Modern Wisdom - #590 - Mark Manson - When Will You Learn To Grow Up?

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Mark Manson is a best selling author, blogger and a movie star.  You're not supposed to just get older, you're supposed to mature as well. You're supposed to leave the juvenile patterns and beliefs and behaviours behind as you shed your past self like a wise awakened crab. So why do so many people get stuck in old habits, and how can they get out of them? Expect to learn what most people don't understand about how relationships work, why so many men are enticed by Andrew Tate's message, what Mark thinks about the modern era of men's advice after being in the industry for over a decade, why he got depressed after a smash hit best selling book, how to deal with high standards for yourself and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 10% discount on all Optimal Carnivore’s products at www.amazon.com/optimalcarnivore (use code: WISDOMSAVE10) Extra Stuff: Check out Mark's website - https://markmanson.net/ Buy The Subtle Art - https://amzn.to/3YdEBVB  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Mark Manson. He's a best-selling author, blogger, and a movie star. You're not supposed to just get older, you're supposed to mature as well, you're supposed to leave the juvenile patterns and beliefs and behaviors behind you as you shed your past self like a wise awakened crab. So why do so many people get stuck in old habits? And how can they get out of them? Expect to learn what most people don't understand about how relationships work, why so many men are enticed by Andrew Tate's message, what Mark thinks about the modern era of men's

advice after being in the industry for over a decade, why he got depressed after a smash-hit best-selling book, how to deal with high standards for yourself and much more. Mark Manson is an absolute beast. That guy is so dialed in. He's someone that I always forget about when you think about the personal development, self development world. He's kind of just so big and obvious that you sometimes forget about him. Every single time that I speak to him is it reminds me just how impressive he is. I am very, very, very keen on his insights. I think he has definitely done the work himself.

He is super, super open and very vulnerable. And just accomplished. I've got a lot of time for him. And I think he's an incredibly admirable, aspirational person to look up to a very, very much hope that you enjoy today. Also, if you do, please hit the subscribe button. It is my birthday, very soon, it's my birthday on the 23rd, and it would be a fantastic

birthday present if you would press subscribe because it does support the show and it helps me get bigger and better guests and it makes me happy. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mark Manson. A lot has happened. You are now a movie star. Yeah, I guess, you know, if we want to put the bar that low, or movie star them. Sure. Yes, yeah, it's been an interesting couple of years. We were talking before we got started about some of the perils of success that kind of come along for the ride.

What do you think most people don't understand about success? I think people don't realize the more success you achieve. And I think it actually has more to do with the velocity of success. Like I've talked to a number of very, very successful people who became successful by just kind of compounding 3 to 5% per year over like 30 years and they seem to all be pretty mentally well adjusted. Those of us who go a little bit cray, cray, it's usually because we have have some sort of insane slope where it's like a 500% or a 1000% increase within a two to three year period.

And that seems to be what messes with your head. And one thing I've said and known for a long time is that identity lags reality by a year or two. You often run into people who lose a bunch of weight, for instance, like they lose 100 pounds. They'll still, it'll take a couple of years for them to realize that they're thin. And I think the same thing kind of happens with success. If you blow up massively in a six month period or 12 month period, you spend the next two years wondering

what the hell happened and where you are and why do all these people want to talk to you and holy shit, that's a lot of money, I think I'll say yes to it and then you regret saying yes to it. There's just a lot of psychological fallout that I think happens when you have that sort of meteoric rise. You are describing a situation that I know pretty well at the moment. It's this weird combination of imposter syndrome

and excitement and anticipation for the future, overwhelm in terms of opportunity. And yeah, there is no one that's going to give sympathy to like, oh my god, your growth is too, too quick. Like, let's, let's all get around a campfire and make you feel better about yourself. That's not going to happen. But it is a concern. And we've heard for a long time about the dangers of child actors, you know, the McColley Colkins of the world becoming too big too fast as a kid. But I think that there's a similar, but even potentially more difficult challenge for adults to deal with because your identity has become locked. You thought

you knew who you were and then something comes along and actually rips you out of that. At least as a kid, you're pretty malleable and you won't be able to remember a time that life wasn't like you having a chef and security and a private jet and stuff like that. Whereas when it's changed, you're so de-anchored, like unmoored from whatever it was before, or I think that that presents a new set of challenges. Yeah, well, I think it's weird too, because a kid doesn't know,

but like the kid doesn't want it, or doesn't really know what they want. It just kind of happens to them. I've actually found it. I'm not a fan of his music at all, but I've found myself becoming very interested in Justin Bieber's career, or his unwinding of his own career, that I think, apparently within the last five years or so, he has just canceled and undone tours and albums to the point where he's just not working anymore,

and I think he just sold his entire music catalog for like $300 million or something. But it's interesting because to me that kind of transmits this idea that like, he wanted to be famous when he was like 13, he didn't really understand what that entailed, and now that he's an adult, he's like, wait, I need to be a normal human being and get my head right and have normal experiences. I think for people like us, it's a slightly different experience because you got what you wanted, right?

Like you asked for that. What you wanted, Paz. Yeah. Like this is the thing you've been working for for like 10 years. And suddenly it's here. And it's a lot more stressful than you thought it would be. It didn't solve a lot of the problems you thought it would solve.

There is that imposter syndrome. Everything that you do or say seems to carry a lot more weight than it used to. You have something to lose now, right? And so you can't just like, you know, shit something out and throw it on the internet and see what happens. So yeah, it is this weird thing where you're like, I'm so grateful this is the best thing

that's ever happened to me, but I'm also so stressed out because I didn't realize that it would carry this kind of mental weight with it. Yeah, terrified and holding on for dear life, I think. I get this sense, man. It's so strange. When the channel blows up and we have a particularly good period and the way that YouTube works, good periods, beget good periods, and then you'll have a little lull and then you'll come back and it will go absolutely bananas again. The number for me is around about 10 to 15 million plays a month. When we break that, there is just this ambient sense of anxiety that goes through me.

And it's just me going, I don't know whether it's correlation or causation, but there's something that makes me feel like there are a lot more eyeballs on me than I'm used to. And as someone that's naturally quite introverted, that makes me feel a bit like, oh, fuck, like this is good because it's rich, but it's bad because who are all of these people? What if I say something that was done more second guessing, more self-doubt? What do you think you mentioned that success doesn't fix the things that you thought it was going to fix? What have you found for people that maybe are aspiring towards success or looking toward finding this inflection point of a growth curve or whatever it is? What are the things that you've found good to ground

yourself in or where do you continue to take your sense of pride, integrity, personal self-worth from that isn't the rapidly changing, ascending numbers and revenue and stuff like that? Well, I think the most important thing, and at least the most important thing for me, is just been having a really solid group of people in your life. And that's the other thing, that's one of the other things that changes with success. Sometimes people around you start behaving differently or treating you differently and both in a positive way and then a negative way. And that's super weird to deal with.

