#961 - Mark Manson - 19 Raw Lessons To Not Mess Up Your Life

28:17They are actually highly conformist, real NPCs, if you will, they're just conforming to a fringe. So being a black sheep is still being a sheep, basically. And it's crazy how many people think, I'm not one of those followers of whatever the mainstream thinks that's for the fucking NPCs sheeple. And you go, yeah dude, you're even worse. You're being puppeted by the inverse of what those people are doing. So similar to the... It's like hipsters. Correct. Yeah, I need to drive, I don't need to care about fashion. It's like purposefully not caring about fashion. Is it caring about fashion? Yeah, it's precisely just the reverse.

28:53You're not even doing it right. You're doing it the opposite. Another one that's similar to that is deliberate de -optimization. So picking the small areas of your life in which you're going to try and optimize. Yes. And letting the rest of them go. And this is sort of the curse of the perennial insecure overachiever that, well, I need to get my health perfect, but I need to have the right number of credit cards to maximize my flight points because I can get a little bit more. If I sign up for three amaxes at once, it means that Delta gives you the thing. But I mean, it's going to take me five days to set everything up and then there'll be a lot of forms and the forms were wrong.

29:27but once I've done that, so picking, okay, what are the areas that really matter to me? I'm going to optimize in those and the rest of them just letting them fall away because the stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than the imperfections will. And we'll take up so much fucking time that you could literally do, you could spend your entire day by hacking. In order to extend your life and in the process of trying to extend your life completely fucking waste your life. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you live an extra 50 years, but you spend 70 years optimizing spreadsheets to live those 50 years, like you're actually not negative.

30:04Right, fuck it. All right, confidence and fear, both required believing in something that hasn't happened yet. At a certain point, you have to consider that you're choosing to be afraid. This ties into the layers of stories, right? Like, I mean, this kind of comes from, I take a lot of, a lot of my influence comes from Buddhism and just the core precept of Buddhism, other than life is suffering is just like, not knowing, like you don't know anything and developing a certain level of comfort in that and still being able to function despite it.

30:48And again, I think this comes back to the narrative thing. Like our brain is a prediction machine and as its predictions come in forms of stories about what's going to happen Is it going to be a good thing? Is it going to be a bad thing? Is it going to go well? And it's going to do it whether you like you can't stop it. That's just what the brain does But you don't necessarily have to believe it. You can watch those stories come and go. You can train your brain to watch those stories come and go, right? and without necessarily identifying or attaching to them. And I just think, A, most people aren't aware of that.

31:28And then B, even if they are aware of it, they like, it's easy to lose track of what stories are narrative you're buying into, or the fact that you can even like kind of choose to find more helpful stories than I am to if you want. So yeah, it's just another one of those, George Orwell's got this great quote of like, seeing what's in front of one's nose takes a constant effort. Like, it's often much easier to see what's here than what's here. And I love that metaphor just because it's all of this stuff that I write that it's like, that's what it is. It's right here, but because it's here, like, I don't see it.

32:10You can't see it. I'm focusing on you. Right. And it's constant. I wonder whether at some point you have to admit that you're choosing to be afraid. I wonder whether part of that is that was so identified with our thoughts. But it's more real to us than reality because reality's final touch point before we actually understand it is our thoughts. We filter it through our brains before we then start to tell ourselves the story of whatever that is, and then the stories are molested by the filter as well. So, yeah, confidence and fear both require believing in something that hasn't happened yet. Okay, so we have an upward aiming trajectory, an downward aiming trajectory, you could say, sort of abundance, mindset, scarcity, mindset, optimism, pessimist, whatever.

33:02And if you assume that you can choose to be confident, I can choose to believe that this is going to go well. So, okay, are you also choosing to believe that it's going to go badly in that case? Yeah. It's like the fundamental attribution era. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a confidence equivalent of the fundamental attribution era. I heard this really great insight. Anybody that's been to therapy for a while immediately starts looking at their parents and you start to think, okay, well, fucking. Why are you like this? And this thing happened because of that and that's because of them and so on and so forth.

33:37Much of the time people are happy to lay their shortcomings, their avoidance attachment and their rampant fucking over sexualization of themselves and others and their need for external validation, happy to lay all of that at the feet of their upbringing. Very rarely do they lay their strengths at the feet of their upbringing. Yeah, it's like, but what about your confidence and your resilience and what about the fact that you work really well I mean, I'm not even willing to solve that. No, no, no, that was a big, I self -authored my strengths. But my weaknesses were imposed on me. And it's kind of an internal equivalent of that here.

34:12When it's, why are you choosing fear and not confident? I mean, there's many ways, right? It's not all fucking, you are insufficient and this is your problem and blah, blah, blah. We've got negativity, fucking rampant negativity bias. But the choice is that. There's also an element of the strategic incompetence here too, like it's, let's say I choose to fear coming on this podcast, right? I'm like, oh my God, I'm going on modern wisdom. He's gonna bring the big lights. Don't say it like that. He's gonna bring the big lights this time on. I'm so nervous. And that gets me sympathy from people. That gives me, it's a way to lower expectations.

34:50Lower expectations for myself. Maybe it's a way to kind of brag to certain people. Maybe after I do the show, I'm like, oh my God, I bomb. This is like going so horribly and then like I get to go home and like get more sympathy and validation from people and then Positive reinforcement went dude. It went so well. Oh my god You have such high standards for yourself. Yeah, you know, it is mark your problem Your problem is like you're amazing and you don't even see it Like you're just have such high standards for yourself. This is this is getting good. Yeah, and now now we're getting to I can't do it I can't do it in a Latino accent.

35:20I'm afraid sorry. This is now we're getting to it But yeah, you know what I'm saying though, like it's fear, there's social value in fear just in that it generates attention and awareness for yourself. And I think some people almost get like, sometimes I think like people who have anxiety, it's almost like a fear addiction. It's like this like compulsive validation seeking that happens through always being worried about something. And something's always going wrong. There's always a fire to put out. It is a consistent way to draw attention to yourself, draw reassurance to yourself, bring validation to yourself.

36:08And so I do think it's like people, there are very subtle incentives around people to like choose the fear narrative. Yeah. That maybe they aren't aware of. This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep. If you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold, this is going to help. It automatically cools down or warms up each side of your bed up to 20 degrees. It's got integrated sensors to track your sleep time, your sleep phases, your HIV, your snoring, and your heart rate with 99 % accuracy. It'll even start cooling or heating your bed for you an hour before bedtime, which is why 8Sleep has been clinically proven to increase total sleep by up to one hour every night.

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37:15That's e -i -g -h -t sleep .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom, a checkout. I had a great conversation with this guy, Dr. Russell Kennedy's, the anxiety MD, Dr. Guy, specialized in anxiety. He's equally bottom up as well as top down, which I really love. So he's, okay, what's happening in the nervous system? Can we do some breath work? Can we get you to fucking meditate and chill out a little bit? And what's the story of telling yourself, do you need CBT, do you need act therapy? Blah, blah, blah. So I wrote this little essay that I'm going to read to you about it after this week. I've been thinking about impediments to happiness and I can see two obvious roadblocks.

37:49First, is wanting things to be different. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing, when nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something. If you want the world to be different, your happiness is held hostage until that change occurs. others. Sometimes, this is an actual change you need to make. To leave an unhappy relationship, change for an unfilling career, complete a difficult conversation, and we will often remain in years of misery to avoid a few minutes of pain. The second roadblock, this is the one that's related, is uncertainty.

38:20Humans never genuinely pursue happiness, they only pursue relief from uncertainty. Happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct whenever uncertainty briefly disappears. If you feel like you can't predict the future, you will default to fear and worry and rumination. Your mindscape will eclipse reality's landscape. Worrying about the thing, you can't predict, usually, involves a nightmare fantasy, which is way worse than what could happen in reality. However, this imagined reality briefly collapses the chaos of the world into certainty, and this is how much humans abhor, not knowing how the future will unfold, we would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable.

39:00people. Sometimes these situations overlap. A family member gets in an uncertain medical diagnosis and we can't be with them. We argue with our partner while we're apart and we don't know how they're feeling overnight. We try to mend a broken friendship with a letter and haven't yet got to reply. So if you're feeling unhappy, look to where you're uncertain and where you want things to be different first. But it's that humans are born not knowing how the infeutual unfold so much that we would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable because it collapses the set of, huh, well at least I know what it, I mean, it's terrible.

39:32Right. But it's not unknown. Right. And that's how much we don't like things that are unknown. Which if you zoom out from like an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense, right? Because it's, we're not evolutionary optimized, be happy. We're evolutionary optimized to be predictive and adaptable to our effectiveness, right? So it's happiness is actually just a lever in our brain that our biology is pushing and pulling to get us to do the right things or worry about the right things. It's just our biology is not used to, you know, watching 2000 TikToks a day. Eventually you'll realize that it's better to be disliked for who you are than liked for who you are not than everything will change.

40:20Yeah, I... But being liked for who you're not is not being liked, right? Even if you get people to like the performance that you're putting on, you never get the satisfaction of being liked because it's not you, it's the performance. And it actually backfires because it just reinforces that you have to perform more. You're not good enough. You're not acceptable. Yeah. I think this was the fundamental, there was many, but I think that this is one of the fundamental issues with the pick -up artist movement, the way that it came about, that what it taught men who were struggling with women was that, hey, you can be really affected with women.

