#758 - Dr Orion Taraban - How To Hack Your Psychology And Become More Resilient

27:16I don't think that this is actually all that good for me, or this doesn't seem to aligned by vacating that from this isn't right. This is in directionally the wrong thing for me to be doing. That is a, that's pretty tough to pull apart. Oh yeah, it's very difficult. Oh, where did begin with that? So.

27:45Yeah, you need hard work in order to accomplish anything. So this problem is actually a problem that most people aren't going to experience because they're not going to hang in there, right? So this is like a second tier problem that people are subject to encountering. And when I say it doesn't feel right, I don't necessarily mean am I having fun or does this feel pleasurable in the moment. Sometimes this means like, do I feel weak? Do I feel ashamed? Is there a nagging sensation that there's something more important that I should be dealing with? And for a lot of people, they become successful at something that is like a step towards something else in life.

28:25Like for example, I for a long time worked as a test prep instructor and I got really, really good at test prep. I have a perfect score on the GRE, I've worked with thousands and thousands of people on this test. It's something that I got very, very good at. And that was necessary for me in my 20s because it paid my bills. It helped to subsidize my education. It was something that the market needed, even though it wasn't like, let's say, the fulfillment of my personal destiny. But I might have needed to go through that process in order to create the material conditions so that I might be able to launch that in the future.

29:01The idea, the problem is some people can get stuck there. They get stuck with some measure of success. They're thinking, oh, I'm actually making decent money. I had to work really hard to get here. Maybe this is the best that life has to offer. And that might not be true. That might not be true.

29:20So I wonder how people work out that, whether this is a transit period or whether they've outgrown the current modality that they're developing themselves within. Yeah, I made an episode about this long time ago, which is that winners almost always quit. The idea that winners never quit is probably incorrect, and it speaks to that kind of mental monologue that you were describing just a few minutes ago. The fact of the matter is that mastery is very, very difficult to achieve. And so anybody who actually succeeds in arriving there must have quit pretty much everything else in their lives in order to devote themselves single -focus on this one endeavor, right?

30:00So you actually have to quit pretty much everything else in order to arrive at some degree of mastery. Now, I think that once you have some success, you have some money, you have built a business or you develop some sort of fame, it's almost like you have a kitty that you can gamble with. And so it's possible now to take bigger risks without necessarily compromising the fundamentals of your lifestyle or your survival. And so that's why I think it's necessary for people to just get some sort of like stability in their lives. And then they can think about the next thing. They can think about the thing that's connected to, let's say, more personal fulfillment or their passion, whatever that means, as opposed to going after that right out of the gate.

30:46That might be poor advice for a lot of folks, especially young folks. There's a Jason Pargan quote where he says, accept that all of your heroes are full of shit. Your heroes aren't gods. They're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by sacrificing literally everything else. And that's the quitting that you're talking about. You got another idea which I loved about, overpaying is the cost of winning. And it feels like that's related here as well. Yeah, it's connected to the idea that getting what you want is disappointing. So basically I talk about how life is sort of an auction house.

31:17And the way to auction houses work is it's full of things that people want, but it's not a charity in order to achieve those goods. People have to out bid every other person in the room. It's not a perfect system, but it's kind of what we have developed in order to maintain some form of fairness or justice with respect to the allocation of zero -sum goods. Because the universe is abundant in its general's, but it's zero sum and it's specifics, right? So with respect to the analogy with life, it's not just about money, though it could be. It could mean that you have to work harder than anybody else.

31:55You have to work longer than anybody else. You may have to sacrifice your pleasure, your wellbeing, your social life, your friends. You might have to put that all into your offer to increase the value to surpass all of their bitters for that one zero sum good. And if you actually succeed in winning, it's because no one else thought it was worth that much. Like by definition, you must have overpaid, like the likelihood that you hit the exact correct minimum amount of value. If you went any lower, you would have been outbid is functionally zero. So you paid more for that than you needed to because no one else thought that that good was worth what you did.

