Modern Wisdom - #302 - Ryan Bush - A Guide To Mental Self-Mastery

Episode Date: April 1, 2021

Ryan Bush is systems designer and an author. Redesigning your mind is hard because there are a lot of influences at play. A very comprehensive approach is needed to really impact our mindset. Today I think I might have found someone who has all the tools. Expect to learn how to design your mind to work with you not against you, how to cultivate meta-cognition, how to rewire your mental biases, how to restructure your emotions, how to modulate your desires, how to build self control and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Get 20% discount on Reebok’s entire range at https://geni.us/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy Designing The Mind - https://amzn.to/3tR3189 Complete Ryan's Survey - https://designingthemind.org/survey  The 9 Levels Of Increasing Embrace - http://www.cook-greuter.com/Cook-Greuter%209%20levels%20paper%20new%201.1'14%2097p%5B1%5D.pdf  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, you wonderful humans. Welcome back. My guest today is Ryan Bush. He's a systems designer and an author redesigning your mind is hard because there are a lot of influences at play a very comprehensive approach is needed to really impact our mindset and today I actually think that I might have found someone who has all the tools Expect to learn how to design your mind to work with you and not against you, how to cultivate meta cognition, how to rewire your mental biases, how to structure your emotions, how to modulate your desires, how to build self-control, and much more. If that sounds like quite a bold claim, then I'm pretty prepared to put my money where my mouth

is. Ryan just reached out to me because I think he likes the show and it aligned with what he was doing. This book and the stuff that he goes through today is absolutely phenomenal for the people that listen to Kyle Eschen Roder's episode toward the back end of last year. Again, just another like underground monster. This guy is understanding of how mental self mastery can be achieved is insane. You really, really should take tons away from this. So yeah, I really hope that you enjoy it. And if you do share the episode with a friend or give me a message wherever you follow me at ChrisWillX.

Also, get ready because this Monday, Dr Jordan B. Peterson will be joining me on Modern Wisdom, been looking forward to this episode ever since I started the show. And yeah, I'm really, I'm really hoping that I provide a conversation from him that we maybe haven't heard before. To make sure that you do not miss that episode

when it goes live, navigate to your little podcast app and press the subscribe button. It would make me incredibly happy and it means that you will never miss out when these awesome episodes go up on the internet. Go, go press it, press little, subscribe, you tapped up, tap away. But for now, it's time to learn how to redesign our mind with Ryan Bush Ryan Bush welcome to the show Thanks for having me Chris. I'm happy to be here. Really happy to have you here, man. You start your book off with this quote from Harari,

which says, in the past, we humans learned to control the world outside us, but we had very little control over the world inside us. Does this highlight a blind spot that lots of people have? I definitely think so. I think we're naturally wired to pay attention to what's outside of us. I think there are potentially good biological reasons for this.

We have desires specifically to motivate us to go out there and try to achieve them. But a lot of thinkers within practical philosophy, the Stoics, the Buddhists, right? These thinkers have suggested that a better path to satisfaction and well-being is to work on what's going on inside your mind, rather than just trying to get what you want, right? So trying to manipulate and master your own desires rather than just gratifying them, right? Trying to make the changes in your own mind so that you don't suffer, so that you don't have these biases, so that you can restructure your actions and your behavior. So this book is really sort of meant to take that idea

and sort of provide the nuts and bolts 21st century manual for it, and sort of expanding on this idea in a very modern sort of way. Yeah, because the stoicism and the Buddhism stuff is lovely, but if all it took was Confucius' quotes to get yourself to enlightenment, we wouldn't need CBT, we wouldn't need to have neuroscientists and all of the way to wonderful sciences that we've developed over the last few hundred years.

Sure. What I kind of realized was that these ancient words of these thinkers really haven't their ideas, the reason they've stuck around is because they're really based on a lot of science that they just didn't have access to yet. So these ancient ideas are kind of these snippets of open source cognitive code that there's actually starting to be a neuroscience basis for. But, you know, human nature existed pretty much as it does today many years ago. So we can study these ancient ideas and sort of combine them with the modern ideas to get to something like a science from modifying and improving your own mind.

Yeah, what were the main influences for you? What were the bodies of work that you drew upon to write this? So in the ancient side, stoicism is pretty huge. Epicetus, Marcus Aurelius, these thinkers. There's also a lot of Buddhism and Taoism that shows up. And then sort of gradually working chronologically up and arriving to a lot of the modern science, like cognitive behavioral therapy, and other proven methods of change

in terms of your mind. So some neuroscience in there and a lot of affective behavioral cognitive science I'll next in. You say that there's a gap between skill and wisdom. What do you mean? So essentially, our culture really trains us to be good at developing knowledge and implementing it in ways that are good for industry, basically.

I mean, the education system is all about learning the knowledge that they want you to have and learning how to kind of be obedient and be employable, right? But it doesn't teach you how to be happy, it doesn't focus on how to actually organize your mind or develop these psychological skills, right? We've got therapy for people who are, you know, so far below the level of psychological adequacy that it can kind of lift them up, but we don't have that kind of institution for taking you higher than that. The closest thing that we have is the the world of self-help, which has some gyms in it and a lot of fluff and inspirational nonsense, right? So really, I really kind of

made it my mission to create that body of information on a systematic level for how you cultivate wisdom, how you actually get better at programming yourself for life, not just for work, not just for knowledge or skills. What's a goal with psychotecature then, which is the term that you've coined in your book? So the ultimate goal of psychotecature is to get closer and closer to your ideal self and to embodying those values and ideals. So I really kind of leave it as sort of a blank canvas. I don't tell you exactly where you need to go because that depends on your own individual values. So initially, when I started writing, I sort of thought that we wanted to get rid of all of the negative emotion and disturbance, kind of

like you see in stoicism, right? And that's very much a big part of it. I think, you know, the negative emotions are a big part of what stand in our way of really living a life to our potential and living a good life. But I also don't think that's necessarily the ultimate end is just to get rid of bad feelings, right? I think you could live a better life by working towards becoming your ideal self. If you reflected on your life at the end,

