The (Not So) Subtle Art Of Mark Manson: The Truth About Self-Help, Transformation, & Life Advice That Doesn’t Suck

27:25It's the same shit. And the funny thing is, is, you know, people, instead of church, they go to a seminar, um, instead of praying, they meditate, do yoga. Um, instead of doing a potluck charity dinner, they, you know, do a mastermind and most of them still behave exactly the same afterwards. Yeah. I mean, I think in, in many ways, it's a, it's a reaction to the decline of community-based, you know, sort of spiritual gatherings, religious gatherings, whatever your doctrine might be. And it's not surprising because I think as human beings, you know, we're hardwired to, you know, find comfort in a tribe and we want to be part of something that is not just bigger than us, but, you know, speaks to kind of the unanswerable questions of what it means to be human.

28:17Absolutely. And so I don't, and I don't want people to take this wrong way. Like I'm not, I'm not denigrating this. I guess what I'm denigrating is like the lack of self-awareness because it's the people in Texas I grew up with, they knew what they were doing. They knew they were going to church. They knew they were worshiping God. They knew they were, you know, reading the Bible, but fucking up each week and not doing it right. You know, there was a self-awareness about it and an honesty about it. What I find here and with the self-help space in general is that there's not that awareness. There's not that honesty.

28:50And in fact, there's a little bit of an arrogance, a little bit of a spiritual narcissism of like, well, I did, you know, 12 meditation retreats and an ayahuasca trip. And my shaman said that I've reached this next level. And so, you know, you should listen to me. Yeah. Yeah. Really? Like, uh, cause you look like the same fucking person I've known the last two years, right? Like nothing has changed. You're literally making the same mistakes you made three years ago. The garments, the attire might change a Yeah, exactly. Exactly. A new tattoo or two. But so I don't mean to, as you said, there is a, I do believe there's a fundamental like human drive towards community, spiritual practice, all these things.

29:37There's nothing wrong with that. What I find here is I described it to a friend recently, as I said, California is an incredibly conformist place, but the conformity involves not thinking you're conforming. Yeah. It's like one of the most conformist places I've ever lived. That's analogous to the group think that is like heterodox thinking, right? Like all the, all the heterodox thinkers are lack of self-awareness that all of their heterodoxy falls into like one very narrow lane. Yes. It's, if you're compulsively contrarian, then you're not contrarian, right? You're just picking the other side of every bet, which I feel like a lot of people have built careers in podcasts and YouTube, just being compulsively contrarian.

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35:38We're in like this guru sphere, right? Particularly in the self-help world where there are outsized personalities out there who are commandeering like very large audiences and a significant mindshare amongst a vast population of people who are probably genuinely looking for good advice and guidance at some period in their life in which they need it. But back to like kind of what YouTube and the internet rewards, it rewards hot takes, contrarianism, heterodox thinking, certainty, conviction, charisma, all of these things, none of which necessarily are related to truth, veracity, and good advice, right?

36:28So you, as somebody who I know thinks about like how do I provide good advice and do it with integrity, you're out there not competing, but you're in a world in which those other people are out there for better or worse who are motivated not by values necessarily, but more and more by metrics like growth and with growth, that means platforming people who might be not the best people to platform under the rubric of like just asking questions and all of that kind of thing. Like, let me tell you what they don't want you to know and everything you've ever been told is a lie. And this is like what works, right?

37:11And I don't know if it's a willful blindness or a lack of self-awareness or maybe just I don't give a fuck. Like it doesn't matter as long as I'm growing and more and more people are paying attention to me. Yeah, I have mixed feelings about this because I think it's good for the world. Actually, let me start with a caveat and then I'll go into my mixed feelings. So the caveat of all of this is I wanna say that as this is simultaneously having the guru sphere, as you put it, I really like that word, is exploding, right? Self-help is bigger than it's ever been. It's become mainstream essentially.

37:50There is an unprecedented wealth of genuinely good mental health and physical health information that's become available in the last 10, 15 years that was never available in all of human history. There's probably been more good advice shared on the internet in the past 15 years than the rest of human history combined. So that's mixed in with all this stuff. And it's often very, very frustrating to, as a consumer, to parse the good from the bad. Even people who, by and large, have ridiculous positions and beliefs about most things will occasionally share a really good piece of information. So it's like there's a mental struggle of sifting through all the information out there.

38:39So I want to put that on the table first. And then that relates to my mixed feelings in the following way, which is ultimately I feel like it's a good thing to let two opposing narratives into the public sphere and let them kind of combat each other. And because a lot of times the conventional narrative does end up being full. I mean, how much nutritional information over the past 20 years, you know, that was conventional turned up to be absolutely terrible and horrible for people, you know, a decade later, right? So it's like the conventional wisdom does get overturned frequently. And so you do want that.

39:17You do want it to be free and available for people to attack and combat and offer alternative theories. And yeah, even if occasionally they're harebrained, you know, sure, whatever. That I think is fine. And I do think it does cause a lot of stress and strife among the population and among consumers. It makes our lives a little bit more complicated as it puts more responsibility on us to figure out what we're consuming and whether it's good or not. What I do worry about is, to your point, the over-indexing of crazy town, let's call it. I've kind of come to just as somebody who has observed online media my entire adult life and tried to like really kind of track it and understand why certain audiences behave certain ways.

40:00I've kind of come to the conclusion that perhaps the most chronically online population in the world are the crazy town conspiracy theory people. They're more engaged. They're more vocal. If they like you, they'll watch everything. They'll like everything. They'll comment on everything. and so I think as creators I think there are a lot of people in our industry who you know they'll dip their toe in that pool in the crazy town pool and they'll get that flood of engagement and that feels good it's like especially I mean when you've been say grinding through 20 episodes and you're at this plateau and like nothing's really popping off or performing well and you're like, man, what am I, what are we doing wrong?

40:46Like, what can I be doing better? And all of a sudden one just like shoots off like a rocket and like, man, I should do more of that. So I get where it comes from. I understand where it comes from. I don't think most of them realize what they're doing. I think they're just kind of. Their dopamine mechanism has been hijacked. It's like a, it's like a casino. It's like a, you know, it's like a slot machine and then you win. And then suddenly you have this euphoric reaction. And of course you're going to chase, you're going to chase that dragon. Totally. So you bet a little bit more and then a little bit more and a little bit more and then you go bankrupt.

41:19Right. And I think there's, we've seen the creator audience version of that multiple times where somebody dips their toe in crazy town, gets that huge bump in engagement and traffic. They're like, oh, maybe I'll go back for seconds. And oh, maybe I'll go back for thirds. Maybe I'll have this Looney Tune guys on my podcast and have a two hour conversation with them and see how that goes. Right. And then the next thing, you know, he's just like, well, the more time you spend with those people, you're going to start like believing, you know, what they're saying. And then before you know it, you become a mouthpiece for those ideas yourself.

41:51I think, you know, what you just said, I think you pointed out the difference between you and me and a lot of these other people in the space, which is I fundamentally believe. And I think, I, I think you share this belief, which is that we don't believe what's true. We believe what we're incentivized to believe. Like as human beings, there's just so much, like as somebody who studied psychology, we are so good at bullshitting ourselves that when we're incentivized, like when we're rewarded for believing something, our brain will find a way to believe it. And I think the people I see falling into this trap that we're talking about, I think are the people who have a little bit of an idealistic view of truth of like, I'm just having conversations.

42:37I'm just trying to find the truth. And if I'm honest with them, and if I have an honest conversation, eventually the truth will come out and they don't realize that your belief or your definition of what's true can get warped by the incentives that are placed around you. There's a really famous quote. I forget some congressman from years and years ago, but he said it's, uh, the quote is something like, uh, I think it was Upton Sinclair. I don't know. Anyway, he said, it's impossible to get a man to believe that he's doing something evil when his paycheck depends on it. That is Upton Sinclair. Okay.

43:11It is Upton Sinclair. Yeah. I mean, it's really a two-pronged thing. On the one hand, we're much more easily manipulated than we want to believe. And that's true of everybody, no matter how smart you are. And perhaps the more smart you are, the more easy the mark you are. Yeah. Secondarily, our capacity for denial and kind of defense mechanisms around what we decide we want to believe is more powerful than we want to accept. Can we dig into that, that first one? Because I love that. I noticed this so early in my career. A lot of people don't know this. I started out as a dating coach. And one of the things I noticed very early on is that the hardest clients were the super smart guys.

