Know Thyself - E45 - Mark Manson: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

Mark Manson, Author of "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" explains why most self help is backwards, and how to actually improve your life and wellbeing.  He shares his perspective on life, death, success, and finding our purpose. Mark recounts how the surprising death of his friend shifted his view on life, and why it's important that we lean how to die before we die. He describes the challenges he faced after becoming 'an overnight success' and selling 10 million copies of his book - challenging the idea that success can make you happy. He uses 'The Paradox of Progress' to explain why the wealthiest countries are also the most unhappy. Mark also explains the fundamentals for building a healthy relationship, and how to use the context of the past to inspire gratitude for the present. SPONSOR: https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself Code: KNOWTHYSELF for 15% off (Currently only ships to US & Canada) ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro  1:45 The Death of My Childhood Friend 8:12 How to Die Before You Die 9:56 The Painful Reality of Personal Growth and Change 12:44 The Challenges of Success and Happiness on the Macro and Micro Level 19:44 What to Give a F*ck About  23:37 Stopping BS’ing Yourself 25:55 Why the Rich are Unhappy - The Paradox of Progress 32:05 Finding Meaning Beyond Success and Dealing with Exponential Swings 37:20 Overcoming Depression after Massive Success 40:12 The Backwards Law and the Pursuit of Positive Experiences 43:44 Letting Go: A Pathway to More 47:10 Self Sabotage: Manson's Law of Avoidance 54:11 The never-ending wheel of self-improvement 57:17 Taking LSD & Seeing God  1:03:56 Finding Your Unique Combination of Skills and Gifts 1:12:28 The Limitations of Identity and Finding Meaning Beyond Success 1:14:57 The Importance of Maintaining Separate Identities in a Romantic Partnership. 1:17:53 Historical Context & Understanding Progress 1:27:44 Conclusion ___________ Mark Manson: Mark is the three-time #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, as well as other titles. His books have sold around 20 million copies, been translated into more than 65 languages, and reached number one in more than a dozen countries. In 2023, a feature film about his life and ideas was released worldwide by Universal Pictures. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson/ Website: https://markmanson.net Books: https://markmanson.net/books YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson ___________ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/

As a civilization, when we solve the problems of physical scarcity, we introduce a very difficult psychological problem to ourselves, which is like, you're safe, you have everything you need. Now, who do you want to be? The velocity of the success really made me feel trapped. I always feel weird when I talk about this on podcast, because what is more unrelatable than a guy who, like, sold 10 million books and then got depressed? What amazes me is that the solution's exactly the same. So here's the dirty little secret about all your favorite personal development authors. The reason we write, the books we write, is because it's the advice we need to hear ourselves. I found the conventional personal development approach to, quote unquote, improving yourself

was a little bit naive. Everything is backwards. If you want to be happy, then don't chase happiness. If you want to stop being sad, let yourself be sad. Figuring out what to give a fuck about, it's a question that never ends because we're always growing and evolving and changing. The world is always growing and evolving and changing. And so you've got to ask some of these questions.

Hello, beautiful beings. Welcome back to the Know Theyself podcast where every single week, we get the honor and privilege to sit down with a brilliant mind and open heart to see how we can learn more about ourselves and the world around us. My guest today is a prolific author and content creator. He wrote the infamous book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, which has sold over 10 million copies and has been a huge success worldwide. I personally love how he approaches a lot of these perennial questions of life, such as what's our purpose, how to be happy, how to be fulfilled, but from an unexpected lens that you typically don't find in the personal development world. So Mark Manson, thank you for coming on the show, my friend. It's great to be here.

Yeah, I would love to start with the light topic. Death. Oh, boy. All right. Getting to read some of your books and get more familiar with your work, you know, what stuck out, one thing that really stuck out was that you had a deep transformational moment when your friend Josh passed. when you were a teenager. And I know that for me firsthand, I feel the most alive in life when I'm closest to the realization of my own mortality. You know, when you feel that viscerally, that possibility and how we are all mortal, you become so present. It's like there's this immediacy that comes to it. And so could you share a little bit about that time in your life, what unfolded and how that

radically changed who you are and how you view yourself? Sure. Starting with the light topics here. Yeah, right. So when I was 19, well, to back up just a little bit, like give you a sense of who I was as a teenager. I was very lost. I was stoner, lazy, failed classes, you know, very like, not only unmotivated to really pursue anything in life,

but also too scared to actually pursue anything in life. life and but wasn't self-aware enough to realize that. And so I had a good friend named Josh and he was kind of a party buddy that I had at music school. And we went went out to a lake party one July. And we were just having a good time. And it was so there was like a swimming pool and it was on a cliff and the cliff was above the lake. And basically people were getting drunk and jumping off the cliff into the lake and tons of people were doing it so it seemed completely reasonable and i even asked josh i was like is this safe do people do this all the time and he was like yeah people do it all the time i was like okay and uh a couple hours later i went up to the house to get a snack

came back got distracted came back down maybe 10 20 minutes later and there were ambulances fire trucks police everywhere and the party had completely stopped And long story short, in that like 20 minutes I was in the house, Josh had jumped in and drowned. And, you know, not only that proximity to death, obviously that proximity to death is always a wake-up call of your own mortality and all the things that you take for granted in your life. There was something fundamentally shocking about the randomness of it and just the tragic proportions of it. I mean, the guy was like 21. We're literally just laughing and drinking beers together like 30 minutes prior. And then he's just gone.

And for my young brain, it really just like scrambled kind of everything I thought I knew about life. And went into like a pretty intense depression for most of that year trying to sort it out. And, but it was interesting because I really, I eventually came out of it. It's cliche to put it this way, but like very much like a carp adium. Like, dude, stop wasting your life. Like, what the hell are you doing? You know, stop smoking pot every day. Start studying.

Like, pick something that you're going to pursue and, like, actually go pursue it. And it ended up being, it ended up. have, I don't want to say it was a blessing, but it ended up having very positive consequences in my life. And I think also experiencing such an immediate tragedy that early in my life, it made me, I find that most young people, well, most people period, don't like to think about death, but especially young people. And I think it forced me at a very young age to start considering a lot of these questions. And it eventually kind of sent me down more of a contemplative slash spiritual slash philosophical path in my life. And yeah, it was very formative,

one of the most formative things that's ever happened to me. Yeah, I could only imagine. I think so often we just overlook the gift of what it means to have a life and to be human. Yeah. And unfortunately, we need to experience, well, it can be fortunate that we experience those unfortunate things in our life, whether it's a death of a loved one or, you know, a serious illness or something that like really is that wake-up call that like shakes us and like, yo, bro, human, you're alive in this body. And like, it's, and you can, you can radically transform yourself into a new way of operating and existing within yourself. But oftentimes a lot people need to go through those tragedies to experience them. Yeah. And the weird thing about death,

too, is that we all, we treat it like this very rare, horrible thing when it's actually like literally the most common thing on earth. It is like one of maybe only a handful of experiences that we are all going to have at some point and we're all going to lose loved ones at some point. We're all going to have tragedy at some point. Yet I find that most of us, most of the time, we kind of like dilute ourselves into thinking

that it's this very rare horrible thing that, you know, if we don't talk about it, then it won't happen. But I have found that, you know, I have found that the opposite is actually the case that you should think about these things. Like my wife and I have had conversations before where we have both said it's like yeah, I actually

it's uncomfortable how much I imagine you dying because, and it's a horrible thought, but I have it frequently and it's almost like mentally, A, mentally preparing yourself for the possibility, but B, it's also like it prevents you from taking them for granted. It prevents

me from taking my marriage for granted. It's like every day, even if I didn't sleep well, even if, you know, she's nagging me about the trash or whatever, it can, like, remind me of, like, this is one of the most important things in my life, you know, so don't overlook that. The egoic human mind that is really one of the only things that's actually separate from all of other existence around us is the suffering of that separation, I feel like makes us fear our own death, right? But, like you're speaking to, it's so common, it's so prevalent.

everything is going to experience it. Every living being will at some point. But what I'm also really interested in is like how can we not just wait for those big tragic moments, but how can we in this moment have a perspective shift that allows an old identities, old identities to die and experience death in that? Because we are experiencing in ourselves, in our body, deaths every single moment. Sure. Many, you know, we're just not aware of.