32:38And so that's part of the disappointment of actually getting what you want is you probably overpaid. The idea is, wow, I finally won. I got what I was doing for, but look at all that I had to give up all of the years, all of the relationships, all of the opportunities that I've had a surrender to get this, was it worth it? That's a tough question to answer. And most people in order to resolve their own cognitive dissonance will say, oh yeah, That's definitely worth it. But the way I kind of reconcile that to myself is the goal is really just a pretext for the transformative process to achieve it.

33:14It's like most people can't win as they currently are. So the goal is the excuse to become better than what they currently are, to put themselves in a competitive position to achieve it. And that's the actual gold. That's the alchemical gold is the process by which the latest, the base metal is transformed into something precious. My friend Alex talks about how he spent I think five years building up his financial resources to the stage where he exit to the business and was able to put it all into this new project. And this is, you know, he'd worked for five years and he'd worked like a dog just so hard and then dumped it all into this new business and then the business partner sent it all to his girlfriend in Switzerland declared bankruptcy and he was back at zero and he thought those five years of my life and I have nothing to show for it, literally zero, like every single penny sent zero left.

34:14But within the next 12 months he made more money than in the last five years combined and then the year after that he made like 10 times or 100 times that much money and his point is not too dissimilar to yours, which is the real thing that he got out of that experience was the person who he became while he was doing it. And you discover who you are in the process of striving towards a goal. Everybody in the privacy of their own fantasies thinks that they're bigger, stronger, smarter, more clever than they probably truly are. And we often only get to see who we are in the competition for those zero sums that exist in the world.

34:56Like the goals are also an opportunity for us to get to know ourselves. It's very difficult to actually know who you are by thinking about it. The only way you can arrive at any kind of accurate self -knowledge is by taking action in the world and then examining and retrospect, well, what kind of person would have done this? Well, I did that, so maybe that's the kind of person that I am. It's not something that you can decide in your own cognition. It's very difficult to do. This is one of my criticisms with monk mode as a personal development strategy that it's great. You're going to do isolation, introspection, and really focus on you, but until you brushes up against things that you haven't selected, because you're going to go do, I'm going to run a 5K quickly or whatever.

35:47All right, but you chose the distance. It's not run until an undisclosed amount of distance where your mum is trapped under a car. Right? Like that's really unchosen training or suffering. People in CrossFit, they talk about how hard the workouts are. and you go, they are, they're difficult workouts, but you chose this modality. And the reason that you chose this modality is because you take a degree of pleasure from it. Now, if I was to say, you need to lie on the couch for three months and you're not allowed to train and you have to eat dog shit, like, that would be difficult. That would be genuinely hard because it's outside of your existing sort of paradigm of selecting things.

36:26So you're within this bracket. And Tim Ferris, I heard this quote from Tim Ferris, which is fucking fantastic. He said, running a business is a personal growth strategy masquerading as a vehicle for accumulating wealth. But by doing things out there in the world, you learn so much about yourself because you crash up against your inefficiencies and yourself out and your challenges with other people and your fears and your anxieties. And it's like, it's more like running on a treadmill than running on a road because the treadmill is continuing to move at a pace and you go, I can't slow down. I need to keep this business going.

37:06As opposed to being like, ah, you know, maybe my meditation session was a bit hard today. Maybe it was easy, no one knows. Like, you don't have an external counter of that. But when it comes to running a business or just testing yourself out there in the world or begins to the people, you do. That's why I think one of the best little psych hacks that a person can have is to choose whatever happens to them. This was something that the Stoics talked about. They delineated everything in terms of what was within my locust of control and what was outside of the locust of control. And the vast majority of things are outside the locust of our control.

