Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - The Psychology Of Not Giving A F*ck | Mark Manson

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

What if the most important skill of our moment isn't knowing more, but knowing what's actually worth caring about?Mark Manson is the bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked, with three #1 New York Times bestsellers and tens of millions of readers around the world. The last time Mark joined Finding Mastery was in 2020, mid-COVID, when uncertainty was loud and the world felt strange. Five years on, the world is no less strange... it's just strange differently. The information ecosystem has fractured. Trust is harder to find. And the same noise we worried about five years ago has become the air we all breathe.In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Mark walks through the three principles he's organized his life and work around: radical ownership, radical honesty, and radical acceptance. He explains why ownership is the foundation under everything, because nothing else really works until you take it. He explains why his bar for honesty is anything "relevant or pertinent to somebody's wellbeing." And he talks about why radical acceptance, the Buddhist part of him, is what allows agency without collapse.The conversation moves into territory both timely and timeless. Mark and Mike dig into why the decline of religion has helped the self-help industry explode, why a spiritual framework remains one of the strongest known protective factors for mental health, and how the comparison machinery in our brains, designed for a tribe of thirty, now buckles under the weight of three hundred million people on Instagram.Mark also opens up about Purpose, the AI app he's built, and what he learned designing it to be intentionally disagreeable. He explains why a yes-man entourage, whether it's people around a star athlete or an AI that agrees with everything you say, quietly untethers people from reality. And he shares the stoic-style practice he uses to stay honest with himself: imagining what would be true if he were the problem, then holding that thought lightly enough to set it back down.By the end, Mark and Mike land on what feels like the heart of the episode... You can be perfect as you are, and you can always be better. Both can be true.In this conversation, we explore:Why sincerity has become the most valuable signal in a fractured information landscapeThe three principles Mark uses to navigate uncertainty: radical ownership, radical honesty, and radical acceptanceHow our ancient comparison brain breaks under the weight of social media at scaleWhy a spiritual framework remains one of the strongest known protective factors for mental healthThe premortem practice that helps Mark stay honest with himself, and why most of us avoid itWhy an AI (or a person) that agrees with everything you say is a slow-motion mental health riskHow to use AI as a thought partner without letting it do your thinking for youThe question that keeps Mark up at night, and might be worth asking yourselfIf you've ever felt like the noise is winning, or like you've lost the thread on what's worth caring about, this conversation offers a sturdier place to stand.Links & ResourcesThis episode is brought to you in part by our partner, Sunlighten, the company that has pioneered infrared sauna technology. Go to https://findingmastery.com/sunlighten to see how you can save up to $2,100 on their mPulse Intelligent Sauna.Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMastery Get exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors!Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/ Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine: findingmastery.com/morningmindset Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and XMark Manson's Books: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope, and Will (co-written with Will Smith)Mark's AI app, Purpose: https://markmanson.net (see Mark's site for the latest)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The information ecosystem has become completely fractured. There's kind of no shared source of truth among the population. And so a lot of how you perceive reality is now being dictated simply by like what information sources you choose to ingest. In a world where everything is competing for your attention, how do you decide what actually deserves it? We are human beings. It is natural for us to compare ourselves to others, but we evolved in small tribes and small communities. And so that comparison mechanism in our brain is very much designed to compare yourself to, say, the two or three dozen people around you, not the 300 million people on Instagram. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers.

I'm your host, Dr. Michael Jervais. A high-performance psychologist named Michael Treveig. Who head coach Mike McDonald and former head coach Pete Carroll brought into work with the Seahawks. Famous for his work with Felix Baumgartner when he jumped out of space in the Stratos Project. Olympic athletes depend on something more than just training and talent. They have to stay mentally tough. Today's guest is Mark Manson, best-selling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***

and Everything is F***, whose work has challenged millions of people to rethink what they care about and why. If you were adopting a value because some guy with a book or a big Facebook page told you to adopt that value, that kind of undermines the whole reason to value that thing. The whole point of this process is to figure out what you care about yourself. for no other reason than it is important to you.

In this conversation, we explore a world where it's harder than ever to know what's real, what matters, and what's worth your attention. What is most upsetting the most people isn't necessarily that mistakes are made or a new story has gotten wrong. The problem is the insincerity of it. Finding out this story was spiked and portrayed wrong intentionally to nudge an election or to skew the population into thinking this. That's where people have gotten very cynical.

With that, let's jump into this one. week's conversation with Mark Manson. Mark, last time we connected was in the middle of COVID. Good times. Great, great memories. You know, two, one, I love the humor. And the second is like, it's been too long. Yeah.

Like, I love how you think. I love how you operate. And it's been too long. So I'm really stoked to sit down with you. Thanks, man. It's good to be back. It's good to be here in the flesh. I know.

And, you know, not quarantined with like a hazmat. So times then were strange. We're trying to figure it out. And it feels like times are strange now. There's a geopolitical intensity. There's just a lot happening. You know, at the time of marking this, like, are we at war? Are we not at war?

I'm not sure. It feels like it. And I say that because I don't trust the signals that I'm getting. I don't know really what's happening in the Middle East. But I'm uncomfortable with the whole thing. Well, I'm glad you asked because, no, actually, I have no idea. You're going to give me the answers the whole thing. Perfect.