I don't think you would necessarily believe that the life where you suffered the absolute least was the best possible life. So really, there's sort of three realms that I examine in the book. There's the cognitive realm, the emotional realm, and the behavioral realm. So you're looking at developing better views, more accurate views of the world, getting rid of your biases and the distortions in judgment that sort of plague your perception. You're looking at getting rid of emotions that are

maladaptive or that stand in your way of living what you believe to be a great life. And then you're looking at behaviors and habits and actions. So really, all of these take a very systematic view and say, look the things that are happening in your mind, they're not just single events. They're all ultimately interconnected. I call it psychological software. You've got this series of algorithms that all connect together. And this is really what all these different types of science show in their own particular realms, whether you're looking at habit change or you're looking at cognitive therapy. We find that our thoughts and our actions and our emotions are intricately but intimately tied together and triggering one another. And in order to actually make changes to them, we have to

really understand these connections between them. Why did you give them the particular order that you do? Because although they are separate, they are almost hierarchical. So one of the biggest reasons for this is that, for example, if you look at emotions and the reason why we have these negative emotions. In many cases it's because we have these biases, these cognitive distortions that trigger them. So that the cognitive realm comes first because it's sort of foundational to the later realms, right? If you can get good at identifying distorted beliefs in your

own mind and actually countering them and replacing them with better beliefs. You'll have the basic skills that you need to be able to build on them and master your emotions and change your habits and all of these. So they do sort of build on one another, like you said. Is that why do you think Eliezer Yukowski's just got like the the fattest foundation of the pyramid ever? Yes, yes, I think so. I've always loved less wrong in that whole community. It's always sort of been one of the components of my vision for designing the mind to sort of take that type of community that's so focused on optimization of beliefs and biases and apply it to more than just beliefs.

Apply it to behaviors and particularly, I think, emotions, because the same kind of logic applies there. Why do you think it is that we don't have a less wrong.com for the other two sections? Have you thought about that? I think there are sort of similar things for behavior. There's a lot of talk about habit change out there. I mean, James Clear, you know, his, all of his work and his book, Atomic Habits,

very much examines the, that side of it. But it's kind of something I've always wondered. I don't know exactly why there is that gap because I look at like the, the community centered around biohacking, for example, people taking all these chemicals and psychedelics and injecting themselves with gene-altering materials and microchips. And there's something really cool about it, even though there's a bit some risk there. But I've always wondered why does that community on centered around optimizing your whole psychological software, not exist. And that's kind of where I'm trying to come in there. I get it, man. I mean, for anyone that is uninitiated,

lesswrong.com, and overcomingbyus.com as well, was that another one? Yeah. And then Slate Star Codex, which is now Astral Codex 10 or something. Yeah. So all of these different websites are born out of this sort of rationality movement. And if you want to go down a fantastic blog hole, just go and have a little bit of a look because I've had, I've read some of the best work I've ever, ever seen. Robin Hansen, Elie Dzerukowski and Scott Alexander

are titans, absolute titans, and this stuff's just out there. They just do it because they need to write some words on a page, which is unbelievable. But yeah, I would be interested to work out why it is that we don't have that same level of community and passion around stuff that isn't just rationality. I wonder whether it's a bias toward the personality type of the people that go onto those websites, whether they tend to be quite rational, utilitarian, scientific, sort of praying

at the altar of science themselves, and that fits in quite easily with the world view, whereas if you were to say, okay, now let's talk about how you're actually acting in the real world. Okay, let's actually talk about how your emotions are feeling and doing the metacognisant sort of self-look. I wonder whether that might make it be a step in an uncomfortable direction for people. I think that's possible and I will note note that if you really spend time on those blogs, you will see that they do pay some attention to those other areas as well.

But I think all of it is pretty new. I mean, really, before the internet, you had scholars studying these things, but you didn't have these sort of DIY mind hackers who were all getting together and trying to optimize themselves. So I think it may just be that it's all kind of new and that just happens to be the community that caught on. Yeah, that's a good point. But I think the desire is there.

I do think once people see it and can visualize it, they'll want to be a part of that kind of thing. Yeah, before we start trying to improve our source code, you say that we need to develop our metacognition. How can we do that? So, metacognition is the term I generally use mainly because mindfulness has kind of become this cultural fad and there's all these different definitions, knowing quite knows what it means. So, I'm very specifically talking about knowing what's going on inside yourself.