41:05You just need to not be yourself. You just need to be. I said, dude, I saw this firsthand so many times. Like, I saw people don't know that you wrote models, dude. The best, still the best at dating advice book for me, Everyone should go and get it on the audible and go back in 2014 that came out 13 13 fuck 12 years dude. That's insane. That's if you're a guy who wants to improve. I would say Mate be the guy women want Jeffrey Miller and Tucker Maxx and models by you the two they were the two fucking the two car garage of Thanks Ben. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I used to coach those guys, and it was funny because I saw it all the time.

41:46Guys, they'd learn the lines, they'd practice the techniques. Did you see the midget fight outside? Yeah, exactly. Who lies more? But in a lot of them, they would start getting laid, and then they would get laid. You would take these kind of awkward nerds who had never had a girlfriend, never hooked up. They'd learn all these tactics and stuff. They'd start getting laid all the time, and they'd actually feel worse about themselves. They'd actually get more depressed. And it was exactly this. It's like they're not... The fact that they had to learn a performance to get a woman to like them, just reinforced how unlikable they were.

42:23You're not good enough? Yeah. Yeah. I... Eventually you'll realize it's better to be disliked for who you are than like for who you are not. It took me a 15 -minute TEDx talk to say that. I didn't... I'm not kidding. I didn't entire 15 -minute TEDx talk. So, took fucking months. Took so long. But yeah, I had this insight doing a club promo that toward the end of my 20s, I'd achieved success in a lot of the ways that society tells a young man that he should be successful. Similarly, massively dissimilar to yourself. You got notoriety, you have social access, women, and like a little bit of money and stuff, and you're comfortable, and people know who you are, and all the rest of it.

43:04I was like, fuck, like, why doesn't one of this success that's really like feel real. And I realized that a persona can't receive love, it can only receive praise. You know, it's saying, hey, well done, gladiator, not well done, Russell Crowe, well done Thor, not well done, Chris Hemsworth. There's this sense that, you know, if you're not being who you truly are, all of your successes will feel hollow, because people aren't in love with you, they're just applauding the role that you play. and you're always at best. The closest that you get is being one degree removed from your successes. And much of the time, you're four, five, six, seven degrees removed from it because it's okay.

43:45I, Chris, must work out what him, Mark, wants me to say when he said, what do you think about the new Avengers movie? It's a reverse engineer. What do I know about what Mark likes about the Avengers movies and he's franchising? What do I think that he's predicted? I think it's good. Yeah, it's good. Yes, it is good. I knew it was good, you know? And there's always this performance that you have on, but again, just reinforces, you cannot be you, which is, it's also exhausting. It's like such a draining mental exercise. This way, I hate networking. I'm like, I'm a terrible networker. And I think part of it is I feel like I have to do that a little bit, like, I don't naturally, see, this way I don't have guests in my podcast anymore, because I'm not like keeping on topicing.

44:29I don't really care. Like I'm not I'm not super curious about like oh, I wonder what that guy across the room is like like that's just not me I'm like very low -key introverted Don't need to like be everybody's friend and I I still feel that sometimes in professional context where it's like okay, I'm in a room I'm like this is totally one of those rooms where I should be walking around like shaking everybody's hand introducing myself I'm just like And it's exhausting. It's like so fucking exhausting So yeah, I can't imagine living like that. Like it's okay when it's just like this one sliver of my life that I only occupy briefly, you know, each year, but to never switch it off when you get home.

45:09If you're going through your whole life that way, and especially, yeah, if you're that way with your partner, if you're that way with your friends, it's just, it seems like such a miserable way to live. It's the reason for, how do you say, the front loading being yourself in the extreme, as early in a relationship as you think that person can tolerate. That's very carefully chosen words. I had to look, I did, I was single last year for the first time in a long time, and certainly for the first time being this version of me. Yeah, and I had a strategy of an intellectual shit test, which is kind of like, you told me you were a business idea.

45:56Yes, I knew you'd keep it in your mind. Everyone's gonna be like, what's his billion dollar idea? You don't get to find out. It's, if you imagine, negging, but instead of insulting a girl, send them psychology today articles and seeing if they say something interesting in response. And it was like, this is something that's interesting to me. Human nature's one of the things, like if you're gonna get into a relationship with me, I'm gonna send you lots of articles from Substag, okay? And I'm going to expect at some point over the next week for us to have a chat about one of the things that I've sent you That's room hopefully remotely interesting to you and if that doesn't it's a relatively innocuous but pretty good front end filter for Maybe I'm not going to be reading articles at the same velocity that I am now in ten years time But I imagine I'm still going to be intellectually curious and this is a good rough -hune rubric and like a cute Oh, isn't this interesting?

46:51Do you see that article about how Taylor Swift's changed? What other the fuck? Like, that's interesting. So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna do that. And it, I think an older version of me, or a younger version of me, would have been, ah, well, that's not, that doesn't necessarily fit what a cool guy would do. Like, you're really gonna send this article about like the mating habits of zebras and how it's different to horses and the fact that that's like really interesting because of the different environment they grew up at a simple shit. It's like, yeah, actually, that's actually a really, really good thing to do.

47:25The story that it reinforces in yourself is, I am allowed to be me. I'm allowed to be more me sometimes than I even, especially if you can tune it up at the start and push yourself beyond your comfort zone because you go, I'm future proof for like, I wouldn't have usually done this for two years. And you know, I've got myself to... It's funny, it's funny you brought of models because like I'm remembering now, you know, one of the central points in that book, which at the time was controversial, was that as a man, you shouldn't, you're not optimizing to get laid as many times as possible. You're optimizing to be happy with women.

48:03Like that's the whole point of this. Like whether you get laid, whether you, you, you date and sleep with one woman or a hundred, what matters is your happiness. It's not like like you can get to that and the party count. It's not a body count, right? And like what you just described is, I'm just having flashbacks of when I was in that industry, like I would say things like that. I'm like, yeah, dude, send them zebra articles, you know? Like, because that's gonna show you if she's the type of girl that you're gonna enjoy being with. And you know guys you'd be like, whoa, good luck getting laid with zebra articles, you know?

48:35And they'd look down on it, they'd call you fucking beta and pussy -ass. Hi, so you're prepared to sacrifice something that you know that you do want for something that you think that you do want. With someone who doesn't actually want you because you can't be you in order to get the thing that you think that you want. I don't, I didn't follow all that but yeah. Sure. I'm sick. All right. Wait, okay, go ahead. No, you go ahead. No, I was, I was gonna tell a story. Tell a story. So the night I met my wife, I met her at three in the morning in a nightclub in Brazil. and within five minutes, I somehow ended up in a conversation about Russian grammar and how it was different from romance language grammar.

49:21And she actually sat there and listened the whole time, dude. And she was like asking questions. She was like curious about it. And I remember that moment, I was like, holy shit, she's still here.

49:36And I was like, wow, we're gonna get along really well. Yeah. And, but yeah, it's funny. It's like one of the first conversations she and I had. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of guys want to date a Brazilian. I'm not convinced that they would have zeroed in on Russian grammar and romance languages the way into the heart, but like, I mean, you were the guy that wrote the book. Yeah. Whatever works, right? Before we continue, you've probably heard me talk about element before, and that's because, and frankly, dependent on it for the last three years, I've started every morning with element. Element contains a signs back to electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium with no sugar, no gluten or artificial ingredients or any other BS.

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51:01Sorry to break it to you, but it's impossible for someone who destroys your mental health to be the love of your life. Obsessing over someone isn't love, it's fear disguised as affection. Unhealthy love often feels exciting, dramatic and profound, but hurts us in the long run. Healthy love often feels dull, peaceful and repetitive, but it heals us in the long run. Yeah, I think fundamentally people mistake intensity of emotion for positivity of emotion.

51:33They ride the roller coaster of a dramatic and toxic relationship and the highs are so high and the lows are so low and they just think that, well, this is part of it, right? Because they're experiencing both extremes. It's like by far the most emotional experience they've ever had around anything in their life. And so they assume, oh, okay, well, this must be what it is. But it's not that. It's actually There shouldn't be this like insane oscillation between the highs and lows. There of course are highs and lows with every relationship. Like that's natural, but Not daily. It's what you want what you want to optimize is like the average baseline that you return to.

52:21So, yeah, I see that all the time. People mistake the intensity of the emotion for the intensity of the relationship for being a positive relationship. And I think part of this happens because just like the way our psychology is, is that the more intense the emotion, the stronger, the story, and narrative and meaning that we place on that experience. When, if you think about it, there are all sorts of emotionally intense experiences you can have that actually don't mean anything at all. I can jump out of a plane. That's gonna be a very emotionally intense experience. It doesn't necessarily mean anything.

53:03I can date a woman who drives me absolutely fucking insane and then have the best makeup sex in my life, and just like the airplane convinced myself that it means something, but it actually doesn't really mean anything. Like what, it took me way too long to figure out that like what actually means something is the quality of time spent together in the dull moments. Like, what's the delta between your baseline and you're happy in it? Like, what is your level of happiness during the dull moments when nothing's happening, when you're just sitting around eating breakfast, you know, reading emails?

53:46Are you happy in that moment? Like, that's what you should be measuring. Because that's what life's made up of. That's the vast majority of life. Life is made up of breakfast at the kitchen counter. Yeah. Yeah. Checking emails.