37:39And the proper attitude to develop towards these things is a difference. And to choose it, like Epictetus talked about how if Zeus wants me to be sick, then I want to be sick as well. I want what fate has in store for me. And by choosing it, you take some degree of psychological control over it, and you can kind of wrestle with it. You say that there's something in here that can better me. There's something in here that I want in almost like a massacistic way. Like I can take this, I can struggle with this and come out, potentially reborn on the other side of it. Like that's an indomitable mental set.

38:24Yeah, there's a study that I heard Matthew Hussey talk about, which you'll probably be familiar with, two hamsters, one who gets to run on the wheel when they choose attached to another wheel that has a hamster in that only runs when the other one chooses to. You see that? I don't know this study, but I can picture it. Basically, you've got one that's got internal locus of control and the others got external locus of control. One is running under their own volition and the other is being made to run when the other one chooses to. And a pretty nasty experiment, you know, if you imagine that there was someone that did something compulsively and you had to do it at the same time, it would be pretty painful, but very interesting, the stress levels of the two hamsters when you compare them together are just night and day, completely different.

39:13And yeah, if you are, this is the mental equivalent of that. If you can try and take a little bit of power back from whatever it is that's occurred to you, I chose this as opposed to like, I am happening to it. It is not happening to me. And of course, even the hamster who could get on the wheel whenever it wanted was an cage. I mean, it had very strict limitations on what it could do. So we're really talking about just a relative difference. Most of us in terms of our human experience are the second hamster. There's the universe is just so much larger than we are and it was set into motion a long time ago We're coming up against forces that are rippling from Cross the stars All we can really do is choose how we want to respond to them Some Victor Frankl talked about this.

40:05It's like sometimes you were in a situation where there is no possibility of escape And so all you can really do is choose how you respond to that and And he saw that there was an opportunity for dignity and self -transcendence and even the most, you know, important circumstances. You mentioned just before about how you doubled up or tripled up on work to get you through your studies and that you realized it was a stepping stone between you and something that you wanted in future. I'm going to do these things because in future it will get me toward a position that I want. What's your belief about whether people should grind out in their 20s or not?

40:48I think it's a really important thing to do. But everybody's on their own path. I initially wanted to be an actor. I was a professional actor in New York City for about 11 years. And I spent most of my 20s pursuing that. And I would travel around the world and do shows and party and lived a life of a bohemian. And looking back, I couldn't have chosen to live my life differently because that's who I was. I'm sure if well -meaning Orion got in a time machine and said, hey, look, man, you know, your lifetime earning is going down and your real passion is psychology and helping people and self -discipline and he'd be like, I go fuck yourself, buddy.

41:25So like, I had to live the life that I lived because that's who I was, right? And that put me on one level behind some of my peers who in their late 20s were already, they've gone through medical school, they've gone through law school, they have their secure lifestyles, they were partnering up, they were having children, they were buying houses, and I was still living in subsidized housing in Brooklyn, you know, from month to month. And that's a harder look, the older that you get. Right? So then I entered into a period of grinding where I burned all my boats. There was no plan B and I worked 120 hour weeks for five straight years without taking a day off.

42:10It was awful. But it positioned me to create the life that I lived today. I remember Whenever when I was back in that housing, I was visualizing my life, like down to the decoration of the office that I wanted to have. And I realized eight years later, I had arrived there. Like it took me eight years to actually manifest the dream that I had when I was in my late 20s. And I think that's about right. I think it can take seven to ten years to make a dream a reality. And I call that like a chapter of life. And people have several chapters to their lives, but they don't have an infinite number of chapters.

42:49You know, what is it like average age is 70, maybe 10 years at the, so like maybe 50 good years divided by seven. So you get maybe a seven or eight good chapters in your life. You got to, and so like, what's the theme of this chapter? What do you want to have accomplished at the end of it? Where do you want to position yourself for what happens next? I think it's really, it takes so much more work than most people think in order to achieve a goal, to make a dream come true. But that's really what life is about. Life is like the dream making factory, man. This is where it happens. This is where you get to make it real.

