SOLVED with Mark Manson - How TikTok Ruined Politics (And Your Sex Life)

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

How many f*cks should we give about politics? What’s driving the widening ideological gap between young men and women? And is the world truly and utterly f*cked beyond all recognition? In this episode, we talk politics without really talking politics. We cover how to stay up-to-date on current events without going insane, what history can teach us about the present, the real downside to TikTok’s invasion of—well, everything—and why there is still reason to hold out hope, even when it seems like the world is going straight to hell. Check it out. Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person. Chapters 01:17 The F*ck of the Week: Politics 16:24 Brilliant or Bullsh*t: Is TikTok Ruining Politics AND Dating? 32:24 Q&A: Is Everything Just F*cked? Theme song: Icarus Lives by Periphery, used with permission from Periphery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction. So check it

out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.app. That is purpose.com. Drew, I'm so over it. I'm so over the election. I'm so sick of it. I think this is a really useful thing to talk about, especially this year, is how much we should

give a fuck about politics. That's the fuck of the week. How much should we actually care about all this nonsense that goes on week in, week out, that feels like a soap opera that you that is on every channel every podcast every radio show all the fucking time i i kind of just lost it this morning like i my i usually i make my morning smoothie and i do like some house stuff and i listen to a podcast in the morning it's like just it's not my morning routine

but it's one of the things i do in the morning and uh every podcast i listened to this morning had an election episode even the non political ones even the non political ones Please. Like the business ones. Yeah. The finance ones. All of them. And now I'm here making an election episode.

We're doing this too. Right. I have officially become what I hate. Yeah. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. But seriously, I do want to get into, you know, how much does this actually matter? Right. How much is it worth caring about?

I think you and I were. we're old enough now. We've been through many election cycles. We've been through many, you know, quote unquote, seismic shifts in the American polity. Like, how much has it really mattered? I don't know. I'd like to discuss that today. Cool. Yeah. Well, I mean, how much should we give a fuck about? I mean, politics, election, like big elections, um, elections in other countries. Sure. Politics in general. How much do you think we should give a fuck about it? Does it different for everyone. So clearly we should give some fucks.

Right. Like you can't just pretend nothing's happened. Right. Like ultimately, you know, if you were blessed enough to live in a democracy, then it is part of our responsibility to give somewhat of a fuck about what's going on among the leadership. I have two takes around this. They both took me a long time to figure out.

And I think both of them are under broadcast towards the general public. But I think more people need to hear them. The first one is, I think people put. way too much weight on the person and less weight on the party or policies. For instance, I don't like Donald Trump. I never liked Donald Trump. I've been on the record for many years. I'm not a fan of the guy.

But if you look at what he actually did in his four-year presidency, it didn't differ that much from what any other Republican would have done. And you could say the same about Biden. You could say the same about Obama. you could say the same about George W. Sure, I think the individual can influence a lot at the margins. And there are maybe like rare specific occasions where the actual individual does have a lot of effect. You know, I think Obama's choice to go after Osama bin Laden is an example of that.

You know, I think some of Trump's choices foreign policy wise are examples of that. But it's like the bulk of it, 95% of it is the party. And I think people lose track of that because it's human nature to glom onto personalities and find all the things you love or hate about certain personalities and not realize that they're really just kind of figureheads of these like larger blobulous movements that take place. But personality matters still though, right? The character of the person matters, right? So this is something I might be changing my mind. on. Okay. Okay. So this is low conviction. Like, don't hold me to this audience. I am playing with an idea. But this is something that I'm reevaluating personally because if I look back the

the presidents in my adult lifetime, the two people that I think were very high integrity people, I think George W. Bush was a very high integrity person. I think Obama is a very high integrity person, I think Trump and Biden are not high integrity people. If you look at who got the most done and who affected the most actual change and actual policy, like actually got their policy agenda through Congress and into law and actually affected the country and the world stage, the two guys, like, I think Obama was largely ineffective and I think W was just made really bad decisions. Whereas I think both Trump and Biden, whether you love them or hate them, you can't argue that they both were very effective at getting their policies done. Right.

Like they both got shit done. So I don't know. I'm reevaluating that. I think it is important that you don't have just like a total criminal who's like trying to subvert everything. But like, I don't know if I need a saint either. I don't know if I need somebody who's honest. Like, well, first of all, anybody who gets shit done in politics. is by definition not an honest person. Like you have to lie to get shit done in politics. So I don't know. Maybe I'm becoming cynical with age, but I think people over-index on the personality of the person.