And so as you've been on this path of supporting a lot of people in an industry that has been super saturated, but you found a way to really break through with a clear and unique voice because you're very creative and I think your writing capabilities. Like it's a beautiful gift that you have largely to really support people into breaking this habit of who they've been and the way that they've, you know, kind of viewed life. And so what have you learned about either in your own path but then also in supporting others have these kind of mini deaths of who we perceive ourselves to be? It's a great question. Because I, you know, I think, well, first of all, I think there's a lot of value in just developing kind of a mental habit of a thought experiment of if I died today,

you know, or if I died tomorrow, what would I think about my life? Or if I knew I had a month to live, what would I think about my life? Like I think these are useful questions to periodically ask yourself. And I think there's a reason, you know, whether you look at Buddhism or the Stoics, like it is that those questions are a fundamental part of those practices and they've been around for thousands of years. To your question about identity, you know, that's something I've been banging on that drum quite a bit, especially when I got started early in my career.

So, you know, everybody wants to change something about themselves. Everybody wants to improve somehow. And I found this kind of the conventional personal development approach to, quote unquote, improving yourself or changing yourself was it was a little bit naive. Like it was all about this cool new habit or persona or skill that you were going to adopt for yourself. And oh my God, isn't your life going to be amazing? And one of the things I started writing about a long time ago is that for a real fundamental identity level shift to happen, it's not sufficient to simply adopt something new into your identity.

You also have to kill off something old. and when you kill off that old part of yourself, there's a grieving process that you go through. Even if it's like a terrible, it's a terrible thing. Like I went, when I stopped partying, which was horrible for me and I like wasn't enjoying for years when I stopped, there was a grieving process of like, who am I? If I'm not the party guy, who am I?

If I'm not the one drinking with my friends, like, why are my friends with me, right? Like there's all these very uncomfortable and, and kind of sad questions that pop up, even when you eliminate a negative part of your identity. So I've long written that this, that identity change is not simply like, you know, hey, check out this new cool habit I've got.

You know, aren't I amazing? It's like, no, there's a sadness when you let an old aspect of yourself go. And that sadness is okay. In the personal development world, I think partly also because of how plugged we all, are on social media, seeing everybody's highlight reels constantly. But we think that like self-improvement and growth is just like, we just see the end result. We see the outcome. We see the puppies,

rainbows and butterflies and think in reality, to get to that point, it's a lot of the opposite. It's a lot of purging. It can be a lot of painful purging. It can be a lot of kind of existential questions of like, who am I? Will I still matter? Will people still love me? And there's also a lot of boredom too, which also doesn't get publicized very often because it's boring. Yeah, because it's boring, right? But it's, you know, a lot of personal change is just very dull. Like, it's crossing your T's and dotting your eyes and, you know, making very mundane decisions consistently. We just don't glorify those, right? But it's like, it's what we do in the dark that shines in the light. Nobody saw you for years and years writing behind the seas before you had this big breakthrough, right? And then it's like,

whoa, this dude's an amazing author. Like, you should check him out, this new guy that has this beautiful new gift and sharing it in this way. And it's like, but do you understand that years, the decades of who you've been and the skill set you've developed and the life experience that you've gone through? Yeah. It's, it's, I experienced a lot of that when subtle art took off because that was my first convention like book in the publishing world and so in the publishing world I was this hot new talent that had just been discovered and oh my god look how many copies he's selling where did he come from and I used to get uh I used to do like media interviews and they would ask me they're like you know wow it's how does it feel to be an overnight success and I'm like bro I've been doing

this for like nine years like this obscure blog on the internet you just never heard of me until a month ago. It's so interesting, right? All the things that come with that level of impact and success. Like to one of the largest degrees you can have success with the book, right? You experience with that. It's beautiful for your work to get recognized. It's exciting for the ideas that you cherish and that you value and that you think are important

to be planted, those seeds to be planted in the minds of millions and millions of people. That's got to feel so rewarding. What have you learned on the other side of the other side of the other side of the way? the success and the impact about how it's actually correlated or not with your own happiness, because a lot of people think they're just so intrinsically interwoven, and that's not always the case. I think about it on two levels. So there's kind of like, the lack of a better term, a macro level, right, which is, well, let me start on the micro level. So the micro level is that, yes, success is great, and it brings a lot of joy into your life, but it also brings a lot of challenges

and unexpected. A lot of those challenges are very unexpected and they kind of like blindside you a little bit. And so there are periods during success

that it can be very difficult and I think for certain people depending on their background how old they are that it can even be a little bit of a curse like we all know of stories of people

who got famous too young and bad things happen. So there is that like on the micro level there are challenges. On the macro level, it's like, I would never trade it. Like, there were brief, there were years in the last five years that I struggled a lot and it kind of messed with me. But at no point would I ever be like, yeah, I want to go back and not be successful.

I want to go back to like, you know, asking my, my girlfriend for rent money, you know, like there's none of that. So there is that glorification of the old days too, which is like there's a nostalgia, right? of like, but in reality, it sucked a lot too. It was horrible. I would, yeah, it's, so the most accurate way I can answer this is simply that like, yes, success will make your life better on the whole, but it's not like a linear thing. Like it's a very, there's a roller coaster. And yeah, it trends upward, but there are down months and years and it can complicate a lot

of problems in your life as much as much as it solves problems in your life. Sure. Yeah, I'm sure you've had to continually redefine what success in general even means to you because we're talking about it in the traditional sense of having career impact, right? Sure. And prosperity in that sense, but you could be immensely successful in your career but feel like a failure internally, you know, and oftentimes those are the driving mechanisms to get to that place in the first, you know, in the first way. So, yeah, how is your definition of what successfully means turn into becoming something that's just more holistic? I think one of the things that got me in trouble is, and I think this is a mistake a lot of people

make, is having too narrow of a definition of success for myself, maybe not defining it on multiple metrics. You know, I think the same way it's, this is going to be a cheesy metaphor. But like the same way, the same way, you need to diversify an investment portfolio so that, you know, if the price of oil collapses tomorrow, you're not screwed, or if the U.S. stock market collapses, you're not screwed. I think you need to diversify your value system and how you define success for yourself. Like, you need to create success metrics. You need to create multiple success metrics for yourself. And I think I probably, I was so, driven back then because I was young. I had a chip on my shoulder. I was like and in back then it's like

creators got zero respect like I understand there's still kind of overlooked these days but it's like there were no doors open anywhere like it was like oh you have a blog like good for you you know and so there was there was a big chip on our shoulder back then of like being. one of the first people to have a door open to you in traditional media and taking it and then it works. So like my definitions of success were very kind of conventional metrics of like how many readers does my blog have? How much money is coming in each month? How many books sell? How many books are my selling? Am I on the New York Times list or not? And that's fine. I don't think there's anything wrong. I think those kind of like external materialistic metrics get a bad rap sometimes.

I think it's fine to have those. It's fun to have those in a lot of cases. It's just that you can't only have those. You need to have, you need to also have this other set of success metrics for yourself, you know, of impact, of meaning, of fostering community for yourself. And I definitely overlooked that 10 years ago, for sure. And I ended up paying the price for that because once you hit the worldly materialistic metrics,

you get a trophy, you get a big check in your bank account, and then you wake up, you're still the exact same person. You're like, oh shit, now what do I do? So if you haven't built up those other success metrics, if you haven't built a strong community around yourself,

If you're not having impact on people, like, if you're not doing something you feel is very meaningful every day, then you're going to feel a little bit lost. And I definitely did for a while, for sure. That shift, because contrary to the initial perception, maybe seeing the title of the first book, the subtle art of not giving it a fuck. Most people will think, all right, I shouldn't care about all these things. But on the contrary, you're really speaking to how we should really find what we really give a shit about. What are the things that truly have meaning to us? What can we actually really deeply value? And so how important for you has it been to discover what your true values are, what really

has meaning for you in order to actually have a fulfilling life? Well, so here's the dirty little secret about all your favorite personal development authors is like the reason we write the books we write is because it's the advice we need to hear ourselves. And we suck at taking that advice ourselves. I have so many author friends who like continually screw up the thing that they wrote a best-selling book about. And we all joke with each other of like, you know, oh, but you're like so-and-so. You're supposed to be perfect with this.