43:26There's nothing more thrilling and exciting about this. I don't know what your spiritual belief is, but that could be why there's all of these spirits floating around just can't wait to get down here on earth to make something happen. Cause this might be the only show in town. It's exciting to think about uncertainty of the future and I understand it and I see it myself, like it's anxiety inducing. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't have certainty about the fact that things are going to work out or that my dreams are going to occur correctly or what I don't even know what's going to happen in 10 minutes time.

44:00I don't even know the next words that are going to come out of my mouth, but there's something thrilling about that and it's one of the reasons why I've increasingly been spending less and less time on the internet. I've been spending less time on social media, even though it's like partly my job. I've been trying to find a way to get the information that I need to not be completely siloed off and totally hermitted. So I don't know what's going on in the world, whilst also not being trapped by a lot of the tenor of the internet, because the tenor of the internet, at least a lot of what I see at the moment, is very fatalistic.

44:38It's not even. It's either a factory, which is a type of dream. Yeah, I suppose so, but I was about to say I don't know if it is a nightmare factory. Like at least the nightmare factory would involve, it would be exciting. It's more vanilla and beige than that. It's like this sort of slow, trudging walk toward inevitable boring despondency. I don't know. Like it's just, I'm not a massive fan of a lot of the trends that I see on the internet at the moment, despite the fact that I curate a lot of things very carefully. And yeah, it makes me, when I think about it, when I truly, truly connect with this stuff, it makes me sad.

45:13It makes me sad to think how many people perceive the world in a way that is so unintentional, so non -agentic. They're not a sovereign individual. They don't have control over their outcomes or their future. Things happen to them. Things happen for other people, but that's not going to be for them. And yeah, it's unfortunate. Now, that is a difficult situation for one person to get in. The point at which it really starts to rile me up is when those people begin to try and convince other people that that's the case. I'm like, yo, you can be as despondent as you want. Is that your choice? The free world debate's way longer than we've got time for.

45:56But you can be as despondent as you want. But there is nothing more perverse and toxic than trying to convince other people that they're living inside of the nightmare that you believe that you're already inside of. Like that to me seems to be like, I don't know. I think the world would be a significantly better place if those people just weren't allowed to talk. Hmm. Well, it's their way of reducing their own cognitive dissonance. I assume because the presence of other people who don't see that life is a nightmare, who are living their lives in a energetic way and moving in the direction with hopefulness and confidence towards their goals is a palpable counter example, counter evidence, counterfactual to their entire worldview, it denies the validity of that worldview.

46:55And that's embarrassing because it, in some deem recess of their minds, calls up the possibility that things could be different and that they could be wrong. And that's actually very difficult to approach. Like, there are actually some correlates here with depression. Like, I've worked with some folks who have been depressed for years and years and years. And at a certain point, after a certain amount of treatment, they do come to the understanding that maybe they've prolonged this condition longer than was necessary. Maybe they have been willfully mired in this state. And the possibility of recovery is isomorphic with admitting that they kind of did this to themselves and that they might have been wrong for years.

47:54And that's really difficult. That's the sunken cost fallacy, right? And so if I actually get better, it kind of admits that I could have done this earlier and I'm having real trouble making sense of that. Does that make sense, Chris? Absolutely. Yeah. You talk, we both have talked in research a lot about dating. Have you spent much time looking at the black pill, in -cell movement and those communities? Have you spent much time in them? Well, I'll answer your question. But first of all, to your point, I actually don't consume a great deal of content on the internet, just like you were discussing.

48:37Part of that has to do with I want to keep my content as original as possible. And I don't want to be unconsciously or unduly influenced by other people's ideas. I think that a lot of the value that I have to provide has to do with kind of being an independent critical thinker. And I'm very careful about consuming content with respect to dating and intersectional dynamics because there's a lot of angry men, there's a lot of angry women, and there's just a lot of hopeless and despondent folks. I knew about the existence of Black pill, like abstractly, but I had never actually met somebody who identified as Black pill.