Okay, good. So what is your take on what's happening now? Like, how's it going? You know, it's funny. Every time I hear somebody say something like that, like times are so weird right now. My knee-jerk thought in my head is always point me to a time where they weren't strange. The dark ages. Yeah, where they didn't feel strange.

Yeah, right. Because you can go back decade by decade by decade. And every single decade, people were freaking out over something. And there was some sort of grand uncertainty. that was happening. And it's just funny because it's a little bit of a perceptual bias in that we can sit here today and look back at the 90s and the 90s seem so calm and so simple or the 80s and the 80s seems so like logical and reasonable and like, oh, we totally understand why that all happened. But at the time, nobody knew, you know. It's just the flavor of uncertainty like

morphs and shifts. Yeah, it feels amplified to me. I agree with your sentiment. It feels amplified to me because of, it feels like a more polarized and louder opinion from people. It feels more divisive than it was when I was younger. But maybe I didn't know. To me, what's really weird right now is that the information ecosystem has become completely fractured. And so there's kind of no shared source of truth or shared reality among the population. And so a lot of how you perceive reality is,

now being dictated simply by like what information sources you choose to ingest. And the problem is, is that there doesn't seem to be any consistently reliable information source generally. So one, title of your book is really important, you know, which is. The subtle art of not giving a fuck. So what I take from that is like you're helping people think about what two care about. Yes. And if information is unreliable in many respects and rabbit hold and in dangerous ways. Where are you personally finding information that you find to be neutral enough so that you can make an informed decision? Personally, my information diet, I seek out individual experts whom I trust, who I believe have a track record, and generally are not affiliated with any

sort of larger institution or organization or definitely not a political party. And I try to find a variety of them kind of across the spectrum and just list and pay attention to and understand that they're not going to be right about everything. But as long as they are being sincere, to me, that's what matters most. I think probably what is most upsetting the most people isn't necessarily that mistakes are made or, you know, a new story has gotten wrong. That's always happened. The problem is the insincerity of it, right? It's like finding out after the fact that, oh, actually this story was like spiked and portrayed wrong intentionally to like skew, you know,

know, nudge an election in this direction or to skew the population into thinking this, I think that's where people have gotten very cynical and upset. But to bring it back to my book, like, it's interesting because when I wrote the subtle art and not giving a fuck, like, these issues were just beginning. Like, it was like super, super early days of this kind of online cacophony and of disinformation and people screaming at each other, echo chambers. And if you go back to the book, I talk about it a little bit, but I, I most, you mostly just talk about it in terms of social media, kind of skewing our perception of ourselves,

of like where we kind of sit, you know, like we are human beings. It is natural for us to compare ourselves to others, but we evolved in small tribes and small communities. And so that comparison mechanism in our brain is very much designed to compare yourself to, say, the two or three dozen people around you, not the 300 million people on Instagram or whatever it is. And so in the book, it was kind of like, look, the tech. Technology is now kind of taking some of this ancient machinery in our brains and turning it against us. So we need to be very, very thoughtful of what we choose to pay attention to, what we choose to care about, what we choose to get emotionally invested in because we can't just rely on what we see at face value anymore. And I had no idea at the time how well that was going to age.

For many years, I joked that I probably owe some percentage of my books. sales to Trump. Not just him as a person, like in kind of the chaos that he creates, but the kind of the cultural effect that he has had on the entire media landscape, I think, has just driven people back to my book to hear that message and be like, okay, I need to take ownership of this. And I need to be very, very thoughtful of like, what am I paying attention to and what am I caring about? Do you have a shorthand process for people to follow where you're helping them identify what are the most important things

to care about? I intentionally try not to get into that game. I offer some principles in the book and in some of my other writing, but it's interesting. Like, I made a very conscious decision early on in my career to not try to push my values

onto anybody else. Yeah, you do a nice job of that. It drives me crazy. Yeah, because it's, even if it's well-intentioned, right? And even if it is, say, a good value, I feel very strongly that if you were adopting a value because some guy with a book or a big Facebook page or whatever, like told you to adopt that value, that kind of undermines the whole reason to value that thing. The whole point of this process is to figure out what you care about yourself for no other reason than it is important to you.

So if you are just picking and choosing the things to care about from the world around you or from the people around you and then you read a self-help book that tells you, hey, you should value these. things, now that self-help book is part of that problem. Yeah. So I know that you're like antagonist to the self-help industry, and you're, but you're right in the center of it. I jokingly call myself a self-hating self-help guru. Yeah, the antisocial social club. Yeah.

So, yeah, I don't want to be in that category. So I align with you there. I don't want to be. I actually, it's a first principle of mine when I am working with people as a, as a sports psychologist or performance psychologist, is, I don't want to be. I don't give advice, and it drives people a little baddie. I will listen. I will understand and I will agitate.