I've always been pretty strong on this side and less aware of what's going on around me in the world and sense of direction, all of that. But it seems like most people really need to cultivate greater medical cognition. And this is why the mindfulness movement has gotten so big. It's because people recognize that they aren't paying enough attention to what's going on in their mind. So meditation is one tool for doing this. I think walking mindfulness is more

along the path that I've taken. I love going on walks and just reflecting and introspecting. But essentially, you are trying to become aware of your own thoughts and feelings because if you aren't, you've got little hope at actually modifying them. If you don't know what thought you're going through, let's say that you don't realize for hours

until this is already passed that you were going through this whole room-initiv spiral where you were having all these self-deprecating thoughts and that were just triggering emotions and kind of spiraling out of control. If you don't know that's happening until way after the fact, you're not going to be able to step in and intervene. Whereas a lot of these things that people get told they can only get a little better at managing when it comes to their emotions, you actually can sort of bypass many of these emotional experiences if you can catch them quickly enough and sort of do what's necessary to alter

that emotional trajectory. Yeah, you talk about something, you give it a different name, but the mindfulness gap, basically a brief beat in between stimulus and response. And cultivating that, I said it on an episode the other week, cultivating that, if I get no closer to Navanna from my meditation practice than having that mindfulness gap, a couple of percent more than I used to, I'm gonna consider it a win. So you mentioned that sitting meditation,

also walking meditation, which is kind of just introspection and looking at the texture of your own mind. How do people take their metacognition off the cushion, so to speak? How do we get it from the walking session? Within that, I feel real mindful. Texture of my mind is very, very plain and easy to speak. How do we get it from the walking session? Within that, I feel real mindful. I'm texture of my mind is very, very plain and easy to me. How do I get that expanded

out into my bosses just shouted at me, or I'm stuck in traffic? Right. I think if you can really build the habit of keeping a log of what's going on in your mind, instead of just noticing it when you're on the cushion like you said, if you can get to where you're trying to notice as quickly as possible and actually write down the mental experiences that you're having, this will cause you to start seeing these patterns all over the place. A lot of people don't know what's actually causing the majority of their daily suffering. You may start writing these things down and realize, oh my God, like

90% of the times that I'm getting upset, I'm waiting in traffic, and it's the specific thought chain that is triggering all this. If I can focus on that and program it out and I can notice when it's happening, then I can eliminate that huge, huge emotional category that isn't serving me and that I don't want. So if you can do this habit of actually writing down and sort of categorizing and clustering these different experiences, writing down the event that triggered it, the thought or belief that is sort of catalyzing it, and the emotion you felt, and then you can even get more advanced, and this is a CBT method of actually identifying the distortion in that thought, and the correct belief that you want to replace it with. If you can just keep this log, you'll start noticing these patterns, and even just noticing

can often be enough to get rid of these things. That's a good point that's one of the things. Anyone that's done a headspace is take 10. The most basic thing, the Andy putty comb, lovely baldy, Andy putty comb with his nice soft voice. The first thing that he gets you to do is he just wants you to note, just note what it is. There is something happening in the texture of your mind. And as Sam Harris says, being lost in thought while you're awake is like dreaming without knowing that you're

dreaming. That's the danger. And as soon as you step through that and think, right, okay, I can step into my programming. I'm not at the mercy of the next thought that comes corigning into view. Remembering that not only are you not your thoughts, you're also not the creator of your thoughts either. You're the person that sees or hears them. So it's the same as letting somebody else

constantly talk at you. If you don't give that mindfulness gap. So yeah, I do, I think it's a great way to kind of set that foundation. So you start off in this cognitive section, how can people rewire their cognitive biases? So the short answer is it's really hard to do. This is what the research suggests. And I do think the research is a little bit limited

on this, but a lot of people think that if they just learn the names of all the biases, that it'll kind of just magically make them go away. And in some cases, that's true. That's why I recommend before you do anything, learn to identify these pretty much universal biases that cause us to make these mistakes and hold false beliefs. If you can just do that as a first step, it will help improve things. What are you top three, top five? Okay, confirmation bias is a huge one.

It's hard to even call that just one bias. It's more like a cluster of them, but the whole tendency to want to seek out information that reaffirms your existing beliefs. That's huge. I mean, if you can get to where when you're researching an issue because you're arguing with a friend, you can at least notice, okay, I'm tailoring my Google search a little bit towards showing me what I want to see. I'm clicking on certain links and not others. This can help work towards getting rid of that one. Another is this whole mess of social biases.

We want to fit in. We want to be a part of a group. This has a tendency to cause us to skip over a lot of the logical steps and arguments and a sort of find a way to believe what will allow us to fit in. So this is sort of a fundamental desire between behind a lot of our beliefs. And then another sort of fundamental one is our tendency to want to absolve ourselves of blame and blame others. So the fundamental...

That was my one month, that was the one I was gonna give you that gets me every time. Yeah, so we just constantly tend to say, well, the reason I was late, the reason why I made this mistake is because the world was out to get me, I got in traffic, right? The reason why someone else is late

is because they're just a bad person. That's a bit of an extreme exaggeration, but that's essentially what we do. We want so badly to preserve this positive view of ourselves that we'll tell ourselves just about anything. And I'm not saying that you should go against that to the point of having terrible low self-esteem, right? The point is to develop an accurate view of yourself

so that you can actually work towards improving yourself. OK, so we've got some understanding, little glossary of mental models that are commonly going to come up. How do we then go about rewiring our cognitive biases? And what I say on this is that it's sort of a process, it's sort of a creative design process for every individual bias. And I go through a few of them, but one of them as an example is the planning fallacy, right?

We, we have a tendency to think we can get something done in a much shorter time than we actually can. You can look at studies have been done on classrooms where they ask people like, okay, this is the due date for this paper. What are you? What they are you 90% done? You're going to have it done by 90% sure you're going to have it completed by.

What are you 50% sure? And inevitably, there's so much more ambitious than they actually end up doing, right? So Daniel Coniman, who's generally kind of cynical about the ability to rewire biases, he even says, you can actually rewire this one. And the way to do it is to look to distributional information, objective information.