54:00It's interesting to think about, okay, there's emotionally intense situations that don't mean anything. And I imagine that there's also emotionally mundane situations that mean a lot. I mean, everything. Yeah, so the level of peace in your mind is your head hits the pillow at night. Mm -hmm. Never going to probably appear in a gratitude journal, because it's just such... It's so obvious again, it's there. Yeah. It's like, I slept okay. Yeah. You know, because I wasn't worrying about something. It's like, huh. Well, fucking, there's a lot of people on the planet that wish that they could have that.

54:33Yeah, that we are, so peace, optimizing for peace. You know, not sexy. What about obsessing over someone isn't love its fear disguised as affection? Ha ha ha. Yeah, because obsession is driven by a fear of loss. You know, when you're obsessing over somebody or ruminating over somebody, you're not, you're not actually loving that person, you're trying to prevent loss of that person. And those are two very different things. Love is very, loving is, it's unconditional. It's done. Like, I don't do things for my wife to like prevent her from leaving me. That's not the intention. You know, it's like, I don't buy her flowers because I'm like, well, I better do this otherwise she might leave me.

55:20Like, that's not love. Love is you do something for her, expecting nothing in return. Just for the simple reason that you want them to be happy. And again, I think it's another area that people like mistake because they feel such an intensity of the emotion and that emotion is directed towards a person and keeping that person as close to them as possible. They assume, well, this must be what love is, right? This is, I'm clearly in love with this person because all day and night, all I think about is like, how do I keep them as close to me as possible? And that's not love, that's fear. There's a good insight from Vsikan Varasmi.

56:06He says, I think he calls it the divorce paradox, which is why do people who from the outside seemingly have a perfect relationship? Why do they end up breaking up? And it's because it's a society we haven't fully internalized the lesson that it is not the highs but the lows and how you manage them that make up break relationships. and outwardly it's rare that you see two people arguing. They'll put the face on, they're having a good time at the wedding, or at the dinner, or whatever it might be, but then when they go home, they're fucking shouting and screaming and calling each other and they're out and sleeping in separate rooms.

56:41Well, you don't see that, and how well do they deal with those bad times? So it's how you deal with bad times that are a better predictor. Yeah. Then very few, I would guess, most marriages fail because of a surplus of poor rupturing repair as opposed to a scarcity of super intense high experiences. You're insufficiently exciting to me is maybe there but less than you are too low to me. You are too much of a drag. Absolutely. And one thing I told friends all the time, which is a really annoying thing. The tall friend and like a new relationship. But like whenever I talk to people who are in a new relationship and they're like, you know, honeymoon period really falling for the person.

57:27I always tell them like, that all sounds great. But let me know when you've had your first fight. Like you really don't know what it's made of until you've had your first real fight about something because all the good stuff, I don't wanna say it's easy to find. But it is relatively, it's not scarce. Like you can find somebody who you have a lot of fun with. You enjoy being happy. Hey, me too. Yeah, it's like, oh, you like the thing? I like the thing too. Let's do the thing together. Like, that's not that complicated. What's complicated is when all of her childhood issues come up and get triggered because of the thing that you said, because you've got this blind spot in your life that you haven't dealt with, and then you start really going at it.

58:12And it's really the quality, like you said, the rupture and repair, the quality of the fighting, like how, all communication always breaks down to a certain extent during fights, but it's like how deeply does it break down? Does it get nasty? Does it get personal? And then similarly, how quickly do you recover from it? And do you do recover from it or do you hold it against each other? Do you start the scoreboard? You know, it's like, okay, it's one zero, right? If the scoreboard's there, it's over. It's just a matter of time. I don't care how smart or beautiful they are, how many companies they started or degrees they have, they're insecure, they have no fucking clue what they're doing either.

58:55Feeling like you have no idea what you're doing is the price of entry to achieving your dream. I feel like this just undermines your entire podcast. I have never claimed to have any idea about what it is that I'm doing. My guests may have done. Yes. You included. No, no, yeah, I mean, I think it's a So my my a good friend of mine had a really funny story around this So really good friend of mine back in New York startup guy super smart Startup founder hadn't exit did really well with the work for VC Did really well at the VC and then eventually got brought in by by one of the 20 or 30 biggest companies in the world to advise and help, man, like they're doing like an internal incubator.

59:51And basically they wanted him to come in and kind of like advise their projects or whatever. So, you know, and this guy's like 30, right? So he's like climbed the mountain, climbed the next mountain, and now he's like being brought into like one of the biggest companies in the world, literally household name, and he's supposed to be in charge of like like all these like special projects and new innovations and stuff. And I remember he came back, I had dinner with him when he got back to town and I was like, dude, how was it? He just looked at me and he's like, he's like, I just had this realization like it's fucking idiots all the way down.

1:00:22Like, I always thought one day I'm gonna walk in a room and there's, it's like, okay, these are the people that know what's going on. These are the people who like have the plan and have figured it out and these are the lords of the universe. And they're like secretly like pulling the puppet strings behind the scenes. And the rest of us are just trying to keep up. And he was like, yeah, nobody knows what the fuck they're doing. Like it's, he's like, it's a disaster. It's a complete and utter disaster. And he's like, I don't know what I'm gonna do, but they're paying me a ton of money. So I always love that story, and I love that phrase.

1:01:00It's idiot's all the way down. And I include us in that. Like I think it's, it's we're all just like chipping away at our own idiocy. Yeah, slowly but surely. Publicly, but I do think that there is a, there's a fair trade to be made and certainly one that I've made, even more perhaps than you as somebody who's actually written legitimate books. You can trade expertise for relatability. and I think if you say, hey, I don't know what's going on. And in my not knowing of what's going on, you can feel better in your not knowing of what's going on. You know, that is probably one of the most common threads across 950 episodes or whatever we've done at this show, which is, I'm unsure about this thing, but I'm gonna try and find out from someone who might know a tiny little bit more than me.

1:01:54And we're gonna work it out together of, Hmm, but six months later I finally arrive at a realization that something approximating like accuracy. Huh, well that's cool. Well, we'll hold onto that one thing and we'll get another one and get another one. George Mack, one of my favorite friends and favorite writers. He's got this essay, Adults Don't Exist. Steve Jobs delayed nine months of medical treatment of pancreatic cancer to try a carrot juice diet in Dacupuncture. Mozzart. Overspent his income, lived miserably in mountains of debt, and regularly wrote letters to friends begging for money. Friedrich Nietzsche lost his virginity in a brothel and caught syphilis.

1:02:31He only saw his work sell 300 copies in his lifetime. Martin Luther King had extramarical affairs with over 40 different women including spending his last night alive with two women in physically attacking another. Isaac Newton spent 30 years of his life writing one million words on the pseudoscience of alchemy, alchemy hidden for years by his ears because they were too embarrassed to publish it. Don't put any adult on a pedestal, kill your gurus, or a more useful belief. The adults aren't going to save you. They don't even exist. I love that. That's awesome. He realized when his friends that he went to university with, who were the most degen, Larry couldn't hold, they couldn't get up on time.

1:03:14They weren't handing their assignments in. Went to go and be teachers. Holy fuck. Oh, that means that my teachers were that idiot from, oh, okay, like the adults literally do not exist. It's idiots all the way down. I do wanna hit on this though. So one of the things that has been like concerning me lately, so I agree with you by the way. I think one of the things that is good about what you do, what I do, with the kind of like all the alternative media or whatever you want to call it, is that there is a little bit more of an openness of uncertainty. I don't have it until I get out. Yeah. Lack of expertise, whatever.

1:04:02Yet the end result seems to be producing a public of greater uninformed certainty. So we've gone from a media and information environment that was very much built on certainty and expertise and credentials and authority and all that shit. And now we've gone to a much more decentralized information ecosystem and media system where people are very open about like, well, I don't have all the answers. Let's try to figure this out. And yet the public just seems more certain about dumb shit than ever. That's interesting. There's a great idea called knowingness. Lots of the issues of the modern world are laid at the feet of misinformation and the claim is basically this person believes the wrong things because they've consumed the wrong stuff.

1:04:54And if only we could get them to consume the right stuff, we could update their beliefs. You go, how do I mean that's a pretty fair assessment if that's the problem. But if the problem is knowingness, knowingness being a lack of curiosity around what is true in place of a dogmatic belief about what you already know. So it's believing that you know the answer to the question before the question's already been asked. That is a prophylactic against any new information regardless of whether it's misordice or mal or correct or whatever. And the challenge that you have is to try and get, I guess the reason, the way that you know that this is true is precisely what you're pointing at, which is everybody acts as if the fact have already been settled, while no one can agree on what the facts are.

1:05:45Like we say, people say, well, we know how much human to contributing to climate change. We know this for a fact on both sides, while both sides don't agree with each other. Right. In it's the same as kind of a religion question, which is every religion act as if theirs is correct, whilst not agreeing with all of the others. Like, well, this can't all be correct. Like none of these, like everybody can't be right here. A best one if you can be right. And the same thing goes with the sort of knowingness question. Yeah. Yeah, I guess it's in, and it's the more, the greater diversity of information that people are exposed to, the more contradictions arise, and the more the contradictions arise, the more people would just kind of default to their whatever feels right.