But my first principles are not your first principles. So you do need to understand your first principles to be able to make decisions with speed and accuracy under pressure. First principles help you and also mental skills help you. And so do you have a sense? And I don't want to back you into a corner, but do you have a sense of some of your first principles that are important for you to be as skilled as you are

in writing, in thinking, and building an app, which I want to get to. You've built an app on purpose. Right. So I've got kind of three core principles or core values of mine. The first is just radical ownership of everything in my life. So everything that happens to me, everything that goes on in my life, whether or not it's my fault, I have to take ownership and I have to be responsible for it. And because I just strongly feel like nothing else really works until you empower yourself

and take ownership of your time in your life. Let me pause you on that just a second. Where was it about your environment that brought that first principle together? So I grew up in the Bible Belt in Texas and was a pretty nerdy, artistic kid, horribly unathletic. I tell people that where I grew up,

there were only two things that mattered. That was Jesus and football. And I wasn't really into either of them. So I got pushed around a little bit as a kid. Does that mean bullied? Yeah, I was bullied. It was a very conformist environment. and I was not conforming very well.

And so a lot of the other boys, the way they took that out was, you know, they'd just beat you up. Or they'd beat you up to kind of impress the other boys. And what did you learn from that? So I'll give you a simple example. There was one guy who used to bully me, but then he got a girlfriend, and his girlfriend liked me. And so when his girlfriend was around, he was really nice to me. But it wasn't like a fake nice. It wasn't like a mean nice.

Like he just kind of chilled out. And he was like, oh, yeah, Mark's all right. And then as soon as his girlfriend was gone and his buddies were around, he'd be a dick again. And it just made me realize that people are very multifaceted. Like he wasn't being manipulative in either context. It was just that ultimately he was optimizing for social approval. And social approval when his girlfriend was around meant being nice to me. And social approval when the football players were around was meant being a dick to me.

And I saw this in a lot of different places. So I grew up, I went to church very frequently. My parents were both very involved in the church. And I was always very analytical. And so I read the Bible and I would listen to the preacher. And then I would watch my parents hang out with their church friends at lunch or in the afternoon. And they were behaving completely oppositely of like everything we just heard in the church sermon. And so of course it's like a 10 year old.

I'm like, what's going on? Yeah. Why are you guys acting this way? So it was just, I think from a very young age, because I grew up in that environment and because of kind of my personality, I was exposed at a very young age to a lot of displays of inauthenticity. I guess you would call it just seeking social validation. And I developed a pretty intense distaste of it. That's really cool. So it's, again, it's honest for you.

Right? And what you're suggesting people do is like go through a process to be honest with yourself about what matters and what to care about and who. to care about their opinions. Mm-hmm. Right? Okay. Radical honesty. Cool.

Yep. So, and that was born out of like, what is the hypocrisy that's happening and why are people acting this way? And I never want to be about that. I need to own my thoughts, words, and actions. Yes.

Okay. Are you more aligned to a Buddhist process or a deity-based process, like a Christian? So I got very in the Buddhism in my 20s, and it's been very impactful on me. I joke that I'm, like,

probably the most pro-religion atheist you'll ever meet. I don't believe in anything, but I have come to just through all of my years of studying psychology and personal well-being and I think religion is good for most people and it serves a very positive social role for the most part.

In some respects, it's the ultimate training mechanism for billions of people. You know, here's a set of principles. They're meaningful, thoughtful principles. And here's a set of practices. Pray before you eat. It's the ultimate training ground to be more tuned to the things that quote unquote matter.

Yeah. And so, but you're saying that as an atheist, you don't believe or you don't know, agnostic or atheist? Yeah, atheist, because I don't think too hard about it these days, but I would describe myself as atheist. I'll add to that as well, that I think religion was the original self-help, right? And I think one of the reasons you've seen the self-help industry explode in the last 30, 40 years is because of that decline in religiosity that we're seeing across Western culture. which is a decline in trust. So, okay, there's an interesting note. It'll be interesting for you to square with this

is that one of the most significant protective factors for mental health is a belief in something later. Yeah. So a spiritual framework is by far one of the largest protective factors or significant contributors to mental health. Yeah. Which is an interesting finding.

That is not what they taught me in graduate school. Yeah. It was a bunch of other things. Now to come to find out, the thing that was kind of in plain sight for thousands of years has been like this framework on how to think. And it makes sense, right? Because if you have some sort of spiritual framework

that you're operating off of and a belief in in the afterlife, right? Suddenly any sort of suffering or struggle that you're going through in the moment in the here or now, it becomes much easier to see the explanation of why this can be meaningful. Of why there's a purpose to this struggle

and this hardship. Whereas if you have no framework to believe in and you're just suffering, then it just feels incredibly unfair and you don't know what to do about it. On the extreme ownership as a first principle, I want to go back to the selection of information and what you tune to

because that would inform what you're considering to be of what you're owning. You've got a bunch of people that you're tuning to for information. Right. You want to be unbiased, but we're all biased. Of course.

It goes through a filter because the ultimate kind of end bucket is like, I need to own what I think, say, and do. Okay, so there's a filter in there somewhere for you about what is getting through, and what's not. Got it. Okay.

So this is the selection of information. Right. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Sunlighten. I'm really excited about a new partner of ours. Something that I've come back to again and again is when I invest in recovery with the same intention that I bring to my work, everything gets better. My energy, my focus, my ability to show up fully for the people that I'm with and the work that I care about.

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slash mastery. That's proton, P-R-O-T-O-N-V-N-V-N-V-N-V-N-V-N-com slash mastery for 70% off your two-year plan. Again, that's ProtonvP-N dot com slash mastery. So what's my filtration mechanisms for like qualifying, who am I going to listen to and who I'm not? Yeah. And what? Yes. Yeah. What gets through?