So basically, stop trusting your intuitions about how long it will take to get this thing done and start asking yourself, how long has it taken in the past, how long has it taken me, how long does it generally take other people? It's likely gonna be a few times longer than you estimate, right? I mean, my natural thinking was that I was gonna be able to finish

my book in six months. In reality, it took me close to two years, right? So, but I knew at the time when I was setting that goal, like, I'm probably not going to hit this, but so I'm not going to, like, go promoting that it's going to be ready in six months. So you just have to keep that in mind that it is more about how long it generally takes than how long you feel like it's going to take at the time. Did you see Daniel Kahneman with Sam Harris, that live event that they did and Sam asks, this Nobel Prize winning psychologist of like 50 years

or 40 years or something, just a total monster in the psychology world. And he says, so after all of this time, Daniel, researching cognitive biases and understanding how our minds work, have you actually got yourself any closer to rationality? And he just goes, no, not really. Yeah, I did hear that. It is. And that's enough to lead most people to think, well, you just can't do this. What gives me optimism is that, and a lot of these studies, pretty much all of these studies, they're finding people who are volunteering to be in the study to get rid of a bias, and they're doing it for class credit or to get paid or whatever it is.

Most people aren't that deeply motivated to get rid of anchoring bias or whatever it is. There's kind of just going along with the study. If you look at cognitive therapy, which is essentially the process of getting rid of biases for emotional purposes, right, where people are often meeting with a therapist once a week on these issues. They're doing these homework assignments. They really want to improve their own minds. We find a totally different finding. It's not impossible to change these beliefs.

It's actually pretty common. It's very effective to work on these beliefs and then get rid of the negative emotions and mood disorders that were propagated by the beliefs. So to me, that tells me that the motivation of the person working on themselves plays a really big role. And I think that's missing from a lot of the studies that suggest we can't change our biases. Some skin in the game as well, right? Right.

You know, if your life is falling to pieces and you're paying somebody $50 an hour to put it back together, you're probably gonna work fairly hard to try and get it fixed. What about introspection? How can people improve their introspection? So that's a great question.

I think mindfulness plays a pretty big role. I read a book called Insight, which is all about introspection. And it finds that introspection can actually cloud people's judgment if you're not doing it properly. One of the findings, Tasha Yurick, she covers the way that you ask yourself questions, plays a big role in how much introspective clarity you can get.

So the people who tend to ask themselves, why did I do this? Why did this happen? Who are essentially looking for a simple cause-effect explanation? These are the ones who typically go wrong and go astray when they're trying to get clarity. Because just like in the world of rationality and science, just like the ancient, like natural philosophers who thought the earth was made up of four elements, it's natural for all people to jump on whatever conclusion they come to first and want to stick to it. So I think that's what most people do wrong when they

introspect is they come up with a theory for why am I this way? Why do I keep doing this? And they tell themselves the first story that pops into their heads. Whereas if you can actually step back and ask what questions, ask what's going on in my mind and observe it and use mindfulness or metacognitive awareness to actually understand this chain of events going on, you can get a lot more clarity.

So just stopping imposing a narrative when you look at your mind and just seeing what actually happens is a huge way to get better at introspecting. That's cool. So not having an agenda as you go in. Increasingly, I wonder if you've seen this. Curiosity is this new buzzword personality trait. I think one of the reasons is that it does allow you to genuinely be interested in the outcome without an agenda on your way through. I think that's why it's quite useful. So yeah, people need to try and avoid going in with,

even with the hopes of finding an answer, right? Because often that can cause you, as he said, to kind of jump at the first thing, which comes to them. Moving on to self-limiting beliefs. Why, what, you put quite a bit of importance on these. Why are they so important? I think we tend to hold beliefs about ourselves

that really lock us in to these patterns that cause us to fall way short of our potential. I give examples like if you believe you aren't the creative type, or if you even believe in the idea that there are creative types and non-creative types, then it will cause you not to explore the opportunities that you could be an incredible creative person and you wouldn't know because you've been telling yourself this story your whole life. Personally, I am very much naturally an introvert.

I could have very easily gone my whole life believing that I'm not the kind of person who can do public speaking, who can go on podcasts and talk about my ideas. Right. So if you have biases that relate to yourself and what you're capable of and what kind of person you are, if there's a very good chance that you're going to hold yourself back from what you really are capable of. So really, I think it's important to put these things to the test and actually get out there and give everything a fair shot before you decide, I'm not good at this, I'm not capable of that. You have to take on the mindset of a scientist and experiment and see what you actually can do.

So much of this is carried over from childhood as well, right? You had one crack at public speaking in your 11 when you were 16 years old or 15 years old and that's it. I'm a crack public speaker for the rest of my life. So hang on a second, you wouldn't say that you were the same person now as you were back then for most other things in your life, but you're right. When it comes to the self-limiting beliefs, perhaps there's a little bit of safety in there as well that we can inoculate ourselves from public failure by certifying failure privately by simply not stepping into the arena.

You can't lose the fight that you never have a go at. Yeah, self-limiting beliefs and that voice in your head that is usually someone from early in your childhood, a parent, a younger, an older brother or sister, some sort of teacher in school. For the most part, they're just bollocks. I don't know what they're talking about, and they're no longer applicable. Right, right. I mean, I often talk about it as being your default settings. The way that you are right now is because of that's just your default settings. That's what you haven't programmed yourself to be. A lot of time, these are programmed at an early age when we're in our childhood. It can be initially programmed by genetics, by observing our parents, all these

different early experiences. But that's just your default setting. The experiences that you have and the memories associated with them serve to reprogram your anxieties and your fears. The only way to actually get past these things is to get out of your comfort zone, do this thing that you've been telling yourself you're not capable of, and it sort of, it's sort of the output retrains the input, right? The result gives you new reference experiences, so you can actually observe, you can learn from your own behavior and say, oh, I can do this and restart that belief and get rid of your fear centered around it. So right, man, I ruptured in a killee's last year, thought that my mental makeup would be

really bad for that sort of an injury and I'd get super depressed. And it was, I was so much better than even in my wildest dreams I could have thought. I didn't realize how much resilience was there for me to tap into and then when I needed it, it just arrived. So I really do think that was quite shocking to see and it made me question a lot of my assumptions around my own self-limiting beliefs as well. I wouldn't advise rupturing in a kill easier personal development strategy, but it's at least the outcomes are okay. So moving on, we've got our cognitive biases, we've got rid of our self-limiting beliefs as best we can, we've improved our introspection, then we need to cultivate self-mastery in wisdom. How do people even start with doing that?