1:06:30So yeah, confident, yeah, uninformed certainty. It's certainly part of it. But I also see the black sheep equivalent of that, which is sort of like nihilistic despondency. Like, well, you know, we can't trust anything anymore. Who even knows what facts are. And that you can't trust the news and you can't trust, you can't even trust your neighbor next store and what they're saying. And I wonder whether there's maybe a bunch of different reactions to an overwhelm of information. One of them being you kind of intellectually reverse engineer the biases you wanted to be true all along. But on another side, you just throw your hands up and say, I don't even, like I can't even trust anything anymore.

1:07:16Right. Yeah. There's definitely an asymmetry around trust. Warren Buffett's got that great Quote where he says it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it and I think the same is true with trust. It's like An institution can spend decades building up a certain amount of reliability and then just ruin it in a single day and I think the more we're exposed To everything The more we're exposed to like the flaws and everything This episode is brought to you by nomadic summer is here and travel season is in full swing but let's be honest, your backpack was probably built for a school field trip, not international adventures, which is where nomadic comes in.

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1:08:28Right now, you can get a 20 % discount and see everything that I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic .com slash modern wisdom. That's nomatic .com slash modern wisdom related I've been treated to that on the independent media system, and also the trade between expertise and relatability. I have a theory that we don't admire people who appear perfect, we admire the people who are imperfect and are comfortable with it. And Dr. Robert Glover, who wrote, no more Mr. Nyskai, he's got the three essences of a masculine man, which usually would be the sort of thing that makes my fucking toes curl, but this one's actually really good.

1:09:08and he says, a man who's comfortable in his own skin, who knows where he's going, and just having fun while he's going there. And you go, okay, well, the comfortable in your own skin thing, okay, someone who is imperfect and comfortable with it, right? It's very difficult to be comfortable in your own skin. No one believes that, very few people believe that they're perfect. Right, so given that you probably are imperfect and know it, but are comfortable with it, think, ha, this person's relatable and reliable. Right. It's another paradoxical kind of relationship dynamic in that we actually admire people who are comfortable with their own flaws.

1:09:44Like we don't, like think about the, if you think about a person who's just trying to cover for their own flaws and act like they're not there or pretend like it's not their fault, generally we don't like those people. Those people are very annoying. And if you think about the people you do find very endearing, it's the people who are quirky, weird, you know, kind of off sometimes. Why do you think that is? But they own it. Um, I actually think it comes back to the trust thing. I think it's like, if I see somebody who's a little bit weird, but like owns it, and I was like, yeah, I just got this.

1:10:20I'm just kind of an oddball. Like, I feel that I can trust them. that they're not gonna bullshit me or try to be something they're not. Whereas somebody who's just trying to look perfect all the time, you actually don't trust them. It's like a yes man, right? Like, you know, it's the irony of a yes man is that somebody who always agrees with you on everything is like the last person you can actually go to for advice. If I can trust you, no, I can't trust you, yes. Exactly. So, yeah, I do think the the, the, the, the confidence that comes with one's own flaws and imperfections, like, it, it ultimately does boil down to a trusting, which is ultimately like why authenticity is sexy is because you feel like you can trust the person.

1:11:03Yeah, I mean, there's an, an idea again from George, he's so fucking good. He just did this high agency essay. Everyone should go and see a high agency .com. His essay is available on that. It's fucking sick. But this one, non -fungible tokens, NFTs, there was like boom, whatever, 2021, and everyone and I'd COVID money and didn't know what to do with it. He's got this idea of non -fungible people. And that's basically the same as what you're talking about here. He uses his mum as an example. And his mum fucking hates fighting. Like can't bear physical altercations. And apparently she was on the phone with George's brother, just like 20 or something, he's some young guy.

1:11:42And she's driving in the car on her own. and she sees two young boys fighting by the side of the road. So she stops the car in the middle of the street and gets out and sort of fucking Arthur Shelby's and Tommy Shelby's and she's like, no, fucking fighting. No fucking fight like she's got these two apart, but the sun is still on the phone, mum, mum, what? And she's like, it's two people fighting. I must get out, I must stop. It's like middle of the street, god, like two people she doesn't know, like totally didn't need to get, could have got punished, could have you like anything, gets back in the car tells the son and George made this point that at her funeral nobody's going to talk about how she was always on time or you know the quality of the pastor Aldante that she cooked or whatever but she was the sort of woman that stopped her car in the middle of the street to stop people from fighting and it's just a beautiful that's a non -fungible person.

1:12:34It's interesting to think about like what are the stories that you know good that? It's interesting to think what are the stories that are going to be told at your funeral because Yeah, it's never, I mean, obviously there's stories of like, you being very charitable or loving or whatever, but like people always find quirky shit like that. Like they find the NFT version of whoever you were in what areas we non -fungible. Yeah, like, yeah, well, where were you in Audble? What's the inside joke that everybody at the funeral service is gonna laugh and understand? Yeah, dude, you remember when he, dot, dot, dot.

1:13:05Oh, he did that to you too? Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. It didn't mean loving, like it was so great. Yeah. If you aren't naturally tied at night and excited in the morning, then you probably haven't found something meaningful to work on. You are not stressed from doing too much. You are stressed from doing too little of what you care about. So this is a drum that I bang on endlessly to the productivity crowd, and I feel like it just gets ignored. but I think emotion is the most important productivity system.

1:13:43There's a lot of... And I think the reason it gets discounted is because there is a lot of cheesy, cliché advice around like, oh, if you do what you love, you never work a day of your life, you know, like bullshit like that. It's... Passion is practical. Like, when you deeply care about something you're doing, you're going to work on it longer, you're going to think harder about the problems, you're going to take feedback better, you're going to be more resilient, you're going to be willing to stay up at night, get up early on a Saturday or whatever. Like emotion is, it is actually the highest leverage system within yourself towards whatever whatever your productivity goals are.

1:14:24And I just feel like so much productivity advice is disembodied. It's like, you know, the hustle culture bullshit of just like, you know how you feel. Just grind, grind, grind. And yeah, it's like, you know, stopping a bitch like, you know, sleep when you're dead, date when you're dead, like whatever, go make a billion dollars. It's, what is it for? Like, if it's not for something. Like if you're not doing all this work for some greater cause, then what the fuck are you doing? You might as well just hang out at the beach and play video games. Like, because why not? You know, like there's a certain there's a nihilism in the productivity space right now that like it really bothers me.

1:15:10And it, because I don't think it's healthy, but B, I also think it's like just bad advice. like the best advice is find something you really fucking love and care about and give yourself to it But Cassie's got this great line. He says find what you love and let it kill you and I just there's like so much beauty in that because When you find a craft or a trade or or a skill that like You deeply deeply care about or a mission that you deeply deeply care about you become willing to trade yourself for that mission. And when you trade your time, you are literally trading your life for something. So what are you going to trade it for?

1:16:05And what is the point of making that trade? Get a billion dollars, get a hundred million followers. What the fuck can do? like what does that mean? You know? So I continue to bang that drum. Uh, hopelessly. Hopelessly? Yes. But I don't, I don't get it, I don't get invited to, you know, the same, uh, uh, biohacking conferences that, uh, my contemporaries do. So, uh, Joe Hudson's got this wonderful line. He says, enjoyment is efficiency. Yes. Uh, that he looks at, however much enjoyment I got out of doing a thing is just a direct correlate with how efficient I was at doing it, that the more that I enjoy something, the more efficient I'm gonna be.

1:16:51Dude, people, and it's double -sided as well, right? Like the better you get at something, the more you fall in love with it. And the more you love something, the more patients you're gonna have to get good at it. And so it's just like, to me, it's like the most obvious entry point, but I think a lot of people develop kind of like, fucked up relationships with productivity and work. And I say this is like a bona fide workaholic. Well, I was gonna say, you know, you have found something that you love and you have done it so much that it almost killed your passion, or at least acutely killed your passion.

1:17:29You wrote three books in three years? Three books, three books in a movie in four years. Yeah. And then needed to kind of just play PlayStation for basically a full year after that to recover. Yeah, but it's interesting because in hindsight, I think the reason that happened is I actually lost sight of what what I was doing and why I was doing it right so early in my career Was blogging doing the creator saying in the early 2010s fucking loved it Book blows up all these opportunities show up big book deals movie deal You know world tour all this shit start saying yes to everything because it's like well when's this gonna come around again and And basically gave three to four years of my life to a bunch of stuff that wasn't, it wasn't optimizing for what I cared about.

1:18:23It wasn't optimizing for the mission that had driven me throughout most of my career. It was optimized for, fuck, that's a lot of zeros on that contract. I should probably say yes. I should probably say yes to that. And don't get me wrong. like it's, I think it's okay to do that in bits and spurts, but it's not long -term sustainable. And I think a lot of people develop, and it took me a number of years to kind of get back to what I love and appreciate about my work and like getting that mission focus again. But I do think people often use productivity as like, they develop a toxic relationship with productivity.

1:19:09It becomes a way to outsource their self -worth and avoid dealing with a lot of these like simple truths that they don't want to admit about themselves.

1:19:22And you can definitely get, we live in a culture that will gladly encourage that. Correct. I've always thought about Billy McFarlane, the guy that started Fire Festival. The fucking prototypical example of this. I always thought about if Billy McFarlane had managed to string together a semi coherent festival, he would have been hailed as the Steve Jobs of Marketing. Nothing could have changed. Nothing would have needed to have changed in his motivation for doing it. His shameless requirement for self -promotion, the deception that he was going through with his investors, the fact that he didn't know, that he was the adult that didn't exist but saying that he did, all the way down.