49:19That changed when I, when my channel became more successful. And I could see some of the comments that were left on some of the videos. And I was taken aback by how hopeless and despairing some people out there are with respect to women and relationships. So William Costello, one of my good friends, he's the number one researcher of in cells on the planet. And he was either the guy from the UK Irish don't say don't say that careful excuse me excuse me. I think I've watched some of you. I think you've had him on twice And I think I've watched both of them. So he was he was wonderful. He's really brilliant and you know, he's doing this huge a bunch of huge studies at the moment.

50:05Anyway, he uh He told me about ascending. Have you heard this word before? Mm -hmm. Yeah, so ascending for the people that don't know is Rising out of the insolace fear potentially becoming a viable mate and maybe getting a girlfriend friend. But what he told me, which was really interesting and it kind of leads to what you were talking about, I think the key word was hope. Right? If you believe that things can be better, hope is painful because it posits an ideal. And as soon as you pos it an ideal, you then begin to compare yourself to that ideal. But if you just assume fatalism that nothing can change, this is the way that things always are.

50:45There is no hope. Nothing can be altered at all, there is no such thing as an ideal. The ideal and reality fit together because you are constrained. You're constrained by that. And he told me that in some of the chat rooms, they'll say with regards to ascending or becoming a fake cell, as it's called, that I said, oh, so if you got a girl's number or if you run a night out and you ended up sort of kissing somebody in a nightclub and he was like, no, no, no, much, much smaller than that. So So if you went to Starbucks and the baristas eyes lingered on you from half a second longer than you thought and you were to go back and post him one of the forums and say, this thing happened to me today.

51:29The problem with that is if everybody is completely locked into their position, if all insults can't get laid, if there is absolutely no hope to them, then there is no hope for any of the others. But if one of them ascends and becomes, get a girlfriend, well, what does that mean about me? Maybe that means that the onus and the locus of control is on me as opposed to out there in the world. I'm not constrained by things that are immovable and infallible. I am the architect of these things that occur because egg user 2997, they just did it. And they just managed to do it. And that's, it's an un -fulsified, in many ways.

52:12And I have an awful lot of sympathy as well for the Insel movement. And I'm writing an article at the moment about that. But it is a completely impossible to disprove philosophy because anybody that doesn't adhere to the philosophy gets accused of not being one of the members at all. Like if the only people who ascend to fake cells, then there's no such thing as an Insel because it's just anybody that isn't all of these things that's outside of them in the second that someone breaks those rules They weren't one of us in any case I Have a few thoughts on this so for a couple of years I did my pre -doctoral internship at the Cancer Support Community in Walnut Creek, California where I was doing therapy with stage 4 cancer patients and often their caregivers or their children and that was a very difficult placement that was the first time in my life I had experienced that much sickness and loss and death.

53:13I remember leaving that placement and crying. The tears would just be coming out of my eyes as I was driving home every day. I learned so much about life from working with those folks. And hope was something that would always come up in our group and individual therapy sessions. and hope is a very personal thing because there is a time when the person is not going to get better with a certain disease and holding on to hope longer than is justified can just create more and more pain like it is a roller coaster hope. But it's not for me or for anybody else to say when it's time to kill the hope.

54:02For some people, as long as there's life, there's hope. For other people, especially those who are dealing with the disease, sometimes they're more comfortable giving up the hope than their wives and their husbands who want them to keep fighting no matter what. So hope is not a unilateral positive, like in the myth about Pandora's box in which all the evils were released into the world, well, the only thing that remained inside the box was hope. Hope was in the box with all the other stuff. Like, why would that be the case? Sometimes some folks have positive that hope is the evil that lives within.