43:53Because the smarter a person is, the more they can rationalize whatever they want to believe. Like a smart person can come up with a million excuses not to do something. And all of them sound like really good excuses, like completely valid. Whereas like somebody who's just average intelligence, maybe they'll give one excuse and then you like disarm that and they're like, okay, maybe you're right. I should go do this, you know? And with highly intelligent people, there's, you can kind of seduce yourself by saying like, oh, I'm so smart at these other things. I've got, I've got all these degrees.

44:23I like made all this money doing this other thing. I can keep my head on straight. Whereas actually you are probably more susceptible because as your beliefs warp towards your incentives, you're going to be so good at constructing narratives and stories to justify those. Yeah, that intelligence turns on itself. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is a thing in recovery also. Like the smart person is a real tough customer when it comes to getting on board with the 12 steps. because it's like, yeah, I mean, the smarter you are, you walk in, you're like, and somebody says like, you need to show up here every day and like stand at the door and shake hands with everyone and say, hello.

45:03It's like, fuck you, you need to make coffee. You're trying to outthink and outsmart all of these things and say, well, what does this have to do with, you know, drinking or not drinking? Or, you know, I don't understand why I would have to make an inventory, like in my mind, okay, I've done the inventory in my mind. Why do I have to write it down? I'm like, I'm smart enough. I got it, right? And all of these things become antagonists to the recovery process and make intelligence the enemy of the growth that you seek. Yeah. Are you a David Foster Wallace fan? Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever seen his interviews about going to AA?

45:38A bunch of them, yeah, yeah, yeah. He talks about that. Because first of all, like dude has the biggest brain on the planet. It's like so smart, but it's like, imagine a guy - But he never would really admit that he had a problem. He would say that he was going for research yeah yeah of course yeah research yeah my friend took me you know all this sort of stuff i think um listening to him talk about it and write about it in a couple places it's so funny because he talks about that about how as a literary author it killed him that every aa lesson was essentially just a cliche right like yeah and he was like he would be like no no you guys you guys have to like no we need to discuss this you know he'd like start trying to talk about it like as if he was a philosophy professor.

46:21Right. Yeah. It's like, he's bringing his gigantic brain into this and wants to break down the epistemics of the entire, you know, underpinnings of this. The problem is - And then he goes out and gets drunk. Exactly. Because the problem is your lizard brain. It's not your, it's not your, you know, philosophy brain. Right, right, right, right. And then, you know, the self-delusion part too has sort of antecedents in recovery as well. Like I know well, like the power, my own power to create denial. When it comes to something that I want to do, I can come up with some pretty good arguments about why it's just fine.

46:56And so if that's the case, then what's happening in the guru sphere or the kind of digital information landscape at large with somebody whose dopamine mechanism is getting lit up and then realizes that not only are the incentives to move more in that direction. Like the pot of gold is real. Yeah. We're doing that. Yeah. Speaking of intellectualizing addiction, I'd love to talk to you about this. I've been playing with the idea. I mean, I don't know if there's any value in it of like going to a meeting. So I'm in this weird gray area and maybe it's not a gray area, but on the one hand, as you know, I quit drinking two years ago.

47:40The more distance I get from quitting, the more I look back and realize how big of a problem it was. And the more I look at my people in my family and my family history and everything, and I'm like, okay, this is feeling like alcoholism. It's alcoholism mish. And then I was talking to a friend who's a recovered alcoholic, and I was talking to him about this. And I was like, I'm starting to wonder if I'm an alcoholic. And then he kind of laughed and he was like, well, if you have to wonder. He was like, nobody who's not an alcoholic ever wonders if an alcoholic asks himself or herself that question.

48:21People who are not alcoholics, that doesn't occur to them. Exactly. And yet it is a self-diagnosed thing. It's not for anybody else to say. Totally. So I'm in this weird place where I'm like, am I, is this like an identity? Like, should I make this part of my identity? Like if I start drinking again, is this, am I bullshitting myself? Like, is it going to get bad again? Right. So I don't know. I'm in like, there's a lot of confusion in my life at the moment around this. Yeah. You're in like this weird liminal gray zone with the whole thing. Well, we talked a little bit about this when I was on your show, the joke came up around like, is a good alcoholic one who is just, who can figure out a way to continue to be an alcoholic and drink, or is a good alcoholic one who realizes he needs to stop and get sober?

49:12And I could sense like you're kind of like trying to feel like where you fit into this whole thing as I was kind of sharing my story. And I think, well, a couple of things. First of all, if you really want to know the answer, or go out and do some more research. Yeah. You know, go out and start drinking again and see what happens. You know? You can always do that. We have you on the record. Right. So, you know, when I wake up - I'm not encouraging you to do that, but maybe you, but like, and this is another kind of like AA thing. It's like, well, maybe you need to go out and drink some more. If you're not sure, if you're not committed or you don't think that this program of recovery is for you, like go out and see what happens out there.

49:53And then, you know, we're always here if you want to come back. Right. So that's an option. The second thing is on that subject of good alcoholics, when you reflect back on your own past and your family history, maybe they were good alcoholics who were good at masking it or keeping it just enough under control that they could kind of still live their lives and be functioning alcoholics, which doesn't mean they're not alcoholics. It just didn't progress to the state in which it becomes, you know, the kind of dramatic stuff that we talk about. Right. I can't answer that for yourself. This is really just between you and you.

50:29And I would say, does it really matter whether you decide to label yourself an alcoholic or not? if you think that you had a problem with a substance that was antithetical to the person that you want to be, you've taken this huge first step of saying no more and not doing it anymore. But then you have to contend with emotional sobriety. Like what you've accomplished is abstinence. And we also talked about this too, like your workaholism, right? And I said, did your workaholism increase once you stopped drinking? Yes. And you said, yes. And I'm like, yes, because that discomfort inside of you is looking for something to latch onto, to feed it, right?

51:11And so it's choosing work right now, which just tells me there's something there for you to examine within yourself that perhaps could use a little bit of healing. And, you know, the 12 steps is really good for that. It's good for self-awareness. It's good for kind of understanding your character defects and your patterns and, you know, how your unhealthy relationship with this substance or however it manifests. Workaholism is interfering with that kind of better version of yourself that you're aspiring to inhabit. Yeah. Yeah, that's the other thing that's gotten me thinking too, because ironically, back when I drank, I never considered myself like a very compulsive person.

51:55But since I stopped drinking, I've noticed that my behavior in a lot of, not just work, but in a lot of different areas has become much more compulsive. that like I feel. Because the alcohol was the solution. Yes. To the problem, not the problem, right? It was a salve to the compulsivity or whatever, the discontentment inside of you that's driving compulsive behavior. But does compulsiveness get solved or does it just get redirected? Well, it can be solved. Like, I don't know, like there's the whole kind of like dialogue around like, can you actually be healed or are you just always in recovery?

52:36And let's just set that aside for now. Yeah. Certainly the compulsivity can be held at bay by healing what's beneath the drive to be compulsive in the first place, which is a psychological examination of self and figuring out like what is causing that. Sure. And perhaps that could be healed. That process of self-examination and healing is a way of, it speaks to like kind of the white knuckling versus surrender, right? Like if you're abstinent and you have this compulsive tendency and you're just kind of like holding onto the edge of the table and like, I hope I'm not compulsive today or I'm gonna go work all day so I don't act out in other ways, like you're not really well, you know what I mean?

53:26Like That's not engaging in your own healing. That makes sense to me because, you know, when we had this conversation before, the thing that didn't land for me was that healing the compulsivity because it's now I'm thinking about analogous to like anxiety, right? So like if you, let's say you have a very highly anxious person, somebody who's very anxious, they're probably always going to be anxious. Like the anxiety doesn't go away. it gets managed and there's a comfort that develops in the managing of it. So it's like the healing isn't going from lots of anxiety to zero anxiety. The healing is going from lots of anxiety that's unmanaged to anxiety that's comfortably managed.