And I think that's human nature. We tend to, we want to like elevate people as heroes or denigrate people as villains. When really they're just figureheads for movements of large interest groups. And I use interest groups in a very broad context. Not just like limited to like certain corporate industries or whatever but like also Demographics of people right so that's the first point right second point is I think we over and in the age of social media We over index on global and national issues and we under index on local issues I think there's a tendency we are overexposed to

Things that happen very very far away that are often very terrible, but we have absolutely no control or influence on, and they have no control or influence on us. Yet we wrap up so much of our emotional well-being and mental health in the outcomes of these things that happen on the other side of the world. I just can't help but feel like that's insane. Meanwhile, like, your local school is underfunded. The crime in your neighborhood is going through the roof.

you know, there's like a housing crisis in your city. And nobody's paying attention, nobody cares. Like to me, that is just absolute insanity. That you would over index on this thing that's happening 5,000 miles away while ignoring your neighbors and your schools and, you know, the streets that your kids walk down. So that's another drum I've been banging on for a long time that I just think people need to like, again, it's good to know the things that are happening on the other side of the world. But I don't know if we should be basing so much of our, like investing so much of our emotional well-being.

Totally agree on this one. And yeah, just this morning. So I took this one to heart. You've been saying this for a while, like you said. I took this one to heart a year or two ago. And I signed up for like my local newspaper. You know, I live in a fairly small city. And it's like, I don't really know what's going on.

And, you know, there's been like, I didn't know. There was this whole long debate about closing schools and everything that I had no idea about. And that affects my neighborhoods, even too, that I live. in. So I wouldn't have known about that had I not been paying attention to what was going on in my own community. And just this morning, actually, too, there was some data that came out. They do the survey in Colorado every two years, mental health of the kids in school. And actually, it's improved drastically in the last two years for 2021 to 2023. So they collected the data in 2023. That's not reported. Nobody probably sees that. Hardly anybody in

my city probably sees that. Right. You know, but at a local level, great. That's a great. thing. Things are improving in that way. But you would think if you're reading the national news, everything is going to hell on a handcart. Oh, yeah. I think this is a, this is probably a third really good point, is that bad news will come to you. You need to go find the good news. Ah, yeah. Because there's actually way more good news than there is bad news. Like if you, we've got a book on the shelf here, better angels of our nature. Stephen Pinker, like he, it's an 800 page book and it's just the whole book is essentially charts and data and graphs showing that by most metrics, we live in the best time to ever be alive.

Like there's less crime, less violence, less war, less disease. People are living longer. They're more educated. There's more freedom. There's more equality. Like all of these things are the best they've ever been. And if you watch the news all the time or if you're like doom scrolling TikTok all the time, your instinct is to not believe that because you're simply not exposed to all the

the amazing things that are happening. But if you do go dig into a lot of data like that, things are getting better all the time. Like there's improved, there's vast and drastic improvements happening in all sectors of society on a pretty regular clip. So it's like, again, it's, it's finding context, I think, is the thing to give a fuck about.

You know, it's, yes, you should care about what's happening in the world, but instead of getting sucked into whatever narrative is going viral, that week, which there's always a narrative going viral. Like the thing you should be giving to fuck about is finding the context, finding like, okay, that narrative is nice, but like, what is actually changing? What is actually going on with, you know, the world economy or education or like whatever's

going on, you know, like whatever the story of the week is? Right. And I think you and I were talking about this the other day. Like, there are times where it's almost impossible not to get sucked into it. right? Like July was crazy for politics, you know, a assassination attempt on Trump, Biden drops out, that whole thing. Yeah. That's almost impossible not to get sucked into that. But what you just said about putting that into context. So somebody is getting sucked into this. Sure. Like how would you, how would you recommend that they do put that into context? One of the things I thought about anyway

through all this was like, I get, I will nerd out about the procedural stuff. I'm like, oh, the, the Democrats now have to find a new replacement, you know, all that kind of stuff. Or, you you know, what is the history of assassination attempts in the United States? It's a kind of a complicated and active history. Yeah. What do you, how does somebody put that into context? You've mentioned before, like reading history books. Yes.

Learning about history more. And if you want to think globally, is that, is that how you do that? You think more historically in larger context? Or what do you think? I think reading history is hugely important because it just shows you that there's nothing new. Yeah. Like nothing that's happening is unprecedented or new. We've had multiple presidents drop out of the race.

We've had multiple presidents with like major mental health or health issues who are still in office. We've had many, many, I think like almost a dozen assassination attempts. Yeah. And four successful assassinations in our country's issues. Out of 46 presidents. Right. So like these things are not uncommon. They're not unprecedented.