54:42It's inside the box with all the other bad things. So it's not unilaterally good because it can create so much pain and suffering. I hope is a very tricky thing. We need it more than we think. Like the ability to feel like things could actually improve without that life would be a slaughterhouse. It would be an absolute miserable hell. And people experience hope in ways that they're not even conscious of experiencing. So that's one thing. The second thing I wanna say particularly about in cells, because it's also related to depression. So there's many different forms of narcissism. And I know that's a loaded word.

55:26So I'm kind of going to approach this more clinically, which is we all kind of start out narcissistic. All children are inherently narcissistic because they can't do perspective taking, which means that their empathic ability is completely offline. Like they can't help but think that the center of the world. And as they age, then the world generally more or less, softly or more or less, harshly beats that misconception out of them, right? When we talk about narcissists, it's individuals who, for whatever reason, have avoided disabusing themselves of that fallacy of the necessity for perspective taking theory of mind, et cetera, et cetera, into adulthood.

56:06But there's many different kinds. You look at the DSM and you just see one flavor of narcissists, which we might call the grandiose narcissist. I think that I'm the God's gift to women. I can't I can't not succeed. Everybody loves me. I'm far more important and powerful than I actually am. But we might pause that there's another form of narcissism that's called like inverted narcissism. An inverted narcissism, I think, is very much related to depression. It's the idea that like, Oh, I'm so broken and damaged that nothing could possibly fix me. Happiness is for something else. It's not for me. It's like a negative form of specialness.

56:49I'm so broken that I'm a unique exception to the rule. This treatment would never work for me. This protocol would never help. I will, because I'm this special negative exception to the general rule. And that's a form of narcissism. And it's very difficult to... I have a lot of sympathy for narcissists. I've worked with some of them clinically. I've worked with enough of them to know that they're actually very scared hurt children underneath. And they've done the best they can develop this wall of defenses around them. And when that narcissistic facade, which could be, I'm fantastic or I'm so uniquely the negative exception to everything.

57:37When that collapses, they're back down being the scared, shivering four -year -old, even if they might be 30 years old or 60 years old. And they kind of have to begin building up emotionally from there, which is a very daunting prospect if they've already lived decades of life. But there's really no other way that they can begin to ground themselves authentically in their own being. And it can work work. Like after that narcissistic collapse, people can begin to build themselves up based on their authentic foundations, but it's very, very difficult to do. So I think that this phenomenon that you describe in the Insel movement is sort of related to this is that I am this unique negative exception.

58:18In grad school, I learned in my assessment class that But people would rather be told that they have below average intelligence than average intelligence. If you gave somebody an IQ test and you had to administer and interpret the results, more people needed counseling and consoling to be told that they were average intelligent than if they were below average. Because on some level, it's like, I was special in some way, even if that specialness was negative. That seems to be almost like a badge of honor to a lot of folks. There's nothing that more people fear than just being average, which most people are by definition, of course.

59:04That is fascinating. I absolutely love that story. I learned about herostatic fame. What's it have? From my friend Gwinda, a couple of weeks ago, herostatic fame. many people would rather be hated than unknown. In Ancient Greece, Herastratus burned down the temple of Artemis purely so he'd be remembered. Now we have nuisance influences who streamed themselves committing crimes and harassing people purely for cloud. And it's not too dissimilar to what you were just talking about, which is that people would rather be special but suboptimal than average. average at all. We see that all the time in adolescence when there's trouble in the household or emotional neglect, they often act out.

59:53And most people, no matter what their chronological age is, are emotionally adolescent. Yeah, that's interesting. Given that you've worked with, and you know, I think you work exclusively with men, in my clinical practice, I work exclusively with men, but I do consultations with men and women. Gauy, what do you think about the effectiveness and challenges of therapy for men and women? There's a lot of talk on the internet at the moment, a lot of criticism about therapy for men. It's gynecentric, it's female focused, it's designed for women, it's instantiated by women. What have you come to learn and understand about the role of therapy for men?