54:14Does that make sense? Yeah, coping mechanisms and strategies. Yeah, and so I imagine it sounds like what you're saying is like that process is analogous to the compulsivity. I think so. But I think there is a freedom and a liberation that you can experience. And I think that there is a spiritual mystical aspect to it as well. Like this idea of letting go rather than holding on and trying to manage something that's unmanageable and saying, instead, I give up. I'm letting go of all of this. I'm turning this over to whatever it is that's more powerful than me. And - Spirit animals. Yeah. Like what, yeah, exactly.

54:58You could be to your, you know, yeah, like the ayahuasca road runner or whatever it is in your case, it doesn't matter. Sure. And those are qualitatively two different experiences. Well, it's funny because it's the compulsivity that's showing up in other areas of my life. I would say it's not harming my life. It's a lot of it's just like silly. like it's just like like i play more video games than i used to and and my wife pointed it out and she's like yeah you're playing a lot of video games like the last year i'm like huh well yeah because usually when i used to go out and drink like i used to go out and drink so now i just sit sit at home play play a bunch of video games instead so it's there's nothing inherently wrong with that unless you're using that to not deal with something else right if i'm not sleeping You're like, you don't want to, you have a discomfort or like, you don't want to be around your wife or something like you're running, you're using it to run away from something.

55:51Totally. I guess what I'm talking about is just that there's a lot more nervous energy inside me than I knew because I was drunk or hung over half the time. And now that that's gone, it's like, oh yeah, I got a lot of nervous energy going on. And like, I kind of like constantly feel need to be doing something. and when you just sit still and do nothing, what is the internal experience? That's a good question. You know, okay, so this gets into meditation. I used to meditate a lot when I was young and I kind of got away from it. And I've had this conversation a lot, especially here in LA, when people ask me, why don't you meditate?

56:32And my reply is always, I just haven't seen a reason to in the last five or six years. I think this is a good reason to I actually now that I think about it because uh, I used to I used to meditate pretty intensely in my 20s And then I just kind of moved away from it. I think That would be a good experiment is like yeah start doing like some longer meditation sessions And see see if it's different. See if it feels different. It's in the steps Is it it's one of the steps Meditation sort of given short shrift in the rooms, but like yeah, I mean technically it's one of the steps and And a sort of condition of the alcoholic is a constitutional restlessness that speaks to a lack of emotional sobriety when you're not actively engaged in like doing these things to be in the solution, right?

57:28And those things are like the personal inventory and gratitude and service and, you know, all the like. Like none of these things are like revolutionary things as David Foster Wallace would give you an earful on. But for whatever fucking reason, it works. Of course. And so the not David Foster Wallace doesn't ask questions about why it works. They just do it because it moves their life forward in a positive direction. And this ties back into the self-help junkie thing. and this has always been my argument, which is that what works is very boring and it hasn't changed in 10 ,000 years. It's just that we forget or we avoid or we deny or we...

58:13we get bored. And so some newfangled seminar and a big theater with 5 ,000 people and some guru who's got some new method that's going to like change this and that in your life overnight, that feels both there's a complexity to it and complexity. We tend to associate complexity with something valuable. And then two, it's shiny and new. And three, there's a lot of like social proof involved. You know, it's like, oh, there's 5 ,000 people here. It must work. So all those things feel very special, but ultimately what works is very boring, which is sit in silence, practice gratitude, acts of service.

58:51Yeah, call somebody who's having a hard time. Yeah, eat healthy, exercise. Yeah, eat healthy, get sleep, exercise, all of that. But we all suffer from terminal specialness, right? It can't be this. Yeah. I've done that and I still feel like shit. So it must be the$5 ,000 seminar and I'm special and that person's special and I'm gonna go behind the velvet rope and I'm gonna get the special answer that only the special people get, right? Yes. And there's a halo effect with that. It almost doesn't matter what the person says just because you've spent the money and there's a lot of drapery and dressing around it.

59:27Like perhaps that will get you to do something you wouldn't ordinarily do. But the tail on that is very short, right? Like the half-life dissipates immediately because most of those are premised on some form of motivation, inspiration, and positive psychology. Yep. And I know you have a lot to say about that. But the greater point is you're just running from one thing to the next under the delusion that you're engaging in your growth when in fact you're running away from deep down what you know works. It's just, it just sucks to do it and it's boring and it's not fun. Well, you know what's funny?

1:00:04I have a very complicated relationship with Tony Robbins and he probably doesn't know who I am. So that's fine. But it's funny because for years I looked at his seminars. I've never been the one, but I have a lot of friends who have gone and they would describe them to me. And I'm like, that is so ridiculous. Like, you know, this arena with all this like crazy shit going on and fireworks and light shows and all this stuff. And as I've gotten older, as I've talked to more and more people who have like gone to his things. What I realized is that most of the time in his seminar, there's not teaching, there's not lectures.

1:00:44I mean, there are some of those things. Most of the time spent at his seminar, you're doing one of two things. You're either dancing to music or you're socializing with the people around you. They build in exercises for you to socialize and meet the people around you and to connect with them and build friendships. And as I've gotten older, I realized I'm like, most of the people who probably go to his seminars and report that it was life-changing or they feel so much better, like 80 % of it is probably the dancing and socializing. Like if you think about your average depressed person, what's true about them?

1:01:24They don't go outside. They don't have enough relationships. They don't have enough going on in their life. They don't move their bodies. And so you put them in this environment. There's a lot of stimulation. They're meeting people. They're talking to people. They're being vulnerable for the first time in years. They're making a new friend. They're dancing more than they've danced since they were like 18 years old. And after five days, they leave to like, oh my God, I'm a new person. And it's like, that's actually where the vast majority of the value is. But if you advertise a seminar of dancing and talking to people, A, nobody would sign up and And B, they definitely wouldn't pay$5 ,000 for it.

1:02:02So it's almost like this genius packaging of the whole point of that seminar is not him and it's not what's on stage. It's not the theories. It's not the ideas, which I mean, a lot of them are totally fine and normal. The bulk of the value is the fact that you're just there moving your body, talking to people, being vulnerable, building a relationship. That's so interesting. Yeah, I know a lot of people who have not only gone, like they go and go and go again, right? And these are successful people that are friends of mine that I like a lot. I've never gone. And I just, like, I see him, I see what's happening.

1:02:43And I'm like, I just, there's something inside of me that thinks like, first of all, is this guy even a human being? Like, there's something like alien about this guy. Me too, me too. Like most of my friends who are into his stuff, they've gone, they've like spent an absurd amount of money and they've gone to like 15 events. But when I ask them why, you know why they say, they don't go for him. They go for, because it's like - The community, the connection. They made a bunch of friends at the seminar and they all keep in touch and they're like, I'm going to go to the one in August. Oh, you should go too.

1:03:14Okay, yeah, let's all go again. You know, and they do it again and it becomes church. And it's funny because again, this comes back to the self-awareness thing. There's nothing wrong with it as long as everybody knows the game they're playing, right? Right. And where I have ethical issue with it is that, I mean, I imagine Tony knows the game that's being played, but most of the attendees don't. And then he gets the credit. Right. You know, the attendees like, oh, I've done three Tony Robbins seminars, changed my life. I love it. It's amazing. Great. Why did you love it? Oh, well, you know, Tony, this and that, and I learned this and blah, blah, blah.

1:03:47It's like, that's actually not what made you happy. Like, this is actually what, like all of the research, all the good research that we have on human happiness. Shows that this is actually what made you happy. Was taking place like in the unconscious part of the experience. In the hall outside the convention center. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I really, I struggle with it because I, again, like I have lots of friends who've benefited from it tremendously and speak super highly of the experience and of Tony. And then I hear him speak and it's just, there's always an upsell. There's always like the use of language is very consciously deployed and the right name is dropped at the right moment and all this, it's like, it all feels very contrived.

1:04:32And I'm left thinking like, who is this guy? Like, I never see, and maybe it's not like I'm paying attention to his stuff. So maybe I'm just missing it. But like, where's the vulnerability on his part? Or like, I don't get a sense of authenticity, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah, I agree with the contrived thing. I mean, I've only seen videos of his seminars, But anyway, that's an epiphany I had recently that I kind of came around on. So I've come, like there's like a begrudging respect. What he's built is incredibly powerful. It is incredible. It's not for me to judge. I don't know. Like it's helped a lot of people.