It is self-help, I guess. Yeah, it is very literal. It's the first person that's being helped is this guy. So it's the thing about the subtle art, and I think this is something that it gets overlooked a lot from that book, is that this, so first of all, you're correct. It's not about being indifferent. It's not about not caring about anything. It's about very consciously choosing the things that you care about because you have a limited amount of fucks to give. And so if you just give them about everything, then you're going to feel very lost. And the thing about it is that you don't, figuring out what to value or what

to give a fuck about. It's not, it's a question that never ends. Because we're all. growing and evolving and changing. The world is always growing and evolving and changing. And so it's a question you have to, I almost consider it like spiritual hygiene, right? It's like the same way you got to brush your teeth every day or else shit's going to start rotting out. Like, you got to ask some of these questions consistently, regularly, including like the death questions, right? It's like, what do I care about? Is this worth caring about? Are there other things that are probably more worth my time and energy. What am I grateful for in my life?

If I died next month, like, how would I feel about my life right now? These are just consistent questions that you're never going to stop asking because it's the practice of asking them is what keeps you on track. Right? So, yeah, it's, I definitely got, you know, after the book took off and everything and the career went bananas. I definitely got a crash course and taking my own medicine. Yeah. Right, because our behaviors are intrinsically connected to our values. And so a lot of times if you ask people, like, what do you value?

They would have to probably think about it because most people don't think about that sort of thing. Sure. But we all do have our values. And often just subconsciously, we're holding on to them. They've been passed down to us. If you look at somebody's behaviors and results, it's going to be trickle-down effect from what they actually value, right? Totally. It's, it's, behaviors never lie.

And what's funny is that a lot of people, even if you do think about your values, a lot of people will give you an answer that it's just not correct. Like a lot of times we're not aware of our own values, right? So what value sounds good. Exactly. So somebody would be like, oh, most important value in my life is family. Meanwhile, they're working like 90 hours a week and are on the road six months a year and have missed all their kids' birthdays, right? And it's like, okay, you know, is it really? Yeah, yeah.

So it's another one of those things that we can easily trick ourselves and dilute ourselves. Yeah, it's just, I get the image of just, for me and my own personal path, like there's definitely been times where I've also been on that journey. Like we all go through ups and downs of saying that we really value something, but then our behaviors don't necessarily reflect what we actually say to ourselves. And so question comes into, okay, once you have that awareness, right, which is the first step, then can you stop bullshitting yourself? Yeah. I don't know if it's ever possible to completely stop bullshitting yourself. I think you can get better at it. Yeah. And bullshit yourself less. But I don't know if any of us like ever completely nail it. Interesting. I think this is this is one of the reasons why it's so, so, so important to have a really good group of people around you who are also very aware and that you're able to have open and honest communication with because it's like if something

misses my own bullshit filter, then my wife's is likely to catch it or one of my good friends is likely to catch it and vice versa. And so it's extremely important to have that network around you to kind of like reinforce these systems in yourself. A quick share from today's sponsor. I'm a warm beverage kind of guy. I like my tea, cacao and other products like from our sponsor today, Mudwater. Mudwater is a coffee alternative with adaptogenic mushrooms and Ayurvedic herbs. With only a fraction of the caffeine as a cup of coffee, you get the energy without the jitters or crash. Their original blend has chai and cacao, mushrooms like Lions Main to support focus, and chaga and Rishi to support

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I want to talk a little bit about because it's also tied into all of what we're talking to here, this idea that you kind of share in your book, which is the paradox of progress, right? There's like this inverse effect that we think as societally and also just in our own lives as we find more success, as we do better, that everything else in our life will kind of find this, this euphoric rise with it. But often the case, like you spoke to many times, it's just like we've often traded our physical struggle for the psychological struggle. Sure. And so anything you want to speak to and just share a little bit more about what that is. Yeah.

So most of my second book, Everything is Fucked, is about this, which is... I love your book, that one. Everything is fucked. The book about Hope. That book is definitely not as commercially appealing as the subtle art. But I think in terms of, like, importance for me at the time, like, that book is actually more important because that book is, actually more important. Because that book is... kind of like a thinly veiled

therapy session for myself. So to answer your question about the paradox of progress, there's this fascinating thing in psychological research that finds that basically the wealthier and more abundant a country is

the higher the rates of mental health issues, suicide, depression, anxiety, almost across the board. And it's actually they've like they've studied it like it happens so consistently like you can take a city and you can kind of map the areas of the city and by wealth and abundance and resources and the wealthiest parts of the city will have the greatest suicide rates, greatest rates of depression, greatest rates of mental illness. So it's this paradox of like the better our life gets, the more we seem to kind of freak out or the larger percentage of people kind of like freak. out and have these existential psychological crises around it. And meanwhile, at the same time, I was going through the same thing. I just experienced, like, an amount of success that exceeded all my wildest dreams,

and yet I'm like this, like, insecure, neurotic, anxious mess, you know, trying to write this new book. So I kind of, like, that book, like, almost like wrote me out of my own angst and depression. But, what I ended up, the conclusion I ended up coming to is that, you know, the, as a civilization, when we solve the problems of physical scarcity, you know, having enough food, enough shelter, protecting ourselves from wild animals and the elements and everything, like once we give ourselves enough physical abundance that we no longer have to spend our entire lives worrying about our own survival, we introduce a very difficult psychological problem to ourselves, which is like, okay, you're safe, you have everything you need. Now, who do you want to be?

Well, that's a hard fucking question. That's a terrifying fucking question for most people. And so it's almost like it's such a privileged question, but at the same time, it's so psychologically difficult. And I don't think we acknowledge that or we're very aware of that tradeoff, If you are living in poverty, say in sub-Saharan Africa, it's easy to know who you are. It's easy to know what you want every day. You have no choice, right? So your physical life is difficult, but psychologically, you know why you're waking up every morning. You know what you're working on.

You know what success means for you. And you know who you care about. if you live a super privileged life and say L.A. And you have all these great things and all these opportunities and all this education and you know all these amazing people. These questions of like, who am I? Who am I going to be? What do I want to do with my life? Is this more meaningful than that? Is this making more impact than that? Maybe I should have done that over there. It tortures you. It like it can absolutely eat you alive. And so the paradox of progress is I don't necessarily have. a clean solution for it, but I think, you know, I tried to simply express what the problem is

and put words to, I think, what a lot of our generation is experiencing. Growing up with all the education and abundance and technology that we grow up with, yeah, it does complicate knowing who you want to be in the world. So much of that suffering, right, is just tied to our own self-centered self-appointed importance and how special we think we are. And so counterintuitive, most people think that once you have access to a level of abundance or resources that, you know, and of course, a lot of your problems do get solved, it's easier to take care of yourself if you get sick.