Yeah, I think wisdom is one of those words that gets used for just about everything. You have to make sure you're on the same page when you're talking about it. To me, it's what you get when you combine rationality with that introspective clarity, because there are a lot of people out there who have gotten good at understanding and getting what they want, but there's something still missing, right? I mean, you were just talking about these setbacks, like Terri and Eurichilles, right? You can look at lottery winners and quadriplegic or parapelgic and ask, you know, how happy

are they actually a short while after? And the answer is like they're generally the same. It doesn't matter. It's the same. Lot of winner and someone who's disabled made disabled in a car crash reset to the same level of happiness after 12 months. Right.

So you have to question at that point, whether just being rationally good at getting what you want is actually a good strategy for happiness, right? I think wisdom is being able to combine that rational sort of strategic side with the introspective clarity, with the knowledge about yourself that, okay, this is how my mind works, this is how I think things are going to go and how I'm going to feel when this happens. This is why that may not be true. If you take the classic

example of whether you should take a wallet that you find or return it to the owner, it's got a bunch of money in it. Strategically, you could say that, of course, you should keep it in a purely rational, short-term sense. But I think if you've got this introspective clarity combined with it, meaning you've got wisdom, you know that there are other psychological outcomes that could come from that, that these things that seem like they would make you happy very often don't make you happy.

And we seem to have to keep relearning these things over and over. So actually remembering the next time you're in one of these cases, remembering that your new car didn't actually result in greater well-being, that's what it means to be wise, I think, is to hold those ideas in your head the next time instead of just forgetting again. So that's busy and updating in a way? Absolutely. It's just a more holistic Absolutely. It's just a more holistic version of it, applied to your whole life and your mind. Did you take your section on Ducobias from Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is true?

A big part of it. Yeah, I mean, I quoted him in it. Yeah, yeah. So I got absolutely torn pieces on YouTube for using the word unsatisfactoryness? Really? Because someone was like, duh, it's dissatisfaction and somehow half of the internet decide on an episode that went massive with Douglas Murray. Half of the internet decided that that was the comment that they were going to work vote. I was like, I'm quoting someone else, it's not my fault, it wasn't my word, I promise. Can you just, because I absolutely love this story, man, can you explain what the duke biases? Right. So duke is a Buddhist term. It's essentially the term for the problem with the human condition.

And it's been translated roughly as life is suffering, but that's not a very good translation. Unsatisfactoriness is the best comment and give Ryan shit, please. Thank you. So unsatisfactory is the way the Buddha described life and the human condition and what's wrong with it is essentially that even when we get what we want, there is this longing that just never goes away. And from a modern perspective, you could call it hedonic adaptation. We don't actually get happier when we get what we want.

So the Buddha's solution to this was to look at this process of craving or thirsting and try to completely unplug it, right? He said, you know, if we can just eliminate our desires completely, then that's sort of the way to end this constant cycle of unhappiness. My approach is a little bit different. I say that if you can learn to manipulate and master your desires, you can use them to fuel you towards your goals rather than just preventing them from causing you to suffer, but you can do both essentially. Well, it's an example of that. So with the kind of splitting two different sections, so an example with for desire modulation.

So if you have a desire for comfort and you basically have this need to be comfortable all the time, you're not capable of enjoying a camping trip. You're not capable of being content if the temperature in your house isn't set to the right degree. And you recognize that this doesn't really matter. This is basically an addiction that I've developed. You can basically do the opposite using something called asceticism, the stoics called it voluntary discomfort.

You can go through this process of putting yourself through something uncomfortable so that you build up your resilience, you build up your ability to adjust these desires. So if you can say like, actually the life that I want to live will cause me to take risks. It'll cause me to step outside of my comfort zone. This need for comfort is holding me back. You can sort of counteract that desire using a number of different methods that I talk about. And then you can use different desires to fuel you towards your goals. The Duke of bias, as you've called it, is ever since I read that man in Robert Wright's book, it's been one of those ground-shake moments, I think, for the way that I view the world. And the example, I'm not sure if it's him that uses it or if it's one that I've come up with, he talks about, imagine that you're planning a holiday

and you can't wait for this holiday, you and your partner have been planning it for ages, you're going to be somewhere hot and you've researched all the bars near the hotel and you know, you even know the cocktail menu. You know what cocktail you're going to have and the sun's going to set there. And that's the actual table I want to sit at. And for ages and ages, you're thinking

about how beautiful it's going to be. And then you get there and you go away on a holiday and it's the first night and you've booked your table and it's the exact table that you want. And the sun's just setting and you've got your cocktail in your hand. But then you notice that there's some grains of sand between your toes and you think, well, that's a bit irritating. And I wish, I wish actually

there's a little bit less ice in my cocktail. And I wonder whether I should have had it shaken instead of blended. And I would actually, the sun's a little bit low. It's kind of hurting my eyes. I wish I'd brought my, and I wondered, oh, I've got some sauce on my jacket. This isn't, this is built into the source code of how you see the world. If the first time that you caught a bison or picked some berries, you were satisfied, you would never get another bison or pick another berry.