But ideally you have a critical mass number of people in your life that don't give a shit how much money you make or how many people downloaded your life that don't give a shit, you know, how much money you make or how how many people downloaded your last episode or whatever, like they just want to hang out and drink a beer and watch football, like they always did. And I found that incredibly, like I found myself craving that actually, you know, I would go do a speaking tour, go hang out with Will Smith, meet a bunch of crazy celebrities that I always wanted to meet, and then make a bunch of money, and I would come home, and I'd be like, God, I just want to see my old friends and talk about totally unimportant stuff and just goof around for a week.

That seems very nourishing at those moments. Yeah, I completely get that. It's very strange. It's a very, very strange world when you can achieve status and renown in a very short period of time. I think the interesting point around someone that that iterated three or five percent per year and has had time to identity, lifestyle, friendship groups, everything has just changed it around about the pace that you can. But if you got to 20 percent per year, perhaps you are actually starting to lag behind a little bit and that's a little

bit too much. One of the things that you also have with this is high expectations. So someone may have very high demands of themselves, they want to perform very well, they want their work to have an impact, they do want to chase down this. But commensurate with that is this pain when you don't achieve what you intended. You know, if you want to hold yourself to a high standard, you immediately set an ideal and then begin to compare yourself against that ideal. And inevitably, for the most part, apart from the freak bestselling book or whatever it is that you do, you're always going to fall short. Have you considered how people could deal with having high expectations? Well, it's one of those things. I think there's a lot of situations where certain mentalities or mindsets that work when

you're not successful at all can actually start working against you when you become very successful. So, I think that mentality is a perfect example. You know, it's like when you've done nothing, I think it's probably very helpful to set high expectations for yourself just because it gets you working harder, it gets you expecting more of yourself. I found that once you start to reach the peaks of a certain industry, maintaining those absurdly high expectations, it just kind of works against you. It's like if I expected my next book to sell,

I don't know, more copies than Harry Potter. Like that, that's absurd. That's like a completely absurd metric of success. And I'm like, pretty much guaranteed the fail. So I think it's just you have to, the goalposts have to move. And not only do the goalposts have to move, but maybe you even have to find a different field to set up your goalposts on than you used to, because it's a lot of the same measurements that you use to get up the mountain no longer makes sense once you're fairly high up on it. Yeah, the tools that got you here won't get you there is something that I've thought about an awful lot, especially when it comes to obsessing over little things, not being prepared to delegate control to other people,

not being able to relinquish any of the neuroses that you have around stuff. It's like if you want to do this, you're going to have to scale. If you want to let go of this sort of thing. And yeah, the strategies that get you from 0 to 50 are not the ones that are going to get you from 90 to 95 or 95 to 96. Yeah. Yeah. You say that the most important question to ask yourself in life is,

what pain do you want in your life and what are you willing to struggle for? Why is that the right question to ask? I think it's the right question because anything worthwhile is going to require some degree of pain and struggle. And so if you're oriented towards the pain and struggle, you're probably going to be more aligned with what you're capable of accomplishing rather than if you just orient towards the pleasures. I also just think it's a much more interesting question, right? Like, we all want the same stuff, more or less, we all want to be liked and make money and be popular and be good at something.

What I think differentiates us as individuals is what sacrifices we're willing to make and what challenges we actually enjoy. I used to say like, I meet a lot of people who tell me they wanna, it's probably like, I'm sure there's a million people who tell you now that they want to start a podcast. It's ever since my book's blew up, it's like everybody I meet, it's like, oh, I want to write a book, I've got this great idea.

And then of course you ask them, have you started writing and they're like, oh, no, no, no, no, I need to like, you know, think about it a little bit more. And it's, I think at the end of the day, most people just don't enjoy sitting by themselves in a quiet room, writing and rewriting and rewriting the same paragraph eight times.

And I do for some reason. To me, that's a very enjoyable afternoon. And that's probably why I'm a writer and most people are not. So that is the pain that you want in your life or at least it's the pain that you're willing to endure. Yeah it's you know another way to frame it is kind of like what what is the pain that what is the pain that feels easy to you but seemingly nobody else. like it never, I remember when I first started blogging and I went to a couple, like the first couple, like kind of blogging or internet business events, I went to, people would come up to me

and they'd be like, man, how do you write such long blog posts? And I was like, what are you talking about? And they're like, yeah, I can't write, like it's 500, 400, 500 words a day and like I'm tapped out. And meanwhile, I'm writing like 3,000, 4,500, 5,000 word posts every couple of days. And to me, it never even occurred to me that that was a lot.

That was just kind of like what came out when I sat down the right. So I think it's very useful to look for and discover the difficult things that come easily to you, but don't come easily to most people, because that's probably where you can competitive advantages, and that's probably where you're most likely to succeed. Yes, I think the reality of the lifestyle that you say that you want is going to be very different from what you see in other people. So I remember this example, I think James Cleese's it where

he talks about what it's like to be a rock star. So what it's like to be a rock star from the outside is playing this show in front of all of these people and the screaming your name and you're making money and you're with cool guy. But the reality is 15 years living in a van with four friends sleeping in the van, with bloody fingers, putting super glue on, with poor health, poor sleep habits, not knowing if you're going to make it stress, being dragged by A&R and agents and all sorts of stuff all over the place, learning about mixing and mastering and song playing and desperately trying to go back over chords again and again and again.

That's not what you see, or the same thing for Konome Gregor, right? You know, although he is now on a damage trajectory, I think he's kind of like one of the most cringe people on the internet right now. But when he was at the peak of his coolness, what you saw was this like fucking God, this like, subvant artist manifest into physical form. What you didn't see was him living in the attic of his parents' house in islands somewhere, rolling the same combinations and the same sequences over and over and over again with no idea if it was going to work out. That's what the practice you need

to be willing to play. Yeah, it's like every goal is like an iceberg, right? There's this shiny, beautiful thing on the surface, and then there's all this difficult hidden stuff underneath that is not apparent until you actually get into it. How can you go to press stuff to your first book? I think it succeeded so insanely highly. I honestly felt like I was like, where do I go from here? For so many years, my goals were oriented around, become a published author, become a bestseller, become known in my industry, like a leading voice in my industry like I spent

Probably half a decade with that as like my map my mental map of what I was working towards and and then all those things are achieved and I think literally three to six months after the book came out and then again the velocity or the the intensity of the success was so drastic that I honestly was just completely at a loss of what I should do next for about six months. And I think depression at its core is a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of like none of your actions matter. And so I, you know, because I was so oriented towards those goals and I achieved,

like not only did I achieve them, I obliterated them. It just felt like, until I kind of found new goals or new challenges for myself or new map for myself, it just felt like anything I worked on or did was pointless. Gold medalist syndrome is kind of similar. and I think that Tom Brady's a really interesting example of this, you know, is one of the longest standing cubies of all time. Seven championship rings are something like, Tom, you only have ten fingers. Like literally, you know, if you have a good couple of runs coming up and you manage to

stick your longevity, you're going to have more championship rings than you do fingers to put them on. It's, I think athletes are always a fascinating example of this. Something that's been your identity your entire life, you've been rewarded psychologically, socially, financially, to such a massive extent. And then you're supposed to retire at like 36, you know, and you have the rest of your life. Good luck. Like, go with that identity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, have fun. It's, it's, I can't even imagine. You know, the best description I heard of this was, apparently, Quincy Jones used to call it altitude sickness. And he would see it in