I think one thing to keep in mind, you know, coming back to the narrative thing is like people have to remember that the, the best marketing and publicity minds on the planet are working around the clock on U.S. election years to suck you into their narrative. So you are like, you know, people love to complain about advertising and the unrealistic marketing messages of like such and such industry and how it's like skewing people's perceptions as reality. It's like, dude, those are the minor leagues. Like the people who are who are writing the narratives and pushing the narratives today are like this is the big leagues. And you've probably like surrendered and gotten sucked in the one 100% without realizing that you did. So it's important to understand like the playing

field and the playing stakes that we're on. But you know, to your point about just like the inevitability of getting sucked in, in these moments I'm always trying to zoom out. And reading history is one way of doing that. Looking for the broader statistics, historical statistics is another way of doing that. Again, fighting against the human inclination to put all of my hopes or hate onto a single individual and realize that like they're kind of just writing this wave of large demographic and economic interests. And so pay more attention to the demographic and economic interests and less attention to like the person who happens to be surfing on top of it. Right. Right. And I think kind of related to that point too is that it's something probably

somewhere between 95 and 99% of people have already made up their mind. Yeah, right. Right. So why why even give a fuck about the weekly, you know, gyrations of the media landscape when you already know who you're going to vote for? I mean. And you know the issues. You know the talking points they're going to hit. Sure. Why why you pay so much attention to this? And there's also the point that there's a significant overlap between the two parties. Like there's a whole swath of policy decisions that are going to be the same no matter who's in office. So you mentioned earlier about caring about elections in other countries. I was doing some interviews in Australia. Oh, by the way, speaking to her in Australia coming up. Check it out. Quick plug. Yeah, quick plug. I'll actually

be there during the election. Oh, yeah. Thank fucking God. But I was doing some interviews to promote the tour in Australia. And it was funny because they kept asking me about the U.S. election. And it is funny. There's like this love, this love, hate relationship that the rest of the world has with our politics. Like they can't look away, like they want to look away, but they also can't. Because we are the biggest economy on the world. And we also have the best marketers and publicists working 24-7 to, like, get these narratives out there.

So how much should you care about? politics and elections happening on the other side of the world, again, I would argue not a whole lot. First of all, like, the vast majority of the influence, you know, unless you live in like a very, like a rival country, like unless you're in like Russia or Iran or, you know, Israel, like, what happens politically in the United States is not going to have that much of an effect on like what happens in your country. What happens with the U.S. economy is going to have way more of a difference with what happens in your country. So again, focusing on the demographics and economics. And again, putting most of your attention on the demographics and the economic

waves and less attention on the jackass is surfing on top of it. Right. Right. Cool. So we'll be right back with another edition of Brilliant or Bullshit. Quick message from our sponsors. The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road, that's the Volkswagen Tiguan. Its sleek exterior makes a first impression you can't ignore. Step inside to find available full leather seats and wood accents. Under the hood, the available 201 turbocharged horsepower engine gives it a fun to drive edge. The refined Tiguan, you deserve more style. Visit vw.ca to learn more. SuvW, German engineered for all. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa

Whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. All right, we're back. All right, Mark, for this brilliant era bullshit, we've seen this data for a few months now being passed around. There's a political ideology gender gap opening up right now.

So what they're finding across many different countries, actually, is that young women, especially, are becoming more liberal while young men are either remaining conservative to moderate or getting more conservative. And there's been a widening gap recently in recent years. In some countries, it's huge. like in South Korea, there's now like a 50 point difference between how how conservative and liberal young men and women are in the U.S. It's like a 30 point difference. Wow. Most of the, most of the effects seems to be driven by women becoming more and more liberal. Yeah. Young people have always been more liberal than older people. Yes. But what's happening right now is that they're they're diverging. Young people are diverging from one another. What do you think's

going on here? I find this super fascinating, especially because, you know, To my knowledge, previous generations, it was much more about age than it was gender. Yes. And what we're seeing now is that genders are polarizing across generations. Men are becoming more conservative. Women are becoming more liberal. I have a theory about this. I have no data to back this up.

But this is just – and maybe I'm being biased because this is just the world that I live in. But correct me if I'm wrong. The polarization starts around like 2019, 2020. Yes, yeah. So my theory about this is actually it has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with the for you feed on social media and TikTok. Okay. So what most people don't realize, I think this is one of the most underreported significant events of the past 10 years, is the rise of TikTok.