1:00:37and its effectiveness and challenges? I think it's something that really does change depending on the gender match between the client and the practitioner. I know that there are certain topics in particular that men would likely feel far more comfortable talking with another man. These include anger and aggression. These include their own sexuality. These include discussions of power. And I think that there are other topics, including the use that women are going to feel way more comfortable discussing with other women. And that's fine. But the idea that the way that men communicate is the way that women should or vice versa, that's not quite true.

1:01:21And the vast majority of talk therapy for better or for worse is geared towards women. I think 85 % of my cohort in my professional school were women. I interviewed at places that didn't have a single man on staff, like the vast majority of all kinds of mental health provisioners are women. The vast majority of mental health service clients are women. I mean, they use therapy three to four times as often as men do. So it's sort of like reflected in that marketplace. And I think that the way that men and women approach problems, there's a lot of overlap, but there's also some fundamental differences, fundamental differences that are kind of revealed in some of the stereotypic arguments that happen between men and women in relationships.

1:02:10A woman comes home, she's out of sorts about something to happen at her job, and she's talking about it. The guy starts offering solutions. And the woman says, I just want you to listen. He's like, of course I'm listening. That's how I know that I think that this is going to work. I just want you to just sit there and listen, well, what the fuck is that going to do anything? How is that going to help? Ah, you just don't get it. Yeah, I guess I'll find you just want this problem. So it doesn't work. Women actually just want to talk a lot of the times. And if they can get it out, they feel better.

1:02:37And a lot of guys are just scratching their heads like, how does that help anything? Like, most men are more problem solution oriented. They're action oriented. they want to solve the source of the problem as it exists in reality, either out there or in here, and then they can move on with their lives. A lot of men, including myself, see talking simply for the sake of talking to be more or less pointless endeavor. It's very interesting. I've started back therapy in Austin. I've been doing it maybe three, four months now, three months form and something like that. It's very interesting, but it's made life in some ways more difficult because it stirs up things that are much more difficult to forget about.

1:03:22You know, like, your story about Victor Hugo. It's very interesting, and I'll probably be thinking about that at some point. So I'm like, oh, that's cool. I got this image of Victor Hugo. But if I want to forget about it, it's not going to be keeping me awake tonight. But if you have a particularly or at least in my experience of a particularly illuminating therapy session, there are things about myself that I literally didn't know existed three hours ago. And two hours ago I stepped out of the therapist's office and now I'm sitting down at dinner and all I can think about is this new thing.

1:04:00And it's great. You need to go through the world as a functioning person. You need to not permanently be thinking or talking or expousing and expanding on whatever the fuck thing was that you just talked about. Right? That wouldn't be good. You need to keep things, it stirs up in at least the best approximation I can say is it It stirs up things that are sufficiently deep, that it's very hard to not think about them and that's relatively rare. That won't last forever. I mean, if this is something that kind of blindsided you that you didn't even know existed inside of you, it's going to take some time for you to integrate that into your preexisting personality structure.

1:04:51And so maybe there will be some time that you'll have to devote to making sense of what you've learned about yourself. but that won't be forever. I started. That's the bottomless pit of as yet undiscovered things that are going to be. There might be. There might be, but there might also be. There might be diminishing returns of investment for you to seek them out and integrate them into your existence. Like maybe you're doing a good enough job as it were given your pre -existing self -knowledge. You know, and for a lot of people, that's the truth. And they run into issues when they're preexisting self -knowledge and their behavioral routines and their worldview come up against something that creates pain, that creates suffering.

1:05:39There's friction, there's resistance, there's failure in loss, and they don't know how to handle it using their preexisting knowledge base. And so that's the time to potentially go in and grow and expand. But yeah, there's a time to plant. There's a time to reap. There's a time to just get on with the business of living as opposed to introspect simply for the good of introspection. Yeah, that's a really interesting point thinking about when you're supposed to stop doing all of these practice runs and actually just get out under the field of play and make things happen in the world. Again, this is another criticism I have around monk mode, which is the purpose of monk mode is supposedly to prepare yourself and improve yourself to become a better version of you.