young music artists that he worked with that they would, if they became too successful, too quickly, he said that it was like climbing a mountain without acclimating on the way up, and that they would basically develop altitude sickness and then fall back down the mountain in order to survive. Like sabotage their, their, their, themselves to get back down. They would soon have familiar failure than unfamiliar success in a way. Exactly. Exactly. Because it's just, it's, again, coming back to like how identity lags reality. Like it's, it's, I think when that separation between how you see yourself and how the world sees you

becomes too massive, it becomes untenable and you start, you probably find ways to sabotage, to bring that gap closer together. Just reflecting on my experience here, breaking the fourth wall a little bit, I've certainly noticed within the last six to 18 months, but certainly the last six. The way that people treat me is different. People that I've never met before, people that I roughly know or don't. And yeah, the way that it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to work out whether people have got my best interests at heart, whether they actually want to spend time with me because they're genuinely interested and they're a well-meaning person, or whether it's just because they want to be associated with someone they think is a rising stock.

And that's like a genuine, something that I've palpably noticed. And I think that you're probably right, the analogy across to the person that loses a lot of weight of it being around about maybe one to two years that your identity lags behind doesn't seem that wrong. Yeah. It's so the trust thing is super interesting. That is something that I've experienced. I'm much slower to the trust people than I used to be. And it's exactly for the reason you said. I've also noticed that I've developed a pretty strong, I call it like a fan radar. And it's exactly for the reason you said, I've also noticed that I've developed a pretty strong, I call it like a fan radar. So there's a lot of people who like are big fans, but they don't obviously they don't want to like fan boy, they kind of want to like

come in under the radar and like be friendly first and get to know me and then, you know, be all casual about it. And I've noticed that I've kind of, I can be talking to somebody for like 10 seconds and I'm like, oh, this is a fan. I can tell this is a fan. And sure enough, like two hours later, they're like, by the way, can you sign a book for me? I'll also say that, you know, my wife has got a very good bullshit detector and she's been huge

for me the last five or six years just because just as an outside observer because you know when you're when you're in the interaction with somebody you know you like somebody they seem cool you're you're having a good time it's it's very easy to miss things or miss details or miss red flags and And having somebody like that who's close to me that I trust very deeply kind of pull me aside and be like, hey, I'm not sure about that guy. Like, I think you want something. I mean, this isn't to say that I,

some of my favorite connections that I've made over the last few years have been through the show for people that listen because it becomes a gravity distortion well that attracts in other people that are interested in the things you're interested in, which is great. The concern is people that maybe don't have your best interests at heart. And I haven't had my fingers burned by that, like, super badly or whatever yet, but it is the sort of thing that I do get quite conscious about. Speaking of keeping yourself on the straight and narrow,

you recently quit drinking alcohol recently, right? Welcome to the club. Welcome to the club, right? I actually, I saw your video, remember if it was right before I quit or right after, but it was, you know, there was, it was one of those things where there was a series of events over about two or three weeks. I saw your video, I saw the Huberman put out his podcast about alcohol, which was very eyebrow-raising. I had a couple conversations

with friends who had quit alcohol recently, and, and then I had a personal event which I've been, I was a heavy drinker, pretty much my entire adult life. What does heavy drink look like? I mean, I was a party hound, right? So anytime I went out, you know, when I was younger, any bar club or party, I went to a drink a lot. As I got older, that kind of turned more into restaurants,

fine dining, trips, vacations. It was just alcohol for me always, if you took something fun, alcohol made it more fun. And if you took something boring, it made it less boring. So I pretty much always found some sort of justification of like, you know what'd be great right now, a drink. But it, I think for me, it hit, and I'm a very functional drunk. So, I know some people have, it causes a lot of problems in their personal professional lives.

For me, it was always, it never interfered massively, where it actually started the interferer for me was in physical health. I started getting a ton of weight. I went to a doctor, got blood work done, the doctor was like, shit, this is the blood work of a This is a blood work of a man like 30 years older than you You might want to like take a look at your habits So all that was kind of going on the background. I started losing weight cleaning up my diet that also meant drinking less and then cleaning up my diet, that also meant drinking less. And then, and around this time, I, you know, some friends of mine were kind of experimented with quitting drinking. I had hired a health coach

who was kind of encouraging me to maybe give it up, stop for three, three months or six months. And then I remember I went to an event and it was a event I signed up for and paid for and I ended up hanging out at the bar the first night I ended up hanging out at the bar with a few guys that I had met and just got absolutely plastered like just fucking shit faced. And I was so drunk I couldn't I couldn't get up and go to the event the next day. And I remember just laying in bed in the hotel room being like, this is the dumbest fucking thing. Like I paid thousands of dollars to be here. And I feel so awful.

I can't even, I can't even be here, right? So it was kind of in the air, you know, it was percolating. And so I gave, I gave it up end of July last year. Initially, I was gonna do three months. The three months was so amazing that I was like, okay, I'm gonna go to the end of the year, went to the end of the year, drank it new years, just to see what it felt like, overrated. And so my goal

for 23 is to actually go do all of 2023 without a drink. Let's fucking go. Dude, that's so good. It's the exact experience that I had as well. So throughout most of my 20s, running nightclubs, 1000 events stood on the front door, big party boy, similar to yourself, and then I realized, this isn't really serving me. Again, was propelled by a very bad hangover one day and thought, right, I mean, just the memory of this hangover will get me through the first month.

And then I only have another five to do after that. Committed to six, went back to drinking, didn't really like it all that much, wasn't very enamored with it, found that the progress that I made when I was sober was more addicting than the enjoyment of the party when I went back to drinking.

Absolutely. Came back onto drinking, did another six months, then thought, right, well, I must have done my sobriety stint now, I must have got it all out of my system, went back to drinking for like a month and a half. And this is once every two weeks. This isn't me drinking consistently and thought this sucks and then did a thousand days and that was what I did the video about. But yeah, it is such a game changer for a vestigial party boy to go through because you just open up all of this consistency, time, money, calories

to spend on things that you genuinely care about, energy, everything that you care to care about in your life gets better when you go sober. And this is from two people who had their drinking like relatively under control, right? Alcohol is the only drug where if you don't do it, people assume you have a problem. And the problem that both of us had was lifestyle or productivity, slash health based, but it wasn't dependency based. So it's the easiest of the letting goes, you know, compared with almost everybody else that attempts to go sober. And if they can do it, we definitely can do it. Yeah. For sure. And I vastly underestimated the effects they would have on my energy, my

focus, my motivation. One of the things that stood out to me that Huberman said in his episode is he said that if you've been a heavy drinker and I think researchers define heavy drinker as I think it's 15 drinks a week. Which for some people is one night out. Yeah, right? I'm like, yeah, that's an average, that was an average week in my 20s. He said at least 15 drinks, you know, if you've been a heavy drinker for multiple years, he said that it can take six to 12 months for your system to actually entirely reset. So your brain to go back to the way it was, your internal organs to go back to the way

they were. And I was like, God damn, I've been doing this basically since I was like 18, right? So half my life, almost two decades. And yeah, it's incredible. It's incredible. It was, I'd say within a few weeks, waking up with more energy, sleeping like a baby. And one of the things, I'd cut back quite a bit

before I quit completely. I'd say I'd cut back to drinking maybe two, three times a month. And when I drank, it was like just two or three glasses of wine. And it's funny, like something, I feel like something you notice when you cut back that you don't notice when you keep drinking heavily. Like when you drink heavily you just expect to feel like shit. So when you feel like shit you're like, oh yeah, well of course I drank I drank a lot. But when you drink very moderately it actually showed me how much it affects you. Like I would go out and have two glasses of wine with dinner, and not only would I feel maybe 20% worse the next day,