People mistake what actually made TikTok successful. Most people look at TikTok. TikTok had two innovations. The first one was short form video. And I think that's what most people associate with TikTok success. That they pioneered the short form video and that they were, you know, this gave them inroads into the social media environment and everybody got addicted to it and everybody had a ton of fun. There's a bunch of dopamine, yada, yada. There might be some truth to that.

I think the thing that is way underrated that people miss is TikTok's second innovation, which is the for you feed. So it used to be prior to TikTok, all of the social media algorithms were based on something called the social graph, which was essentially it looked at who your friends were and it looked at who you followed. So it would understand like, okay, so he's friends with this guy and he's in a relationship with this woman and he follows this famous actor. So he's probably going to be really into, I don't know, like Quentin Tarantino movies. So like let's show him a Quentin Tarantino movie. And the social graph was really effective and everybody was hooked on. social media and everything. I think the side effect of the social graph is it pushed people in very tribal direction.

So people became very like conscious of the group affiliations that they had. What TikTok did is TikTok said, I don't give a fuck who you know or who you like. I'm just going to pay attention to what you actually watch and then I'm just going to serve you more based on that. So the 4U feed is based on what's called the psychograph, which is essentially what do you enjoy actually looking? at because sure, maybe your friends like this thing, but you're different than your friends. And maybe there are things that you like that you don't talk about with your friends or that you don't show to your friends. But TikTok will figure that out based on your viewing patterns of all the short form

video. And so the For You Feed is it segments people not by group affiliations and relationships. It segments people by their personalities and just their inherent likes and dislikes. Now, when you look at people, what are the things that, what are the greatest determinants of what they're likely to like or dislike? Well, one of the biggest ones is gender. You see very consistent differences between preferences between men and women, what they like to watch, what they like to listen to, what they like to read. And sure, not all women and not all men, but on average, men and women tend to have some of the biggest differences in content and media preferences. And so it would make sense to me that the 4U feed would create new epistemic bubbles, new echo chambers of content that were largely based around gender.

And the reason I thought about this when I saw this data is because we are experiencing this in our industry at the moment. Like for the first 10 or 12 years of my career, both men and women read my content in roughly equal proportion. Suddenly in the past three years, there's been more men showing up, and that trend is accelerating. I haven't changed anything. I haven't changed my messaging. I'm not targeting men anymore than I used to. I'm not speaking specifically about men's issues. I think what has happened is that the 4U feed is just picked up that as an older man myself,

I tend to resonate more with younger men. And so those are the people that are getting exposed. those are the newcomers to the audience more and more, whereas women, they're getting shown, you know, women thought leaders in this space more and more often. So you're starting to see a polarization in the self-help industry between what men consume and what women consume for the first time in like 15, 20 years.

And yet nobody's really, like, it's not like we all got together and like, all right, you take the men over here and we'll take the women over here. It's just like everybody's doing the same thing they always did. It's just the algorithm that is sorting who is exposed to what has fundamentally changed over the past few years. Right, right. I've seen some data, too, about the 4U algorithm for TikTok, and it only takes something like 30 or 40 minutes of using TikTok for them to figure your psychographic out, basically. And when you think about that, like Netflix has an algorithm, right?

You can't even watch a show in 40 minutes and on Netflix, right? It takes them weeks, if not months, to figure out what you like. They can figure it out in 30 to 40 minutes. I don't know. I can't tell if that's, if that is scary that TikTok is that smart or sad that we're that simple. Like 60 second video is just wiping and they can figure out. Like we all like this is what you're going to like. We all like the thing that we're like these sophisticated and like thoughtful people with like very nuanced taste. And it's like no, TikTok's got you figured out.

Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. For sure. But you know, this is, it's widespread though too. And so I think you're right. I mean, it's cross-country and cross-culture, like, it can't be, it can't be like, you can't blame, like, Trump or you can't blame, you know, some political thing. It's anything that is that multinational, it has to be something like very fundamental. And to me, technology is just kind of the most obvious. Right. Like, anytime you see anything happening across the world simultaneously, the first place you should look is technology. Information technology for sure. Yeah. To me, then, there's a concern here that this could have wide-ranging effects.

Now, we should say that a lot of people who research this, not everybody quite buys this story just yet. It's early on. It's kind of a sudden shift, and sometimes these things will regress back to the mean, or there could be something in the data collection. Yeah. So there's, like, proceed with caution a little bit here. But if this is a real thing, what do you think are some of like the second and third order effects that we're going to see? Well, I find it deeply concerning because I feel like there's always been a little bit of a battle of the generations. You know, the older generations have always skewed much more conservative. And younger generations have skewed much more liberal and progressive.