1:05:08It's secular church. And it's like, and look, even if he is a little bit contrived or a little bit aggressive with the, like the aggressive upselling bugs me too. But I mean, he built a secular church for people who needed church. and not saying everybody needs church. I'm just like using that figuratively, but like need, they need a social group. They need, you know, some sort of higher purpose. They need something to look forward to. You know, he built that and he like marketed it in a way and provided content in a way that, I don't want to say use the word, trick is a strong word, but like convince people that that's what they were going for.

1:05:48And really, you know, it's the old like, you seduce them with candy and then you switch it out for broccoli in the last minute

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1:07:37If you were to like look directly to camera and speak to the person who's feeling lost in their life right now or without direction or feeling like they're lacking opportunity or skills or the mindset to achieve the dreams or ambitions that they have but they do have like a lot of free time and that free time is spent on YouTube and listening to podcasts and stuff. Like what's the litmus test for that person to draw that distinction between somebody who's offering advice, who might not have their best interest at heart versus somebody who's like, this is good. You should subscribe to this channel and listen to this person.

1:08:21Like, do you have like sort of rules or guideposts for trying to help that person who might not have the savviness to make that distinction themselves. I think ultimately it comes down to a couple kind of mental principles that you have to adhere to. Develop a habit of questioning your own assumptions, being willing to question the things that you're excited about or interested in. Not putting anybody on a pedestal, like nobody's going to save you. Nobody's got it all figured out. Uh, and definitely don't listen to people who claim they're going to save you and claim they have, have it all figured out because those people never do.

1:09:04That's a good heuristic right there is just, is like index for humility. And also their relationship with like certainty versus, versus like nuance. Yes. But I, I should also note here too, that like, and this is something that I try to repeat quite often on my show is that even the biggest experts in the world, like Nobel Prize winning psychologists, their shit gets like, you know, fails to replication. Right. You were talking about this the other day, like so much of this stuff is like a coin toss. It's crazy, dude. There are these massive meta-analyses of all of the therapeutic modalities, right?

1:09:44CBT, DBT, the IAFB, like psychodynamic, everything. Like they've gone through dozens and dozens of therapeutic modalities going back decades, a century. They've run it through hundreds of studies, tens of thousands of patients. They've tracked who's benefited the most, you know, which therapeutic modality works best for which problems, which one is most consistent, which one is the easiest to implement. Almost all of like the best ones come back with a 40 % hit rate. You know what a placebo hits at? 30%. That's after 150 years of psychological research, we've gone from 30%. It's hardly confidence inspiring.

1:10:2830 % to 40%. So it's - Well, and betwixt and between all of these modalities, the real driver is just going to talk to somebody, right? Like, okay, that can take many shapes and forms, but that alone is the most important piece in the whole puzzle. In fact, they've actually, in a lot of those meta-analyses, they compared various therapeutic modalities to simply talking to a friend. And talking to a friend performed just as well. Is that true? Yeah. In some cases, it performed better than some of the therapies. A lot of this is just to come back to the point of like, uh, of humility. Like it's, we don't know.

1:11:15And like I said, you know, at the top of the show, I believe a lot of dumb things in my life that got me here. Right. And sometimes you got to go through some of those dumb beliefs or like a weird phase, right. To kind of like learn the lesson and get to the right spot. So you have to be allowed to do that without, without like sort of having to weather judgment or a bunch of people attacking you for it. Totally. Totally. And And I mean, at this point, you know, I've been doing this about 15 years and I'm sure you've gone through this as well. Like it's, there are a lot of things that I wrote and published and like hung my hat on eight, 10 years ago that like today I'm like, Ooh, no, no.

1:11:56Well, I mean, to me, yes, of course. Right. But to me, like, if you're not feeling that, then you haven't grown at all. Like you should, that's, that's appropriate. Like that's the way it should be. Exactly. So what is something that you've changed your mind on perhaps since your last book came out or the last time that we sat down? Recently, it's hard for me to place when certain beliefs changed, but I can say one of the things, and a lot of the beliefs change slowly, but I will say one of the biggest ones that has changed as time has gone on is I think early in my career, I had a little bit of a naive belief that with enough effort and focus and the right tools, anybody can kind of change any aspect of themselves.

1:12:47You know, if you want to be a morning person, if you want to change careers and go into this, if you want to like stop having panic attacks and go do this and, you know, start a skydiving career, like all these things. I think when I was younger, I had a little bit of an idealistic belief about people's malleability and the power of personal development and, um, and just discipline and hard work. And I think as I've gotten older, and this is a combination of two things. One is observing myself and my own fucking thick skull over the last 15 years, but also observing a lot of friends, family, fans, audience members, people I've coached, and also just having a much better understanding of the scientific literature.

1:13:34A very significant portion of our personalities is genetic and it's baked in. And it's a fact. And to me, this is actually a very liberating thing because I think a lot of people don't like hearing this. They don't like hearing like, oh, if you're an anxious person at 18, you're probably going to be an anxious person for the rest of your life. Not always, but very likely. They don't like hearing that. But coming back to the surrender point you were making earlier, to me, this is actually liberating because I think when you believe that anything about yourself can and should be changed and made better, there's an immense amount of pressure you put on yourself.

1:14:14And then when you fail to make that change or when you don't get the progress you're looking for, you really beat yourself up about it. Yeah, you just levy all kinds of self-judgment on yourself. Exactly. And I have found this realization a little bit freeing in the way of like, this is who I am. This is part of who I am, right? It's like the same way some people are born athletic or unathletic or with really great eyesight or terrible eyesight or, you know, with big feet or small feet or they can jump high or they can't jump high. You know, it's like some people are born anxious and they're unanxious.

1:14:49And all of the things that are like considered, I guess, bad, you know, like let's take anxiety, stick with anxiety as an example. You know, we've kind of this industry writ large has just decided anxiety is bad. You shouldn't be anxious. We should find ways to make you stop being anxious. Well, anxious people, they notice problems sooner. They notice details better. They're much more conscientious about their environment. they can be much more observant of the people around them like there's a lot of benefits that come with high conscientiousness and neuroticism which is associated with anxiety like that like we don't think about we don't talk about well it's a survival mechanism like hypervigilance that is born out of probably you know being reared in a household or an environment that had aspects of it that were unsafe that that demanded that you be paying attention and that you kind of be in a state of fight or flight at all times for your own survival.

1:15:46It's just that later on in life, you don't need that defense mechanism anymore. It's hardwired into you. And so the question then becomes, like, if it's chronic, yes, it's good. It has its advantages. You are going to do all the things that you just said, but in a chronic state, it's going to impair your health and it's going to derail you in all kinds of different ways. So how can you not just manage it, but kind of unravel it and create new kind of neural pathways by going into that, you know, whether it's IFS or like some other, there's all kinds of modalities for doing that, right? A variety of them.

1:16:19There is a way to maybe not completely graduate from that state, but to - You can soften the edges and you can definitely, yeah, if it's a chronic thing that is debilitating in some way, you can definitely bring it back from that. You can soften it, but it's never going to go away. There's a certain amount of who you are. Like there's like a center of gravity, right? Or there's like a gravitational level, right? Like you can push it a little bit away, you know, you can make marginal differences, but you're never going to go from like being a highly anxious person to a, just a non-anxious person.

1:16:50Like that just, it's very rare. But I think your ability to, um, navigate personal change is improved when you kind of take ownership of your kind of default state, right? Like this is who I am and this is what I have to work with, right? I'm not going to change my eye color or, you know, suddenly get drafted into the NBA out of the blue, but I can stop drinking. I can lose 40 pounds. You know, I can do all these other things. So I think it goes both ways. Like I hear what you're saying, but I also think people don't really acknowledge that there is more latitude than they might imagine in other areas of their life.

1:17:32Yeah, 100%. So it's like, and this almost comes down to like which audience you're speaking to, right? Like if I think the self-help industry as a whole probably overestimates how much could be changed and how much should be changed, right? And I think the non-self-help audience probably underestimates how much can be changed and how much should be changed. It's interesting. I heard a quote from a psychiatrist once who said that somebody asked him about overdiagnoses, medication being overdiagnosed. And he said, you know, this is going to sound paradoxical, but the population is simultaneously overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed.