I would feel 10% worse the day after that. And that was shocking to me. I was like, whoa, this is actually, it's not about hangovers, it's about just general lack of energy and motivation on a day-to-day basis, and it lasts for multiple days. So, yeah, it's been an eye-opener. I think it's underrated. I'm also, I feel like it's becoming a thing. I've been really shocked and surprised how many friends of mine who without talking to like people that I haven't seen in six months I

Hang out with them and they're like oh, I quit drinking by the way, and I'm like what me too? Holy shit like that is that that's probably happened three or four times just in the last year Completely spontaneously so I feel like it's something that is becoming almost trendy among, I guess, people who care about productivity and accomplishing things. So one of the interesting things, it would make a good bit of sense for someone that's in the 30s, like me and you, perhaps, to dial this back, especially if you're not going out and trying to pull every night and going to clubs and stuff, right? What is maybe even more interesting is the trends that I'm seeing amongst younger people,

people who would have taken their sense of self-worth from their degeneracy, like me and you might have done, and even those people, even the gen Zedders, are also seeing going out and getting absolutely lathered as not exactly a high status pursuit. Yeah, it's funny. I've seen this a few times on social media over the last few years, but I always find it amusing. Inevitably, it's somebody post a chart and it's like alcohol consumption, sexual activity, maybe illicit drugs thrown in and it's a chart of like generations, like how much each generation had done it by age 18 and it's a consistent trend downwards. And Gen Z does it the least of all. all day the sex drugs and alcohol less than any other generation before and the people who post this chart

They like complain about the kids. They're like wow kids are so boring these days. There's like on their phone all the time They should get out and have some real fun. I'm like having some heroin and protected sex come on now kids All right, I'm like I'm like wait a. When the hell did this turn into a criticism? Like when I was growing up, it was, you know, everything was like, don't drink, don't do drugs, don't have sex. And that's all we wanted to do. It's really funny how it's like somehow flipped almost.

Yeah. I mean, the behavior that mean my housemates considered high status 15 years ago, when I was at uni, would have been how drunk you got the night before, whether you woke up in a bush, if somebody got an injury. I actually did my master's dissertation on this. It was the effectiveness of anti-alcohol advertising

on students at Newcastle University. And what I discovered was that a lot of students saw these painful experiences as badges of honor. They were almost like a right of passage that everybody went through. You know, if we were 21 year old Mark and 21 year old Chris ring each other and say, man, how was last night? And you go, dude, it was amazing. John lost an eye.

And you're like, what? Like, that would be, that was being an ironic way that we would go about talking about stuff. Yet, Hamza, who is a young guy 24, 25, I think, British kid living out in Dubai now, YouTuber, his whole thing is do hard things, especially when you don't feel like it. Big in the no-fap community, he's got this underground fight club thing where he gets young boys to box each other. This is the new sort of hustle culture. It's the counter culture away from cheap dopamine and sort of ease degenerate behavior. So yeah,

like the cool culture is always the counter culture to whatever is the main culture. And for a long time, degeneracy was so mainstream that now it's come the other side. I don't even know if a film like the hangover would resonate with young people anymore if you were to release a movie like that. That's a good point. Yeah, it's something that I've been fascinated with recently, especially because I'm doing a lot more

on YouTube now and obviously everybody on YouTube is young as fuck. So it's I'm like watching a bunch of 24-year-olds feeling like an old man. And it's so fascinating to me because yeah, it's what was cool, my entire young life, what was cool was destructive. It was how fucked up can you get what crazy thing

can you do, what rule can you break and get away with it? Whereas it's high status behavior today, at least among a certain amount of the younger generation, it does seem to be very productive. It's like study hacks and sleep habits and go into the gym and no fat and all these things, like digital detoxes. and no fap and all these things like digital detoxes. It gives me hope. It's funny. I found myself I was at a speaking at an event. I was at like a dinner with a bunch of the VIPs or whatever.

And we were going around, you know that Peter Tiel question is like, what do you believe is true that most people don't? Yes. We went around the table. We were like going around the table and everybody was giving their answer to that. And the answer I gave is I said, not only are the kids okay, but they are so much more impressive than you and I or anybody was at their age.

And for some reason nobody sees this. People just see TikTok and they're like, ah, the kids are fucked. They see the crazy woke stuff going on on campuses and they're like, ah, the kids are fucked. You know, they see the crazy woke stuff going on on campuses and they're like, oh, these kids, they're brainwashed. And I don't know, like, I play a lot of video games. I spend a lot of time, you know, I post a lot on YouTube. I have a lot of young fans. I spend a lot of time engaging with Gen Z and I'm consistently very, very impressed by them.

Do you think that that could be selecting for the cohort of Gen Z that consume content like yours, that there will be ones that will have an idea about how to restrict their use of TikTok and what they consume online and stuff like that? I think so, I think in the case of like my fans, but I don't know, even when I get on and play games, play video games with bunch of random kids, I hear the stuff they talk about or go on message boards and stuff, go on Reddit.

They're not calling you racial epitaphs, are they? Or at least way less often than they did when I was, when I was in high school. Yeah. Yeah. Or actually, like, so, you know, I got kind of sucked back in the online gaming a few years ago. What are you playing? Well, years ago, I played a bunch of Overwatch

and I loved it. It was, especially because it was kind of a throwback to my ear. I played a lot of Quake and Unreal when I was growing up and so Overwatch was kind of right up my alley. So I played a lot with a bunch of young people and it was two things really blew me away. One was, first of all, how many women there were playing, like openly, too. Like when I back when I played video games in the 90s, it was like if there was a girl, she didn't want anybody to know that she was a girl. Like using the voice modulator to try

it was like if there was a girl, she didn't want anybody to know that she was a girl. Like using the voice modulator to try and go see if there was any other side of a pillow. Yeah. Or just didn't, you know, there was no mic. She used the boy's name, you know, stuff like that. So there are a lot of, there are a lot of women playing and, and the other thing that impressed me too was just, yeah, obviously, young people are immature, they're dumb, but, and they say and do stupid things, embarrassing things, but I was impressed with the amount of kind of self-regulation. So, inevitably, there would be some jackass who would come in and say a bunch of racial epithets.