And that, to me, that makes sense. Like that, there's like a balance in the force to that. Gender feels scary because, like, ultimately men and women need each other. Right? Like, polarization around gender, like, to me, is a little bit scary because it's, you know, Now you start to get into repercussions in the dating market. You start to get into repercussions around household formation, family formation, fertility rate, just children, like, fucking propagating the next generation.

It worries me for sure. And I don't really, I don't know how you solve for it. Like, I don't know what the counterbalance is here. I saw a related statistic just recently, just the other day. And it was, it was like married men, I think it was married men like 70% voted Republican, married women, it was 52%, single men it was like 60%. And then single women, it was like 75% Democrat. Right, right.

And so then you get into, there's like a, if you like, you know, dig down further into the data, you maybe you get this effect where it's like, okay, the only women getting married and forming families and having kids are the conservative women. And then it's just like you have this like this loose demographic of of single women who are just like becoming more and more radicalized left wing. I don't know. I don't know. It's like it's a weird thing. It seems on like I don't know. There's nothing that I know of in history. I mean, women have only been voting for like 100 years. So like there's nothing that I know of in history that like was similar to this. Yeah, but I mean, if we use South Korea as kind of the harbinger of this, though, because

they have the widest, so far studied, the widest gap. Sure. They have one of the lowest birth rates of all. They do have the lowest birth rate. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's under one per woman, under one child per woman.

Right. Right. Right. So they're not even close to replacement rate, you know, which needs to be two. I feel like there's another aspect of this, which is just the, the transition to the service economy. Definitely. Like I, you know, there was this book a long time ago that got shit on a ton.

It was called, I think it was called the End of Men. I think her name was Hannah Rosen. I think it came out around 2010. But she pointed out and then Christina Hoff Summers like wrote a book on this, I think in the mid 2000. Like there were people, there were women who were like pointing to this coming a long time ago. And what they pointed out is they said that like starting in the 90s or so, girls started performing much better in school by like the 2000s that by far getting in the college more often, they were getting more degrees, they were getting more graduate degrees.

Now we're at the point where it's like, I think up until about age 30, women are out earning men by a significant amount. And it's like that statistic, you know, every decade that statistic creeps up, you know, another five or ten years. And I do think that like if you are a woman who has worked her ass off throughout her life, gotten a good degree, have a great job. I think there are two things start happening. One is, you know, the opportunity cost of getting married, settling down, having children becomes much, much greater and a much more complicated decision. And then the second thing that happens is that like you're, you're. your dating pool of acceptable men, like if you are a high achieving woman, then the vast majority of the men you're going to meet are less successful than you, less accomplished than

you have had fewer life experiences. Less educated, yeah. You know, and like, that's not an exciting dating pool. Right. Right. So it becomes harder to find a partner. And so, yeah, I don't know. It just, I see, you can kind of see how all these things, you know, we've talked about

all these subjects. We've talked about like the, how weird the dating market is now. We've talked about, you know, some of the educational attainment. We've talked about loneliness. Now we're talking about politics. And like you're seeing the same, like echoes of the same pattern show up in a bunch of different places. But back to my point about like paying attention to the economic and demographic wave and less attention to the people writing it. I think a lot of this can simply be explained by the world is largely switched to a service economy and women are more like women seem to excel in service economy. They know like it's men's natural advantages are in physical labor and blue collar work.

And you know, and it's you could argue that women's natural advantages tend to be more in service, service jobs, care oriented jobs, dealing with people, relationships. And like, that's the economy we live in now. So I don't know. I don't have the answer. But it's like I can see where the threads are connected. You know, I don't know. Like what do you think about it?

Back when I was doing research, I did a little bit of research with a political scientist, actually. He was looking at like physiological markers and how they relate to political polarization. Yeah. More or less. But one of the things he found, which was really interesting to me, was that your political views actually predict your, your mate's political views more so. than like any other measure that they, like smoking. Right. Even like one, it's more likely that you would be a non-smoker and marry a smoker

than to be like a liberal, a marry a conservative. Interesting. Like that sort of thing. So this like really, really matters. And that makes sense to some degree because it's like a values thing. Sure. So the more, this was back in the late 2000s too, when we thought polarization was going crazy and we had no idea what was in front of us, you know.

Well, I don't want to. I don't want to interrupt, but generations ago that wasn't true. Right. Right. That's another, that's another interesting thing is that now more and more people, I forget the exact number, but more and more people are saying I would not want my son or daughter to marry someone of the opposite political party. Right.

