom just looked at me and she was like, you're a fucking idiot. And I was like, what? And she goes, I've been with your father for 30 fucking years and I still wake up and wonder if I want to be with him forever.

1:29:26She's like, you never stop wondering that. You just choose to be with him. And I was like, oh. It's a choice. It's a fucking choice, yeah. At the end of the day, it sounds like a lot of self-control. Self-control is harder for different people with different things, right? For some people, not eating takes a lot of self-control. For some people, not drinking alcohol takes a lot of self-control. For some people, staying in relationships takes a lot of self-control. And I think at the end of the day, you can always kind of train yourself to do it. And again, this kind of comes back to choosing your problems, right?

1:29:59The thing that my stepmom said that shifted was like, oh yeah, you dumbass, you don't know what's going to make you happy 30 years from now. If you put it in the context of a business, you don't start a business because I'm going to be happy with this business when I'm 60. No, you just fucking wake up every day and just keep building. You just keep building. And if someday you wake up and the business is bankrupt or you fucking hate it and you're miserable, you quit and leave. And it's the same thing with marriage. You take the leap because there's a chance that will create a ton of happiness.

1:30:35You're investing in something that's going to compound value over time. That's the thing that's kept me happy. Actually, these days, I'm a huge proponent of marriage these days. And the big reason is because there was that very subtle hidden form of value that was compounding that I was never aware of. When you're only with a bunch of different girlfriends or partners for a short period of time, you never have enough time to see it compound. It's kind of like trading too much, and you end up losing a bunch of money. Whereas if you just fucking buy a really good ETF and sit on it for 10 years, you wake up one day and you're like, God damn, this is like twice as good as it was 10 years ago.

1:31:24I'm twice as happy with this person as I was. And I didn't do anything. I'm just here. Dude, you know, here's some context. I was giving my mom some shit a couple weeks ago. But I told her to buy Nvidia stock when I was like nine years old because I used to play a lot of games, right? So 10 grand would have became 6.3 million by now. So that is the power of compounding everyone. So look, I got a couple more lines for me. Also the power of taking stock tips from a nine-year-old. Dude, everything I told her to buy worked out. She just held on to it. Never a loser. Modern day dating advice. People are talking about hypergamy.

1:31:59It's adversarial. Women deserve less. It's about dating Eastern European women. So what is your take on this? Because you got the Tates out there. You got the Red Pill community and all that. And I enjoy watching it for entertainment. Because sometimes they invite people. They fight each other and all that. So what's your take on all this? Because look, you are like the top 0.1 % of this because you spent your 10 ,000, not 10 ,000 hours, 10 ,000 days plus on this. Sure. Okay, first of all, the hypergamy thing is fucking dumb. All right? Like people are attracted, people, not women, people are attracted to status.

1:32:35It's just that status markers tend to be different in males and females, right? Like getting mad at women for being hypergamous is like getting mad at men for being attracted to, you know, big boobs and skinny waist. Like it's dumb. Stop fighting nature. Well, let me share a story with you real quick. So, so, so on the Eastern European one, my buddy, my buddy's friend, he was like, you know, he got, he's like, I'm tired of dating American women are so entitled. I need an Eastern European woman. So he signs up for this language app. And so this Russian girl starts teaching him. He starts teaching English.

1:33:14They end up meeting and they end up getting married. Anyway, sorry. Okay. So I have a bunch of thoughts around this. Like, it's one of those things where it's not that they're wrong. It's like the Big Lebowski. It's like, you're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole. Like, it's not necessarily wrong. It's just I think they're taking the wrong conclusions away from it. Okay. First of all, let's take Western culture, right? Like, Western culture is complicated dating for a lot of reasons. one of the reasons is that women tend to be attracted to men who are more professionally successful than them statistically right now if you're under the age of 40 or 35-ish anybody like the average under the age of 35 the average woman is more successful than the average man more women are graduating college more women are getting entry level jobs women are moving up through the workforce quicker there's obviously like nuances and caveats and stuff like but if you're a 25 year old or whatever then yeah the average woman you meet is statistically going to be slightly more successful than you and then that puts you at a disadvantage and so you end up with this situation where it's like all the women want to date up professionally there's only a few men at the top and whenever you put men in a situation where they have a lot of options they never settle or commit and so you have this you have this classic situation that's been written about many, many times of women are in this conundrum of, do you date the rich playboy or do you marry the garbage man?