And then everybody else who just immediately mute that guy, and it was like problem solved, no big argument, no big drama, no. It's interesting. I tell you what I've become more and more obsessed by recently is availability bias on stuff that you've learned to do with contentious topics. So this weekend, one of my good friends, a guy called Gwinderbogel who's been on the show three times, he's on again next week, he just released an absolute monster of an article about TikTok. He put it out on his sub-stack.

And I managed to get it in front of Rogan. And then Rogan tweeted it out, which means that it reached like three million people. So his sub-stack just went berserk. And this thing is a fucking masterpiece. I'll send it to you once we're done. Everyone that's watching now will have already seen the video that I put up with Zach,

what we talk about it, and we go through it. But my most recent, because that's the most recent thing I read and it was so compelling, I'm currently in this state of, right, okay, how do we protect? We need some sort of guidelines. Maybe we should do the same thing that the CCP's done and only restrict access for 45 minutes a day. You can't open it between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. minute today, you can't open it between 10pm and 6am. So that's my current leaning and yet I can't deny people that are Gen Z and watch your content or my content or guys like Hamza who not only speak to those kids but comes from that world and is just completely flying 1.5 million subs on Twitter really, really well regarded, super well rounded guy. Yeah, I don't know. I wonder whether there's going to be, whether the Matthew principle is going to come back in here and you're going to have the haves and the have-not. The people

who do have the ability to deploy some self-control are going to benefit so much more than the people who can't, because the people that can't are going to be hijacked ever more limbically by these new technologies, by the four foe algorithm and stuff like that. Yeah, I think, I mean, look, every generation has its super talented people who are very well adjusted and figure things out very quickly and every generation has its people who lag behind, its anti-social people, people who get distracted or whatever. I'm always skeptical. Social media is such an easy scapegoat for a lot of general cultural issues.

And my default position is to be very skeptical of those things. When I was growing up, I used to come home from school and watch TV for six hours straight. And that was what I did from age seven till probably 10 or 11 TV in video games, like nonstop from the moment I got home from school until I went to bed. I don't see how that's that much different than TikTok. Just in terms of constant stimulation and distraction and getting your entire sense of culture from a very tiny sliver of human experience. I think these are things that just,

there's just kids. Kids are very distractable. Kids are very easily seduced by crazy ideas and charismatic people. And then kids generally grow out of those crazy ideas. And you know, nine times out of 10, they grow out of those crazy ideas and charismatic people. And so I just try to remember that and hold some patience.

I personally think I've been banging this drum for about a year now and nobody listens to me and nobody cares. But I personally think TikTok might be the most overrated thing in our culture right now, both in terms of its dangers and in terms of, you know, it's taking over Silicon Valley or whatever. The thing is, is TikTok kind of puts up, it's like TikTok puts up garbage time minutes, you know, to use a sports analogy. TikTok is like that basketball player who can score 60 points a game but never wins. It's, the videos are super short.

There's a lot of bot activity. There's a lot of kind of compulsive scrollers. So you get these very inflated numbers on the platform. And coming from a place like YouTube or Facebook where content is longer form requires more time, energy. You see a TikTok video with like 800 million views and you're just like, that's fucking insane. Oh my God, everybody must be watching this,

but they're not. It's what that what that is out of those 800 million views, it's 600 million people spent two to three seconds and then immediately forgot about it. Like when I use TikTok, I'm usually either taking a shit or like waiting in line somewhere, you know, there's like a, I've got to wait five minutes for a bus to come, and I have nothing else to do in those five minutes, so I just get on TikTok, and I'll watch 10 videos, and I will, as soon as I close the app, I've forgotten

nine of those 10 videos. I don't remember who made them. I don't remember what they did or what they said. I may have chuckled once or twice. They're just... So one of the things that Gwinda brings up in that article is digital dementia, which is a term that actually refers to this loss of gray matter in the brain

and it appears to be facilitated by very passive, short, iterative platforms like TikTok and the precise reason that you can't remember the stuff that you went through. If you were to ask me what the last four videos were that I watched on YouTube, I probably could tell you. I think I watched a Sunny V video about Joe Rogan's biggest arguments that he's done on his podcast. I watched something from Moist Critical between him and Ludwig about building a new esports team, something else and something else.

At least when you spend sufficient time and attention with a particular topic, it does force you to do a little bit of recall. So although it may be good in that the impact that it has on you isn't so great, you can't be ideologically pushed, you can be sort of psychologically degraded through this particular, I'm gonna send you it and I'm gonna be interested to know what you think. So that may be true, that may be true, I'm gonna send you it and I'm gonna be interested to know what you think. So that may be true, I'm not, and that may turn out to be true,

but just to wrap up my argument really quick, it's empty calories, psychological side effects aside, it's empty calories, it's advertisers are discovering this where it's like you can't get people to leave, like nobody buys anything there, nobody clicks off of it. It's the views there are not, they're worth a thousandth of what a view on Twitter or YouTube is worth. Creators like us are discovering that views there are not worth anything.

So I just think, you know, we should chill a little bit, wait a little while. And what you're saying about the digital dementia, it's like, okay, if somebody, if they're only media consumption in their life is TikTok for like 12 hours a day, okay, yeah, that's probably concerning. There's probably negative side effects to that. But if you're like watching TikTok for an hour or two a day, you're watching YouTube for an hour, you're watching a movie a few times a week, you're listening to podcasts, like you're probably,

it's fine. The world's not it. You have a media engine around you, and I've mentioned to you offline that I'm really impressed with the way that you have this sort of cascade of single pieces of content repurposed across lots of platforms.

For the people out there that are maybe trying to do the same thing, what is the current prioritization list of the hierarchy of Mark Manson capturing of audience members? Well, I'm in a unique position because I have built up, I have like 200 to 300 long-form articles over the last 12 years that I've built a library out of. So that's probably two to three books worth of written content on my website. And generally what we do is, and then I have a weekly newsletter that is kind of new content. But generally what we do is we just find ways to repurpose that old content for whatever platform we are posting on. So Instagram that might be a little frame slideshow of, you know, a three or four frame frame idea Twitter might be a little tweet or a quote

and And then YouTube it's usually some video format of one of the ideas from the website So a lot of most of the work I've been doing online in terms of just audience generation and engagement It's just been re taking that like massive library that I spent 10 years building and then just repurposing it, testing new ideas, testing new versions of old ideas in a bunch of different places and kind of seeing what sticks and what doesn't stick. What's your priority at the moment?

Is it grow email list? Is it grow YouTube? Is it accumulate Instagram? What is it? Top priority right now is video. So I'm actually, I just hired the first few people on a video production team. 2023 is basically completely blocked off in my mind is like going all in on video content. That's primarily, there's two reasons for that. One is, I think the only two mediums and formats right now that aren't super saturated for scaling

is podcasts and video. And I think even podcasts might have peaked right now, but there's probably still, I mean, you're showing there's still pockets and people can still climb through. But I mean, in terms like written, like blogs are dead, it's if you're trying to like build an audience on Facebook or Instagram, like you reach this garbage. It just seems to be doing okay. Some people seem to be growing okay, so I sub-stacks. Sub-stacks could be good. I think it's very niche dependent. So it's, if you are, especially if it's politics related, that seemed like, if you're an interesting voice in some political topic, you're probably always going to find a way to break through. But for me, I'm in an industry where anxiety today is exactly

the same as anxiety was 10 years ago. There's nothing new to say about it. So it gets very crowded. Or like, and once you've kind of like stuck your flag in, it's going to be there for a long time. And I think I've done that with a few topics. James Clear has done that with a few topics. Ryan Holliday has done that with a few topics. And it's just gonna be very hard to like change that real estate in terms of ideas and everything. So I'm, I'm, I'm excited and bullish on video content.