1:18:09And what he meant was he said, overall, if you take the population of people who actually have a condition, they are underdiagnosed. But if you take the overall population of everybody, they are overdiagnosed. And that's because the majority of people who are taking a medication, they're taking it for something that they probably shouldn't be taking it for. But the people who actually need the medication, not enough of them are taking it. So it's like, it all comes down to who goes to the psychiatrist. Yeah. I mean, there's another kind of parallel in this mental health context, which is there's never been more awareness of mental health.

1:18:45And that's such a good thing. Like we're acknowledging all of these kinds of conditions and how they impact us in a variety of ways. And that gives us the ability to heal and grow and live more expandedly, right? At the same time, there's an identity attachment to a lot of these diagnoses that are then kind of used or weaponized to say, well, I can't do that because I have this thing, right? Or the world needs to accommodate me and I don't need to try to address this because that's the responsibility of everybody else. A hundred percent. So I think this is a really good, important distinction.

1:19:25I'm glad you brought it up because it's the underlying thing might not be able to be changed, but your attitude, beliefs, and behaviors around it can absolutely be changed. So it's like maybe the fundamental anxiety is not going to be changed, but your reaction to it, your beliefs about it, your narratives that you tell yourself about it, those can absolutely be changed. And that by itself can make it totally livable. Right. So I think there's a lot more of that. Like that's actually kind of the healthy version of self-help, but it's not a sexy thing. It's not, nobody wants to hear that. I get emails from people who, uh, who will say something like, you know, I'm in med school and I, I hate all the coursework and I can't focus and I don't want to study, but I really want to be a doctor.

1:20:17What should I do? I'm like, you don't want to be a doctor. You actually don't want to be a doctor. You don't want to be a doctor. You're trying to convince yourself that you want something that you don't actually want. Exactly. And they're like, well, no, but maybe if I study more and I like just try harder and if I learn some productivity tips, you know, then maybe I'll start liking it. I'm like, no, no, no, you don't understand. They like the idea of being a doctor, but they don't actually like what being a doctor is. And so that's a very practical example of just like, this is who you are. You are a person who doesn't like studying medicine.

1:20:51So therefore you should probably not be a doctor. Yeah. We kind of talked about this when I was on your show, this idea of like willingness. Like, what are you willing to do, right? To achieve your goal. And if you're not willing to do it, maybe it's not the right goal for you. Yeah. And there's this trope around willingness that I think creates a lot of confusion, which is like, well, just be willing to be willing or something, you know, like, and it's like, what is willingness? Like you can't compel anyone else or yourself to be willing to do something that you don't actually, it's like asking somebody to want something that they don't actually want, right?

1:21:31Willingness is like, it's like a gift from God. Like if you're graced with some willingness to suddenly do something you ordinarily wouldn't wanna do, where does that come from? It's internally driven. I don't know where it comes from, but it's not something that you can just summon out of like grit or discipline. in i associate it with giving up like what are you willing to give up like a willingness to do something means you're okay with the costs and sacrifices involved and i think this idea that you should just be willing to do anything for your goal essentially what you're saying is you're willing to give up everything for your goal and i think there's very few things in life that you will feel that way about or that you should feel that way about.

1:22:22Like some goals you shouldn't be willing to give up everything. So I don't know. It's funny. I gave a little spiel about David Goggins on my show a month ago, and we posted a little short. It was funny because all the Goggins fanboys came after me. First of all, I love David Goggins. I'm a huge fucking fan. That dude, the amount of times I've been in the gym and like heard his voice in my head when I'm like getting that last rep. Who's gonna carry the boats. Who's gonna carry the boats. You know, I love that he exists and I love what he does. And I think he's just, he's an amazing influence. But I also, from an intellectual point of view, I find him fascinating because there are millions of people like myself who admire the hell out of him.

1:23:07Yet I watch him, I'm like, I would never in a million years fucking live like that. Like that is insane to me. Like the dude's like running on like broken feet and like. But he always, to his credit, he always says like, don't do what I'm doing. No, yeah. You know, he's very quick to like tell people not to emulate him. So I'm bringing this back to the willingness thing because I find his story interesting and I find his mindset interesting because it's the lengths that he's gone to to do the things that he's done. You have to be willing to give up everything. Like you literally have to be willing to give up everything.

1:23:43And if you like read his books and learn his story, he did hit a point in his life where he kind of had nothing. So fuck it. I might as well give up everything for this goal. And I feel like he's just kind of like stuck in that mode. Cause like, I look at my life, right? Like when I was young, I had nothing. And when I started my first business, I was like, I've got nothing. So I will literally give up everything. I started working 16 hours a day. I broke up with my girlfriend. I moved in with my mom. Like I literally gave up everything. No social life, nothing. And then I built the business I wanted.

1:24:15But that was easy because I didn't have anything. I look at my life now, like I start like trying to process this now. I've got a mortgage. I've got a wife. I've got, you know, aging parents. I've got a great group of friends. I've got like very comfortable. I have assets. I have like a really nice life. There's actually a lot of shit I don't want to give up anymore, you know? Well, this is the dilemma of success. And I think at the crux of this is this idea that it's, listen, willingness, surrender, all of these things, it's easier when you have nothing to lose and you have nothing going on, right?

1:24:51Like, what's the big deal with surrender? Like, you're going to go back to the homeless shelter? Like, you know what I mean? Like, what are we actually wagering here, right? And then as a result of that willingness that you demonstrated and that depth of surrender where you just let go of like every idea you thought would serve you and allowed yourself to be guided in a new and different way. It's that energy and that sensibility and that commitment that delivered you to this place of success. but what happens and I suffer from this is that when you arrive there, then you convince yourself that it was you all along, you're in the driver's seat, you're in control and it's once again, like self-will run riot.

1:25:38So the self-will run riot is what created all the problems that led to me losing everything and having to surrender in the first place and you get amnesia when you become successful because the ego starts to have free reign again and convinces you that you're a genius or whatever it is, right? And so it becomes more difficult than to be in that place of surrender because now you have a lot to wager, right? Like letting go is a much trickier feat because you're like, I don't wanna let go. Like everything's really good, right? And this is like where I'm at right now. Like I have to remember like what got me here and what got me here wasn't my ego or anything else.

1:26:21It was like being in that state. And when I start to take it back, that's like when it all begins to like crumble and go away anyway. Yeah. So the more you hold onto it, the less likely you are to be able to sustain it anyway. And it's not yours to hold onto anyway. And everything's shifting and changing always. Yeah. Do you worry about that in the context of audience? I try not to. Yeah. I'm an athlete, I'm competitive. Like I look at this stuff and I'm like that fucking guy and like, why is this happening? And like, how come this? Like I can be that person very easily. And so I try to like immunize myself from all of that because I have no control over it.

1:27:07The only thing I have control over is like what's coming out of my mouth right now, right? And everything else is none of my business, but it is my business, right? This is like how I'm paying my bills. And obviously the better everything does, then the more people I can hire and the more, you know, like, you know, all of that kind of stuff that comes with living in the modern world. Have you knowingly said something on air and put it out that you knew was going to lose audience? Like what was... Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How was that process for you? That was uncomfortable.

1:27:41Like I struggle with like giving too many fucks about what other people think. And I want people to like me. I'm a people pleaser by nature. And I'm not trying to like stir up controversy or put content out that's gonna be divisive. I wanna put out content that's helpful and is evergreen. But I've put out some stuff that I knew like, oh, well, this is gonna be polarizing. And it's going to definitely lead to a bunch of people like walking away from me. But I had conviction over my values around it. And I feel fine about it. It's fine. Yeah. You know, I don't care about that. I would say those have been the hardest points in my career.

1:28:22It's only happened a few times. The last time was actually with COVID. I wrote a number of things about it super early on, like late February, early March. Like, hey, this is a thing, like get ready, blah, blah, blah. And people were like, dude, you're the give a fuck. Like, why are you right? I'm like, because it's, this is coming and nobody's talking about it. I was like losing my mind. So you were early in that. I think my first news. Well, you went like, so hold on a second. you came to my house in 2000. Oh, that was the year before, 2019. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because then you went to Australia and I was like, you weren't in Australia when it started.