1:20:05The only issue that people had was that the rug got pulled out from underneath his obfuscation and his lies and his incompetence. But if he'd even just about managed to creep like okay, festival out, people are so seduced by success. The modern world praise at the altar of success so much that they would have happily forgiven or overlooked the things. They didn't we all know this there's so many people that hold on to popularity, not because people think that they're good or authentic or sort of genuinely being truthful but because there are a rocket ship that's going up into the right and that sense of, huh, I don't think that that's why your productivity, like Pioneer, should be at.

1:20:55I don't think that that's necessarily the person that you should be following. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. It's funny too, because I see so much of this stuff and like so much productivity advice. It's funny to me so much productivity advice is actually catered to people who are using their productivity as a way to escape their problems, right? It's all about morning protocols and when the set your alarm and they do this thing in the first five minutes or whatever. And like, I don't know, I look at that. I'm like, okay, first of all, I'm up by six without an alarm. And I can't fucking wait to get to my computer.

1:21:34Like, I'm like, I don't have a routine. I'm like, already awake. I'm awake because I'm excited. Like, as soon as my eyes open up, I'm like starting to think about what I'm gonna do that day. And I'm so excited that I just like, I get out of bed. And I'm in front of my computer within three minutes. and like, why would I use a protocol? Like why would I need like a habit tracker or like, you know, all this stuff? Like if the emotions are aligned, like everything takes care of itself. Whereas if the emotions aren't aligned, then you have to spend all this extra energy. It's like the performative thing, right?

1:22:06With people in relationships. It's like if the emotions aren't aligned, then you're like basically self -flagulating to get yourself to perform all these actions that are ultimately performative. It's like, okay, I put in 12 hours today. I got these six things done. I hit these KPIs this month. My new nighttime routine demands, I do these six things. And it's like, you know, there's a certain healthy rhythm that like naturally emerges as with most things, most things when, you know, the systems are aligned. That was an interesting transition that I had. You know, we had, when we had done it, it was about a year ago when we did that, no, I must have mean a little over a year ago.

1:22:46Yeah, it was a little, it was like you're in a couple months. Okay. And that was me as in the trenches as I've ever been. You were going hard. Correct. Yeah. And since then, I've learned to back off a little bit. But in that, as you take your foot off the gas or as you speed up, you sort of notice changes in life and you could make an analogy to sort of acceleration or deceleration in things, you know, your net worth staying the same, it's kind of, it's nothing. But it going up, it's like, ah, there's a change in it going down. Fuck you'll notice that too. One of the things that I noticed as I sort of purposefully tried to decelerate and de -lever some of the things that I was doing from then until now, which I've done real real successfully was I had to face an awful lot more of the things that my obsession with productivity and being busy were hiding in the fog.

1:23:48So, you know, my busyness was certainly a hedge against uncertainty and fear and a lack of importance and meaning in this desperate requirement for validation and a lack of self -esteem. It's like, how can I not be important? and look at how many calls I've got today. Like the world, the world need me. Look at how busy my calendar is. Like my calendar is so fucking busy. There's no way that I'm a worthless piece of shit. It's impossible. It's simply impossible. So yeah, sure, there may be some echoes of existential loneliness in the background, but sorry bro, I can't hear you. I'm blasting sleep token at 150 decibels.

1:24:28Like that was a busy calendar was a hedge against existential loneliness for me. and it's a really good way to just continue to not see the lies that you're telling yourself, to not have to face the fears, the sensitive insufficiency, the scarcity mindset, all of that stuff. It's like, I'm so busy, bro, that I don't have time for that. Totally. And as you, if you go, okay, I see that that's a pattern that almost everybody does, and I'm going to, I now have the opportunity, maybe, to choose to take my foot off the gas, you sort of feel that slowing as you kick forward and you're okay. Why do I take myself worth from now?

1:25:09Because I used to take it from that. And now I have to realize maybe me believing that my importance, my self -importance, was bolstered by my level of busyness, was a lie. Yeah. And that's a... Like that's a fucking real... It's a real thing, though, for sure. And I, I, I, again, admitted workaholic here. Like, this is something I struggle with too. The other thing I notice, and I don't know, I'd be curious if this rings true for you. I've not been brought up to date on your, your dating life. But it, like, I see in friends that, you know, they're like perpetually single and, or they like, wanna settle down, but then they complain that like they, they can't find the right person.

1:25:56and I'm like, well, dude, you're on the road like six months a year. Like when was the last time you saw the same person twice? And it's, I think in some cases, that busyness, again, it kind of comes back to that strategic incompetence. It's like, oh, well, I can't figure out my dating life because I'm too busy. I'm on a hotel free card. Yeah. You've always got one foot out of the door. So if this thing doesn't work, well, it's not that much of a comment on my sense of self -worth because I wasn't that committed anyway. like, is it? Yeah, yeah, it's not because I'm hopelessly bad at making somebody feel comfortable around me and scared of letting somebody see me.

1:26:35It's because I'm on the road six months of the year. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I've seen that. I've seen that. I think I've done that not in my intimate relationships, but I've done that in like with like social and family relationships, right? It's like, oh yeah, sorry, I can't come home. I'm like touring Australia, you know. I'll see you next year. We missed each other by like three days twice in Australia. Yeah. Oh the fuck is. I know. We need to organize it better. That would have been cool. I think you did, I think you actually did the same, we did the same cities. Yes. But just in different orders.

1:27:11Okay. And I think a lot of people just like, because I, there were people on, I would be both. Right. Well I read it to a lot of people who were like at your show like the night before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well dude, what, imagine that for a weekend and a fucking Manson, Williamson, back -to -back, spit roasted by us to... It's just gonna go there. Two podcasts, bro. Yeah, one fucking venue. Yeah. The happiest people are not the ones with the most options, but the ones who stop questioning their choices. This comes back to your point about uncertainty, right? And this is, I think, where is at the foundation of the paradox of choice?

1:27:47Is the paradox of choices on the surface, you have more optionality, you have more things to choose from, You have more paths that you could go down, but that optionality itself generates more uncertainty because whichever path you pick there's proportionately more uncertainty about whether that was the right path or not whether you made the right choice or not whether you could have made a better choice or not um And so I think at a certain point like if you really just boil it down to it happiness comes down to being satisfied with what you've chosen not trying to optimize it. That's a, it kind of like a, whatever it's called, golden handcuffs are available at prison where if the thing that you claim that you want to have happen in life happens, I get better options, I achieve success, people respect me, people want me, people need me, things are available to me.

1:28:47Okay, if that happens, if you are going to need to become increasingly good at saying no to an increasingly attractive number of an increasing quality of things that you could do with your life. And you're going to have to become better at being able to be happy with the choice that you have made. Alex Homosy talks about the woman in the red dress from Matrix. And he says, remember that scene? Neil's walking down the street. And Morpheus turns to him and he says, Neil, were you looking at me? Are you looking at the woman in a red dress? look again and it's Agent Smith with a gun pointed at his face.

1:29:23And his analogy is, yeah, but now imagine that it was three years later and it's 1 ,000 hypothetical 1000s, not one hypothetical 10. And you need to, I mean, what's your thing of shamelessly fucking nomenclatured it? I called it identity dysmorphia. identity lags reality by one to two years, is one of yours. So if you've got this identity, which everybody does, right? You just, you see in the mirror the person that you used to see, the world sees some other version of you, and it takes a little bit of time for that version to catch up. So you are lagging behind the options, your ability to discern options is lagging behind the options that the world is going to give you.

1:30:10and your ability to say no is fucking two, three years old, all of this stuff. And yeah, the 1000 hypothetical 1000s in red dresses, and you need to go, I would have begged to have had the opportunity to have maybe said yes to this. And now I need to be pretty comfortable with saying no. Yeah, crisis of success. That totally tracks and, turn remember, the scene told I had a quote around this, that was something like true wealth is measured by the money you turn down. Which I just, uh, Morgan, Morgan Howesall says, uh, uh, wealth is the Ferrari that you didn't buy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:30:51Um, but yeah, it's funny because I feel like good decision making at any point in life is primarily learned by making bad decisions. So whatever level you get to, there's a new set of bad decisions that you have to make to realize not to make to get to the next level. And so again, it's just one of these tricks that your brain plays on you of like, oh, well, you know, if you make it, then you don't have to deal with this bullshit anymore. And so it's going to be easier. And it's like, well, no, no, there's a new level of bullshit that you've never been exposed to. That is actually 10 times harder.

1:31:27It's problems all the way up. Exactly. It's problems all the way up in its idiots all the way down. Yeah. I think about that. That'd be a good book title. Problems all the way up in idiots all the way down. Yeah, or maybe not. Yeah, so you come up maybe two or three times in my live show and one of the one of the bits is it's all the way up So it's funny that you said it's all the way down Yeah, the the ability to sort of become increasingly discerning and Jeffrey Katzenberg who sat there earlier on you know guy that fucking created Shrek and Aladdin and Lion King I did like fucking pretty woman this guy is a monster like 800 movies 80 animated things and I asked him about you are someone who if you have one skill set you're tasteful.