Which that's getting a little bit scary at that point. Because now you're starting to see them as the other. And that's not too far of a elite from dehumanization. We're literally sorting society in the two camps. And yeah, that doesn't. There's more and more super districts now, too, what they call super districts. districts where, you know, one party basically has a monopoly on that that's more and more common now. It's like one and four people live in one of these districts now or something like something crazy

like that. I have never lived in a state where my vote mattered. Yeah. On a national level. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, the trend is very, the trend is scary.

There is a lot of second and third order effects. Fourth order effects we probably can't even think of right now. I don't, I don't know. I don't like this at all. Yeah. I don't like it either. you know the the the the the the one of your son and daughter to marry somebody like that that's super fucked up because I remember seeing data around that too and they were comparing it they were saying it was so back in the day back in like the 1950s or 60s they would ask people how how they would ask people that question how would you feel if your son or daughter married a person of like X trait and the largest the two things that had the largest disapproval were somebody of a different race

and then somebody of a different religion. And today, those are like almost the non-issues. Yeah, there's like very, very, very few people give a shit if you marry somebody of a different race or a different religion, which is great. That's like where we want to be.

The problem is, is that they seem to have replaced that with political stripe. You know, so now it's like, people will say, I'm, I disapprove of my son or daughter marrying somebody of an opposite political stripe just as much as people 60 years ago said

I disproved my son or daughter marrying somebody of a different race like that it feels like we've just replaced one problem with another and I hate the same like I don't know I don't want to be one of these people

who like inflates the meaning of words but like I don't know maybe we've replaced one form of bigotry with another form of bigotry like you and I are both from red states grew up in in very like

rural middle America backgrounds. Like I have a ton of right wing people in my family, a bunch of friends at home who are right wing. But I've always lived in very blue states and very left-leaning places, New York, Los Angeles, Boston. So I've always lived in both worlds. And it does like, it does concern me

just how blind so many people I meet or talk to are to the other world. Right. Yeah. You can't, and you can't, communicate that to them. What I find is is very hard to communicate that to them anyway. Or like show like, you know, these perceptions that you have that these people are completely wrong. Yeah. Like you can't go up to somebody and be like, no, you're wrong. Yeah. I found that very difficult. And it's like, yeah, when you, but like you and I, when you have one foot in both worlds, it's kind of, I don't know, it's kind of a mind fuck. It's hard to navigate. This is why we get so depressed every election year. Yeah. That's true. That's true. I just, yeah, I've tried not to get sucked into it, but here we are. Yeah, yeah. All right, we'll be right back. All right, we're back.

Mark, I got a couple of questions for you from some YouTube viewers. Okay. This first one, is it possible to get fully numb to all the tragic world events? With all the wars and conflicts going on, will we eventually become more apathetic and give less attention to things like genocide? Is there a limit to the amount of empathy we can give to larger tragic events? Oh, for sure. I mean, people are already numb to it. I mean, nobody gave a shit about the genocide in,

South Sudan. Nobody gave a shit about the genocide in Syria. Nobody gave a shit about the Uyghurs in China. Nobody gave a shit about the civil war in Yemen or the civil war and all the murders in Somalia. Like Congo has been in a civil war. I think there's like been 10 million people killed over the last like 40 years. Nobody gives a shit. Nobody's talking about that. Like people are already there. People aren't protesting at college campuses over like the fuck at civil war in Congo. So like again, coming. back to the smartest marketing and publicity minds in the world are constructing narratives around certain interests.

And so if you're getting swept up in one of these narratives, I'm sorry, maybe I'm, maybe I'm jaded, but like, I don't think you actually care about the thing you think you care about. Like, if you actually cared about genocide, you would have been protesting every day of your life since you were an adult and you were old enough to read the news. Right. Right. The fact that you're only protesting or upset today means that you've bought into a narrative.

You've been manipulated, yeah. Yeah. So, yes, you are already numb. We are all already numb to massive tragedies. And we hear about them all the time and we don't care, don't listen unless we find that specific narrative intriguing enough to buy into and get invested in. Okay, well, this next question is a follow-up, and I think you can elaborate a little bit on that then, too. So how do we deal with uncertainty in these troubled times when so much sad news is around us? Yeah.

The general trend of the world is getting darker every day. Not true. And it makes me more anxious. So how do I not give a fuck about the status of the world? You should give a fuck about the status of the world, but you should have an accurate perception of the world. And news media is not going to give you an accurate perception of the world. One of my favorite studies ever, and this is science. I did a huge article on the website a number of years ago.