So just realizing basically that everything's going to be a bit shitter than you think it's going to be. And just accepting that and being like, look, I can enjoy this holiday, I can get excited about it and know that when I get there, there will be sand between my toes, there will be this, but I have the perspective and this is where it comes back to the mindfulness gap on the metacognition in your language to just give us that buffer zone, that space to know. Okay, like this, this doesn't matter. The next one can be blended or shaken. The the source will come out of the top, the sandal come out of the toes, like it's sweet,

it's fine. But yeah, that's that bias, the duke bias is so awesome. I think everybody needs it in their vocabulary. Are you talking about the pathologies of philosophers? What do you mean by that? Yeah, so there's this tendency that we all have, and I call it that specifically because philosophers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer often lean on this side.

But it kind of glorifies suffering. And we see this today by saying that great people or creative people are the ones who suffer the most. And it kind of allows us to justify unnecessary parts of the human experience. I'm not saying that suffering can never be useful for bringing about a good result or that you can't even necessarily completely

eliminate suffering, but I think by and large, our negative emotions really do hold us back and they keep us locked in things that aren't good for us long-term. So on one end, Nietzsche talks about how, if you want to be happy, then believe, and he's talking about religious belief and faith, if you want to be incisive, if you want to understand the world, then inquire.

And he kind of, in doing that, suggests that people who are, who have incisive beliefs, who see the world clearly, must not be happy. And these kind of happy, go lucky, dogmatists are the ones who are actually happy because they don't see the world clearly. And I kind of call this into question and say, no, you can develop incisive beliefs and be happy that this is not a contrast. It's a, it's a defense mechanism that people who are smart put up to justify depression and despair in negative moods, right? This cynicism.

And then the same is done for effectiveness. Like I said, with creatives, right? We say that you have to suffer in order to be great, right? You have to go through this negative emotion. And very often, negative emotion is useless. It doesn't serve, it doesn't serve us, it doesn't make us great. You know, there are exceptions, I think, but generally you should try to get rid of any negative emotions that cause you to suffer and you shouldn't

worry about, shouldn't worry that you won't be able to achieve your goals or you won't be able to see the world clearly, right? You can work on all these different fronts and develop mastery in each individual area. That's such a blind spot that I think a lot of people who enjoy a particularly existential philosophy, but anyone that's kind of in the rationality movement, they, and I find this in myself, this is a bias I have myself, that the puritan work ethic that's been baked into us in the West just sees the suffering as you know, it's in service to some higher power. And you don't actually think, well, is there, is there an easier way to do this or a happier way? Is there a happier way for me to achieve the same thing? And part of you say, because culturally and maybe even genetically as well, you've got it in your head.

You're like, well, maybe I don't want it to be easier because maybe if it was easier, I wouldn't do it as much anymore, I wouldn't be as effective or something else. There's just an aversion to it being not painful. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. Just I've seen it all the time on internet forums. I've heard people in interviews say like, I don't necessarily want to get rid of my anger or my anxiety. They're, you know, I'm all about getting stuff done. It's like you, you can, you don't have to choose between those two outcomes. Like anger isn't a very good motivator, right?

Lao Tzu said, the best fighter is never angry. So if even fighting doesn't benefit from angry, even if you're trying to punch someone in the face and being angry, yeah, do you worse at it? Well, an awesome example. I mean, as well, like, think about, I often think about this. A lot of the time, people justify discomfort

on route to a goal, which actually undercuts the achievement of the goal itself. It's like I need to be angry or anxious in order to be creative. Why do you want to be creative? Well, I want to be creative because I want to be successful. Why do you want to be successful? I want to be successful because I want to be happy. Can you be happy if your anxious or angry? No, right? Okay. In that case, the first step, the thing that you are using to fuel your development is limiting your ability to reach your goal. Absolutely. Yeah, you have to keep in mind what the ultimate goal is. There are more direct means to get what you want. And we're so trained that we have to do this whole roundabout

process in order to just be happy. If you just go straight to the source and work on your mind, you can build a lot of that happiness in, and then you can go towards things, you can work towards things out of a love for the process rather than because you're so eager to get the result because it's going to make you happy. Is equanimity desirable? Because if people don't really care about what happens, maybe they're not be motivated to go do anything anymore. I definitely think it's desirable. And I think really I make this contrast between desires and values specifically for this reason. Because if you don't have any negative emotions causing you to suffer, that doesn't necessarily mean you aren't going to do anything. I didn't write this book out of a desire to escape all the bad feelings that I had from not having written a book.

Right? We have these intrinsic motivations that push us to do things, and if you want to be able to tap into those intrinsic drives, I think you do need to develop a certain level of stability into your own mind. You need to get to where your conflicting emotions and drives aren't pulling you in all different directions so that you can actually focus on the things that you really value and the direction you really want to go in rather than just what you feel like at any given time. How do people achieve Econymity? How do we turn down the volume of those different poles and emotions? So a lot of philosophies have suggested that there's this one core problem at the root of

our minds, whether it's our ego or whatever it may be. I kind of take a different approach based on evolutionary psychology, and I say, look, all of these different forms of suffering exist in our mind for different reasons, right? Because they caused us to, we get jealous because, you know, it helps us to retain mates from a biological perspective. We get angry because it helps us preserve our status. You know, we have all of these different things that aren't necessarily that relevant to us today. And I think we have to look at each of them all a cart and we say, how do I, how does this work? What is the structure of the algorithm causing me to get angry or jealous? And how can I rework it? So it's very much a creative design process that you have to apply to every

different struggle. Like I said, you may find when you really observe your emotions, that 90% comes from the same mental process. So you have to look at what it is that is preventing you from tranquility, and you have to work on that specific issue, and really figure out how it works so you can rework it. Similar to the way that you advise people to go about the cognitive biases at the start. Absolutely. That's kind of the idea behind psychotexture and the reason that's the word for it, because it is a creative design process comparable to architecture or something. You are looking at each psychological issue as its own creative problem-solving challenge to tackle. Evolutionary psychology for me is the emotional equivalent of learning mental models. Yeah, absolutely.