You know, you can afford healthier food and a nice gym and like a lot of these things. But really, we need a lot less to take care of ourselves than we think we do. And that psychological struggle that we find ourselves where we're in the space now, a lot of things become possible, but we're also just so uncertain as to what direction we should go in. Almost like grow in, but that's also a really big part of it. What do we feel like we're contributing to the world? And then how do we feel like we're actually growing? Because I know for me, I'm most happy when I feel like I'm making progress and growth internally and externally in my life. There's this upward trajectory of feeling like there's this usefulness. I feel like I'm being used

by life in a good way in a sense. And I think that once you get to this place where if you make a lot of money or you become very successful and you don't have something that's really meaningful to your heart, like that you feel like as a service to the world and to get out of your own bubble of your own mental constructs of just like about yourself, but like to get out there and to go support and to serve and find things that have meaning to you, I think is just, is just so valuable and important. Yeah. So for you, for you, when you had your massive success and you find yourself still in a depressive state, how did you actually get out of this? that because in hindsight when you look back at that period of your life, there's these ideas of

how to cure depression and how to move beyond that state. But when you look at the things that you actually did, what were the things that really moved the needle in terms of your own experience from before the success and then even after the success? The first thing I did is I took a little bit of time off. I was like, you know, I've been working my ass off for eight, nine years, like let's chill for a little bit. And I think that was helpful for maybe like a month. But then I was like like, okay, I need to do something. I can't just sit around for the rest of my life. And eventually, I just kind of came to the conclusion. What I realize is that the velocity of the success really kind of made me feel trapped. And what I mean by that is, you know,

when you're, let's say you're progressing on a goal. And this, it doesn't have to be a career or money or whatever. It can be anything. It's like, We kind of have this mental expectation that as time goes on, you're going to experience incremental improvement over a steady period of time. And that feels good. It's like, I'm better this week than I was the week before. Awesome. Feel great. You know, this month went better than last month. Amazing. It's when you get these crazy exponential swings in fortune that I think really like kind of breaks our brain a little bit. So it's like kind of imagine you're going along and every year is five to 10 percent better in the year before and you do that for almost 10 years

and then the next year is 10,000 percent better. And you're like, well, wait a second. What the hell did I do? Like where did this come from? And you start asking all these questions like, did I get lucky? Is it a fluke? I'm never going to be able to do this again, right? So there's that insecurity and anxiety. And so it just really starts scrambling with your head. And there's a lot of imposter syndrome mixed in. And suddenly you've got all these, you know, you've got agents and publicists and publishers and people in Hollywood are like calling you and expecting all this stuff. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I wasn't expecting this all so fast. And I basically just came to the conclusion. I was like, okay, look, I can.

either be miserable and do nothing, or I can be miserable in work. So I might as well be miserable in work and work myself, my way out of it. Because I was like, you know, if I just get like the next couple projects out of the way and watch them do 10% as well as this last project, it's going to hurt and I'm going to be really sad about it. But it's okay. Life will go on. And I'll get over it. And I think that's more or less what happened. It's just coming the terms with like, yeah, this crazy outsized thing happened in my life. It doesn't need to define me. It doesn't need to be who I am. Like one of the best conversations, so this kind of ties back into like having a good network around you. Some of my best friends are psychologists and therapists. And I was had dinner with a friend one night who's a therapist. And I was kind of telling him like how stuck I felt. And he was like, look, you're thinking about your life in terms of like you like if it's a chart, you have all these like, you have all these like, little experiences down here and then you have this one experience up here and you're like freaking out that nothing's ever going to be that high again and he's like but you have to realize

that there's going to be dots all over the chart stretching 50 60 years into the future he's like you don't even know if that's the highest or not your your metrics of how you measure success could completely change and that becomes one of the lowest dots right like so he's like you're you're assuming all these things are true about your life that you actually have no idea if they're true or not. And all you can do is just keep showing up and doing the work and putting out stuff that feels good and important at the time. And so I did. And I it was just in that process of working and trying to focus on what it was true and important to me and not trying to match the previous success that eventually kind of liberated me.

It's so interesting. I think not a lot of people are really. very few people are able to experience that form, I guess, of depression that comes by massive success, you know? And I think it's interesting to see how when you have that level of success, you realize how important it was for you because you put so much of your self-worth on reaching that same level or like you just realize how much weight you've been putting on to your career and like who you are and the things that you find meaningful all kind of attached to external appreciation. Totally.

And when that's up for grabs and you don't know which direction that's going to go into, it's like it becomes unsettling. For individuals that, maybe on the other side, maybe they don't have any success, they feel like there's nothing positive coming into their life externally. They just feel like an internal kind of whole. And they wake up and they're just like not motivated. I think one of the biggest things that I just want to state again that you shared was like how important it is to be surrounded by individuals and have that network because like, you know, we're fortunate enough to be in the space where we can have friends that are therapists and psychologists and that's beautiful. But then also just cultivating community, it's like we're so isolated to such a large degree that we don't really realize comparatively to how like we biologically have evolved.

Yeah. But what general advice have you given that you've seen supportive for individuals that are kind of on that side of things? Well, it's funny. So I always feel weird when I talk about this on podcast, right? Because what is more unrelatable than a guy who like sold 10 million books and then got depressed? Like that's, I always feel like, oh, boo-hoo, poor me, right? But what amazes me from like a psychological perspective, what amazes me is that the exact same thing fixes it on both ends, right? When your life changes positively so fast that it, scrambles your identity and fucks your ego and puts you into a depression or whether your life goes wrong so fast it scrambles your identity and fucks your ego and puts you into depression. The solution's exactly the same. You just, you show up, you focus on small wins piece by piece. You surround yourself by some good people. And you take it step by step. And you slowly do the work of disidentifying from that massive event that happened. and realizing that that doesn't necessarily define your life or define who you are,

which is crazy. It's the same in both directions. And so to me, it's, it almost, this is, this is why I've, I've written about how, like, the directionality almost doesn't even matter. Like, what fucks with our heads is the magnitude of change. Like, our, our psychology seems to only be kind of prep for a certain amount of change at a time. And when we exceed that rate, of change when something so massive and drastic changes our lives so quickly, whether it's tragic or super fortunate, it takes us a couple years to like mentally catch up and redefine ourselves and redefine our values and understand like what we're going to pursue and what we're going to care about. So to me, I don't know, that's just, maybe this is just me, but I find

that really fascinating. Absolutely. Regardless like that in your book as well, you spoke to the backwards law, right? And how I would love for you just to dive into a little bit more why negativity is kind of the pathway to positivity. Because a lot of times especially just in modern society that we live, we just have so many things completely backwards. In terms of if we want a more positive experience of life, let's just chase more positive feeling experiences. But oftentimes that pain comes on the other side, right? So it's like choosing the pain first, it kind of flips that on its head and its way. So why is that such a fundamental perspective shift that we should have who want to actually have a positive experience of life?

Well, I think, so the backwards law for people who haven't read the book, it's, I describe it as, it actually comes from Alan Watts, but I kind of simplified it and crammed it in the one sentence, which is the pursuit of a positive experience is itself a negative experience. and the acceptance of a negative experience is itself a positive experience. And I think what a lot of people get in trouble with is, as you said, they are so fixated on pursuing positive experiences that they actually make themselves miserable because they're constantly reinforcing and reminding themselves of everything they don't have,

which is just kind of the most fundamental definition of suffering in Buddhism. And whereas it's that acceptance of like, you know, life is pain. This is difficult. Don't resist it. It's going to be okay. That mental experience in and of itself becomes liberating. And I think it's particularly important in the modern world because so much of the modern world is geared and optimized around pursuing the thing you want. Right. So it's like if you want a degree, it's here are the steps to go get it. If you want to build a business, here are the steps to go get it.

If you want to find a relationship, here are the steps to go do it. It's like in everything else in our life, you have this established goal and then you just kind of like figure out what the steps one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight are to get to that thing. That works for everything in life except for our own internal state. It's like if I decide I want to be happy, okay, what are the steps to happiness? Okay, I got to do these eight things to be happy. I'm making myself miserable.

Just by thinking about that, I am actively making myself miserable. So it's when it comes to our internal states, everything is backwards. It's if you want to be happy, then don't chase happiness. If you want to stop being sad, let yourself be sad. And it's very difficult to logically kind of wrap your head around. it, but when you experience it, and I think this is a lot of, like, you know, what meditation is kind of training you to do is when you experience it, you see how it works and you kind of develop a skill of being able to relax into it. Yeah, I think that experience of that is like the most

valuable thing, right? Because you can have the intellectual idea of that. It sounds great. Yeah, it's tantalizing, you know. But then again, you put it into practice and you experience when something negative comes into your life. And instead of resisting it, which is like you think you don't want a thing so you resist it and that'll stop you from having the thing. But then you're just preoccupied and stopping the thing, which is a shitty experience, right? Yeah. And so this alternate understanding your perception of letting go as a pathway to more is very backwards

for modern society, you know. But it is so potent. It's so powerful. And it's a real experience that you can feel and then you can actually cultivate and start to harness that understanding more in your daily life. I got another one for you. Please. Real freedom is found in limitation,

which is this one, it took me well into my 30s to really understand. But I think it's arguably as important, maybe even more important, especially in the social media age where you're supposed to have everything, do everything, be everything.