Yes. There's two, and they're kind of related. One is, are they primarily evidence-based versus, let's just call it. tribal-based, right? It's like, is this a person of science? Is this somebody who listens to evidence? And I guess the corollary to that is, is this somebody who can change their mind? And I actually deeply, like my respect for a thought leader goes up dramatically if I see them change their mind on something. That's cool. Especially if they do it publicly. But that's what good scientists do. Yes. We don't know.

This is what we think. We're still testing it. Matter of fact, I know my peers across the hallway or across the world are testing the same things, and they have a very different view of it, evidence coming forward ought to be the thing that we're listening to as opposed to the opinion. Yeah. So you like when people are like, this is what I think. Yes. Oh, come to find out? That was not right at the time.

Yes. Yeah. So you like that. So do you also like when people make mistakes and own the mistake? Yes. You like the public nature of being honest. Absolutely. Okay.

To me, that's just criteria. number one. I mean, obviously, we could get into what sorts of mistakes and how some mistakes are more serious than others. But this is assuming that they are like rigorous and their research and they think clearly and they're a smart person and they're not trying to dupe anybody. The other thing I would look at is like what are their, what's the incentive structure around them? Oh, interesting. Yeah. Because there's a lot of people. I mean, the most basic example, right, is like when you see like a fitness influencer who's, you know, pushing a supplement all the time and then it come to find out

that they're like sponsored by that supplement. Well, this is why in research you have to disclose any biases that are embedded in the funding of the research or the participation of it. And there's always a disclosure with good science. So you're saying, yeah, if you're a fitness expert, find that you like this supplement

or this machinery or whatever it is, but just make it clear that that is what's actually happening. Yeah, and it's, and I don't think it's, look, we all have incentives and biases, right? But I think as long as the person is transparent about it, and as long as they're not egregious, right? Like, as long as they're not, like, if somebody's out there pushing war against some country and then you come to find out, they're like part of the KGB or something. Like, you know, it's, as long as it's not some egregious conflict of interest.

Yeah. I think it's some of it's inevitable, but I think it's just, it's important to be aware of those incentive structures and then understand that like, okay, this person, this is their background. this is how they get paid. So their view is probably going to be biased in this direction. It's probably still worth listening to them because they're very smart and they're very honest and they're very rigorous. But also understand that like that's where their bread gets buttered.

So, you know, keep that in mind. Okay, back to the three. Yes. So radical ownership, responsibility. Second one is radical honesty or as much honesty is reasonable. And then the third one. Whoa, let's stop there.

Radical honesty. Sure. Radical is a cool word. We'll stop. I really appreciate that about you, that you've done that. I think you stand for that really well. Honesty is hard.

Yeah, it is. And sometimes it conflicts with a lot of your short-term incentives and motivations, right? You know, it pisses people off. It can, you know. Leisure vulnerable. Create tension. It can cut off opportunities, relationships. But like my approach with it is simply that, sure, in the short run, you're going to cut off

a lot of those opportunities and relationships. But those opportunities and relationships were probably not going to be very sustainable over the long run anyway because they were based on something very transactional, very short term. But I do want to say, like there are some people, like there was a guy back in the day named Brad Blen who actually wrote a book called Radical Honesty. He was like hardcore about this. So he took it to the point where that if he had a thought about you, he thought it was immoral to not say that thought. Now, as a Buddhist, I don't trust my thoughts. I have tons of useless, unimportant, irrational thoughts day and day out. So my threshold for...

I thought I was the only one. I'm glad to know. My threshold for honesty is anything that is relevant or pertinent to somebody's well-being, I feel a moral obligation that state it bluntly. If it's something I think white lies, you know, it's like, okay, whatever. Sometimes you've got to get through life. What is your process, to be honest, with yourself? That's often the hardest part.

It's funny because I started doing this back when I was, I meditated a lot in my 20s. And I started doing this a lot kind of as a thought experiment when I was on retreats. I later found out that it was, it's kind of a stoic practice called negative visualization. But one of the things that I used to do is I used to intentionally imagine the worst case scenario. And not just in terms of like, I'm going to come on this podcast. You know, let's imagine me bombing, right? Like it's, it's not that, although that does have some usefulness. But I would imagine the worst case scenario in terms of like, let's say I'm having like relationship problems with my wife.

And I've got all of these hypotheses of like what the problem is. It's like, okay, well, it's we moved to L.A. And that changed this thing. And like one of her parents has gotten sick. And that's changed the dynamic here. And, you know, you've got all these explanations. You're running in your head. And you're kind of like collecting arguments and evidence for them.

Situations like that, I would intentionally imagine what if I'm the problem? them. What if this is my fault? But hold that thought lightly. Don't like start self-flagellating, but actually think about like what would be true if this was actually I was causing this and I wasn't aware of it. Like what would be the signs? What would be the behaviors? And I think it's essentially just the ability to try on the thoughts that you don't want to try on and see how they sit with you. because a lot of times you realize, like, once you sit with them for a minute, you're like, ooh, no, this kind of makes sense, actually. Yeah, I think I'm contributing to this. But then you can hang that thought back on the rack and, you know, try something else.