I think it's literally called why you should not watch the news. Yeah, I should quit the news, yeah. And there was a study and it found that people, the more news that people consume, the less informed they were about specific topics than they had watched. And so like news media is actively making you less informed. You are more informed on, like, in the abstract,

like you're more aware of certain things that are happening, but you are completely unaware of like the details, the context, the data, the historical context around certain stories or pieces of news. Like those are, as a rule, like news is optimized for the moment. It's not optimized for truth. Right. It's not optimized for getting the data right. It's not optimized for historical context.

So my advice to this person and to everybody is spend way less time watching. Like I'd say cut out 90 plus percent of your news diet. and replace that with readings of history and looking up and trying to understand historical data or the data of certain issues, certain conflicts. What you will find is that most data is either bullshit or it was created by one side or the other to feed a narrative. And what you will find when you study history is that none of this shit is new. It's been going on forever. So whatever thing you're upset about, whether it's Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, you know, a presidential candidate being shot at, a pandemic, go read history.

Go read all the other times this has happened throughout history. And the first thing you'll discover is that it happens all the fucking time. And actually, it's typically been much worse than it is today. and we still got through it fine. But the second thing you'll discover is that a lot of this historical context will start to inform your opinion about what's happening today. Like, you'll have a much greater context and understanding of the different forces and interests and backstory and history that are involved with whatever is happening today. In my case, my mind has been changed by reading history more than anything else in my life. news media has never changed my mind about anything.

Listening to a politician has never changed my mind about anything. Arguing with friends has maybe very, very rarely changed my mind. Finding good data and statistics has changed my mind a decent amount, but it's very hard to find good data and statistics. But reading history, man, reading history, that will fucking change your mind about stuff. Because you can't argue, you know, with 100 years of human experience. I remember during the pandemic, I kind of started having a freak out, and I decided I'm like, I'm going to go buy every history book about every pandemic and plague that I can think of. And it was crazy. It was like all the stuff that seemed completely unprecedented and like unacceptable in 2020 happened every single time.

Right. It was like people behave in the exact same way every single time. And yeah, I don't think I heard the word unprecedented more than any other time. during that period. Of course. Everybody's, everything was unprecedented. Again, it comes back to news because if news, it's like everything has to be

unprecedented because that's what's going to get you to watch. It's like, this has never happened before. Stay tuned. Right. You know, and it's, if you just go to a library, you're like, oh, wait, no, this has happened like 100 times. It was funny, actually, I was reading during the pandemic. I was reading Ron Cherno's biography of George Washington, which is fucking fantastic.

By the way, huge recommendation for everybody. George Washington's underrated. That's another thing. That's another topic, though. It was funny. I was reading the biography of George Washington. So there was a cholera pandemic in the United States, I think, in like 1794 or something like that. And it was funny because Washington was like, there's this huge cholera outbreak.

All these people were dying. And so he gave like a stay-in-home quarantine order. And like all fucking pandemonium broke loose. Like people started protesting. Conspiracy theories emerged. People started saying that Washington like invented the pandemic. for his political purposes. Like, it was all the same shit.

Like, is the exact same stuff all over again. I'm like, wow. Like, literally nothing has changed. Right. What were some of these other books you would recommend, though, too? Historical books. So we're talking about, to learn about history in just in general. It really comes down to, like, so this, if I could just succinctly put my recommendation

into a single sentence, it is whatever, like, whatever issue in the world, you are really, concerned about, that you're really upset about, that seems absolutely horrible and unprecedented, go buy two or three books on the history of that region, of that conflict. If it's an event, if it's like a pandemic or a president getting shot at, like it's like, you know, go go buy all the books about the previous times that event happened. And what you will find is that, A, things don't really change a whole lot. B, every single time the thing happened, people thought it was the worst it's ever been and this has never happened before.

And C, it just helps you understand that like the interests and the stakes are like way more complicated than you think they are. Right. And there's like there is history and precedent going back centuries, most of which you probably don't understand, most of which, like, a lot of people within, like, whatever issue, whatever conflict probably don't understand either. So it's, it's, the worst case scenario is you become very informed and you have the same opinion. Best case scenario, you learn so much that you're, you change your opinion or you realize that like, oh, this is just how the world is.

Right. This is just what happens. Right. Okay. So do you have any recommendations then for, for news as well. Like, um, for me, I, I actually do, I subscribe to there's, it's called espresso from the economist. Yeah. And it's just like, here's five stories for today. Like a paragraph of each of them, big things going on. It's, it's the economist. So it's very like, you know, vanilla. It's not, it's not taken a sign aside or on either way. I do that. Then like I said earlier, I also subscribe to my local newspaper. Yes. Which I read almost every day as well. There's a thing 1440. There's a newsletter. Oh, 1440 is great. Yeah. There's a newsletter called 1440. And like, they really just prioritize like, this is what happened.