1:32:14Like you have good taste. The ability to discern between something that is good and something that is not good, right? I taste very difficult to define, but that's the closest definition I can think of. He couldn't fucking define it. Like where does good taste come from? What is it? I'm fucking that. And when it comes to choices so much of the time, we try and again that uncertainty we abhor it so much that we would rather imagine a fantasy catastrophe than deal with something that's uncertain. The reason that you have your, you know, a spreadsheet of 15 countries ranked first by continent and by temperature, then by air quality, then by women hotness.

1:32:55You're hidden very close to that. I just shape with mid -20s anxiety. Oh, God. The reason that you have that is to try and be, to provide some sort of control, some source of control. You go, fuck, like I just, I'm so uncertain about my choices that if only I had more information. When really what it comes down to is just vibes. And I think we've both zeroed in on the show, your show and mine respectively, that it actually is increasingly about vibes. It's like, okay, what's the vibe that I'm bringing here? What's the sort of energy that I really want to put across in this thing? And sure, there'll be maybe some information, maybe it's useful, maybe it's not.

1:33:40But largely what people are going to take away is like, okay, so what was the vibe like? And being a vibe architect is an underrated, which is basically, you know, somebody that's discerning in taste sort of a vibe architect. You should add that to your LinkedIn. Yeah, okay, yeah, I am a vibe architect. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it's totally true though. It's, I had another thing that I wrote that went viral. It said that I'm gonna probably fuck it up, but it was a commitment is the, or no, love is the result. Yeah, love is the result of commitment, not the cause. Right? Like, you commit to something and then you start loving it, not the other way around.

1:34:24Right, and similar to action and motivation, like you don't, you take taking action is what generates motivation not motivation doesn't generate action um and similarly committing this something is what makes you fall in love with it not falling in love you don't wait allows you to you don't go find the perfect country and fall in love with it and then be like oh I guess this is where I'm gonna live it's like no you pick a fucking place to live and then as you live there you start to fall in love with it that's just that's how life works. The more you try to force what doesn't feel right, the longer you delay finding what does.

1:35:00Yeah. I think talking about the discernment, I think it's really... it's hard to develop the skill of knowing when you're bullshitting yourself. Like it's, it's, again, there's like layers to it, right? Like it says, As soon as you figure out your mind's first level of tricks that it plays, there's like a whole nother level that it... Yeah, you beat it at White Bell, but then it's like, fuck it, graduating. Holy, God, it knows, now it knows the leg locks, and kung fu. Exactly. It's just layers of an onion, man. Like it's just, it never, you never stop finding novel ways to kind of trick yourself and bullshit yourself.

1:35:42And you can drive yourself crazy, you know, with the doubt and the questioning, which again, I think is a lot of the value that I took in Buddhism is that I think it's like kind of a mentally and emotionally healthy way to doubt yourself. You don't know and you're never gonna know and that's okay. And it's okay and why don't you sit on the mat and stare at a wall until you feel okay about it. And because otherwise, if you're kind of trying to go through life and asking, you're constantly questioning everything all the time, like you're gonna work yourself up into this like neurotic ball of anxiety and stress.

1:36:20So it's almost like mental hygiene to set aside an area of your life whether it's journaling or therapy or meditation or whatever and like give yourself that space to kind of just unwrap the layers of the onion. Like, okay, well, why do I think that's true? What if that wasn't true? What if I'm like lying to myself right now? What would that mean? Well, how would that say about my life? and kind of go the next layer down and the next layer down. And then when you're done, you know, put all the layers back and go, you know, go about your life. Try to try to try to human as best you can. You said about being in self -conflict and it makes me think about this sort of, especially for the sort of people that read your stuff, listen to my stuff, they are the prototypical avatar for a person who will be in conflict with themselves.

1:37:16They're introspective, they want to improve, they have high standards for a variety of things, many of which are in opposition with each other. You know, they want to be empathetic, but they want to be honest, they want to tell people the truth, but they want to care about them, they want to be supportive as a friend, but they need independence as an individual. Blah, blah, blah. And I thought about, as you were talking there, you have self -conflict, but you have conflict with your self -conflict. Like, fuck, why am I always in conflict with myself? Yeah, why does that keep on happening? And I think in some ways, this sort of non -attachment, you don't have it figured out and that's okay, and you'll be okay, and this is the way it's going to be in perpetuity until you die.

1:37:57You go, okay, so maybe the self -conflict's going to be there because many of the things that we want are in tension with each other and because of opportunity costs you don't get to do two things. Yeah. Right, you want to support the mom and pop business that you are with from the very beginning, but you want to move to a new country. You're going to feel guilty if you leave the mom or pop business, but you don't feel fucking regret if you don't go to the new country. Pick your fucking direction, Western man. And the same thing goes for your self -conflict. You think, fuck, like, I have these things, I'm going to be in tension with myself.

1:38:26But if I'm in tension with the fact that I'm in tension, that is, I have control over that second one at least. So you could call it second -order emotions. Someone gets frustrated. And then they become agitated at their frustration. And then they become resentful at their agitation about their frustration. Is this fucking infinite regress of emotions about emotions? And you go, yeah, I mean, the first one makes sense. That happens. The first one happens. You can't control it. But the story that you've told yourself about this. I wrote a piece of yours ago. I don't even remember the title, so it can't even plug it.

1:39:01But I talked about this. I called them, I've been doing this a long time. I called them meta -emotions. It's like feeling bad about feeling bad or feeling bad about feeling good, which happens a lot to people and And essentially my argument is just like try not to have meta motion like the emotions are always okay and the meta motions are kind of always not okay like you Feeling good about feeling good that that turns into pride feeling bad about feeling good that turns into guilt like feeling bad about feeling bad That turns into self -loathing like it just just don't judge the emotion. Just feel the thing.

1:39:37It's okay. It's gonna be whatever it is, it's gonna be okay. That's sick. Yeah. I like that a lot. Trust people. Most of them are good. And while you might get hurt occasionally, the alternative of distrusting everyone is far worse. Yeah, man. This ties into a lot of stuff that we've been talking about. I look around and I think a lot of the struggles of people today, it is around just trusting people. Being comfortable. I think our views of the median person in the world have gotten so skewed by being online too much by being on social media too much, by being overexposed to news media too much.

1:40:28Like, I just think if you actually get out in the world and talk to people face to face, even people you disagree with, even people who like you think are like the bad ones or whatever, nine times out of 10, they're good people and you can pretty quickly find common and get along really well. And I used to be, he used to be an esports gamer when I was a teenager. I can imagine that. Yeah, and unlike Elon, I actually was. Eeeeee. Call him out.

1:41:06He, I got really pissed because he said that he was, he competed in one of the first quake tournaments and like I actually went back to my old clan buddies and like we looked it up and yeah, he wasn't in it. Oh, anyway, my personal grievances aside. So there used to be a thing that happened back when I was like, I used to compete in these esports tournaments. And of course being a bunch of like 16 year old nerds, we'd like sit and just talk shit to each other all the time online. Like we'd play the game, practice against each other, and everybody just like talk mad shit to each other. And of course it would devolve into like, oh, when I see you at the tournament, I'm gonna beat the fuck out of you.

1:41:41When I see you at the tournament, I'm gonna bring my boys, we're gonna beat the shit out of you. You better be ready, all this stuff. And so every single tournament we went to, there was all this drama about like, oh man, it's gonna go down here, like Chris and Mark are gonna fight. It's gonna be sick. And then of course, what happens? Everybody shows up, everybody meets each other. Everybody realizes that we're all like fat, nerdy lonely dudes who spend way too much time on their computers. And of course, we all go to McDonald's and be friends. And that happened over and over and over and over again.

1:42:11And so I feel like I learned at a very young age that there's just some sort of, there's some sort of like intangible softening that comes when you're face to face with people that you're in the same room with them, the micro expressions, the body language, the tonality. There's a certain amount of empathy and compassion that spontaneously emerges in the physical space that doesn't happen in the digital space. And I just feel as the world becomes more and more chronically online, I just, I feel like so many of our issues like really just boil down to that. I'm friends with one of the pre -minute happiness researchers out here.

1:42:53Her name's Sonia Lubamirski and her lab just did a great woman, super smart. And her lab just did a new study. It still hasn't been published yet. it's in pre -publishing, but it was interesting. They looked at a classic case, social media and happiness, smartphones, social media and happiness, and how they correlate, whatever. And interestingly, like a lot of research around social media and happiness, when you look at adults, it doesn't have that much of an effect. The smartphones had a negative correlation with happiness, but what was interesting is that, And the way they measured it, basically the way she summarized it was like, the smartphones causing greater unhappiness was not because of the smartphone.

1:43:42It was because of what the smartphone was replacing, which was this. Just sitting in a room together talking and actually empathizing, actually being like, okay, I don't want to agree with that, but you're a good guy. So, let's have another beer. You know, like it's it's that sort of casualness to everything that somehow gets distorted or lost So I remember like what you said that got me on this You were talking about Quake

1:44:13The more that you try to force what doesn't feel right the longer you delay finding what does maybe it was that oh Trust people. Oh, yeah, yeah trust them again. Trusting people. So I think a lot of trust It seems to spontaneously emerge from the in -personness, right? And so, again, to the point about the asymmetry of trust, how damaging that is, both for our institutions, our society, but also our personal relationships. Like, if you can't trust somebody, you can't really have intimacy with them.