Like as you're reading, well, this is why you have envy. This is why friendship exists. This is what reciprocal altruism means. This is what kinship is. This is why men are attracted to women that are younger than them and women are attracted to men that have v-shaped bodies

and why we like good teeth and why we like good hair and why we have an aversion to things that are colored blue and that we try and eat them and no one will do it. Like all of this stuff. Yeah, it really is peering into the source code

in a way that I don't think many other many of the subject areas allow us to do. You're right. I mean, most, if you just search like, why do people get jealous? You're not going to find a lot of results actually telling you why we biologically have these tendencies. They often start way later than that.

But to me, this is where you have to start. You have to look at why we're wired the way we are. So you know what function these things are meant to serve, not necessarily for us, because very often it isn't good for us, but for our genes and for our ability to propagate our genes, essentially. So we've got cognitive, we've got emotional, that's done. And then the third section is behavioral. So what are the impediments to self-direction?

So I list four major impediments, right? You've got corruption, you've got compliance, which is our tendency to go along with what everyone else is doing. You've got craving, which is the most obvious, right? Our addiction to different chemicals, and you've got comfort, which is a huge one. So I examine each of these and the basic obstacles that they pose and how you can work around them. I talk a lot about how our cravings are amplified by the modern world. How modern food, for example, kind of hijacks are our evolutionary desire for certain nutrients. How modern social media hijacks our social drive.

So a lot of the four of us were against us and preventing us from living a life that we really choose to live. But I think the best solution still rests in self-mastery, I call it, and the ability to develop more control over your mind. So in the whole behavioral section, I talk about these different creative strategies

to rework your behaviors and your habits rather than just kind of trying to brute force suppress the things you don't want to do and work up the motivation to do the things that you do. What is some of your favorite strategies from that? So if you look at the classic marshmallow test by Walter Mitchell, which found that self-control is pretty much the greatest determinant of success in life out of any other metric, even like intelligence and SAT scores. A lot of people assume that means that people who have more willpower are just

going to be better at things in life. And the reality is, I think the people who have a lot of self-control aren't necessarily gritting their teeth and using a lot of willpower. They're using these strategies. So even in that example with the marshmallow test, the kids who were able to not eat the marshmallow for longer that was sitting in front of them, they weren't the ones who were staring the marshmallow down

and trying to fight back the urges. They were the ones who were either directing their attention somewhere else, playing with a toy, doing something besides staring at the marshmallow, or they were altering their evaluation, right? They were interpretation. They were thinking about the marshmallow as a cloud or something instead of as a delicious treat. And really, you can take a lot of ideas from this

and apply it to your own life in terms of designing the consequences of your actions. Right, you can use the desires that you already have to channel the behavior that you want. So a lot of us have heard of the idea of writing a check to a friend and having them deposit it if we don't meet our goals. This is using our desire to maintain our money

and accumulate things financially. You can also use your social drive. So everything from having a workout buddy or a personal trainer, if you want to exercise, I personally have used a tool that I love called Focussmate. I use this in the process of writing the book where basically you meet with people virtually. You have these hour-long, roughly calls, and it calls itself a virtual co-working tool. You basically just check in at the beginning, tell the person what you want to accomplish over the next hour, and they tell you theirs, and then you check back in at the end to see

how you do. And every time I've done this, I have ended up meeting my goal of word count or whatever it is that I was trying to do. It is a surprisingly powerful tool, and it's because we're not just trying to push through and get it done, we're using desires that are already inside of us to make it a lot easier and sort of turn it into the path of least resistance. What's the opposite of self-mastery? So I call it self-slavery, and it's essentially what I argue is not only responsible for being unhappy and not having self-control or clarity, but it really, I think, explains a lot of the evil in the world, or what we tend to

call evil. So a lot of the people who do some of the worst things, I think are unable to control their desires or they're unable to get the clarity needed to work towards what they really value. So I mean, you can apply this anywhere from like dictators who believe they're doing something good for the world, but they've got this bias and this lack of wisdom to, you know, something like school shooters who simply haven't developed the mastery over admittedly difficult emotions that they're often going through. So if we started looking at things like this and we started saying how can we give people the tools they need to restructure their minds and ignite their interest in restructuring their minds,

I think it would reduce a lot of the the bad actors that we see in society that we often just blame on this inigmatic evil inside of them. Yeah, you're very correct. I think it's odd in a meritocracy that we don't believe that people can have redemption. With that, do you understand what I mean? There's kind of a bit of a juxtaposition there. If you are, if anyone can become anything that they want and a hard work can get you anywhere, the winners at the top are worthy of their successes

and the losers at the bottom are worthy of their failures, it does seem odd that we're not empowering people to take control of their own mental architecture more with stuff like this. I agree. I totally agree. The whole justice system is kind of centered around just deciding who the good guys and the bad guys are and making sure the bad guys suffer rather than figuring out how we can cultivate

these better qualities in people. Have you heard Sam Harris' most recent free will, the final word on free will podcast that he put out last week? I have not heard it yet. Dude, you will love it. Anybody that's listening after this, go and have a listen to that. So Sam has been big into determinism kind of one of the public facing forefronts of that, I suppose.