I love this for two reasons. One is in sport, we'll do a what's called a premortem exercise. Are you familiar with that? Yes. So you see prior to the Olympics, prior to the World Championship, prior to a game, whatever, is that you go through all the things that would contribute to it being an absolute disaster. So you're actually spending time thinking about the disaster scenario and the contributing factors to it, and then you address them. Yeah.

And it might be like, and there's two buckets that emerge, buckets of things that are in your control and buckets that are not, and you address them. You do need to surrender to the things that are not in your control. But then post that, you figure like, well, how would I be agile enough if that were to happen? It's not in my control. Okay. But how would I be agile enough to give myself a better chance? of being my best. So a premortem is a nice exercise.

It involves kind of active visualization, eyes open, on a whiteboard type of thing. We did that exercise. So with my startup, my co-founder and CEO, we did that exercise together. We spent an entire afternoon being like, what are all the worst things that can happen?

Yeah. Is this for your app? Yeah. Purpose? For purpose, yeah. And so we went through, you know, okay, absolute worst-case scenario is customer, you know,

AI psychosis jumps off a bridge or something, right? And they were talking to our app, right? Okay, what do we do? So there's two factors that go into that. The first one is simply, like, having stricter guardrails. So you get a certain amount of safety layer baked in at the foundational model level with AI. As an app, what we did is we just baked in.

We built another layer of safety and guardrails on top of it. So it's kind of like one way to think about it is you have your AI that the user is talking to. there's kind of a second AI that is secretly evaluating that conversation as it's happening and then flags things that are potentially problematic or dangerous and then can like step in and cut it off. It's almost like a chaperone or something that watches. So that's the first part.

The second part, and it's interesting because I kind of had this sense coming from the personal growth world that a lot of the AI psychosis was coming from the AI's tendency to just agree with everything you say, right? Forget AI for a minute. Think about humans. I mean, you've probably seen this in some of your work. Like people who are surrounded by Yes Men, right? You've got a star athlete.

His whole entourage just agrees with everything they say, like never challenges them, never disagrees. It's a trap door that's well greased. Yes. You can watch that person get untethered from reality in real time, you know, over the course of months or years. In some respects, it can help because they keep saying, you can do it, you can do it, you can do it. You're amazing.

That's great. At some level, it does. open the aperture of potential, it doesn't last long, though. Yeah. You know, there's a real, God. Yeah. So, yeah, it might be great on the field, but it, you know, it's as soon as they come off the field, it's like, whoa, whoa, no, no. Yeah. You've got some problems. So I had a sense early on, because for me, the most important thing with purpose was that it was made disagreeable, right? Because if you think about what actually gets somebody to grow and change, it is, they have to come to the conclusion that they're wrong about something or that they miss something or

that their assumptions are off base in some way. So it's of paramount importance that the AI is willing to call the user out and be like, no, that's not it. Let's keep digging and not just agree with everything you say or all of your assumptions. And it's interesting because research has actually come out just recently in the last month or two that has directly correlated the psychophancy problem of AI, the propensity to just agree with everything you say, two cases, you know, psychotic breaks and AI psychosis and for the user for mental breakdowns for the user yes correct yeah it's a little scary yeah

yeah so you built a second AI that's watching to keep the guardrails yeah yeah yeah and AI engineering it's known it's like an eval system so it there's like kind of this AI you're talking to and then there's like the AI the evaluator that is grading the AI on its responses and giving feedback yeah and you know what I like about this conversation is that we're talking about AI but we're also talking about how to show up well as a teammate to other people, whether it's that, you know, partner at home or a teammate at work, is that knowing how to communicate in an honest way, use your radical honesty, does not mean brutal. Yeah. But knowing how to hold a mirror up, knowing how to reflect back, knowing how to ask a question to really understand, and knowing how to have the tack to share your personal

experience in the relationship with the other person. I think the best psychologist and sports psychologists if you think about trained colleagues to help you be your best. They increase agitation. Yes. They do not say, oh, tell me more. Oh, it'll be okay. They don't do that. Yeah. That's actually a bad psychologist. What they do is they say, how do you feel? Like, where do you feel that? You go, oh, it's sick to my stomach. What do you want to do about that? Yeah. I don't want to feel this anymore. What do you want to change? Can't change him or her. What do you want to change? I don't know what to change. I'm afraid to. I keep trying, but it doesn't work. Whatever the, then there's an excuse to say, well, we can keep talking about it, I guess. Yeah. But like, that's kind of not interesting.

Yeah. So there's like an agitation to help people get as close as they possibly can without without kind of falling to a thousand pieces. The micro trauma, the struggle, the way it feels. And then you get to a place where in AA, they'll talk about like, I'm sick and tired to being sick and tired. Yeah. And it's a really nice partner to help people get to that place. So is your app doing it at that level or Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn. We use LinkedIn Hiring Pro here at Finding Mastery because we know one great hire can change everything.

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psychology. Like everything in human history is inside the LLM. So it is the best pattern matching machine that has ever existed. So we onboard users through 20 or 30 questions. We give them some basic psychological assessments, big five, you know, attachment types, a few other things. And then once they get in and they're actually talking to the AI, it has this context around both their personality and what they're struggling with. And then it's essentially just trained to catch blind spots and be like, well, that's interesting. Last week you said that your wife is very supportive of you.