I think, at some point in the last 10 or 20 years, we've mistaken freedom with optionality and when they're actually two very different things. And the problem is, when you have optionality, let's say you have all these amazing opportunities or let's use the simplest example.

It's like people you want to date, right? It's like, oh, I've got all these great people I can date. That's so amazing. I have all this freedom. But then you don't actually want to put any effort into any single one because then that limits your other options, right? You're giving up time and energy, and if you're monogamous, you're giving up, you know, opportunities. My friend calls us the potentials palace. Right. So what is that optionality actually getting you? It's actually

preventing you from having the thing you actually want, which is a meaningful relationship. And I think this happens on all sorts of different levels and all sorts of different like walks of life. I mean, you even see it. One of the examples I refer to and everything is fucked is like in marketing research, like they find that if you give, you know, like let's say you want to buy cereal. If you give people an option like two cereals and then they pick one, they'll be happy with whatever they picked. They're like, yeah, I got the one I wanted. If you give them 10 serials to choose from and they pick one, they'll actually be way less happy, even though they had way more cereal to choose from and they probably objectively got one that is more to their taste. They'll be

less satisfied with the decision because they're so aware of the nine that they gave up. It's so interesting as well. I just think of like in our own daily life as well when we think that happiness will come from being able to do whatever we want whenever we want. Right. And if you follow that path for not very long, you'll see how much lethargy you develop in your system. It's empty. It's very empty. When you're on Netflix, then you get a bucket of ice cream and then you use some popcorn and then you jerk off and then it's like it can be a never-ending cycle of this hedonic treadmill, right? And you will feel very not free on the other end of doing that. First, if you actually cultivate some discipline in your life and you create these boundaries for yourself, limitation,

actually creating those boundaries for yourself and implement those healthy habits and whatnot that might be a little sucky to endure like a cold plunge or a sauna or a workout, right? But then you experience the freedom that you feel on the other side of that, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it's very, it's very backwards. It doesn't make a whole lot of logical sense. The backwards law. Didn't you name another law after yourself? Yeah, I created a Manson's law of avoidance. That's pretty cool. Yeah, which ties into the, you know, the positive and negative thing. You know, I said that we will avoid, we will avoid experiences in proportion to how much it threatens our identity or threatens our ego, which is why we not only avoid negative experiences,

but we also avoid positive experiences because that new job opportunity or that, you know, cool new person who wants to hang out with you, like, we sabotage that because it'll challenge how we see ourselves. I think, I want to dive deeper here on this because I think it's a really fundamental, like how our identity functions in our life. is like the controlling force metric in which kind of everything else happens. You know, and so we have, you know, if we have a self-limiting belief pattern

of self-worth, you know, not feeling good enough, imposter syndrome, whatever it might be, we're going to see the behavioral compensations on the surface of how that manifests itself and self-sabotaging relationships and whatever the case is. But getting back down into the root of how I view myself,

which is often a byproduct of trauma that we're unconscious of that kind of stores is stored in our somatic body, right? What have been some of the biggest, I guess, narratives that you feel like people hold on to within their identity that I want to go into some of the more gross, you know, how this turns into, you know, cults and different things like that as well. Sure. But also just giving us a slightly more shitty experience of life. Yeah.

It's like a pebble in our shoe that keep us a little bit more trapped and limited versions of ourselves. Yeah. I think. so ultimately I kind of think of identity as you know like rubber band balls you know like there's kind of just this endless amount of rubber bands I think of each of those rubber bands is like a narrative right and as the ball starts when we're a very young child and it eventually gets covered with other bands and you know by the time you get to an adult and you even realize you have a rubber band ball you can't see the the core of it anymore because it's just covered by

too many, there are too many narratives stacked on top of narratives, stacked on top of narratives. And so I think any sort of therapeutic practice, whether it's conventional therapy or some spiritual practice or journaling or, you know, whatever it may be, it's, what you're doing is you're just kind of like pulling the bands off and seeing what's underneath. And ideally, you know, getting to a point where it's like, if you do see a narrative that is probably harming you, you can do some work to kind of like pull it out. But that's, it's extremely arduous and emotionally difficult because I think each of those narratives is emotionally laden.

Like the whole thing that decides whether a thing is going to be become part of our rubber band ball or not is how emotionally powerful it is, both positive or negative, right? So it's like if you, let's say when you're a kid, you, I don't know, when, like a piano recital and win an award and your whole family's there and everybody's cheering and it's like this really great memory and experience that you have that puts a little rubber band in your ball that says like, okay, you're musically talented and you like to perform for people and this is what gets you validated by others and that becomes like kind of a core narrative deep in your identity. That's a positive memory. If you experience some degree of trauma when you're a kid, you're abused or

bullied or abandoned by somebody. Same thing. It's very emotionally powerful. It sticks with you. That becomes a narrative that gets wrapped very deep within your rubber band ball. And so it's any, but anything that's not emotional, you know, it's like, oh, you got to be on your spelling quiz in fourth grade. Like nobody remembers. So it's like, it's not in the rubber band ball. It doesn't matter. Nobody cares. So it's emotion. I think the most important thing to realize is that identity is formed proportionally to how important an event is in our life and the importance of an event in our life is largely determined by how emotionally impactful it was. Yeah.

When it happened. And this is just, it's something we all have got, we've all got those negative narratives buried deep inside, some more than others, but we all have them. And I think just developing the, A, the awareness is kind of step one of that these narratives exist and kind of spending a significant amount of your time as an adult kind of like peering into the ball and pulling a band up and seeing what's underneath it. I think that's important. But eventually you also want to, okay, so here's where the metaphor is going to start falling apart. We made it this part. You know, I think what you start to realize, and I think this is maybe where I differ from a lot of people in the personal development space, I don't believe you can pull out every narrative, especially deep down. Like if you try to pull out one of those rubber bands, like deep in the middle of the ball, the whole ball is going to come undone.

And so some of those narratives are so lodged in there and they're so core and fundamental that it's not about getting rid of them. and I think this is particularly true and important when it comes to trauma. It's you're never going to be a person who didn't have a traumatic experience. You can become somebody who had a traumatic experience and made peace with it and are comfortable with it and have become better because of it, right? Like, that is your option. Option A is never your option. Like, you have to, like, delude yourself to be, you know, to experience option A. So I think it's ultimately the exercise isn't necessarily to like pull out some of these deep layers, these deep narratives about our identity.

It's more to just recognize that like you can rewrite those narratives as an adult. You can reinterpret the meaning. You can alter your understanding of yourself. I think some of the external narratives, the shallower. narratives of like, you know, 10 years ago I thought I was going to be a musician. Now I'm a writer, right? Like, that's an easy one to pull off and put a different band on, right? But the deeper ones, I think it's a lot of people kind of bang their head against the wall, spending a lot of years trying to rip one of those narratives out. I think it's so, it's a really important point that

you brought up because a lot of people get on that path of continuing to excavate those deep emotional things. And on some level, like, there's just this deep well of unconscious material that you could say is processed within the collective in general that you could keep on pulling from. And you don't even know what's yours anymore, right? Yeah, that's the danger too is like once you get deep enough, it's, it's very, very hard to know what is actually there and what you're just kind of rationalizing afterwards, right? It's like, you know, it's like, oh, I'm impulsive around food. Is that because my mom didn't cook for me enough?