This is what happened. And like, these are the most important things that happened. And like they give no take. There's no angle. There's no like whatever. It's really funny. Like I did this for a long time. I stopped a few years ago.

But for a number of years, I would actually just read the front page of Wikipedia. So Wikipedia has a in the news section that has current events. And, you know, Wikipedia. by design is apolitical, right? So when an event happens, you just click on the article and then the article has been highly edited and, you know, there's like dozens of editors who are like arguing all the time of like how things should be worded or whatever. So you not always, but you generally get a pretty apolitical telling of just the events

without any sort of editorialization. I think it's really important to find smart people. whose opinions you trust. I would say there's a certain class of thinker online who is really good at not getting sucked into narratives. Those are the people that I look for. So like Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolution, I think he's a great example.

He's more libertarian than I am. I've been reading him for like 10 plus years. I have never seen him get sucked into a narrative. Ever. I've never seen him get sucked into a political narrative. Yeah, he's a real original thinker. He's super, super original. And he, his commentary is almost always meta commentary.

Right. Like so it's like, you know, these are why these narratives are being created and these are why these narratives are being discarded, right? He's never like jumping into the middle of the fray and like arguing for team blue or team red. No, for sure. For sure. Yeah.

And we'll post the article too that you wrote several years back. Yes. Why you should quit the news. I took that one to heart and have really like way, way reduced my news concerns. Subtons since then, and I cannot tell you how much just on a day-to-day basis that has helped my Just overall well-being. Me too. It's insane.

So if you're somebody who's getting sucked into the news, just, yeah. Fun fact, I was brought on to, so the BBC had this show. I forget what the show was called, but the BBC had this show. It was like a debate panel or whatever. And it was about the value of the news media. And they brought me on as like the anti-news voice. And it was me and three journalists. I don't think I ever saw those.

It was, it was, they basically just shat on me for 20 minutes. And like there was one guy in particular, I have no idea who these people were. But there was one guy who was like in hysterics of like, but how are people going to know what's happening? And I was like, I don't know, like Google. Yeah. Like there's like you're not the bastion of, you know, dispensing information. that you were up, you know, 80 years ago, sir. Sorry. Well, and that's the thing about the news media is going to be self-preserve.

They're going to try to self-preserve. And so they're going to tell you, of course, that are the most important. It goes back to the manipulation thing. They're pushing this narrative. And do you want to get sucked into that? Right. Really ask yourself that. Well, I think there's also a very logical explanation for the deterioration of the quality of news,

right? Because if you look at like what was the news media's value, say, in previous generations, It was they were the ones who actually had the resources and means to go get the information. So they primarily just provided the information. Now the information's everywhere. The information is a commodity. It's cheap. It's not scarce.

You don't need to pay for it. You can find it literally anywhere. Now what the news media specializes in is packaging information into narratives. And some news media is really good at packaging into blue team narratives. And some news media is really good at packaging in the red team narratives. And if you don't realize you're consuming a narrative, then yeah, you're just, you're the fucking mark. Yeah.

You know, you're being conned. So that is what they're selling. They're selling the packaging, not the information. Yeah. And I've noticed too when I do get sucked into something that's going on, you know, where you just can't help it. Yeah. I've checked myself and I'll check different source.

I'll check one from the left, one from the right, see what the narratives are being pushed. And I usually come back and I'm able to step back then kind of like. like Tyler Cowan does and take more meta, meta look at it. So I think if you do just intentionally expose yourself to both sides and be like, oh, okay, there are narratives being pushed here. Which one do you give credence to, if any, at all?

Yeah. So, yeah, that's a good way to do it too. That's what I found anyway. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, that's the episode. I'm a big fan of the wisdom of the week this week. There were a lot of political quotes we could have used.

My favorite one, and this goes back. This harkens back to the point that like nothing is new. So Asop, the Roman poet, he wrote close to 2,000 years ago. He wrote, we hang the petty thieves, but the big ones we elect the public office. That's all for a show. Please like and subscribe. Follow the show everywhere.

Leave a review. If you want to submit a question to Drew and I, you can send it to podcast at markmanson. Or you can simply leave it in the comments on YouTube. We will be back next week. and I guarantee it will not be about politics. The subtle art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast is produced by Drew Bernie. It's edited by Andrew Nishimura. Jessica Choi is our videographer and sound engineer.

Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.