But now it sounds like actually, you know, which way is it? Her behavior is not indicating that. So like, what's going on here, right? And then it forces you to sit there and be like, huh, yeah, I guess that isn't very supportive, is it? Or I'm in a bad way. It is supportive and I don't want to hear it. Yeah. Yeah.

You can go, okay. Okay, very cool. Okay. Okay, third principle that you're operating from. Radical acceptance. This comes back to the very Buddhist part of me, which is that all suffering originates in resisting or a rejection of simply what is, trying to dilute ourselves from what's true around us and the reality around us.

And I think on a very base layer, this is obviously accepting that I don't have control over things in my life and that certain things will happen. And it's not fair. It's not what I wanted, but learn to accept that. But then I also think there's a flip side of this, which is more internal, which is like accepting the things about myself that maybe I also don't really want to accept certain past behaviors, tendencies, aspects of myself that I don't really like. I think acceptance, it's so hard on both of those fronts. And I think there's a very strong kind of one-to-one correlation of the amount that people suffer in their lives and struggle psychologically and their unwillingness. to accept certain things.

Yeah. Acceptance is one of the core tenets in Buddhism, and radical acceptance is a cool way to think about it. I think about suffering with one addition, and this is more plain language. Not in my head to everything you said. And then I think having something I don't want or not having something that I do want.

And in plain language, I'm like, that's the way I experience suffering, and that's the way I see people really suffer. the acceptance of what is not and what is is a high art and it gets really confusing between the difference between suffer, I'm sorry, acceptance and that's what I'm looking for. Surrender? Yeah. Okay.

It gets really confusing between the difference between accepting and surrender. Surrender to the podcast, Michael. Thank you for filling in the gap. Yeah, it's that. It is that. I don't want to surrender anything, really. I do want to accept and work from. reality. And then I also, I would love to hear you take on this, I want to not accept that right now

is final, that everything is unfolding. Interconnected and unfolding. So I do not want to accept. I refuse to accept that right now is final, which is a really complicated idea, I think, and it might make the Buddhists in our community their headspin, like, no, I got it wrong. Do you have a first reaction to that? I think this is very necessarily paired with the first principle, right? Like you need to have radical acceptance of what is, but also radical responsibility to make it as good as possible. There you go. It's funny.

My Zen master back in Boston, he used to say this thing. It was kind of a co-on type thing that he used to say when we were in retreat and he would just kind of walk around and very quietly say, you were perfect as you are and you can always be better. Can you hear the sound of one hand clapping? Yeah, and it's just, it's one of those, it's like both of those things are true simultaneously. And I don't know how, I don't know why, but I believe with every fiber of my being that both of those things are true.

Yeah, I think the way I interpret that is I do plenty to get in my way. I do plenty to compromise the quote-unquote perfection of the seed. My mentor at one point said to me, Mike, you know you really matter. I was young when he said this. It was like affirming. He was like, you really matter.

matter to people in your life. I was like, oh, thank you. That's great. He goes, now, zoom out. This plant's been around for a really long time. You don't matter that much. You're not going to be here that long. Like, hold those two together. I really matter, but I don't matter. Yeah. Yeah. So, anyways, all right, we're in the esoteric world of first principles, which I do think is a, I'm watching you share a set of first principles that inform the way you think and choose your words and the way you act. And so I'm imagining that these need to be alive in tune for you to be able to think well and write well. So what do you do to prepare yourself to write well? For me, it's purely lack of distraction. So it's carving out time and space to give myself that space for deep thought

and clarity and working on something on a deep level. I generally find it's funny, I remember I was working on my, I think, third book. And I was living in New York City at the time, which is crazy. And as you can imagine, I wasn't getting any work done pretty much anywhere I was. If I was at home, if I went to a cafe, like I was just constantly getting interrupted and all this stuff. So I got so desperate because the deadline was coming up. I went and found a we work in Midtown Manhattan pretty close to my apartment. And I walked in and I told the guy, I was like, give me the most bare windowless office you have. I just need to finish this.

But I was like, I don't want to talk to anybody. I don't want to see anything. I don't want to like run into anybody. I don't want to come to any of your events. like just give me the broom closet with a little desk inside. And so I booked this little room. I set aside time, you know, four or five hours a day. I'd leave my phone at home, go down to the we work, sit in my little broom closet, right?

And then I remember talking to that guy. I walked out once and he was like, how's the book writing going? Feeling inspired. And I told him, I was like, I don't know if I'm inspired or not, but I'm not distracted. And in my experience, those two things are the same thing. Are you still doing it? No. I mean, it's, because you're not writing right now?

I'm not writing a book at the moment. Yeah. Like I can, if I need to write an article or a newsletter or, you know, a podcast intro or something like, I can get that done in my home office between things, you know, just set aside an hour or two and get it done. But a book, a year straight of like intense, deep work of four to six hours a day, I wouldn't be able. I'm not writing a book now, but if I started, I would have to change something pretty

dramatically if my work habits. Go back to your first. book. You've written three bestsellers. Yeah, three number one New York Times bestsellers. How are you going to write your next book with AI? I actually have no idea. Will you use AI as a thought partner? Absolutely. Yeah, no question. Will you give it credit in the acknowledgments or is it like this is what's happening and we're absolutely not. You will not get right. You would just, you would just like it's a good thought partner, but it's not. Yeah. It is a neutral arrangement of all of human knowledge, right? So it's,

It's anything good or useful that it gives me. It's because I prompted it well. Using AI to help you write or research is it's the same thing as like being really good with like library indexes. Like it's a skill you develop that helps you. It doesn't necessarily mean it gets credit for the book. Yeah. Cheating or lazy would be, hey, AI, write me a book. Yes.