1:34:47There doesn't seem to be an in-between. So that creates a lot of frustration for women. There's probably a lot of commentary and discussion that can happen around second-order consequences of feminism and equality in the workplace and all that stuff. and yeah, a whole nother podcast. I think it's, and I think anybody who tries to just as a blanket statement say it's good or bad is stupid. Like it's way too complicated and intricate and there's way too much stuff going on. You know, like, yeah, there's all. It's like politics. Yeah, and there's just a lot of, like life is not simple, right? Like you can have a very good thing in society and culture, which is women's empowerment, and you can have negative externalities and negative side effects of that, which guess what?

1:35:39There are some negative externalities. So like that doesn't make it bad. It doesn't mean we should go back to 1950. It just means like life's fucking complicated. There's always trade-offs. Always trade-offs. So that is a thing. And I get it. Like if you're a guy who's like not in that top 10 % or whatever, and you're not really getting the pick of the litter, and you're dealing with a lot of women who feel like they should be doing better than you, then yeah, it's frustrating and it sucks. The geo-arbitrage of dating. What happens is these guys, they go to, let's say they go to Eastern Europe.

1:36:13They meet a girl there. She's super hot, super sweet, falls in love with them. They get married, whatever. What all these guys have diluted themselves into thinking, they've taken that experience and put it into, made it fit their narrative that feminism is evil, Western culture is evil. They're like, oh, Eastern Europeans, they get it. They're traditional. The women are feminine, all this stuff. Look how happy we are. I've lived in these countries. I lived in South America. I've lived in Eastern Europe. I've dated women in both places. That's not why they're with you. They're with you because all the Russian men are fucking broke and treat them like shit.

1:36:52And so when you show up and you actually listen to them and ask them for their opinion on something. and don't come home wasted and beat the shit out of them. They're like, wow, this is the best guy I've ever met. And whatever his shortcomings, I'm going to deal with it because holy shit, I'm never going to do better. So that's what they don't see on the other side of that. And instead they only see their own narratives about Western culture. So yes, there is an arbitrage opportunity there. There are a lot of very educated Eastern European women who are super smart, super sweet, very sexy. Same thing in South America.

1:37:32And if you are a just normal dude, an American, yeah, you can fucking find a 10 and do really well with them in some of these countries. But don't kid yourself. It's not because like, oh, these women just... It's the same entitlement that these guys are upset about in the American women, right? It's like they go to Russia and they're like, oh, finally, these women see how amazing I am. They appreciate my masculine enlightenment. It's like, no, dude. You're not a fucking drunk piece of shit like most of the guys she meets. Don't pretend like you're not. You're something special. It's an arbitrage opportunity.

1:38:18Sure, take advantage of it. I married a Brazilian. My wife's fucking amazing. I'm not going to pretend. And I mean, I don't, it's hard to say if I met her in the U.S. like what it would be like. But as somebody who lived in South America, like, yeah, the quality of women you meet is fucking through the roof. Men compulsively date, not for the women, but for the approval of other men. Yes. Dude, you dug deep to find that one. I used to say this. So when I was part of that, the pickup artist industry, I used to say this and people get really upset. To me, it was plainly true that the men, and I noticed this, and I noticed it in myself as well, if you actually really cared about feminine validation, you would just find a really nice girlfriend and stick with her.

1:39:12Because the best way to consistently get feminine validation is to have a really healthy long-term relationship with a woman. If you're a dude who's spending an inordinate amount of time, money, and energy going to fucking clubs. It is such an inefficient use of time and energy to get a scrap of approval from a girl that you're probably never going to see again and don't give a shit about. So why are you doing that? Why are you putting in all this effort and energy? Well, it's because you got your boys next to you who are doing the same thing. And it's a fucking video game. And you want to see who's getting the high score this weekend.

1:39:51everyone's comparing absolutely dude absolutely it's funny I went home and visited a couple old friends I grew up with and one of them he got divorced a couple years ago so he's single again and I went home and was hanging out with him and when was the first thing he did he fucking pulled out his phone and he's like dude check out the chick I'm banging like

1:40:18that's it this happens across the board full stop I had a friend, sold his company, nine-figure exit. He's divorced now. Every time I see him, the Instagram comes out. It's like nine different girls. Yeah. So again, it's like the Eastern Europe thing. There's nothing wrong with it. It's cool. It's fun. Don't get me wrong. It's fun to hang out with your buddies and be like, oh, dude, this chick was so hot. But don't fucking kid yourself what you're doing. It's not about the women. It's about the dudes. You're there. And this is the same thing with all the Tate shit. like all those guys like dude you don't care about fucking western culture you're there because you got pushed into too many lockers and like watching this dude and hanging out with your buddies who watch this dude makes you feel like more of a man that's it just be honest about it I love it well Mark this has been great what is the best place for people to find you online I don't know man fucking google me or youtube you there you go youtube me alright appreciate it man