I think there's, it's still underdeveloped as a, as a medium online. I still think the audience is massive and it's continuing to grow. And it's skews young. So it's a lot of people, if you're a 35 year old or a 45 year old and you've been online for a long time, you've probably heard all the shit that I have to say, or James Clear has to say, you've probably heard like 20 times by now.

But if you're 25 and you're on YouTube and TikTok, you probably haven't. And so for me, that's kind of where the green pastures are. What are your thoughts on the modern era of men's advice? Because this is the industry that originally, originally, originally you were kind of born out of this not quite pick-up artistry, maybe started there, then holistically moved into a more balanced version of that. And yet there is always more opportunities for men's advice to come around. So how do you see this new world of it?

You know, I see it as cyclical. I think every generation, I mean, self-help and general is cyclical. Like, none of these ideas are new. It's just each generation kind of needs to discover them in their own format and their own language. And I think the same is true with a lot of men's advice. I think, you know, our generation, it was the pickup thing, the generation before that, and the 90s, it was men's groups and sweat lodges and iron john and things like that.

This generation, let's say, when it was Jordan Peterson was kind of like the focal point, I was a little bit optimistic. I thought I do think he's an improvement on a lot of men's advice geared towards men. When Andrew Tate showed up, I quickly turned to pessimism. So I don't know, I feel like there's a void right now. I think there's a void for a really healthy voice directed towards young men of how to

be, how to manage yourself, how to develop yourself. Somebody needs to step into that void. What are the memes that you keep seeing coming back around? Are there any trends that you see that from when you first started out, you're starting to see resurface now. I will say that it is surprised and impressed me how the stain power of the no-fap thing. I remember when that started,

I think around like 2010, 2011. I remember I experimented with it a little bit and people, like, a bunch of people jumped on that train. And I don't know. I guess I assume that there wasn't a whole lot there, but it's been impressive how it stuck around. It's interesting. I feel like this generation of men's advice,

it's more about abstention. I mean, this kind of comes back to the earlier point about destruction versus productivity. Men's advice, in our generation, when I was 20 years old, it was all about, here's how to make all the money, and here's how to fuck all the girls, and here's how to go to all the parties. And this generation, it seems a little bit more like you should just, you know, stop jerking off, stop distracting yourself, stop eating garbage, stop wasting your time, stop dealing with people who don't respect you. And that, that seems to occupy a lot more, I mean, there still is the make a bunch of money and

frock a bunch of girls like, like we're human, there's always going to be that. But the physics of the system, yeah. Yeah, that seems like there's more real estate given to the abstinence side of things, which is very interesting. Is there anything, I found it very interesting to look at the trajectory of the pickup slash dating coaches from 10 to 20 years ago. So I spent Thanksgiving with David DiAngelo in his new form. Oh wow. Neil Strauss yourself, Tucker Maxx, are all people who came out of a more user-man-loos-him degeneracy partyboy style

or user and loosom degeneracy, party boy style, pick up world, right? Jeffrey Miller, even to a lesser extent, the evolutionary psychologist, you know, and yet, I mean, you look at particularly David, Neil and Tucker as guys that went from being absolute degenerates to now, especially Neil, almost like this sort of awakened, born again, sort of a lined kind of guy. David was showing off his daughter to me at Thanksgiving and he's just this sort of really holistic, like open-hearted guy, took a max, you know, whatever it was, five years of daily psychotherapy, then into MDMA psychotherapy. Now he's living on a ranch with four kids and 50 sheep and whatever else it is that he does. Like, what's going on here?

What's happening with this trajectory of men that go from what appears to be from the outside, one extreme to another? Well, I think some people just have extreme personalities, no matter what their value system is. And I think William James had an old quote where he said, like the only cure for addiction is religion. And that's not to say that these guys have like

literally adopted religion. I mean, I think Tucker has become quite religious. I'm not sure though. But yeah, it's, I think a lot of us from that industry exhibited a lot of compulsive behavior around parties, women, sex, alcohol, and generally speaking, it seems that compulsive personalities don't ever stop being compulsive. They just change the focus of their compulsivity. So it's in a way it's not that surprising. That it is interesting that I mean,

I see a bunch of guys who don't have theory of mind to be able to project themselves forward into what that person in the future would be like. And if 15 years ago, either of us had been tried to be convinced by the older version of us, then actually, when you grow up, maybe these aren't the things you're going to take your greatest sense of self-worth from. We would have just said, fuck off, Pussy. Like, that's how I wasn't there to listen to it. And I am in part concerned that outlier guys who have very black and white

sort of monofinking strategies when it comes to this, who can't perceive a world in which anybody that chooses to get into a monogamous relationship isn't just settling. Ah, because of the like alluring seductiveness of someone that has very, very clear parameters around this is the way that relationships work. This is the way that men work and this is the way that women work and that's just the way it is and there is no room and no caveats and no, nothing else. They are outliers and the problem that you have is if that cascades down, you have a bunch of men who perhaps don't have that same mentality naturally or that same predisposition,

then trying to retrofit their lifestyle to somebody else's preferences because they happen to be a thought leader within the dating space. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, it's, I mean, look, it's these spaces when you're young, it's confusing. Like trying to figure out, especially in this day and age, right? Like trying to figure out your sexuality to begin with is confusing. Trying to figure out dating your dating life, what you like in a partner, how to actually get somebody attracted to you. These are all very confusing and stressful things when you're young. And a lot of cases, the culture has fed you a bunch of stories and narratives that are pretty

obviously not always true. And so there's kind of this void for some other narrative or story to step in. And for us, it was kind of the pickup artist narrative. And I think for a lot of these, the young guys today, it can be somebody like Andrew Tate. So like I empathize like where, like that situation and what draws young men to a lot of these explanations and stories, I think what inevitably happens, and I think this happened in our industry,

like my industry back 15 years ago, and I imagine it's going to happen again, is that you take these kind of countercultural narratives, you know, this is the way men are, this is the way women are, this is how you have to act towards them, this is what gets you laid, and you go, you go try that out. And generally, more often than not, that doesn't work either. Or maybe it works a little bit in this one area,

but it doesn't work in the others. And I think generally, kind of what most of the pickup advice prescribed, and I think what a lot of what Kate prescribes, it's generally it's going to help you feel more confident and help you get more sex, but it's not gonna help your relationships and it's not gonna make you happy.

And so I think a lot of guys have to experience that kind of shallow success, like, oh shit, I do have more friends and I am going to more parties and I did get laid a few times. But I'm not happy. I don't have a girlfriend. I've like alienated some people. I haven't made any new friends. This isn't really like this, this isn't really working for me. And then they kind of start looking deeper at their own emotional issues and what is right for them. And I think most of them at that point kind of move on into into healthier subjects.