Or is it because I just am fucking impulsive? Like, you know, it, does it even matter? Right? It's like, I think we can, there's a certain threshold where you can just start navel-gazing. Sure. You know, there's a fine line between actually doing the work and just

navel-gazing and self-obsessing. And it's hard to know kind of which side of that you're on sometimes. It's like that never-ending wheel of self-improvement can be so exhausting when real freedom actually comes in the acceptance of self and like whatever those rubber bands are that you're pulling. That is actually where the freedom comes in experiencing that. And you could look at also the Advata Vedanta approach of realizing that

there's no ball to begin with. Right. Which is also, I think that they're both useful perspectives and that, you know, it can help to look at, look under the hood to see what characterological defects that we've picked up that are making us suffer in our relationships and different things. But if you're just doing that work and you're also not doing the self-acceptance work and doing the work that kind of wakes you up beyond the illusion of self to begin with, then I feel like it's just a never-ending wheel. It's just like a rat, rat wheel, rat race that you're just going to continue down for the rest of your life. And that is exhausting as well. So it's like, yeah, a little bit of both, the balance. Yeah. And again, I think it's kind of like the

like the bullshitting yourself, like you can get better at it, you're never going to solve it. Like there's no person on earth who's like completely sorted out all their trauma and baggage and emotional issues. Like it's just,

it's impossible. And to your point, I think that is where the spiritual perspective starts to become very useful because it's like, yeah, it's all a game, dude. Like it's,

you don't need to fix it. It's going to be, fine. Yeah, and I mean, it can also be extremely dangerous on that path if you go too far down without, you know, you just say it's all Maya, it's all an illusion, right? Yeah. But like that middle way where you're actually working through those characterological defects, but then you actually can wake up and create distance between you and your thought and emotion, which you're so closely identified with. Yeah. Like, I feel like that's where the real freedom comes in it. And that can be an authentic experience, you just don't want to authentically bypass to that intellectual narrative that

that's what you should do, right? Because that... Anything can become a form of avoidance, right? Like, it's, it's, yeah, you can, you can rationalize anything into, into an excuse to, like, push the pain down. When have you felt like you've gotten the closest glimpse to the center of that Tootsie Pop? Well, like, there's that soul energy that wants to, that's a creative life force energy that wants to be shared with the world. I question sometimes if all of our desires come from some form of conditioning one or the other, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that. Or do you feel like there's this kind of divine desire that's like a bigger source of inspiration that can come through? I separate kind of the spiritual questions from the more psychological questions. I do understand

there's like there's overlap. But I almost think of it as like, are, psychology is kind of this arbitrary piece of software that's running in our brain. And, you know, the spiritual perspective is what points out that it's just an arbitrary piece of software. It's not real. It's just being like spun up. And, um, and you don't necessarily have to buy into it or necessarily should you always buy into it. But you can't, you also can't turn it off. So you have to learn how to like navigate within it. I guess that that's kind of how I see these two things fitting together. You know, my, my, my history with that kind of perspective, so the, I guess the first time,

I took a shitload of LSD when I was 17 and, for lack of a better term, like saw God for a few hours. And it's funny. So I was raised, let's back up you. Sure. I was raised in a very conservative part of Texas. And so church was like a. a very, it was like a daily part of my life when I was growing up. And I never liked it. I didn't

identify with, I didn't understand it. It all didn't make sense to me. I was not like very into the Bible or Jesus at all. And I was actually very resentful growing up in that environment because it was like constantly forced on me. And so I decided, I think when I was like 11 or 12 that I was atheist and that this whole God thing was bullshit. Um, jump ahead. to being 16 or 17, started taking psychedelics. And then I had this experience one night where I basically, you know, just complete ego dissolution, just sat there on my front porch for, I mean, my friend later told me it was a few hours, just like fucking one with the universe, full like Lucy in the sky with diamonds shit. And it's unbelievable. Like absolutely, you know,

top five most formative experiences of my life because I came out of that being like, okay, maybe I'm not Christian, but like there's something going on here, right? Like this, it's not, it's not all just atoms and energy. And so that's when I got very interested in religion and Eastern spirituality and meditation. and I found, I started meditating a lot when I was like 18 or 19. And what I found, when I went on my first retreat, I did like a weekend retreat. And what I found was that meditating for a long period of time was the only thing that kind of got me close to how I felt that night.

And so to me, that was like, ah, I'm on the right track here, right? So I got very into Buddhism and meditation for probably four or five years. And I had another retreat that was a few days long. And I think towards the end of that, I could kind of access it for a little bit, little brief periods of time, brief moments, like kind of wisp of the experience. But it was funny because I started to feel myself getting very attached to that. you know of like well shit my my next retreat's got to be 10 days because i got to get more of that right like i got to get back to that and then i at some point it was just like whoa dude you're doing you're doing the exact thing that you're getting attached right like you're chasing something

and the whole point of a meditation practice is to not chase things and um so i i i i I eventually, you know, throughout my 20s, my life got way more complicated, started traveling, living abroad, started a business, all this stuff. So I kind of lost track with that practice. But I feel like it's always informed my perspective quite a bit. And there's a reason why I mentioned the Buddha in my books repeatedly. Because it's, I do think, again, that simple awareness of like, and choose whatever metaphor you want, rubber bandball or arbitrary piece of. a software. It's like just a simple awareness of like it's just made up. Like it's all just it's a game. You know, this whole concept of this is Mark and this is Andre. Like contracts. It's just, yeah, it's completely, it's like drawing a line in the sand and a wave's going to come and wash it away. So it's, there is some amount of emotional comfort in that at times and that can be useful. But I think it's, it's where I find it to be useful is, you know, know, in some of these kind of more profound existential questions around, like, if I start

kind of getting super stressed out about my life or what am I doing with my life or who do I want to be in the world or, you know, returning to that perspective is, I find is helpful. Because it's, for whatever reason, when we start stressing and get anxious, our world gets smaller. And those lines feel way more real. Those lines in the sand, they feel permanent. And so it's, it's, there's something about the spiritual perspective that keeps the rubber bands loose in the ball. Like they don't, they, it keeps them from like solidifying and, you know, becoming like concrete. And I think, yeah, it just, I think it's incredibly valuable. Now, when you've kind of, you've had those practices, is you've had those experiences that have blasted you out and kind of like

shaked up your preconceived notion of what life is and just into a more vast horizon of possibility when you have oftentimes I think you know when you have a massive success or things that just kind of they're way bigger than you like the creation kind of surpasses you oftentimes come as a byproduct from tapping into a source that is bigger than you and like having a connection of just like to take it out of the esoteric or woo-woo is just like a level of like inspiration from life that feels very connected to all of life and not feel like it just there's less of you doing it now of course you got to sit down on a laptop you got to write the that book right you got to do the research you got to put the thing as that and synthesize it in

a proper context but is there anything else you want to speak to in in terms of finding that thing for whoever is listening to this whether it's writing whether it's podcasting whether it's music. You know, finding, being able to find that thing that you feel like is a unique combination of your unique skill sets, gifts, but then it's also service to the world in a way that's fulfilling. Yeah. It's a great question because what I find, and this was absolutely true for myself, you know, the first thing I tell people is try to find things that you think are easy or normal that most people think are difficult. And because what I find a lot is that the things that people are very passionate about or find a lot of purpose in, they don't even realize it because it feels so natural to them that it doesn't even occur to them that this is something unique to themselves. Like I used to write, so back in back in the old days, before social media was what it is today, you know, people used to write on forums. And so I used to write.

to be a part of a bunch of music forums. And I was that guy on the forum who like, if you said anything dumb or wrong, I was going to write like a five page dissertation explaining point by point, like why you're wrong. Here's the evidence. Here's why. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it it never occurred to me that that's not normal. Like I did that for years. And I just, that was like my idea of a cool thing to do on a Saturday night. And it wasn't until I actually, like, I moved in with a couple new roommates, and one of my roommates was actually on some of these forums.

He's like, too, you're an asshole. No, the thing he said to me is he's like, how do you write such long posts? And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you must spend like an entire day writing your post. I'm like, no, it's just like, I don't know. It's like, it's fun, you know? And he's like, no, it's not.

Nobody does that. I was like, really? And that was the first, he's like, yeah, you should like start a blog or something. Like, if you think that's fun, you should be writing all the time. And never crossed my mind. Never even occurred to me. I got all the way through high school and college, never once considering I'd write a book. And I've since seen that in a lot of other people, is that there's something in their life that they're very good at, that they love doing.

but it is so natural to them that it doesn't even occur that it's easy for them and hard for others. And so I think that's like that's probably the best place to start looking. Like that's kind of the universe's way of telling you like this is where you're supposed to go.