1:28:55Okay, yeah. No, no. But yeah, that was one time. By the way, you're a big deal here in Australia. It's a whole other level, bro. It's insane. Yeah. They love you in Australia. I'm excited. I think I even texted you when it, because I went there a couple of months after you went there and it's just like every bookstore was just an entire wall of your books. It's just orange everywhere. It's just like insane. couldn't get away from it. I'm actually going back plug for my speaking tour. Uh, I lied. I said, I wasn't going to plug anything. I said, I have nothing to promote. I actually, now that you bring it up, Rich, uh, I, I have a speaking tour in Australia in November.

1:29:29I'm going to be speaking at the opera house. So that gives you an idea. Like I can barely fill, uh, you know, uh, a small nightclub here in the States, but I go down there and they give me the fucking opera house. So it's pretty fucking good there. Yeah. I love it. I love it. So yeah. Uh, November 4th, from okay november 4 sydney australia mark nanson.net for tickets um that's cool the opera house that did you have you done that before no that's pretty cool no i actually i quit speaking a couple years ago um you know back to that hole if it's not fun i'm not gonna do it uh and then my publicist down there reached out and she was like you know we were thinking about putting together another tour for you your book's still number one everywhere and yeah i was like okay and then she mentioned the opera house i was like oh your book is still number one there Yeah.

1:30:15As of like six months ago, you know, four months ago. God, that's so crazy, dude. It's stupid. Is it just an abstraction for you at this point? I mean. Yeah, I don't even know. Yeah. It's still on the times list. It's like. Is it? 328 weeks or something. Still, it's this week. I can't. It's still on. The first one. Subtle. Subtle art, yeah. It's still on the New York Times bestseller list. It's six and a half years. If you add up all the time it's been on the list, it's like six and a half years. Wow. Yeah, I don't know. Like, honestly, at this point, I mean, don't get me wrong. I think it's a good book.

1:30:47But like, I think it's probably, it's somewhat like winning the lottery or something. Like, I look at it, obviously, I think it's a really good book. I don't think it's that much better than, say, you know, your other average bestselling self-help book. But just the result, the magnitude of the result is just like so vast, like so insane. James Clear is having a similar experience right now, right? Have you guys, have you guys gotten on the phone and talked about your, your shared experience with this? I mean, his, but how long, how many years has, has Atomic Habits been up there? I think he's at like 250 weeks or something.

1:31:23So his book came out. It's really interesting. Actually, his book came out almost exactly two years after. And then if you kind of look at the trajectories, they're pretty similar. His, his took a little bit longer to blow up, but I think it blew up even harder than mine. And I think he just hit 10 million copies. I haven't talked to him in a while, but it's interesting because one of the last conversations I had with him was when Atomic Habits was going insane. And he had just had his second kid and he was writing the follow up and he was like super stressed and he's doing all his speaking and stuff.

1:31:55And he asked me, he asked me a really good question. It's very smart of him. He said, because like I said, I'm like kind of two years ahead on the same train. You're like one of the only guys who could like give him grounded advice on this. Yeah. And so he asked me, he was like, if you could go back two years ago, what would you do differently? And I was like, I would say two things. I'd say no to a lot more stuff. And then two is I would have spent more time on the second book. I would have, I wouldn't. Because I think I remember you sharing that you, you had to rush certain aspects of it. Yeah, honestly, I think looking back, I think there was a little bit of a imposter syndrome going on.

1:32:38You know, the velocity and the magnitude of the book's success was just like so outside the realm of, again, anybody's expectations that there was a big piece of me that was just like, this is a fluke. Like, this isn't going to last, right? So let's just, let's ride this wave while it's here. Which motivates you to say yes to everything because you think like you're having your 15 minutes or whatever. So it resulted in like a scarcity mentality. And I started, yeah, I just started saying yes to too much stuff. And I mean, the other thing too is like the level of opportunities that show up are so much sexier.

1:33:24Like it's easy to say no to opportunities that aren't really opportunities, but then it's like when things show up and they're like really sexy and exciting, it's really hard to say no. You know, it's like when a TV producer shows up and he's like, I want to do a scripted series like based on your life, you know, like I want you involved. And I'm like, hey, you know, like how do you say no to that? Right. Especially when you're like a 30 year old dickhead who hasn't done anything. So it's, there was just a lot of stuff like that, that I think I had to learn the hard way that it's, it's a, there's not, most of the time there's no there there.

1:33:59It's just kind of empty calories. And then B, you know, I think I lost sight of, of my own values and what I cared about and what got me into this business in the first place, like what I love doing and the things I wanted to work on and, you know, my own ideas and my own, you know, know, the things that I was excited about. So, uh, I lost track of that for a couple of years and I'm proud of the second book. I think it's a really great book. There are a lot of things I think that are actually better about the second book than the first one. But, um, in hindsight, I wish I had taken way more time with it and told people to fuck off a little bit more.

1:34:34Yeah. And maybe appreciated that you actually had more leverage than maybe you thought that you had given what had happened to like slow it down a little bit. That has been a lesson as well of like, you know, there's this transition that comes in, I think every career, you know, early in your career, you have to say yes to everything. And then there's an awkward transition at some point where you have to start learning how to say no. What I didn't realize is that - You skipped the awkward. You went right from the - No, what I didn't realize is that there's another level above you where, you know, it's, it's, cause like in internet world, like blog land, I'd gotten really good at saying no to, you know, you know, this, some random dude is launching his podcast, wants me to be episode one.

1:35:20And I'm like, eh. Right. That's different from like, jump on my private jet and fly to Stodd and like hang out at this, whatever with these people that you have heard of. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Um, yeah. So I'd like learn that lesson all over again and, and yeah, just being, becoming more aware of my own leverage. Yeah. Just kind of standing up for myself. I mean like, yeah, I don't want to do that. Speaking of standing up for yourself, you've been on this health journey. In addition to quitting drinking, you lost 40 pounds or is it more now? If you go from like peak, my wife, my wife's Brazilian.

1:35:58So we call it peak Gordo. If you go from peak Gordo to now or the lowest I got, which was maybe beginning of this year, uh it's almost 60 it's about 55 pounds yeah wow yeah and the drinking was a huge part of that it was a huge part of that but it's honestly this comes back to the compulsive conversation right like i learned in that process that i had a much more compulsive relationship with food than i thought i did yeah we don't realize i think this is a human thing like the extent to which we use food to like medicate our emotional state. And it's only like when you've, okay, I'm not drinking anymore.

1:36:36I'm now I have, I have like a greater hyper awareness of like how I try to, you know, tampen my moods through various different things. And so suddenly you're like, I would have never thought that food and emotion had anything to do with each other until after I was sober for a while and many years into sobriety and realized like, oh, I'm just using food in the same way. And it wasn't until I got super fat that I even thought about looking at that. Yeah, that was honestly the hardest part. The exercise, the habits and everything. I mean, that's hard. Don't get me wrong. Like, you know, getting on a, hiring a trainer and showing up every week and doing the thing.

1:37:15Like, that's hard and it takes work. But eventually you build those habits. You find the thing that works for you. You find the thing that you enjoy. you find the your workout buddy or your your coach or whatever like those things can all be kind of figured out within a few months and you can be on your way and I guess that kind of got me through the first phase like the maybe say the first 20-25 pounds but then I kind of got stuck and started having some rebounds you know would put a bunch of weight back on really quickly and And yeah, it forced me to take a really hard look at the psychological side, my relationship with food, the emotions I was numbing.

1:37:58For me, it was a lot, I had a lot of social and identity issues in this, both with alcohol and food. You know, it was a huge part of my social life. Both were a huge part of my social life. Both, I kind of saw myself as the guy who's up for anything. like yeah I'll eat Thai Indian like five-star restaurant you know street food whatever I'm up for anything you know I'm I'm easy I'm I like everything like it's like I was I kind of saw myself as that person and it was the same with the drinking it's like any party I'm up for I'll be the first one there I'll be the last one to leave I'll dance all night yeah you want to do shots I'll do a shot with you like I was always that guy and I didn't realize I was that guy I didn't realize that that was like an identity that I had built at some point in my life and that I had to like kill that part of myself.