There's a quote from Naval Rava Count where he says, it is far easier to achieve your material desires than it is to renounce them. And what he means by that is that, you know, driving a beta Honda Accords is way simpler if your last car was a Ferrari because you close the loop, right? Does I go on a defect? Is a hell of a drug? And if you can tick that box and go, oh, I know what it's like to fuck a Colombian chick. Like, fantastic.

And now don't need to worry. My Colombian box has been filled. Oh, her Colombian box has been filled, perhaps. Yeah, there you go. And the thing with the reason that I'm like, first of me in Tate of knowing each other for like, maybe four or I'm like, first off, me and Tate have known each other for like maybe four or five years now, I think we've been talking for for an alright while. The reason that I think he has been able to fit in so effectively into the modern

discourse around men's advice is that there is no alternative. There is a huge, huge void. And for all that, Peterson is someone that I consider a fucking unbelievably valuable and important influence in my life. And also someone that I hold as a friend. He has abandoned those talking points recently. I haven't heard him create any new stuff. The last time I heard him talk about this, in all of last year, he did Lex's show and he did mine, and those were the only two times that I really got anything about the sort of existential philosophy, depth of suffering, and life type thing.

Very much now, he's concerned about broad-scale social problems, environmental change, culture, overreach in academia, blah, blah, blah. They very well may be more valuable things in his eyes for him to spend his time on, but for young guys that there is a void and wherever there is a void, someone will get sucked in. And for every single person from the left that has an issue with Andrew Tate being the new role model for guys in 2023, please show me your alternative. Like if you do not speak to men, they will find someone that speaks to them. And right now, you have a very well-spoken,

regardless of what you think of him, his ability to speak is fucking 10 out of 1070 IQ verbal agility. How could he have never, how could he have not been successful in this world? Yeah, and this is the thing, you know, because we had a lot of, I mean, I'll just call it kind of toxic male advice back in the pickup days, but the thing is, is the guys who were giving it were like, weird, do we be guys with like feather boas and top hats? The thing about Tate is, he, if you're-year-old kid, you look at a video of him and he just looks fucking cool. Like, you're like, dude, that's a cool fucking guy. He drives a Lambo, he's got a bunch of money, he's banging girls, he's a kickboxer.

Like, so I get the appeal. I just, you know, and I've been saying the same thing. A lot of people have been, I've been doing a lot of traditional media for the film and a lot of them have been asking me about tape because of my background. And I keep saying exactly what you're saying is I say, look, it is even in the best of circumstances, it's confusing to be a 16 year old, 18 year old, 20 year old guy. Like it's everybody struggles with their sexuality, everybody struggles with their sexuality, everybody struggles with relationships, everybody struggles to build an identity and develop self-esteem in that identity and to get along with others and know how they're going to fit into the world and know how they're going to find a relationship. It's a very difficult

thing for everybody, including young men. And I said that the correct question isn't like, why is Andrew Tate saying such awful things? The question is, is like, why are so many young men listening to him? It, what is appealing about him? What is drawing all these young men towards him? And why isn't there, as you said, a better alternative? I do think to, I mean, it has to be said, like I just think it's intellectually

dishonest to not say, even if you believe a lot, a lot of the social changes that have happened over the last five or 10 years are good, you know, things like me too and some of the woke movement, you have to admit that that adds confusion to young men. Like if you're a 18 year old guy and you grew up watching me to happen and all the stuff that your dad told you to do five years ago is now deemed offensive, that's confusing as shit. Like how do you sort that out and your young head, you know, without, you know, and especially with all the consequences and cancel culture and stuff that's going on. So I just think, again, I hope

for a healthier, more integrated men's voice to start appealing to these young guys. And I do think somebody will eventually come along, but it's definitely a massive gap in the social fabric at the moment. Well, let me give you this with regards to how me too could have hurt and confused young girls' approaches as well. So for almost all of recent history, when it came to dating advice for women,

which they do actually have, apparently there is an industry of that. Very large with it. Yeah, significantly larger than it is for men. Why men love bitches, treat him like you don't like him. All of this advice told women that the way to get a guy to be interested in you was actually to pull away, but then in a post-MeToo world, guys who see a girl that plays hard to get thinks, oh, fuck, I do not want to get cancelled. I'd better avoid this situation at all costs. And yet, girls, I don't think have updated their operating procedure in order to account for this new hypersensitivity that guys have around anything short of a fuck yes, being

an absolutely not get away from me or are you going to end up on the front page of a newspaper? Yeah, and it's, I think this is why I'm not the toot my own horn, but, you know, for people who don't know, I made my name in the pickup industry by promoting a philosophy of just blunt and radical honesty in dating situations. And I think that's more important than ever. Like, you just express how you're feeling, express your desires, but express it in a way that's respectful of the other person and be always be willing to hear no and accept no.

I just think at the fundamental core of all dating romantic relationships, you have to have that clear line of communication from the get go. And I think given all of the cultural confusion and mixed messages around this stuff, it's probably more important than ever. What do you think most people misunderstand about how relationships work? more important than ever. What do you think most people misunderstand about how relationships look? I think they think it's a game. They conceptualize it in ways that ultimately boil down

to a power struggle. So this could be anything from, oh, way to day to text her back. So she doesn't think you like her too much to pulling up old arguments. Let's say my wife and I get in a fight and then I'm starting to lose that fight. And so I pull up something that she did six months ago

to score a point. I wrote an article about this. It was called like six toxic habits. Tixot, yeah, I can't talk, man, six toxic relationship habits that most people think are normal, and one of them I called it the relationship scoreboard. Basically people who keep score, track responses, track time, people who get upset of like, well, I called you twice and you never called me back.

If you're counting shit like that, like you're already losing just from the fact that you're counting. Some people's nature is that though, right? Some people will struggle due to feelings of insufficiency, anxious attachment, just general concern about their partner. They'll think, well, how many times should I call them back? Maybe if I do message them too quickly, then they're not going to like me. What do you say to that person?

It's hard because I think to communicate, honestly, you have to sort through your own and insecurities. And this is ultimately what I wrote a book. It's called Models Attract Women Through Honesty. And ultimately, the core of the book is that honesty always wins, but to actually be able to live that, you have to sort through your own shit. And often that process of sorting through your own shit, it results in short-term failures. So to that anxious person, the person with the anxious attachment.

You ultimately want them to communicate how they're feeling in a very unconditional way, but the first few times that they do that, they're gonna come on way too strong and it's gonna create, it's probably gonna scare people away or it's gonna cause them to not be attracted to them anymore. But I think you have to kind of go through that experience to understand where the line is of like, okay, where does honest communication end and then my insecurities begin

to kind of get a sense of like how to healthily communicate in the future. Yeah, I think a lot of insecurity in people around their own self-worth then get born out when a relationship happens because for the most part all of your foibles and concerns and everything else you can hide them away, brush them under the rug, you know you have that thought pattern every single day and you do some but is a mindfulness exercise thing where you sort of let go and allow and it just mindfulness exercise thing where you sort of let go and allow and it just fucks off. Yeah, I'll deal with that maniana, maniana, maniana, and then before you know it, it's five or ten years later.