1:44:48I think it's all related. And so that that post is just like a shout into the void of like, please people, like just trust each other. Yeah. Just err on the side of trust. Sure, you're going to get hurt sometimes, but the alternative is worse. Yeah, there's a lovely insight from Naval. Karma doesn't need spirits to deliver justice. Karma is just you repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. And that's kind of the same thing with trust that luck dude. Like if someone is that much of an asshole, they're probably gonna get found out sooner or later because there's only so many times that you can roll the dice and that thing happen.

1:45:34And you not get found out for it if it's bad or you not get found out for it if it's good. So you didn't accumulate the negative reputation and you didn't accumulate the positive reputation for so long and maybe some people can dance through the mind field of life and be an asshole to everyone that they meet and arrive at their deathbed and no one really realize, but that's like some 7000 IQ samurai bullshit to be able to make that work. And I just don't think I don't think that most people are going to do that. So yeah, I think yeah. And as well, There is certainly a trend in the modern world of, I don't need anybody, I've been hurt before and that hurt was because of my trust.

1:46:20Therefore, the issue wasn't the person that I placed my trust in, but the act of trust itself. I think that's an equation that gets out of it. That happens quite a bit. Run. Yeah. And it's, that's completely self -defeating. right? It's like I got hurt because I didn't get the intimacy or love that I crave. So I'm just gonna stop pursuing intimacy and love. Like that makes no sense. And I don't know how or why that's become particularly fashionable. It strikes me as incredibly self -defeating. In the game of life, If he who has the smallest ego usually wins, why? Well, it depends how you define wins.

1:47:04But I think in terms of just well -being, I mean, you kind of just alluded to it yourself. You can have that super samurai manipulative asshole who's cheating everybody and stealing and lying everybody all the time. But like, they're probably miserable. They're probably incredibly dark, lonely, miserable people. And I just think all of this stuff that we're talking about, whether it's the authenticity or finding a way for your account to overflow and finding a mission in your productivity, like all of this stuff, it demands a certain humbling of yourself. and I think in a way too, it's just like choosing fear is a form of ego.

1:47:56How do you define ego? That's a good question. In this context, I would say it is an over -importance of self, like a grandice sense of self. I do think having some ego or healthy ego is natural and important, but I just think it's all the stuff that we're talking about, this low -level delusions and misconceptions and distrust of people and choosing fear over confidence. like all the kind of boils back to like feeding this ingrat a grandice sense of self. Like I deserve so much. I'm so special. I I want all these things in the world and I'm gonna be so upset if I don't get them and like all of that religious boils down to like a misrepresentation of your own importance I guess What's a better perspective?

1:49:03I think a better perspective is understanding that everything comes with a trade -off that life is messy and painful, loss is inevitable, but that doesn't mean that the thing you lost wasn't worth it. And that anything you pursue or desire, like you can't just pursue or desire the positive side of it, you also have to pursue and desire the negative side of it. Like you have to, if there's some goal in your life or some dream you have, you can't just dream about the benefits of that dream. You're also signing up for the costs of that You're signing up for the struggles, the failures, the setbacks, the embarrassment.

1:49:52And the mind is just very bad at doing that. It's bad at holding two sides of a trade -off at the same time. We tend to see when we create these narratives about the future, about what we want, or what we don't want, we tend to only see what's bad about it, or only see what's good about it. We don't see the full trade -off. We don't see like oh if I start a new company, I'm gonna have to Give up some of my social life and some of my time at home And so I need to be ready for that. It's like No, we just think that how That stupid fucking company it like messed up my life and you know What a mistake I shouldn't have done that or my co -founders and asshole or like whatever right?

1:50:44it's like it's, it's their fault. It's, you know, blame everybody else. So I think it's a viewing optionality in terms of, of the costs of like the emotional costs. If you read much, Oliver Birkman. I love Oliver. These things. Yeah. Fucking Kang dude. Yeah. His news letter, the imperfectionist, is, it's the same as that Tim Urban thing, new posts every sometimes. It's like on no fucking discernible cadence. And it's like that he's all of the bookens newsletters like the three -body problem of publishing. You know, it's like when the fuck is it coming out, I don't think you know and neither can know and can predict.

1:51:27But he has this idea from 4 ,000 weeks which is choose what you're going to suck at. Yep. You know, choose an advance, the thing that you're going to suck at because opportunity cost demands trade -offs, there are no solutions, only trade -offs. So I want to find a partner. Okay, you're probably going to have to sacrifice some time in the gym. You're not going to be going out on dates, you're going to events, maybe some late nights, maybe some early mornings, maybe some coffee breaks and stuff like that. Probably not going to maximize your finances, maybe going to have to pay for rubbers and dinners, trips and stuff like that.

1:51:59Okay, I really want to make as much money as possible. It's like, okay, your social life's probably going to suck for a bit. You're maybe not going to get to hang with your friends so much. Okay, so I think by in advance of that, especially for the perennial type A fucking optimizer people, which me, you have to say this is a price I'm willing to pay in order to achieve this other thing that I want and it's not forever. And that's what I don't know whether it's like personal growth, hyperbolic discounting or something, but our ability to understand the decisions that we're making right now or just for right now, you know, not just for this second, you know, if you're gonna commit to a habit, make it a couple of months, but okay, I'm gonna get in shape.

1:52:42All right, well, that's gonna take between three and three months and 12 months, something like that for most people, okay? Why are you getting in shape? What's the price I'm gonna have to pay? Well, I'm gonna suck at during that time. Oh, you know, I'm probably gonna have to spend more money on going to the gym and buying better food and probably not gonna have much of a social life because I'm gonna need to really block in on diet and I'm gonna have to like be socially awkward at dinners, the few that I do get to attend, and I'm gonna have to say, oh, sorry, like I'm just having a state receiving it, whatever it might be.

1:53:12Okay, by doing that, when the price comes of the suck, it doesn't feel like this comment on yourself worth as a person that's being ripped away from you. Oh my God, how can I, I'm not gonna be able to deal with the thing that's happening. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, okay, this is an indication that things are going well. Yeah. Actually, okay, this is something that you priced in, and this is a cost you're prepared to go through in order to be able to achieve it. But yeah, for a very, very long time, I would take my eye off the ball of a thing to focus on another thing.

1:53:41And the second that this thing started to slip, I'd be like, okay, I get back under that. It's like one of those cats chasing a laser around. Yeah. I mean, it's like, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. Yeah. I think pricing in is like a good term for it because it's... Because ultimately it is the value of something, right? Like if you are, if you do have a goal or pursuit or something that you want in your life, obviously you perceive there to be a certain amount of value to it. And the same way you wouldn't just look at a stock and be like, well, how much money did they make last year? Cool, let me buy it for this amount.

1:54:13Like you need to look at both sides of the spreadsheet. You need to look at how much money they brought in and the expenses and the costs and also like, what are the future risks? and do the full analysis, 360, but we're just really bad at that with ourselves. We don't think in those terms. And I think ultimately it's because generally our hopes and dreams are very emotionally driven, they're very identity driven. And that part of our brain is the more ancient mammalian part of our brain. right? And it doesn't, it kind of short circuits, the prefrontal cortex, and like, you know, you don't really want to act like think through second and third order effects about, you know, your dream home or like that girl you're really into.

1:55:07And it's, so it's hard. It's like incredibly hard to do it. Yeah, I wish. I don't know. It's sort of a ruthless irony that the times when you need your prefrontal cortex the most are the ones when it seems to be. So it's a shock. Yeah, it's... I think I had another thing. I posted a few years ago where I said it was like the most consequential choice you'll make in your life is who you choose as a partner. And I went through this whole list of things. You know, it's like there'll be your counselor, your roommate, your business partner, your financial advisor, your teacher, your lover, your travel buddy, like, whole list.

1:55:53And then I finished it by saying, like, in yet most people put as much thought into it as like, you know, the color of their iPhone case. Like it's just some people, they're like, oh, I like this, why happened upon it? Yeah, yeah, it's like, oh, she's nice, she's kind of hot. The more that I learn about the way that the human attachment system works, passionate to companion it loved specifically, a combination of Thai to shiro, who's fucking unbelievable and Arthur Brooks who's also fucking unbelievable. Those two guys together, like a two car garage of really, really fucking understanding human mating for like a psychological sense, I guess, and a neurobiological sense.

1:56:27And so many, the way that human attraction and attachment works is it blinds you to this person's flaws. It causes you to feel unbelievably intense emotions about them whilst knowing very little about them. Real ruthless one that I learned from William Costello, when you're in passionate love, the honeymoon phase, your brain actively disengages from being able to see other available options. So it sort of brings this sort of mating blinkers on, which is why friends that are still in the honeymoon phase, but it's with somebody that's really not good for them. You say, but, did you like, you could get like a million other amazing women.

1:57:15I'm like, no, man, I'll never get anybody like her. And she's like, she sucks. Yeah. And yes, you will. And your last girl was better than this girl. And how are you so functionally idiotic? I know that you're normally irrational. Oh, okay, you're kind of on drugs. Well, you mean you are on drugs. You're just on endogenous drugs. Exactly. As opposed to exogenous ones. And yeah, I think so many people spend time with somebody where they love the smell of their hair and the shape of their nose and the way that they feel when they cuddle them at night and they fall backward into a relationship that they didn't with the person they don't actually have that much in common with.