1:38:49It's like, you're not that guy anymore. But that only came up once you hit that plateau after 25 pounds and started rubber banding a little bit and realizing like, oh, if I really want to do this, there's a bigger play here, which is like my whole identity of who I am. Yeah. This was like year three. So, you know, if you, you know, I've tracked my weight now for six years. And if you look at the chart, you know, it's kind of like this downward wave, you know, it's kind of like a, uh, when the stock market's crashing, like, you know, it's, it goes down and then there's like, boop, it bumps back up and then it goes down again and it bumps back up.

1:39:25And, um, so it's been a really long process, but yeah, the psychological stuff was the toughest. And then I guess kind of the third phase, cause then that, that I dropped probably another 15, 20 pounds. But even after that, even after I lost 40 pounds, I was still, I was still like, I think 27, 28 % body fat and I was stuck. And I'm like, okay, I've got the right habits. I got, you know, I'm like, I'm not drinking anymore. I've traveling way less. I'm sleeping better. You know, I'm doing all the things. What the hell? And it was at that point, um, I went and got a bunch of blood work done and it, then I saw the damage, like the just your the autopsy your ldl and your apob and all that kind of stuff hormones were all fucked up like it was ugly you know got a good functional medicine doctor start working with a clinic like it changed a bunch of stuff like cut you cut even more out of the diet um and like got now the blood works good so yeah and it's taken years yeah six like five to six years like all good things.

1:40:30Five to six years, yeah. There's no shortcuts. And it's still a struggle sometimes. Uh-huh. What was the hardest sort of food thing that you had to overcome? Burgers, man. Burgers are good. Oh my God. I love a burger. Honestly, the sweets is, it's not, I'm not a huge sweets guy. Me neither. I can pass, I can pass. It's greasy stuff. Oh my God. A good burger, dude. So as somebody who's like so steeped in psychology and human behavior and, you know, you've studied all this stuff, you've written about it, like what were the tools that you found most effective or perhaps least effective in your like quiver of all this stuff that you've been kind of simmering in for decades that was beneficial or perhaps not beneficial along this way?

1:41:22Because you're really, you're putting it to the test. Basically, you're trying to like walk your talk in a really hard way where you're very challenged. That's a great question. I almost wish there was like a list and I would like give out like one of the five-star ratings for each. This is a future video, maybe. Each technique or tactic or whatever. If I was to do that, the five-star thing is just tracking, not just tracking, but gamifying it a little bit. First of all, just the tracking, one of the most impactful things, and again, this comes back to the most impactful things are usually boring and there are things that are not sexy and people don't like hearing them, but tracking every piece of food, weight every morning, every rep, every workout, how many steps, everything, track all of it, all the time.

1:42:11What happens is when you're compulsive with food, like all compulsivity, you, you bullshit yourself, you lie to yourself, you make up stories. You're like, ah, well, I, I worked really hard this morning, so I deserve this, this burger or, uh, like, you know, I, I had a great workout, so yeah, I can have a little bit of cake tonight or whatever. And it, you know, it's not that many calories when you track everything. You're like, okay, first of all, that workout, no getting around it. Yeah. That workout was terrible. You know, second of all, yeah, that cake was 800 calories. So, you know, you're bullshitting yourself on both sides, you know?

1:42:47So that was massively, massively impactful because it's the only thing that keeps you honest. And probably the least valuable thing, you know, I had a period, there was a period there where, um, kind of, I think initially discovering the compulsivity, there was a little bit of this, like, like what's the emotion driving, you know? And that was, it was useful to identify the emotion, but then I tried to go to the next layer, which is like, okay, well, let's say there's like some sort of wound or something going on. And, you know, talk to some people about that. And they're like, well, tell us about your child.

1:43:18You got all this shit about like what mom cooked and what she didn't cook and all this stuff. And anyway, after like a couple of months, I'm like, this is completely pointless. I mean, there's no bottom to that rabbit hole. And at some point it's like, what's moving me forward? And it's like, whether it's the burger, whether I crave the burger because mom never made burgers or because she brought McDonald's. Like it doesn't matter. The point is the burgers off the menu. Exactly. So what are we going to put in place? It doesn't fucking matter. So, but yeah, it's honestly the keeping you honest with yourself, uh, and being conscious to, um, related, I, you know, not everybody has to go.

1:43:58Have you done a glucose monitor? I have. Yeah. So that, that was interesting just in noticing like how different foods affect me differently. And it was interesting. My wife and I, we did it at the same time and it was like, we'd both eat the same thing and then she would have a different, completely different reaction. Yeah. It's super interesting to do that. I also noticed like what happens when I eat too late during like what, what's my levels are like throughout the night when I'm asleep, which is wild. I think it's important to pair that with a lot of education because the gamification aspect of it incentivizes you to like keep that thing flat all the time, which isn't, which then in order to keep it flat, you have to eat like high fatty foods and all these other things that actually aren't good for you.

1:44:41So it can drive unhealthy food choices, but I think just wear it for like 10 days or 14 days and just like, wow, look at that. Like you just, you just see things that, cause it's not intuitive, you know, you wouldn't know that this is happening. And the interesting thing for me too was days that I would feel lethargic or that I would need a nap, have an afternoon crash or whatever. It helped me connect a lot of dots that way. You're wearing a Garmin too. I am wearing a Garmin. So it's legit. This is all real. It's crazy you're wearing a Garmin. I know. Like when you came to my house in 2019, I was like, I would not have imagined you wearing a Garmin.

1:45:21No, no. That was me. That was probably close to my peak weight. I was a big boy. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't say you look like an entirely different person because your hair is different and stuff like that. But like, you look better, man. Your skin looks better. Obviously your weight and all that kind of stuff. But you just look, you come across like you're more comfortable in your own skin. Yeah. A lot of it is just being healthier. Like it pisses me off. Like this is one, I think this is if there is anything that I've really fucked up in my adult life in terms of this self personal development and everything.

1:45:56Like I've always been really good from a very young age. I was very interested in relationships. I read tons of books and I got into psychology and I started going to therapy when I was like 20 and I did meditation retreats. Like I've been all over all this stuff, like the mental and the emotional side of it, I've been all over it. The physical side, I was always a wreck. And I, and when I was young, like most young people who have terrible physical habits, I poo-pooed it. You know, I would hear podcasts of people being like, well, you need to do this every morning and blah, blah, blah. This is, this is going to increase your mood.

1:46:26And I was like, ah, fuck that shit. I was out drinking till four and I'm up at eight and I'm grinding and I'm working and I feel fine. And there was a little bit of like a defiance in me. And that works when you're 27 and have an insane metabolism. But when I got to 37, it started having chest pains, you know, waking up. cold sweats in the middle of the night, you know, like just going off the rails health wise. I was like, okay, maybe I should look into this. And then now that I've done it, I'm like, oh my God, I feel so much better all the time. I have so much energy. I'm so much happier. Why didn't anybody tell me?

1:47:05Yeah. Why didn't anybody tell me? Right. Where were you, Rich? Well, it's your authority issue as part of the problem. Totally. You know, it's like, it's these things that, can be superpowers also become our greatest enemies. You know what I mean? And I don't know why it's wired that way, but it is. It's like these things that propel us in this great direction and then we become kind of overly enamored with that as a strategy and we become blind to kind of because there's two sides to all of these things always. Yeah. The best thing about somebody is also the worst thing, usually. And that's definitely true in my case.

1:47:45I hate being told what to do. And most of my success can be due to that and most of my failures can be due to that as well. Right, that's the way it goes, right? It's sort of like, you know, I mean, somebody like, you know, like take Lance Armstrong, like seven Tour de France titles, also all of this other, you know, egregious behavior on there. So why couldn't you just like win the titles without the, it's like, no, these things cannot be, they don't happen without each other, you know? I wanna end on some thoughts around like the nature of human habit change. I spent a lot of time thinking about this and I'm always curious, like, again, like you're just marinating in this stuff.