1:06:33So that then you can step out into the world as a more fully formed, better, more social, more likable, more successful, better balanced person. But monk mode as an end in itself cuts off the Y and just continues the how for forever. Bill Perkins says delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification. And monk mode can be very gratifying, which is great. And I had huge success. Huge, huge success sat on a couch in Newcastle upon time doing breathwork or meditation or journaling or reading or fucking Yin yoga or whatever it was I was doing that month. But I realized the addictive nature of it, especially if you're a, it's a particular pitfall if you're someone that's a little bit introvertedly inclined because it legitimates your own retreat from social life and it gives you nobility in isolation and that is something where you need to go, okay, like that's cool, like it's cool that I'm doing this on my own and it's great and This is my rocky cutscene, but the purpose of the rocky cutscene is to then prepare him to go and do the next thing, which is really good.

1:07:46Sticking around and just doing it on your own, I think results net overall in a loss. I would agree. And I think that monk mode is probably the less common manifestation of this. More common manifestations of this socially aren't like education, just for the sake of education. There's a lot of young people because of the way the educational system works. They haven't developed any kind of self -direction. They go to college more or less because it's expected. They graduate and they think, I'm unprepared for adult life. Maybe I'll go get a master's degree. And they do that for a year or two and they graduate and they're a little bit older and they're still unprepared for it.

1:08:23Maybe I'll get a doctorate. That definitely happens. Or therapy. It's just like therapy is not a means to its own end. It's a means to get back on your feet to move on with the business of life. And to use your point about the Rocky Couch scene, the reason why he's training at all is because he has an upcoming fight with Apollo. Without that fight, there would be no necessity for him to train. People who are training without the fight may become trapped in that training as a means as an end to itself. So I think the goal is really, really important. The goal is the pretext for action and also let's you know when you get to stop Because you should be good enough relative to what you actually need to accomplish in the world There's a time to move forward.

1:09:08There's a time to move on. I Think that there's a reverse as well which is the important never Being gotten round to because the urgent always gets in the way and that is oh, you know therapy or the gym or diet change or having that conversation with my partner or leaving that apartment that's in a dangerous area of town or exiting a relationship that I don't like, whatever, I'll do that when, dot, dot, dot, dot, there's not so much stuff on the plate when we're not so busy, when we're not whatever, whatever, whatever. And this is the reverse of what we're talking about. There's never an ideal time or to see it another way.

1:09:49Now is the only time that action can occur. The present moment is the only time in which we can do anything. So if not now when, it's like I've never seen tomorrow. I'm 41 years old, I've never seen it. I'm losing hope that I ever will see it. You know what I mean? So it's like if I want to do something now is the perfect time to do it because it's literally the only time anything can be done. You can begin to expand your conception of temporal reality in that way to have the present moment like dilate and expand both instances in the past and the future. And you can see that now you're poised for action in the present moment.

1:10:33This is the moment that you've been waiting for. Your whole life is actually conspired to bring you to this exact point. Now is the time to act. I love it. Orion, Tyraban, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with your work. They want to check out all the things that you do. Where do you want people to head on the internet. Certainly. Well, I have a YouTube channel called Cycaxx, so you can find my content there. My website is OrionTeribandSidee .com. There are links on my YouTube channel. My side business is that GRE self -study program. It's called Stellar GRE.

1:11:04That's the only empirically validated test prep system on the planet. I wrote all the content myself. It's also the most affordable option on the market. So if you're going to grad school, you might as well check it out, stellarjerry .com. Oh yeah. Ryan, I really appreciate you. I'm a massive fan of your work and I look forward to shutting you again as well. This was great Chris. I was really happy to meet you. Thanks for having me on. And Doug, here we have the Lemo Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their core insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by His natural ally Doug!

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