1:58:02Yeah, and it is a really ruthless trick that the human attachment system plays on you to get you to bond to this person in spite of their flaws. Yes. And then of course that bond or that passionate love wears off after a certain amount of years. You wake up being married and living in the same house with the golden retriever together and you're fine. Completely financially meshed with like two kids and you're like, oh shit, I have nothing to problem with this person. Like, you know, you bring your head above the water of this hormonal fugue state. And you're like, what the fuck was that fever dream that just came out of?

1:58:36It's, I mean, it's another example of just like how evolution did not optimize for happiness or harmony, it optimized for babies, making babies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is very effective. I mean, it's hilarious in some ways, but I think a good lesson there is be careful who you let yourself fall in love with. You know, you almost need to treat you in love as kind of like a child. It's like, if I allow this to happen, I won't be able to use my rational brain. So while I still have a tenuous hold on my sanity, allow me to try and make judgments carefully, how long are we going to spend with this person?

1:59:20And I need to make decisions probably pretty quickly while I'm still, you know, in rational mode, and not speed running through attachment. Because once you're in it, it's like, you're lost. Well, and this is another argument for what you were talking about earlier, of like front load, your identity is much as possible. Try and do everything you can to put them off. Right, exactly. Like just be as much of yourself as possible. Maximize you. Early on, because it's, that's when you're gonna find out. Like if you hold yourself back, and then you fall into this, just love bucket of hormones and, and neurotransmitters, then you might be screwed.

1:59:59It's super cliche advice, but I remember at my wedding, all the old people gave the exact same advice. Like all the old couples that have been together for like 40, 50, 60 years, they all give the exact same advice, which is like put the friendship first. What's that mean? Basically, they all said they're like, look, you're married now. There's gonna be good years, there's gonna be bad years, there's gonna be romantic times, There's gonna be non -romantic times. There's gonna be Difficult points in your life. There's gonna be really great points in your life like Put the friendship first because that's gonna carry you through everything Everything else is gonna come and go and you'll have you'll you'll have patients at different times um But if you're not friends, you're not gonna have the patience to wait.

2:00:48Hmm I feel like most cultural and mental health issues these days can be summed up in just two words, performative victimhood. That one did not perform well as I recall. I don't think. People don't usually like liking a tweet that says that that performative victim's. Yeah, a little bit called out. I'm trying to remember what inspired that.

2:01:14But I do believe that. I do believe. This comes back to the therapy culture thing

2:01:22of people adopt as values what they get validated for, right? Like they, they, if perceiving themselves as a victim is what brings them attention and sympathy and adoration, then it will encourage that behavior further. Like we're monkeys, you know, it's like Pavlov's belt. You reward me for something I'm gonna keep doing it. Right. I remember when I was running nightclubs, I used to get pissed off. There was a couple of other companies in Newcastle and the northeast of the UK, sort of classic working class mindset, like very wily, shrewd, not intellectually sophisticated, but but relationally socially genius people.

2:02:13And you have one goal, busy nightclub, right? If you make your nightclub busy, you're the kings, if your nightclub is not busy, you're the fucking idiot. And I always used to get pissed off at some of the other companies that would make claims, disparaging claim, there was no such thing as slander, right? You can say that this person's night, someone got glassed and they had three people in it and all of them had one leg and they would, you know, they were upside down with a gluten intolerance, shitting everywhere. You know, whatever you wanted to say in order to make somebody else's event, but this was a game that we refused to play and me and my business partner had a principal where we're like, we don't talk shit about other people's nights.

2:02:57And I always used to feel like it was unfair because we were constrained by what actually happened. But our competitors were simply constrained by what they could get away with saying and be believable. And I kind of get the sense that it's similar with this performative victimhood thing, which is if the way that you accumulate status, notoriety, recognition, validation from the world is through you doing a thing, your capacity to get the validation is constrained by a capacity to do the thing. But if it's simply through the performance of grievance, imagined or real, you disguise the fucking limit, you know, like if you're the LeBron James of pretending to be a victim, that skill set is significantly easier to acquire than being LeBron James and doing it through being in basketball, you know, the athlete who's perpetually injured, right?

2:03:57Or as always, you know, brief flashes of being good, but then gets the yips, or I don't know what the equivalent is in America. Like, gets in their own head and is unable to perform, I can't perform in like clutch situations. Like that is kind of romantic in some way, imagine what he could have been. It's like, yeah, but he fucking wasn't. Dude, like, ultimately he wasn't that thing. Even, you know, as brutal as it is, is somebody that that sometimes gets injured doing lifting heavy things. Like if you are the sort of athlete who gets injured, that is also the same thing for you too. That, well, imagine how great he could've been.

2:04:34Well, yeah, but his body wasn't built to be that great because every time that somebody hit him from the left his knee gave out or whatever it might be. And if you have an easy route to, another example of this, so this would have been me, not necessarily performative victimhood, but certainly me leaning into fear as opposed to confidence. when you play cricket, there is something called a TFC and it's a thanks for coming. Thanks for coming means that you didn't bat and you didn't bowl, all that you did was field, because everybody fields. And it's like nod to what the captain would say at the end of the game when he's chucking on and he was like, thanks for coming mate, because you didn't contribute.

2:05:15And having a TFC is kind of a bit of a fucking waste of a weekend. What did you do? You couldn't have contributed that much to the game, presumably you batted what's referred to as down the order So you're one of the later batsmen and if you were a bowler you weren't needed or the conditions weren't right for you Or the captain didn't have confidence in your ability to deliver at this stage of the game and There was a bit of me in the back of my mind that thought If I have the opportunity to have a TFC at least I can't fail Because I'm not faced that I would rather assure my failure privately than risk failure publicly because I'm insulated from other people having to see how I could have fallen short potentially.

2:05:55And that would, depending on how confident I was, sometimes that would be more. I really want this and I would lean into it. And other times it would be fear and I'd be like, I got off scuffer. I really fell up for it this weekend. God, if you'd got me in there, you could have seen the runs that I would have got on the board. But the performative victimhood thing, I think, between that, But if you're not constrained by reality, you can become anything that you want to be as long as you can get away with claiming it. And also this insulation privately. I also, I think there is a cultural norm that is shifted probably since you and I were kids.

2:06:37And I don't totally understand why or where it shifted, but it... I think there's a certain amount of virtues been started being described to victimhood. I think if I think back to like say what my parents were growing up or my grandparents were growing up, it was the opposite. It was like if you felt like a victim or complained about something and it was like, ah suck it up, you know, rub some dirt on it, you know, get over yourself. That's sort of thing. And then it feels like at some point there's kind of like an over correction, right? Like of course you want to acknowledge people who have had unfortunate things happen to them or maybe something's gone wrong or they've been treated unfairly or there's an injustice.

2:07:22But at some point along the way, victimhood in and of itself has become seen as like a virtuous thing. And you can, I think everybody's got their favorite pet groups that they can point to. and like say, you know, as an example, but like I see it all over the place. I see it's like, I think I wrote in one of my books, I said, I think this is the first time in history that literally every demographic feels aggrieved and persecuted. Like rich people feel persecuted right now. Poor people feel persecuted. White people feel persecuted. Black people feel persecuted. Stripes. Straight people feel persecuted.

2:07:58Gave people feel persecuted. Like how is this fucking pot? Who's persecuting? Like who's this possible? It's the Spiderman meme. Yeah, exactly. We live in a Spider -Man meme world right now. I don't totally understand how it's happened. In a sense, I think empathy has been weaponized, both politically but also socially, that it's people walk around with a badge of honor of like, I've been mistreated or the group I'm a part of has been mistreated and that makes me, that affords me all sorts of, you know, regard and respect that I didn't necessarily earn or do anything for. So yeah, I just, I see that as kind of the root, you know, because we could sit here and we won't, but we could sit here and talk about political issues all day and different social and cultural norms and issues that have been changing all day.

2:08:59But really at the ground level of it, I see this performative victimhood as a trend that is just like very fundamental and it's across the board, across demographics and it is like very worrying. I wonder what a part of it is a little bit of a sense of inequality and inequality can be due to empathy as well. If you have people who feel like they're being mistreated in one way or another, that they're you are not recognizing the prices that I pay, whether I'm the rich person or the white person or the gay person or whatever, or three. That sense of, I want to be seen. I want my suffering to be recognized and I feel like it's not.

2:09:49It starts to incentivize and it also resonates with other people who go, I don't think that my suffering has been seen or has been recognized dead just like me. Yeah, and I wonder whether it taps into this Yeah Righteous lack of recognition that many people feel like they're a part of yeah, I think there's also a lot of I believe it's the fallacy of composition that goes on which is like You will see you'll go online and you'll see say one Terrible thing happened to one since we're both white guys. We'll say terrible thing happens to one white guy, and because we're white guys, we're like, oh my God, look at what they're doing to all the white guys.

2:10:38And so there's this logical fallacy that happens, but you just get, you're like, your limbic system gets hijacked by the headline in the horrible video that you see on TikTok or whatever, and you're just like, oh my God, we're under attack. Yeah, fuck. Mark, you're awesome, dude. I think your work is phenomenal and I shamelessly repurpose it regularly. I appreciate your shameless repurposing. Good, I'm plagiarizing you with credit all the time. You got new app, you got new stuff. Where should people go to check out all the things you have? I'm on every social platform, check out my podcast, solved, posting on YouTube all the time.

2:11:18So come check it out. Everyone should. And your newsletter is also sick. So people should go and check that out. Until next time, dude. I wish I had you.