1:48:28So when you think about somebody who can successfully make a change, maybe they just hear the information and they're like, great, got it. And then they go do it and they improve their lives versus the person who struggles and struggles and struggles. And I know there's no easy answer to this. It's not a reductive thing, but do you have any kind of thoughts on what differentiates those two people? Why can some people change and other people find it so difficult? That's a great question. I have found, I'm going to make up a term here. I found that some people seem to have identity flexibility, which what I mean by that is, is some people seem to just naturally, for whatever reason, whether it's they grew up that way or they're born that way or they learned it at some point in their life, they define themselves very loosely and they're comfortable with that looseness.

1:49:27Like they don't, they don't get super attached to how they see themselves. And I've noticed that a lot of other people are very attached to how they see themselves and their identity is very rigid. They're like, well, this is who I am. This is how I've always been. And, you know, I can't change it. You can't tell me to change it. You know, whatever. I've just noticed that people with that identity flexibility, it's much easier for them to kind of remove the Lego block from their, their identity and replace it with a different one. There's not as much friction for them. There's not as much psychological, I mean, there's psychological fallout for everybody, but there's less for them.

1:50:06And there's like a little bit of an alacrity to it. And I actually, I mean, this is the biggest thing that I personally took from all my years studying Buddhism is, is, you know, the central theme of Buddhism is that the identity doesn't exist. It's all an illusion. It's all made up. It's all just, you're just, you put these Lego blocks here and called it yourself and you can take those blocks away or get rid of them at any time. You just forgot how or never learned how. And so that's my observation. That's really insightful. And I think that's right. And it makes me think about what drives somebody to be so attached to how they see themselves in the world and what allows somebody to kind of be flexible and hold loosely to that.

1:50:54And what is behind attachment other than fear, like we attach onto things to give us a sense of control and safety, right? So somebody who, you know, doesn't have that kind of fear is probably somebody who's more likely to kind of like let go and be in that allowing space. I would say that that's one reason. It's, I would say it's our identity attachments probably were created to fulfill our needs. And one of those needs is survival. So like probably the most rigid attachments are trauma related in some way. It's like a defense mechanism, the trauma. And so you're just terrified of removing that piece of your identity because then everything's going to go wrong again.

1:51:39But like, I would say that there's a lot of identity attachments that are perfectly, you know, it's like, I'm very attached to my identity as a husband and my wife, you know, and I probably should be right. Like I shouldn't be able to just throw that away at any time. Um, so I, like some identity attachment is good and, and healthy, but again, I think it's just the, the flexibility or how glued together everything is. Um, it's good to not hold onto those things too tightly. Yeah. And do you think that that is teachable? Like the, the letting go or the unclutching of these things that we hold onto in that way?

1:52:22I do. I do think it's teachable. I do slash Buddhism, you know, not the silly five minute app, you know, those are fine. You know, the app meditations are fine, but like serious introspection and meditation, I think it gets at that. I think really, really good therapy gets at that. I think journaling can get at that. I think it's a skill that can be developed, but I also think like, like most skills, some people have a talent, like there are, there are some people who have a talent for it. Yeah. I'll throw this in here too. I've seen people who are so good at it that it causes them problems. Because they're just like floating in the wind all the time from one thing to the next.

1:53:09They're a new person. Without any kind of ballast. Yeah. They're a new person every other month. It's like whoever they're dating at the time. Right. Well, it's the spectrum, right? On both sides of these things. I mean, in truth, yes, like, of course, your identity as a husband and a father, like you want to hold on to that. But in reality, back to this Buddhist idea, our identity is just a story. It's a story we tell ourselves. And for the most part, it's a story that was constructed unconsciously. We didn't even participate in the construction of it. It just sort of occurred. And it's basically an assemblage of memories of experiences that our brain selects without our agency and decides these are important.

1:53:55Yes. Yeah. And it's like, why is it choosing these? Like you've had billions of experiences and memories and the brain is selecting these things and then creating a through line to create a narrative, right? And we're convinced that that narrative is the definition of who we are and it's intractable. When in truth, we could pick another memory or we could say why, or we could take that memory and put it to the test and say, is that really true? Do we have other experiences that would challenge that? And I think it's sort of like tracking with diet and fitness, like maybe, and that's journaling, but that's like journaling intentionally.

1:54:33Like let's deconstruct this story. Is there a possibility that there's another story that's maybe more true or equally true? And not for nothing, like our memories are highly unreliable. They're just like prisms of like things that happen that like for the most part are so loosely related to any kind of like objective truth. Yeah. And it's to bring it back to the, I guess my story, it took years of struggling with food and alcohol to even realize that I had that story of like, oh, I'm the fun party guy. Oh, I'm up for any dinner or after party or whatever. Oh yeah, I'll do shots with you. Like I created that story probably in adolescence as a way to get social approval.

1:55:19Like that was one way for me. I noticed that I could drink more than most people and handle my liquor and I could eat more than most people and like feel fine. And that made me easy to be around and fun to be around. And so I did more of it. And that story got written and I didn't even realize it got written. and then when I was 40, I had to be like, oh fuck, I got this story. Like I can't, I can't be the dinner party guy anymore. Like I gotta be something else. And then, you know, so you remove it. And then to me, there's a little bit of pain and grief with removing it. Like you, you miss it kind of like you miss an old friend, but then the hard part is like finding what's, what can you put, put in its place?

1:56:03You know, like what, what's the new story I can write so that I can have friends again. Right. Well, what I would say, yeah, I don't think it's like a, it's like a vacuum that needs to be filled. I think, I think it's more like the way that Richard Schwartz at Internal Family Systems would look at it, which is like, this is one facet of your identity that developed when you were very young as a way of, you know, kind of feeling connected to other people in the world. And now you can say, you can give it a name like, Hey, party guy, Charlie, right. You were awesome. Like, thank you. Like you, you really helped me make friends and we had a lot of good times together, but like, I'm cool with people now.

1:56:47Like I can go out and have fun and I get to decide what I want to do that. And people seem to like me. And, and so, you know, you can settle down. I don't need you to like, like, I realize like you're there and I love you, you You know, but like you can kind of like ride in the back seat for a while and like honor that part of who you are without like shame or guilt or judgment and just say like I've grown out of it. Like I don't need – I realize you're trying to protect me. You had my best interest at heart. But like now I have a different, you know, part of me that serves that in a way that's healthier.

1:57:20Yeah. Another way that I think about it sometimes too is our stories are strategies. and, you know, Party Guy Mark was my strategy to get my social needs met. And now Party Guy Mark is gone. So I need a new strategy. That doesn't necessarily mean I need to like find a new identity. It's just like, I need to find other things to do with people. That doesn't involve drinking. And gets you to stop playing video games. Yeah, yeah. Maybe play a few. Are you good with like, I have a sense, like my instinct is that, you know, something else that we share is like, I could be pretty reclusive. Yes. You know, like I'm at home, I come here, I go back home.

1:58:02Because this is my social life outside of my family. And it's very nourishing. Like, even though like we've done three, like other than these three podcasts and like one dinner party that we were at together, that is a sum total of our relationship. Yeah. But like, I feel like you're a friend. And I think even like after that dinner, it was like, hey, let's hang out. And I was well-intended in that, but like, did I call you? No. Did you call me? No, we never did anything together. You know, like I suck at that. I don't know if you rely on your wife for social life, but I definitely do. Yeah, I do.

1:58:35But I think I'm at an age now where I need to be much more proactive about my friendships. So I've been, yeah. We're in the same boat, dude. We're in the same boat. We could be accountability buddies. Yeah, yeah. Let's hang out out of obligation. I have to go see more. Rich, our scheduled social time is coming up. We have a play date. Can we bring a microphone? Ah, fuck. All right. All right. This is unraveling. I think we need to end this now. So our play date episode is rapid. Yeah, okay. Thank you for everybody for listening to our social hour. We'll bring microphones, but we won't attach them to a recorder just so we feel safe.

1:59:20We'll just walk around the Venice boardwalk with unattached Shure mics. Oh, boy. Oh, man. Yeah. Maybe I need to go back to that therapist who used to be in your building. All right. We're ending this. Thanks, buddy. That was awesome. Thanks, dude. Appreciate it. Cheers. MarkManson.net, the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast on YouTube and all the places, right? Yep. Cool. Peace out. All right. Thanks. Cheers.

1:59:50you

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2:01:50Thank you.