Copy my old writing and have it be about this. And people have done that and it is not gone well for them. Yeah. meaning that we can tell. Yeah, there's been, I think, actually a couple fiction authors recently got caught. So it's interesting, they've now trained AIs on how to spot AI writing.

And so they've been running a bunch of published, like recently published books through those spotter AIs and a couple of comeback with hits. It's caused a huge controversy in the publishing industry. I mean, I had a conversation with my agent probably like two months ago about this. And she was telling me, she's like, AI is kind of a four-letter word in the industry right now.

Like she told me, I'm very AI forward, obviously. I started an AI company. But she told me, she was like, if you use AI a bunch on your next book, like, I would not broadcast that, you know, in publishers meetings. Somebody just, I think they, I've read their introduction and they're like, this book would not be possible. It's better without my AI prompting or whatever, something along those lines. I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. But I don't, you know. If you can prompt really well, I mean, here's the thing. This kind of comes back so to the process, right? Every first draft sucks. Every AI draft is a first draft and it sucks. So like the same way you should never publish your first draft of anything, you should never publish an AI draft of anything. Like you- That's a really cool thought. Like you super clean. You have to be imbueing yourself into the text and adding personality to it because that's what takes something from bland generic writing to actually.

being good. You recently wrote about keeping your team lean was kind of an operating principle at the beginning of your career. Yeah. And now you're like, wait, team is amazing. Yes. So you're building your team. Yeah. Can you just talk about the difference between the philosophy for a lean team and like a larger team? Yeah. So I have never had a real job. I started a couple online businesses, solopreneur type projects in my 20s, started blogging. The writing took off. and that's what got me by a publishing deal on everything. So from like 2008 to 2019, it was just me and two guys, a research assistant and then like a web developer tech guy.

They ran everything on my online business. They all my courses, my social media, like everything, my newsletter, email marketing. So it's just the three of us for like over a decade. And for years and years and years, everybody was like, you should just be writing me. books. You don't need a team. You don't want to manage anybody. And both my guys were like pretty self-sufficient. And again, as a guy who had like never had a real job, never like been in a corporate environment and never had a real team. I was like, yeah, I don't want to manage. Like, who wants to manage a team? Like, that sounds awful. I just want to write. And that carried me up

until about the pandemic when I hired a third person. But really where it changed was when everything went video. And myself and and a lot of authors who were kind of my generation in the 2010s, you know, we all had like a fork in the road, which was like, okay, do you try to do the video thing and the podcast thing and be on YouTube and Instagram and all that? Or do you just keep it lean and just keep writing books? And I chose the video path.

And as soon as you step into that, which I don't have to tell you or sitting in the studio, I met like nine of your team members just walking in here. Now you're a business. Now you're like you've got payroll, you've got rent, you've got equipment, you have editors, you have managers, producers, like the whole thing. So from 2022 to today, we went from four people to I think today we're 23 people. And the funniest thing is that I actually love having a team.

I love managing. I love being a boss. It's something that I never expected. And it's one of those things that I'm like kicking myself. I'm like, why did I wait so long? Oh, I can tell you why. It's expensive. It's expensive.

It's expensive. You have to have a real business that has some scale. Yeah. And this is in many ways refreshing for me to hear because AI replacing employees is a concern that many people have. I'm not so concerned about that, actually. Our firm is 42 people. And we spend a lot of time.

about how to work with AI, I don't need a replacement of humans, but I need the humans here to be great with AI to build our AI employees and agents and products that we can really be efficient with our time. So we free up the mundane to be more creative. I love that part of it. And you know the idea you've heard it, teamwork makes the dream work? I totally disagree. Teamwork is the dream work. Yeah. It's just that one word. there makes all the difference. Like the way you feel about like being on a team and leading a team is I feel the same way. It's awesome.

Yeah. We are built like a coral reef. Like we're supposed to be working well with others. And you don't have all the skills. You need other people. And, you know, so like if we can kind of figure out that counterbalance of skills that we don't have, it makes it work. I agree on the AI agent thing, especially being in a media business. and I imagine your business is similar.

Like a huge component of my business is actually developing those long-term relationships, right? Like I need people around me that A, I trust, B, like, they really understand me and my work, my philosophy, my personality. And once you build those things with somebody over multiple years, like it's such an asset that it would be so dumb to just throw that away

because like, well, AI can do it. Claude can do it cheaper, right? It's like, well, no, Claude doesn't care about me. Full stop. Full stop. Yeah, full stop. Cares about how many tokens are being used. Exactly.

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That's 20% off at rag dashbone.com with the promo code finding mastery. And when they ask you where you heard about them, please support our community and this show and let them know that we sent you. Finding mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn. Earlier, I mentioned LinkedIn HiringPro. And I want to come back to something a little more personal. We talk a lot about the people who make extraordinary things possible. And I want to take a moment to acknowledge some of ours. Janelle, Taylor, Alex, Emma, and our newest teammate, Chelsea.