And he just does an hour and a half monologue talking about every single different element of it. It's so beautiful. He really is wonderful to listen to. I know that he's views on Trump and the noise some people over the last year or so, but man, when you get him in his wheelhouse for stuff like that, that is unbeatable. There was this quote actually in the book where you say that if losing all of your possessions, circumstances, social standing and relationships would deprive you of all your happiness, what you have cannot be called happiness in the first place. Do you think that that's a desirable state to get to where we're so detached from our externalities, from our external world, that we're kind of totally floating through in

this oddly diogeny's sort of piss part of self-discare about the world? I don't think that's a desirable kind of life, no. I'm not referring to that kind of lifestyle where you want to get rid of your relationships and possessions and all that. What I'm really getting at there is that if you haven't built the psychological well-being into your mind, then you're essentially going to be hopeless if you don't have all these things that you have come to require.

I think you should work towards a life that embodies your values, whatever that is. So if that involves close relationships and altruism and that kind of thing, which I assume it does for just about everyone. Then that's the kind of life you should lead, but you shouldn't do it because you need those things to make you happy and you're unable to enjoy your life without them. You should do it because that's the life you want to have. That's the person you want to be. I know, I don't, I don't talk about

how you can algorithmically program joy and love into your mind. So you don't need to have anyone else in your life, right? I haven't found a way to do that. I'm mostly focused on how to get rid of the obstacles in your own mind, preventing you from enjoying this world and fully diving into those positive things. Yeah, it's, it's interesting thinking about, I know you've read The Happiness Hypothesis by John Hate, and he talks about happiness doesn't just come from within, it comes from within and without. And there's a quote from Nivalet's floating around online, my buddy Vizzy has just done

a drawing for him, which is beautiful. If you go on at NAVAL on Instagram, you can see the drawing that I'm talking about now. And the quote is, it is far easier to achieve your material desires than to renounce them. And I think that the devil lies in the details when we're having this discussion, a setisism and the rise of minimalism, the minimalist movement where people just get rid of all of their possessions and live out of a backpack. That world's kind of this almost going back to the cynicism of ancient, the ancient world. I think that that is in a way people deciding to not step into the arena of real world success, that as I said before, you can inoculate yourself

from failure in the real world by deciding never to put the coin in the machine and play the game. And the devil is in the details in that you need to try and cultivate personal values, a sense of sovereignty, this robustness around yourself and resilience and fortitude to the things that the world is inevitably going to throw at you, both good and bad, and know that what happens to you, the things that occur to you like that, do

not matter. And yet, in the same breath, you can also enjoy having a family, driving a nice car, being in a comfortable house, getting to go away in a holiday. And I wonder if in a different version of the simulation, we would actually be able to construct a society that was UBI'd up to the max and didn't have this period and work ethic, or we were all David Peast up with intravenous MDMA, in a transhumanist utopia,

where we don't even need other people, right? I mean, but this is the world that we've got. The world that we've got right now is a meritocracy. It is something where you need to go out and do stuff. We still have mental programming that gives you a sense of what is pride? Like, why do we have pride? We have pride because when you do something challenging

and worthwhile, you get a good feeling to yourself because you are moving toward a goal. Not having goals isn't an option. You're always going to have goals. Even if the goal is to not have goals, you're constantly going to be checking teleologically against whether or not you're achieving that. Have I not achieved a goal today? No, right, yes.

Well, no, do that's a goal. Like, it's kind of a bit unfulsifiable in that way. But yeah, man, the devil really is in the details with this. And I think you've done, for anybody that wants to enjoy what we've gone through today, designing the mind, the principles of psychotexture will be linked in the show notes below. You've done a really, really awesome job with it, dude. As a sort of a parting, no, how can people continue to optimize their mental software moving forward? Awesome. Yeah. So what I would tell you is that if you want to follow what designing the mind is doing, you can go to designingthemind.org. I'm going to be sharing a lot of ideas related to psychotecure and all this to anyone who joins the email list.

But I also want to do a lot of big things in the near future. And to help me do that, I've created a survey where I'm essentially trying to figure out what people's psychological struggles and aspirations are, what comes up the most. So I know what to focus in depth on. And I'm also doing a giveaway centered around that. So I'm giving away signed copies of the book. I'm giving away a few other psychological tools. So if you go to designingthemind.org slash survey, you can fill that out. You'll be entered into the giveaway and added to the email list. You can unsubscribe anytime, but I would love to be able to welcome you to a really cool community in the near future.

I love it, man. Thank you. Oh, final thing. What is a underground hero book that you stumbled upon whilst researching, designing the mind that you think more people should know about. Good question. So one thing that comes to mind, I don't know how underground it is, but a couple books by Maslow beyond just the hierarchy of needs that everyone's familiar with. The farther reaches of human nature, just an incredible vision of what the human mind is

capable of. I would highly recommend that or towards the psychology of being by Maslow. There's one really underground thing that isn't even technically a book. It's like a document floating on the internet called The Nine Levels of Increasing Embrace by Suzanne Cook-Royder. And this doesn't show up in this book, but it's a very interesting perspective on the mind and the way that we develop and mature. So I cannot recommend that highly enough.

Awesome. I'm going to try and find the Nine Levels of Increasing Embrace, and if anyone wants to check it out, it may be in the show notes below or I may have given up. Ryan Mann, I'm super excited for whatever the next book is and whatever you've got coming up, I really look forward to it. Awesome, yeah, thanks so much for having me, man. I really enjoyed it. you