I truly believe that if you get masterful at anything you can find a way to monetize it, right? For sure. And you're only to become masterful at something if you enjoy it and time passes and it feels like you know. Exactly. Like it's, yeah, yeah, you have to enjoy, even the sucky parts of it, you have to enjoy, right?

Like, and it's, I write about this in subtle art, but like, the reason I didn't become a musician is because, not because I didn't love music, I do love music, but it's because I didn't love the bad parts of music. I love playing music and I loved studying and listening to music. I didn't love practicing. I didn't love dealing with all the gear and the tech side of it. I didn't love like finding bandmates to like rehearse with and dealing with venues and shit like that. Like I hated all that. And so I never became a musician. And whereas with the writing like, you know, sitting at home in my underwear, revising the same paragraph, rewriting the same paragraph seven different times, that's fun to me. Like that's just, that's like a, that's a great hour spent on like a Friday night. And, and that's why I became a writer. Yeah, it just goes back to that initial point of not resisting what you don't want, but finding the pain that's worth enduring to you, you know, like that that actually makes it worthwhile.

Because like if you want to be a podcaster or a writer, like there's a lot of other ancillary skill sets that you need if you want to become proficient at that, right, that most people don't, don't realize, but if you're willing to endure that pain because it means so much to you, then I think that's a really beautiful pointer to something that is worth following. Because, yeah, some of it is just a willingness to endure, but some of it is even, it's enjoying. Yeah. Like, there's some people who just, they really enjoy. Like, whatever sucks for you, there's somebody in the world who, like, is like, no, I love that.

For sure. For those that haven't found that thing, is it just a matter of just trying more stuff, you feel? I think it's a combination of trying more stuff, like following curiosity. So I think what complicates this for a lot of people is people who, what I find is it's usually two types. There are two types of people that this gets very complicated for. The first one is that people who grew up with a lot of external pressure on them. So let's say somebody who grew up in poverty, right? It's like you don't have the luxury to sit around and think about like, what do I like?

like to do, do I want to be a writer or a musician? Like, it's like, no, you have to get out of poverty. So it's like they probably, you know, got in the college, studied the, only studied the things that were going to get them in the college. And then once they were in college, they only studied the things that were going to make them the money so that they could get the hell out of the poverty they're in, right? So those people, what usually happens is they hit that, that privileged question. And by the way, this whole question of passion and purpose, I always remind me, it's a

privileged question back to the paradox of progress, right? Like, you only get to ask this question if all the fundamental stuff in your life is taken care of. Like, if you know what you're eating, if you have a roof over your head, like this is when you get to ask this question. So yeah, that first group, it's usually, you know, once they've achieved like a level of financial stability, usually maybe in their 30s, maybe 40s, they kind of look around, they're like, wait, I hate being a lawyer. Like, I actually want to do something that I care about, right? But they've never allowed themselves to explore what they care about. And so they actually have zero idea where to start. And so I think for those people, it's mostly just about not only exploration, but like developing

the skill of exploration, developing the skill of like doing something simply for the sake of doing it and not expecting any sort of result. The second group of people I see that struggle with this a lot is, I would describe as people who are very codependent in their relationships. So people who, for lack of a better term, give way too many fucks what other people think about them. And so these are the people who usually do have something that they're very passionate about in their life. But they have not allowed themselves to accept that because they don't think it's appropriate. Like it would not be accepted by their friends or family or parents or whatever. Right.

So it's like it's the kid who spends all. of his free time nerdyed out over comic books, but won't admit to himself that that is an acceptable thing to be passionate about because his parents would disapprove and his friends would laugh at him and, you know, whatever. So you, for those people, I think it's more about recognizing what's already there and having the courage to actually stand up and be like, no, no, no, I'm a comic book nerd. And like, this is who I'm going to be. Right. And then I'm sure, I mean, of course, it is a question of privilege, but at some point as well, down the path of being a writer, finding whatever your thing is, that identity that you created for yourself and that aspect can also become limiting, right, when you want to explore other things at different parts of your life. Totally. It becomes your new prison, right? Yeah. This is why it never ends. It's just, it never ends. Yeah, it's one of the liberating experiences for me,

recently is simply acknowledging that I don't have to be an author if I don't want to. Just because I sold all these books doesn't mean I have to be an author. I can go back to build like fucking around on my website and like filming YouTube videos in my living room. Like there's nothing saying I can't do that. And again, so this is a good example of external pressure, right? It's not. Maybe that's probably what I felt years ago. But, you know, when like Will Smith is showing up and being like, hey, dude, will you write my book for me? You're like, you know what? Fuck my website. Let's go write a book with Will Smith. You know, and that's not like I loved writing the book with him. But I think it's just there, when the incentives are aligned for you to stay in this identity, like if you're being rewarded by the world to have an identity,

it's very, very hard to refuse it. Yeah, you're just getting so, so many positive affirmations and signals from all around you in society that this is, you're doing a good job, you know, but it's coming back into checking with whatever those values are and what really has meaning for you. Because as you inevitably grow and evolve as a soul in this human meat suit, your values are going to change. Yeah, as you age, the things that you cherish are going to change. and that's going to obviously change your behavior.

But that's really beautiful that you do get opportunities. And I'm sure one of the most, I guess, nourishing things that has come from a byproduct of the success is those connections and those networks and being able to work with individuals that are super inspiring for you. And they're asking for your help. Yeah. I mean, look, it's cool as shit. Yeah. Like, it's, I have no complaints or regrets whatsoever. And it's been, you know, yeah.

even through the difficulties, like it's growth, it's learning, it's experiencing. How important do you feel like it is in partnership and a romantic relationship for each person to find their own thing like that that really lights them up

and have that kind of purpose and that drive as, I'm sure for periods, like have that be the priority? Yeah. And then also, you know, when family comes in, I'm sure things change.

But, yeah, how important do you feel like that is to have? It's key. It's, required. You know, you have to you have to have separate identities within the relationship.

It doesn't it's impossible for it to stay healthy otherwise. I think it's great to have like you need a little bit of both, right? You need shared values. You need shared projects and shared goals and worldviews. But you also need your own. And and I think it's by keeping your own

healthy is what keeps the one, the together ones healthy. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think we're just under this whole, the whole notion of you complete me and finding, I think there's so many things that you can only find by virtue of being in union and partnership in that way. But it is just a recipe for disaster if you lose yourself in that process, right? Yeah, it's funny too, because I think there's been a modern,

conception of romance. I don't want to say modern because that makes it sound like recent. Like I'd say, you know, there was probably a hundred years of conception of romance that was actually very toxic and unhealthy. Starting of like probably late 1800s all the way up through

the rom-coms of the 2000s. Like it's just and you get a lot of phrases and cliches like that. Like, oh, you complete me, you're my better half. Like you're all this stuff. It's no. No, no. It's like that's not how it works. Right. Like, it's great. It sounds nice, especially in a movie, you know, like a happy ending or whatever. But a healthy relationship is two healthy individuals who are healthy on their own consciously choosing to invest and care and love each other on a daily basis, whether they feel good or bad and they are going to feel both good and bad frequently. So it's, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, written before that I think romance is overrated. Not because it's not fun and it doesn't feel like it feels

amazing, but I think kind of like the cultural notions around romance and it's important. Like it's not overrated in how good it feels. It's overrated and how important it actually is. Like we just don't have many examples of what healthy relationships look like because in every movie and every story. Yeah. There's always, always some sort of trauma bonding because that's exciting. You know, it is. That's where the drama is. Healthy relationships don't make for good cinema. No. It's It's funny, though, it's something that I've just noticed maybe like the last two or three years. I've started noticing, like, healthier relationships and movies and TV shows. And then the ones that are unhealthy, like, it's, like, very clear within the show that this is an unhealthy relationship.