But there are so few places to hide when you start spending time with somebody else and you get that compulsion of companion it or passionate attachment to someone and you go, okay, all of that stuff that was under the rug has now congealed into a dust monster, and it is just running ravage around in my mind, and you can no longer hide it. And this is why I like your insight around doing the self-work before you then even expect to have a particularly healthy relationship. And it's also presumably why people see the same problems in all of their relationships. You are the common denominator between all of your different relationships.

And if every single partner that you get with is just way too distant or way too needy or way too overbearing or way too whatever, it's like they have nothing in common with each other except you are the only thing that they have in common. Yeah, and again, this is why honest communication disclosures, so important, you know, I get a lot of questions from guys who say stuff like that. They're like, well, I tend to be very anxious and clingy and I struggle with that like, what should I do? And I'm like, well, when you start dating somebody,

just calmly let them know, like, hey, I have a tendency to be a little clingy if it ever starts to put you off, just let me know and I'll back off, them know, like, hey, I have a tendency to be a little clingy if it ever starts to put you off, just let me know and I'll back off. Like ask your partner to help you regulate your own boundaries, understand where the line is so that you can adjust your behavior accordingly. Not only is that the most effective thing to do, but now you don't have to spend weeks and weeks or months and months like hiding this horrible thing inside yourself that you think is gonna get you rejected

by somebody. There's something called the Michelangelo effect, which I learned about a little while ago, which is over time in a relationship, each partner begins to look more and more like the other partners idealized version of them. And the reason it's the Michelangelo is that from a rough, human block of marble over time, it gets chipped away to look like the vision that the artist had.

And that's the best way that you could have a relationship, right? That you are going to help me become not only more of me, but I am going to be more of the type of person that you would like. And hopefully your desire for the type of partner will make me even better than I could have been on my own. But again, that is all mediated by being able to tell the truth, by not coming across as being too needy. And you had a tweet last year that I love that said, nobody remembers your mistakes as much as you do. And I think that that level of self concern and self doubt is because of that, right? That you have this front row seat to every mistake that you make as you fall flat on your face over and over again. And even the person that's the

closest to you probably can't even remember the thing that you did yesterday that you felt like was this huge embarrassing episode. Yeah, it's because everybody else is too busy worried about their mistakes. That they think everybody is paying attention to. What about as a guy who is now 38, you know, 38? 38. What do men have to focus on at 38 that they didn't have to focus on at 28? It's a great question.

For me, the most obvious, I mean, and this is a lot of this is personal, but I think physical health is the biggest one. Tim Ferris actually said it perfectly when I talked to him, he said that it's as you age, the amount of focus and attention you have to give your physical health does not increase linearly with your age and increases exponentially. And I've definitely found that to be true. It is shocking and upsetting how many habits I had

in my 20s that I thought were okay, you know, by 35 are actually causing significant problems in my 20s that I thought were okay, you know, by 35 are actually causing significant problems in my life. So, you know, I think health is the biggest one by far. I do think, you know, the nice thing that happens when you age is you've had enough experiences and enough time has passed. Like I think a lot of kind of the dumb stuff that we do when we're young is simply the fact that we not enough time has passed for us to realize how much our values change over the course of our lives. And so when you're young, if something feels important,

you you kind of just naively assume it's going to be important forever. And once you get to your 30s and probably even more so in your 40s, you've lived enough to see that like, oh yeah, that thing that seemed really important 12 years ago, I realized didn't matter six years ago. And there's like a fluidity that comes in and out with your prioritizations and you know, friendships that you thought were the most important friendships in your life. They come and go and you realize that life goes on and it's okay and you meet new people. So it's almost like this, this kind of like existential fluidity that starts to happen

with the things in your life. I guess that's called wisdom or it's another name for wisdom, but it's, I think it's underrated. Like I really appreciate that about aging and again, it's something nobody really tells you is going to happen. Yes. Perspective. The ability to have that perspective. I do. I remember even now, I find it the same.

I just presume the thing that I'm obsessed by now will be the thing that I'm obsessed by for the rest of time. And even when I started this show, which was five years ago, I was so deep into the productivity space. That was my thing. I thought I would just end to endless numbers

of episodes about the Pomodoro technique or procrastination or mono thinkingaking or monotasking or whatever. And then after a little while, you realize, okay, maybe the friendships I had are going to drop away. And you know, I know that you moved to Brazil or somewhere, you just kind of dropped everything and went. I think when you make decisions like that, which I did last year to go from the UK to Austin, decisions like that, which I did last year to go from the UK to Austin, it, that's a nice sort of landmark flag in the ground, a very formative experience that reminds you, well, maybe things aren't always going to be the way that they were. And maybe I'm not always going to be obsessed. And maybe my friends aren't always going to be there. And also, as

you grow older, people are going to start passing, you know, situations are going to change. I realize this only the other day that I think you'll be episode 600 or something of this show. Pretty soon there's going to be people that I had a conversation with for now that I really, really enjoyed. And then I'm not going to be here anymore. I'm going to have, I don't know, an ever-increasing number of posts that I'm going to have to write or mornings that I'm going to have to deal with where I wake up and go, holy fuck, that guy or girl that I really loved spending an afternoon with is gone. So yeah, all of this, as you grow older, does remind you stuff doesn't last forever, including your obsessions and and including thought processes.

It's interesting related to that. I have found how much more aware I am of the time I have left. Again, I think when you're 20 something, you have your whole life ahead of you, it seems like forever. Coming up on 40, I've now experienced how quickly 10 years goes by, and how many things you wanted to do in those 10 years. You never got around the doing or tried to do and weren't able to do.

So it's again, back to the perspective thing, it's really given me appreciation for like, okay, you've probably got 25 to 35 years left of a career. And that's not, that does not feel like that much time anymore. And so you have to be very, very conscious of like, how you're investing each year, how you're spending each month and kind of bringing this full circle back to the, the, the perils of too much success too soon.

That's been helping me a lot to say no to things is, is remembering like, look, man, like it's, you've got, you've got 20, 25 peak years left. Like, don't waste them. You're almost halfway through your professional life. So make the last half count. Don't make the same mistakes you made coming up the first half. So that's kind of been where my mentality's been at. What can people expect from you next?

So there will be a lot of video content coming primarily on YouTube over the next year. I'm hoping to, I've actually got a video going up this weekend where I make, I guess, a bold intention, which is to reinvent the self-help space on YouTube. I've got some ideas for new formats and involving the audience in real life situations. So I'm very excited about that. I think it's an opportunity to do something very new and big and embold. So that's getting me very excited.

Unreal. Why can people go to check out everything else that you do? Mark Manson dot net to the website. I've got the breakthrough newsletter there. I'm on every social platform for better or worse But yeah, the new the new stuff will be primarily on YouTube. So I'm talking about. Thank you. I appreciate you dude Thanks, Ben. It's a pleasure.