Every single one of them came to us from LinkedIn. And every single one of them has raised the bar of how we operate here at Finding Mastery. Our relationship with LinkedIn, it also runs a lot deeper than just using their tools. We also work with their teams on the corporate side, helping them build the kind of high-performance culture where great people want to stay. They want to grow. I've been building businesses for over two decades now, and I'll tell you, the right team that matters so much. It's the difference between grinding and flowing.

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Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash mastery. Terms and conditions apply. Again, that's LinkedIn.com slash mastery. So what is your business? I mean, these days it's called like a creator business, which I don't know, influencer business, thought leader business. Yeah, I see you cringing because I was trying to figure out like, you're a writer, your thinker writer, and you've got ways that you're scaling it through podcasting and video

and apps. So similar in a lot of respects to the things we're doing. And I was just wondering kind of how you orientate your business. I actually think of it as like new media. Yeah. And the term new media is often used for like kind of news, like political news or current event media that's not traditional like C&S. and New York Times. But I just see it as new media, period. It's new entertainment, new educational content. I think what both of us have are small media businesses. Yeah, you've done

really well on building your footprint, your video, social footprint. For folks that are inspired, they've got ideas, they want to write or they've got a book or they're like inspired by what you've done, what are some best practices to do really well in a very crowded world of thoughts and thought leadership. How do you maximize or what's some things I can learn or they can learn about not getting lost in YouTube? I think anybody who wants to start in this line of work. What I tell everybody is I say pick one platform, pick your favorite. Like what's the platform that you're on all day, every day? It's the first thing you open up when you pick up your phone. What is yours? For me these days it would be YouTube. Okay. And just pick one thing and get really good at that. And then some of this

ties into into like what kind of content you want to make. Where are those people at? So like if you want to do, I don't know, say like business advice, right? Like, okay, maybe you focus on LinkedIn. But it's generally speaking, like the platform that you enjoy the most is going to be what you're probably going to be best at anyway. And you want to build that audience in that narrow lane first and foremost and get really, really good at that process and learn all the basics of just the online content business in general, right?

Like coming up with ideas, testing hooks, repurposing content, the whole production pipeline. building an email list, all that stuff. Like, that stuff takes years, and you should just keep yourself sane and do it in one spot at first. What is most valuable to you right now? Is it your email because you own the relationships, or is it YouTube subscribers? Because it's a broadcasting channel that's really pretty cheap. I think email's still the most valuable.

Yeah. It's definitely the most profitable part of the business by far. Give me one best practice for building a newsletter that has been important to you. and maybe one best practice to grow a community on YouTube. For newsletter, it's about the consistency of value. And I would say it's in newsletters, it's very much density of value. You're one of 500 emails that they're getting that day. So if they actually do open yours and take the time to read it,

like don't waste their time. Like really respect the click and deliver as much value as quickly as possible. I think a lot of people use their newsletters as kind of this like, I'm just going to kind of meander and let my thoughts flow and see what happens because these are my super fans. And it's like, no, these are your most valuable people. And you want to like really respect that relationship. YouTube is much more like television. You've got to have a great pitch.

You've got to have a great hook. So that means really great title, thumbnail first 30 seconds. And you can have, you can be the smartest person in the world with the most life changing idea. but if it is packaged in a lame way, does not have a good title, and you are not introducing it well in the first 10 seconds, people are not going to watch it.

What would you imagine the title of this conversation? What would you want the title of this conversation to be? That's a great idea. Three principles that will change your life. That's probably what I would go with right now, off the top of my head. Yeah, cool. I think it's great.

And those are the three values that you talked about. And then we'd have to get like really large shots of you and me with these like ridiculous facial expert like pissed off. You're like angry and I'm like. And then there's screen grab just happened. And then there'll be text. They'll be like, you'll never be the same after this or something like that.

You know, like tabloid type copy on the, that's YouTube. That is YouTube. You know, we talked to earlier about that, that agitation, but doing it in like a safe and supportive way. I think a lot of what my work is simply shining light on the train. off that is necessary or unconsciously or people like don't realize is packaged with whatever their dream or goal may be. Yeah.

Right? Like there's a quote in subtle art that I see you get posted a lot, which is your dream spouse is the person you're going to fight with. Your dream home is the home that you're going to spend all your money repairing. Your dream job is the job you're going to lay awake, stressing over, right? Like it's, and that's not to say none of these things are worth having. It just means that like this is part of wanting it. you're also wanting the cost.

You can't just want the benefit of something. You have to want the cost of something. That's the drum that I tend to bang on in everything I do. Very cool, man. What is a question that keeps you up at night or that you're really fascinated by? Was it worth it? That's the one. Was this worth it?

If you only knew. Yeah, that's good. Well done, mate. Like, I appreciate what you've done and what you stand for. You introduced a new idea in a fresh way across all three books. You're on the front edge of using AI. And you've built a real community. So congratulations.

Thank you. Mark, thank you for coming in. This is great. Yeah, congrats again. Thank you. Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by John Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus, Molecular Biologists, and Founder of Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction. In this conversation, John explores why so many of us are living in a state of distraction,

disconnection and anxiety. And why the ability to truly be present may be. one of the most important human skills of the future. Join us Wednesday, June 3rd at 9 a.m. Pacific, only on Finding Mastery. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community.

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