But, like, if you go back and watch rom-coms from, like, the 90s or 80, is horrifying. It's like, dude, you are sick people. Like, that guy's stalking you. Why are you rewarding this behavior? like that is not romantic. Stop. Have some respect for yourself. It's I I oftentimes just in my like day to day life washing the dishes or whatever like I like zoom out like I have this visceral experience. I zoom out and like look and feel where I am on the spinning mud ball and infinite space traveling at enormous speeds. And I also think about the historical perspective of how.

how so many people put pressure on the times that we live in. I understand a lot is at stake. My question is, like, your understanding of studying history and a lot of different prominent figures, how have you been able to compare the time that we feel like we're in, which is so relative, like, the past hundred years or, like, the technological revolution,

how important is it for us to put that in a larger context of human development? Because we get so myopic in this, like, a little slot of time of history that we're living in, but it is a blimp, a little small blip in the vast horizon of our existence. Totally. And I think it's super, super important, especially, and again, I think this is something our generation is very bad at is keeping a realistic point of view of how good and bad things actually are. Like, yes, there are huge problems in the world today, no doubt, and there's a ton of work that needs to be done. But if you even go back, like, two generations.

It's fucking horrifying. Like, just talking about movies, like, just go back and watch, like, a popular movie from the 50s. I remember I was watching, like, there's a classic car, a classic film called Streetcar named Desire. I watched this a few years ago.

It was, like, old Marlon Brando film. And Marlon Brando was, like, the Brad Pitt of the 50s. And I started watching this movie, and he, like, just straight up, like, beats the shit out of the female lead in the middle of the movie.

and then like all the characters are just hanging out like nothing happened. And I'm like, what the fuck, dude? Holy shit. Like this would never get made today, like ever. It wouldn't even get like if somebody came in and pitched that script today, like they would be banned from Hollywood for the rest of their career. So it is very easy to lose sight of how rapidly things have changed. And so much time and attention, especially. news media, social media is spent on how the things that are wrong in the world,

the things that have gotten better in the world don't get enough airplay. And for me, I think reading history today is so, so important to understand that, is like to understand how much worse things were not even 50 years ago, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And then if you want to go a couple hundred years back, I mean, you're talking about literally 95% of the planet's population living day-to-day subsistence, right? Like 90% of the planet's population can't read, doesn't have clean water. Like, there's no comparison.

There's no fucking comparison. Like the life expectancy, even just five generations back, is like half of what it is today. It's mind-blowing. It's crazy. It's powerful when you put, like, even just some of those understandings in context

because we are continually fed, by negative news and media that like we are so doomed and like you said, of course there's big problems that we're facing like a lot of huge ones and it's been so bad for very long in comparison.

I mean it's, it's I don't think there's ever been a time in history that there wasn't some world Indian cataclysm like on the horizon right? Like it's before climate change it was the Cold War and nuclear war. And

before the Cold War was World War II, which, by the way, if you ever want to feel better about our time, just go buy a book on World War. Doesn't matter what part of World War II. Just buy any book about World War II, and you're like, all right, things are pretty good.

You know, it's, before that it was the Great Depression. Before that, it was World War I. Like, it just gets worse, the further back you go. And there's no time where it's like, you know, and you get a little bit further back than that. It's like, oh, the slave trade, right? like 30% of the world's population is enslaved. Great. Like there's no time it was better than now. And there's no time that more people in the world had more opportunity than today.

There's no time in the world that there was more equality than today. That's not to say that things are good, but things are so much better. And they're getting so much better at a very rapid rate. So it's strange because it's like I've carved out a very awkward philosophical position for myself because on internal stuff, I'm always reminding people to recognize and focus on the negative, like acknowledge your negative emotions, accept the negative experiences in life, understand that like trauma doesn't completely go away. But then on the external world, I'm like, dude, things are amazing. I'm like very optimistic about life in the world in general. And so I think it, I just like, I lose people on both sides.

Sure, sure, it's inevitable. And I very much feel like there will always be that contrast of experience of just like in the dimension of the human experience. There's just the polarities, right? Like of light and dark, of positive and negative. And I think it's so beautiful that we can be so empowered with being able to be so connected. Like having this medium form and like be able to speak to people on the other side of the planet, such a gift. It's insane, man.

Like, yeah, if we just take a moment and think about what's actually happening, right? Like two dudes are sitting in Topanga, and this can be watched by hundreds of thousands, listen to by hundreds of thousands, millions of people all over the world. People will never meet. It's mind-blowing. It's very strange. It's absolutely mind-blowing. It's very strange.

But when I tap into that realization, I feel so giddy and excited that transformation that transformation on a global scale is so possible. And in many ways, inevitable, if just the right minds and hearts come together to continue having these discussions and start to be curious and explore possible ways in which we can find more freedom within and without. And I think we just give it some more time, right? But then also there is the other side of things with the advent of AGI and the rise of exponential technologies that could lead to a dystopic world, right? And that possibility is there. But like you spoke to, there's no generation in our past that hasn't faced some sort of cataclysmic event upon the

horizon and we're facing our own version of that. I also note that there's never been a major technology that has come along that hasn't also inspired a large percentage of population to think that it's going to destroy the world. Like it's if you go back to like when television was invented, people are like, this is going to rot people's brains, like nobody's going to read anymore. The population is going to become stupid. They're partially right about that one. You go back to radio.

Same thing. You go back to the printing press, same thing. Like, you can even, like, if you go back to apparently somewhere Plato wrote, he complained about how young people, this is like 230 BC, he was complaining that the invention of parchment paper was going to ruin young people's memories because they didn't have to memorize poems anymore. And he was like, yeah, the young people are screwed because they have parchment paper to write their poetry.

So interesting. Yeah. Yeah. What is it about just innovation? I got people just fear change. Scary, man. It's scary. Change is scary.

We avoid what changes our identity, right? Yeah. Before we wrap up that whole, like, is there one moment in history that you've looked back at that has been most fundamental in your own perception shift of like how whether it's in regards the possibility of the human spirit and somebody that's endured something that's extremely challenging or just a time. an era that you think is important for people to remember in this time? I'm a huge World War II history nerd, and it's funny because the more I read about World War II in the lead up to World War II, the more it just like my jaw is just on the floor all the time, that this actually happened. And not only did it actually happen, but there are people, I mean, they're almost gone now,

but there's still one or two people, even in my family, that lived through it and saw it. I don't think we've ever come closer to like a civilizational collapse than we did during the mid-20th century. And the amount of groupthink that took over like such large populations and the sheer number of millions of people that willingly died for kind of nothing, it's absolutely shocking. And again, I think it comes back to, it's like you, to bring it full circle, you know, the same way that you want to be able to think about your own death realistically to understand what you should be grateful for in life. I think it's useful to look at these cataclysmic events in human history with a very sober eye and think about them deeply because that's ultimately what helps us be grateful for what we have today and all the people that's saccharacter. So that we can be here today. I kind of want to like wrap it up at that no. I think we've explored a lot of really interesting topics. And you provided a lot of beautiful, fresh perspective on a lot of them.

And so just thank you for your passion of study and sharing it with the world in this way. Is there anything else that you want to share with this audience or just in general before you start to wrap up? No, man, I'm good. This is fun. Yeah, this is good. We'll have to run it back at some point. But people can find you. You're in a movie now, dude.

I know. I'm a movie. Yeah, it's weird. That's cool. I watched it. It's fun. I love the disappointment panda. Thanks, dude. The visual of that is really satisfying. It's so strange. I got friends, like, friends are, like, watching it on airplanes and, like, taking pictures and sending them to me. I'm like, what? It's so strange.

That's cool. It's just another form of medium. It is. It is. Ultimately, it is just another medium. But, yeah, it's, there's, you know, in the movies. I don't know. There's some, like, cultural weight. put on it. Yeah, and right now you're really focused on YouTube this year, right? Yeah, content creation videos. Yeah. YouTube videos, just video creation in general. Amazing. Anything else you want to point people towards or feel good? Mark Manson.net, all my books are everywhere. Whatever.

Do what you want. Great. Well, from World War II, it's rubber band balls to deep existential trauma and emotional healing. We've come full circle. Thank you so much for coming on. Everybody that's been tuning into this episode of the Know They Self podcast, thank you for coming on the journey. Please hit the subscribe button. If you feel called and come on this journey of knowing ourselves deeper and deeper every single week, thank you for joining this family. Until next time, be well.